Join me in meeting Julie Shelton.
Julie has always loved stories, both reading and writing them, ever since she was old enough to hold a book in her hands. One of her favorite childhood activities was smuggling books under the covers to read by flashlight after she was supposed to be asleep.
A career as a children’s librarian eventually led to her dream career as a freelance storyteller and puppeteer, a business she operated successfully for twenty-five years. During that time she created and wrote all the original material for Kidstuff, a monthly language arts newsletter full of poems, songs, puppet and flannel-board stories, finger plays, and other resource material for early childhood educators. For that endeavor she won the prestigious EDPRESS Award for the best educational newsletter of 1982. Her 288-page book, Puppets, Poems and Songs was a major resource. She has also written other resource materials for librarians and preschool and early elementary teachers.
Julie lives in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. Now widowed and retired, she once again has time to devote to her two favorite things—reading and writing—especially her new love, erotic romances with strong heroines, hunky alpha-male heroes, and lots of smokin’ hot sex.
Lets' learn a little about her -
Can you tell us a little about your new book that just came out on August 7th?
Keeping Sarah is my third contemporary BDSM ménage romance for Siren Publishers. It is the third and final installment in the series which began with Loving Sarah, published in 2012, and its sequel, Owning Sarah, published last September. By the time I finished writing Loving Sarah, it was clear to me that I had enough material for more than one book, hence the sequel, Owning Sarah. Both are MFM ménages. But even though Owning Sarah ended with Sarah, Jesse and Adam’s wedding and their happy ending, I couldn’t stop thinking about the three characters. I couldn’t help but feel that Jesse and Adam needed to explore the feelings they were developing for each other as well as for their beloved wife, Sarah. So, Keeping Sarah was born. But this is Jesse Colter and Adam Sinclair and nothing comes easy for them. So, in addition to telling Jesse and Adam’s evolving love story, Keeping Sarah is also a harrowing thrill ride of deadly car chases, Albanian blood feuds, a sex slave auction, murder, betrayal, and gut-wrenching intrigue.
Please tell us how the idea came to you for Jesse Colter, your main hero. Be sure to include all the fun details.
It started with his name. Jesse Colter. It was the perfect name for a Dominant, alpha hero. I spent months thinking about him and coming up with a compelling back-story for him.
Abandoned by his Native American mother, neglected and abused by his alcoholic bully of a father, Jesse is embittered, angry and going nowhere fast. At age nineteen, he takes a summer job as part-time gardener at the Marshall estate and meets thirteen-year-old Sarah Marshall. To a hardened biker and sexual Dominant, Sarah Marshall is like some fey, magical creature from another world, and he is enchanted by her. For the first time in his life, Jesse has someone who thinks he’s wonderful. Someone who listens to him and values his opinion. Someone who makes him laugh and who cares for him. Sarah Marshall quickly becomes someone precious to him. Someone to treasure and protect. Someone to love. At first he loves her as an adult loves a child.
But as Sarah grows into a beautiful, voluptuous young woman who makes no effort to hide her growing love for him, Jesse is terrified that his carnal feelings for her and his Dominant nature will end up destroying the one thing he treasures most—Sarah Marshall. So he leaves their small town of Marshall’s Creek and joins the Navy, becoming a SEAL. Eight years of grueling training and dangerous missions give him a sense of identity and self-worth. He realizes that he is a man of honor and integrity and is finally able to admit to himself that he needs Sarah in order to make him complete. Determined to do whatever it takes to win her trust and her love, he returns to Marshall’s Creek. That’s where their love story begins in Loving Sarah. It continues in Owning Sarah, and finishes with a bang in Keeping Sarah.
What influenced you to send your first book to a publisher? How long did it take?
I spent four years writing, editing, polishing, re-writing Loving Sarah. It was a never-ending cycle. Then I lost it. Completely wiped it out of my computer. I was devastated. The thought of having to recreate an entire 400-page novel from scratch was so daunting, I fell into a deep depression. Then around four months after I lost it, I had to print something and that’s when I discovered that the entire novel, minus the last 15 pages, was still in the print queue. I was elated! And I knew that I had to send it off to a publisher immediately, before my ignorance of computers caused something else to happen to it. Siren was the first publisher I submitted it to, mainly because they published a lot of my favorite authors. Around three weeks after I sent it to them, they emailed me and asked me to make a few changes. I figured this was a pretty good sign, thinking if they weren’t interested in it at all, they wouldn’t have bothered to ask for the changes. They offered to publish it less than two weeks after I submitted the revised manuscript.
Could you tell us a couple of favorite authors who inspired you to write?
