This is my last blog post here because....

MY BEAUTIFUL NEW WEBSITE IS LIVE!!!!

Check it out at www.elisabethnaughton.com. From now on I'll be blogging over there, so if you happen to have a link to this blog site on your own blog or webpage, please redirect it to www.elisabethnaughton.com/blog/

In addition, if you have a blog feed to this addy, please switch it over to the new address.

My first post is already up on the new site...and I'm giving away first chapter booklets of MARKED to anyone who comments there TODAY. There are still a few hours left (I'm on west coast time!) so hop over and tell me what you think of the new site!

Happy Saturday! I'm still having some computer issues - grrrrrrrr - and didn't have time to work them out this week so my blogging was nil. Right now I'm on the netbook so I can post this fabulous Saturday Snippet.


Today's topic is Black Moments. I admit, I'm a sucker a deep, dark, emotional black moment. I love them! The more emotional, the better!

This one comes from my May release, MARKED. It's not THE black moment(that would give too much away!), but it's the lead-in to it. I hope you enjoy!

***
Excerpted from: MARKED
ISBN: 978-0-505-52822-3
Release Date: April 27, 2010

Theron stared at the ceiling long after Acacia fell asleep. Gods, he liked this. Way too much. Her, here in his bed. Hidden away from the world. Warm and snug and his.

His. There was a word. The irony was like a knife to the stomach.

He rolled to his side so he could watch her sleep and knew they didn’t have long. The king had probably already called the rest of the Argonauts together. What he’d said in the king’s chambers—with Zander as a witness—would be considered treason. He fully expected one of his kin to come charging in at any moment and drag him away.

He could hear their discussion now. Cerek the peacemaker would convince the rest not to take action until the morning. They’d come at first dawn. Play to Theron’s sense of honor. If that didn’t work, Gryphon would crack a joke about getting the king good, in a lame attempt to lighten the mood. Zander wouldn’t care one way or the other— so long as what happened to Theron didn’t affect him. And Demetrius . . . yeah, Demetrius would be pushing to have Theron hanged.

Too late, Theron realized he’d never told his Argonauts how much he respected them. Though they served together, fought together, none of them were close. And as he looked down at Casey, sleeping on her stomach with both arms tucked under her, her face tipped his way and one of her legs intertwined with his, he realized he’d never even thought of his Argonauts as separate individuals before. To him, they’d always been nothing more than fighters in a war they’d all been trained for. But now?

Now it was as if his eyes had been opened.

He brushed a finger down Acacia’s cheek, watched her back rise and fall in deep sleep. Studied the way her lashes formed spiky crescent shapes on her pale cheeks. Her courage still awed him. Last night she’d been ready to take him on. There was no other female in the universe who would dare stand up to him when he was in one of his moods, but it hadn’t stopped her. She was fearless. And as selfless as he’d told the king. Everything he’d never wanted but now couldn’t imagine living without.

He’d known she was his from the first taste. Long before he’d ever slid deep inside her. If he’d been more in tune with his humanity, he would have recognized it the first time he’d kissed her back in her small house. But he hadn’t. Because he’d needed her to unlock that side of him he’d always repressed.

She was his curse. His soul mate. His life. And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to keep her from dying.

His finger ran down her shoulder, over her back until he found the sheet covering her gorgeous ass. He gripped the cotton and pulled it down, then eased up on an elbow and looked at her marking.

Gods, it was fading. In a matter of days, it would be gone.

His chest squeezed tight, and though he wanted nothing more than to slide back inside her and wake her from the inside out, he knew he couldn’t. Shouldn’t. She needed to save her strength, not use it up pleasuring him.

One glance at the window told him the moon was setting and morning would be here soon. Careful, so as not to wake her, he pulled the covers up around her shoulders and headed for the shower. Her scent all over his body was distracting and arousing at the same time. As he lathered and rinsed under the hot spray, he told himself he was doing the right thing. The king had been correct on one count. Sometimes a great sacrifice is necessary.

He cut the water, grabbed a towel and dried his hair. After toweling off his legs, he pulled on new jeans, lifted the terry to his shoulders and froze.

Someone was outside on his porch.

Skata, he’d been wrong. They’d come for him already.

A deep male voice echoed through the closed doors. Followed by Acacia’s surprised and wary one.

His heart rate jerked.

No. He was wrong. They’d come for her.

***
Now check out these other fabulous Saturday Snippets!

Emma Petersen
Ashley Ladd
Lissa Matthews
TJ Micheals
McKenna Jeffries
Eliza Gayle
Mari Carr
Juliana Stone
Lauren Dane
Shelley Munro
Taige Crenshaw

I'm back with Saturday snippets and today's topic is lost loves, which fits in perfectly with my August release, ENTWINED. So this is a piece from that.

Enjoy!

***
Excerpted from: ENTWINED
Eternal Guardians Book #2
Release Date: August 2010
ISBN: 978-0-505-52822-3

“Where do you want me?”

Callia turned away from the window without meeting Zander's eyes, dropped her arms and pointed toward the end of the king’s now-empty desk. “There. Sit.”

He crossed the floor silently in bare feet and eased a hip onto the end of the king’s long desk. He tested the piece of furniture for stability, and when he was sure it wasn’t going to collapse under his weight, scooted back until his legs were hanging over the edge and his bare feet dangled inches above the floor.

She didn’t say anything about the fact he wasn’t completely naked, and he wasn’t about to bring it up again. To distract himself, he stared down at his toes while she moved around the room. She pulled a small side table with her supplies next to her. Seconds later he felt her hand land on his back and couldn’t stop the way he arched in response. When she said, “Deep breath,” he forced himself to relax as she moved the stethoscope around, obviously listening to his lungs.