Sure. Lora Leigh, Maya Banks, Cherise Sinclair, Sophie Oak, Lisa Marie Rice, Lauren Dane, Joey W Hill, LeahBrooke, EdenBradley, Kristen Ashley, LexiBlake, ShaylaBlack, Fiona Archer, Lynda Aicher—and that’s just her first name! My earliest influences, years and years ago, back in the dark ages, were Mary Stewart’s romantic suspense novels and Phyllis Whitney’s gothic novels.
Is music a factor for you while you are writing? Do certain songs put you in the right frame of mind to write certain stories?
When I put music on, it’s to listen to it, so I usually find it distracting when I’m writing because I want to sing or hum along with it. It’s hard to write when you’re bopping around in your chair, singing at the top of your lungs, lol
If you could collaborate with one author who would it be?
Good grief, there’s no way I could pick just one! Go to the list above, close your eyes and point. I’ll go with her.
What is the strangest source of writing inspiration you’ve ever had?
Years ago I was watching the movie, Becket (with Richard Burton and Peter o’Toole). In one scene there was a minor female character dressed in a blue gown. I was finishing my BA in French at the time and doing extensive research on life in a thirteenth-century French castle.
Well, the minute I saw that gown, an entire romance novel sprang into my mind. I couldn’t write it down fast enough. And since I was taking all my research notes on 3 x 5 index cards, that’s what I wrote the novel on. I wound up with two shoeboxes full of index cards, one with all my research notes, the second with my novel. Last year I transcribed the entire book onto my computer and that became Dark Warrior, my third book for Siren, published in January of this year.
What are you working on now?
Oh, I am so glad you asked that! I am nearly half-way through with Passion’s Dream, the first book in my new Passion Lake series. It’s a series of books about a bunch of Jesse and Adam’s former SEAL buddies, all characters in the three Sarah books, who buy a bankrupt town around thirty miles down the road from Marshall’s Creek and turn it into a profitable tourist attraction. Passion’s Dream is about Clay “Raven” Nighthorse, who is hired to protect Leah Stanhope, a woman with whom he had a brief encounter three years ago on a California beach. When their location is compromised, he brings her to his ranch in Passion Lake, where he has plenty of friends who are willing to help keep her safe while he devotes himself to proving that he wants and needs her in his life. Permanently.
Look for Passion’s Dream, Passion’s Fury, and Passion’s Hope, the first three exciting books in the Passion Lake series, at the beginning of 2015.
Keeping Sarah by Julie Shelton
BLURB
Honeymooning in England, Jesse Colter, Adam
Sinclair and their beloved wife, Sarah, are heading for their friend Thorne
Cahill’s BDSM club for dinner when another car deliberately tries to run them
off the road. Thanks to their own
driver’s skills, the other car is destroyed, the two unknown occupants killed.
Through Thorne, they discover that they’re
the targets of a “blood feud”, instigated by Konstandin Sokolov, son of Viktor
Sokolov, the Albanian mobster who had unwisely kidnapped Sarah a few months
back, and paid for it with his life.
They also discover that Thorne’s guests, ruthless human traffickers,
have gathered at the club for a slave auction being held the following
night. Konstandin Sokolov happens to be
one of the buyers.
Fraught with treachery, betrayal, and
deadly danger, Keeping Sarah keeps the reader on a knife’s edge of tension,
while simultaneously exploring the deepening emotional and physical commitment
between Jesse and Adam. They already
trust each other with their lives. Now
they must learn how to trust each other with their love.
ADULT EXCERPT
Then Jesse turned to Sarah.
Bending down, he put his hands beneath her arms and lifted her up off
the floor. Turning her in his arms, he
unhooked the garters, then unlaced the corset, letting it fall to the silk
carpet. As soon as the beautiful, but
restrictive garment fell away from her, Sarah took the first deep breath she’d
had in hours. “Step out of your shoes,
baby,” he crooned, rolling down her stockings and removing them one foot at a
time. “Now bend over and grab your
ankles. I owe you a spanking.”
With a whimper,
she assumed the undignified position, her second of the night, wrapping her
fingers around her ankles while he got on his knees behind her to remove the
vibrators from her pussy and ass.
Dropping the toys on top of the crumpled corset, he palmed her ass
cheeks, his flexing fingers making deep indentations in her sweet flesh. “Spread your legs, baby, or you’re gonna fall
over.” A smile curved his lips upward as
she slid her feet outward. God, I love this ass! He slapped her sharply, the sound and her
subsequent cry loud in the quiet room.
“Count,” was all he said, transfixed by the erotic sight of his
handprint blooming on her skin, first white, then red.
“Y-yes,
Master. O-one.”
“How many have
you earned tonight, slave?”
“Ten,
Master.” Her voice was barely audible,
muffled by her position.
“There will be
no warm-up, so I’ll make them quick.
Count them all.” In rapid
succession, he delivered ten blistering swats to her backside and by the time
she counted the last one, her ass was fiery red and she was sobbing in pain.
Crap, that hurt!
And yet, it felt so good. So damn
good. The heat from her ass seemed
to be having an effect on her clit, as if the two were connected by wires
pulsing and crackling with electricity.
Her sobs turned into moans as he stroked and kneaded the heat more
deeply into her flesh, sending it straight to her pussy until her clit felt
like it was on fire.
Still gripping
her ass cheeks, he lowered his head, slanting it sideways to flick the tip of
his tongue across her throbbing little nub.
She jerked and cried out as pleasure consumed her. Then he straightened, pulling her up after
him, and steered her toward the bed. If Adam was in sub-space, then Sarah was right
there with him, lost and drifting and needing Jesse’s loving care. It was now his duty and responsibility to
love them and keep them safe and give them the pleasure they had both earned
and richly deserved.
“Climb up,
baby,” he said, assisting her up onto the bed.
“On your hands and knees above Adam, pussy over his face, head over his
cock.” As he was talking, he, too, was
getting on the bed, crawling across its enormous expanse toward Adam’s
feet. “Legs apart,” he ordered and Adam
slid his feet across the silky sheets.
“Prepare Sarah.”
At the quiet command, Sarah’s core
convulsed again, sending out another gush of fresh cream. God, she
was so ready to come! She had been so
highly aroused for so long, now that it was finally going to happen, it was all
she could focus on. Without warning,
Adam reached up and stroked his fingers through her slit, from front to back
before thrusting two fingers deep inside her sheath hovering so tantalizingly
above his head. He pressed his thumb
against her puckered anal opening, pushing insistently, until the muscle
relaxed and sucked it in. Sarah stopped
breathing. With wicked skill, he thrust
in and out of both her anus and vagina, pinching the membrane between his thumb
and fingers as he stroked, quickly re-stoking the fires of need in her sex,
burning just beneath the surface. A
thin, high wail escaped her lips as pleasure devoured her.
“Christ, Jess,” Adam muttered over the wet, sucking noises his fingers
were making as he pumped them in and out of Sarah’s sheath, “you should see
what I’m seeing. Our little slave has
the most succulent pussy in the world.
And it’s dripping all over the place.”
“Sarah,” Jesse ordered, “Take Adam into your mouth.”
CHARACTER
INTERVIEW WITH JESSE COLTER
1.
Tell us a little about yourself. How did you come to your author’s
attention? Occupation?
My name is Jesse Colter.
I’m 32, a former SEAL, now Chief of Police of Marshall’s Creek,
Virginia, the small, sleepy town I grew up in.
My childhood basically sucked—my father was a drunk and a bully who used
me for his punchin’ bag—until I was fourteen and bigger than he was, so he
pretty much steered clear of me after that.
I never knew my Native American mother.
She disappeared before I was outta diapers. My father always claimed she ran away with
another man, but I’ve always suspected he killed her one night in a drunken
rage and disposed of her body. I came to
my author’s attention the day I rescued her heroine, Sarah Marshall, from
fallin’ out of a tree. Actually, that’s
not quite true. I came to her attention
long before that. She just had to think
about me for a while and get to know me before she decided to let it be me who
rescued Sarah. She wanted us to have a
happy ending, even though she kept us apart for eight years before givin’ it to
us. (Lol)
2.
What or who is the greatest love of your life? Why? What drew you to
them?
Sarah Marshall is the only woman I have ever loved, the
only woman I ever will love. I met her the summer she was 13. I was workin’ as an assistant gardener at
Marshall’s Hill, the ante-bellum estate where she grew up. I heard this blood-curdlin’ shriek and when I
ran to find out where it was comin’ from, there she was, danglin’ upside down
from a broken tree limb 30 feet above the ground. Scared the livin’ sh-daylights outta me! I was nineteen and full of my own teen-age
crap, but Sarah, oh, my God…[shakes his head]…she just fascinated me. She was this amazin’ combination of child and
adult. She grew up rich, but her
childhood sucked as much as mine did, except she wasn’t beaten. Just ignored.
Her father was a judge, a self-important, self-righteous little prick
who had no time for his only child, so she was pretty much raised by tutors and
nannies. She was the first person who
treated me like I really mattered, you know?
The first person who ever really listened to me. She actually valued my opinion! She bullied me into readin’ all her favorite
books just so she could have someone to discuss them with. She turned me into an avid reader, for which
I’ll always be grateful.
When I hired on the next summer, she had entered puberty
and had filled out. Boy, had she filled
out! God, she was so gorgeous and I knew
I was in trouble. When I was at work, I
couldn’t stop lookin’ at her and when I was anywhere else, I couldn’t stop
thinkin’ about her. But I was bad
news. Six years older than her, a biker,
and a Dom. And even though I suspected
she was a natural submissive, she was still just a kid, and I knew if I claimed
her, I would ruin her life. After all,
she was rich, the daughter of a judge, the descendant of English aristocrats,
while I was the bastard son of a Native American prostitute and the town
drunk. At that point, my life was a
steamin’ pile of crap. What kind of a
future could I possibly give her?
I didn’t show up the next summer, but still saw her every
night in my dreams. I tried to stay away
from her, but kept seein’ her around town, even rescued her from gettin’ into a
truck and goin’ off with three guys who were even worse than me. Boy, were they pissed! Then, three years later, my cousin overheard
a couple of those guys laughin’ and gigglin’ about raidin’ Sarah’s eighteenth
birthday party and havin’ some “fun.”
The minute he told me I hopped on my bike and rode out to her place to
try and stop ’em. I managed to keep the
one guy from rapin’ Sarah, but I had wanted her so badly for so long that when
she threw herself at me and begged me to make love to her…I very nearly did. I left town that night. Just sneaked out without sayin’ good-bye to
the only person who’d ever really mattered to me. I hitched a ride to Norfolk where I found
myself the next mornin’ standin’ in a seedy, rundown strip mall, starin’ at the
Navy recruitment office. I enlisted that
day. I’ll never regret joinin’ the Navy,
but I will regret to my dyin’ day the decision to leave Sarah the way I did,
with no word of explanation, no good-bye, no word at all for eight long
years. It was a crappy thing to do
because it wound up nearly destroyin’ both of us. Believe me, I will spend the rest of my life
makin’ it up to her. Because now that I
have her, I can’t imagine ever livin’ without her.
3.
What’s your greatest fear?
My greatest fear is losin’ Sarah. I already lost her once, that night I left
town. It took me eight year to admit how
much I needed her, and how wrong I’d been to leave her. I nearly lost her again when I introduced her
to my best friend, Adam Sinclair, and we told her we wanted to share her in a
D/s menage relationship. Adam was already
in love with her just from hearin’ me talk about her while we were servin’ with
the SEALs over in Afghanistan. But I
needn’t have worried. As soon as they
met each other, the attraction was instantaneous. It was like…completin’ the circle. Then I almost lost her when her ex-fiance
tried to kidnap her in order to get hold of her money. Fortunately we got to her in time. But the absolute worst was a few months ago,
when that SOB who’d nearly raped her got out of prison. He kidnapped her and sold her to Viktor
Sokolov, an international slave trafficker.
They nearly got away with it, too.
Adam and I were terrified we wouldn’t get to her in time to stop Sokolov
from flyin’ her out of the country and beyond our reach. In our latest adventure, Keeping Sarah, we are surrounded by danger.
4.
What’s your motto in life?
No secrets. There
must be open, honest communication at all times about everything. It’s the only way a D/s relationship,
especially a menage, can survive and flourish.
5.
How do the other characters in your book view you?
My best friend and brother-in-arms, Adam, knows me as a
dom, a fellow SEAL, and a man of principle and integrity. We love and admire each other as friends,
brothers, and finally, in Keeping Sarah,
as lovers. It’s a development I’m not
sure I’m ready for, even though I know the feelin’s between us have been
developin’ for a long time. But Adam can
be very persuasive, and knows exactly which buttons to push, although he and
Sarah practically have to stage an intervention to get me over the final
hurdle. Sarah, the love of my life, sees
me as macho, bossy, domineering, chauvinistic, over-bearing, and annoying. Oops, I forgot sexy (lol). She also sees me as one of the two men who
love her to the bottom of our souls and who would give our lives to protect her
from harm. The bad guys view me as their
worst nightmare.
6.
What is it about you that is going to draw us readers in?
I’m sexy as hell (lol).
No, really. I am. I love fiercely and forever, and will fight to
the death to protect those I cherish. I
don’t suffer fools lightly and I abhor bullies and abusers of women—any
women. Women are to be loved, revered,
protected and treasured. With a few
spankings, a little harmless torture and lots of orgasms thrown in just to
spice things up a bit. I am, after all,
a Dom. [Grins]
7.
What was your happiest moment?
The first time I had Sarah tied to my bed and she looked up
at me, beggin’ me to let her come…I knew I had found my joy. I knew I would spend the rest of my life
wantin’ to make her scream with pleasure.
8.
What trait in others do you find most deplorable?
Dishonesty and lack of respect.
9. What is your favorite time of day?
First thing in the mornin’, when Adam and I
wake up with Sarah between us all soft and warm and smellin’ delicious. We wake her by makin’ slow, sweet love to
her, startin’ her day with the gift of pleasure, lettin’ her know just how much
we adore her.
Thank you, Jesse Colter, for stopping by
and talking to us.
It started with an arrangement,
temporary no strings attached sex.
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