The metal against his skin was cold, but her fingers were warm and silky—too warm and silky. His blood was already heating just from being this close to her, and every time she brushed his skin, it set off tremors deep in his body. He focused on his breathing—on the steady in and out—in an attempt to stay calm. When she moved around to stand in front of him, repeating the order, he averted his eyes from her face and focused on the fitted white sweater she wore instead.

Her gasp brought his head up. “What happened to you?”

“Nothing. I’m fine.”

“That’s not nothing.” She focused on his shoulder as she looped the stethoscope around her neck, reached for her bag and came back with gauze and supplies.

“Leave it,” he said before she could touch him. “It’s just a flesh wound.”

She dabbed at the dried blood with a wad of gauze. “The muscle’s torn. You need this stitched closed before infection sets in.”

“It’s already healing.”

“I see that but—”

He grabbed her wrist, stilling her motion. A jolt ran through him at the connection, but he ignored it. The last thing he needed was her hands on his body more than was already necessary. “I said leave it.”

Her eyes slid from the wound to his face and held. And before he realized it, he was staring into eyes like a Caribbean sunset in the human world. Eyes he’d looked into countless times before as they’d made love. Eyes he’d dreamed about numerous times in the years since until he’d woken in a cold and aching sweat.

Thoughts vanished from his mind. The connection they’d had from the first sparked deep in his chest, burned in the bottom of his soul. Tempted him to reach for her and find out if she felt it, too. He couldn’t be the only one who remembered, could he? She had to feel something when she saw him. When she stood this close. When she touched him.

Thoughts, memories, feelings he’d kept buried for a long time pushed in as he stared into her gem-like eyes. A movie of their time together flickered in front of his face. And then when he got to the part where she betrayed him, that blaze went out. Leaving behind nothing but charred ash and ruins.

It didn’t matter what she felt. Their past was over and done with. The Fates had screwed him in more ways than one. There wasn’t anything about her now that could change what had happened back then.

He dropped her hand as quickly as he’d grabbed it. Then glanced back at her sweater. “Finish the exam.”

***
Now check out these other fabulous Saturday Snippets!

Leah Braemel
Emma Petersen
TJ Micheals
Ashley Ladd
Lissa Matthews
McKenna Jeffries
Shelli Stevens
Taige Crenshaw
Eliza Gayle
Mari Carr
ViviAna
Juliana Stone
Lauren Dane
Shelley Munro

Oy...it's been a while since I've been here. Sorry! I have a good excuse.

Two weekends ago I went to an awesome weekend writers workshop and left my laptop at home. (And if you've never listened to Michael Hauge, and you're a writer, your really should find where he's speaking and go listen. The man is amazing.) My kids played on my laptop while I was gone and somehow downloaded a virus which has totally mucked up my system. After a week of trying to clean it up I have nearly everything working except for Google. And since blogger works off Google log-in info...yeah. I haven't been able to blog. Grrrrrrrrrr... Right now I'm on the netbook but hoping to get my regular laptop back up and running soon. (Oh please, oh please, oh please...)

Aside from working on pulling my eyebrows out over the computer issue, I've been working on TEMPTED (Eternal Guardians book 3). The book is going good and I'm loving the characters.

In other news, I got an A+ review today on STOLEN SEDUCTION from The Good The Bad & the Unread! I can't remember the last time I got an A+ on anything! My good friend (and fellow writer) Kristina McMorris has a way of keeping me firmly rooted in reality, however. When I told her about the review, she said, "...do you really think it's a healthy policy to award a PERFECT grade to any author? I mean, where does an author aspire to go from there? Basically, they're saying you just penned "The Sixth Sense" as one of your first books. And we all know what happened to THAT director since. All downhill from there." Ah, thank goodness for friends who know how to bring everything back into focus. LOL

So let's see...in other news...I have a few ARCs of MARKED left and I'm thinking of running a newsletter contest. If you haven't signed up for my newsletter...go do it soon!!! (The sign up form is on the bottom of the home page.) You just never know when I'm gonna start handing out ARCs!

Oh! And I almost forgot! Stay tuned because my new updated website is going to go live sometime this month! It's really really really really awesome (did I say really? Trust me. It's REALLY awesome.)

Hope you're all well.

An excerpt for my August release, ENTWINED, is up on my website!

Click here to read it!

And here's the official back cover copy:

ZANDER – The most feared of all the Eternal Guardians. It’s rumored he can’t be killed, and he always fights like he has nothing to lose. But as a descendant of the famed hero Achilles, he’s got to have a vulnerability...somewhere.

Forces of daemons are gathering and have broken through the barriers of the Underworld. Now more than ever the Eternal Guardians are needed to protect both their own realm and the humans’. Zander can’t afford to think about what might have been with the bewitching physician he once regarded as his soul mate. But with eternity stretching before him, he also can’t fathom spending his life without the one woman who makes him feel most alive. Perhaps he’s found his weakness, after all…

I'm hard at work on book three in my Eternal Guardians Series - TEMPTED. And I gotta have a theme song. Or something I can listen to that puts me in the mood. So far, this is it:



So powerful...

Safe Sex?

I love Twitter. You just learn all kinds of things.

Today someone on Twitter posted this article from Mrs. Giggles about Things That Should Be Banned From Romance Novels. I'm not going to go through the whole list, but I will point out this part:

Safe sex - or why we protect ourselves during sex
If I see another author having her heroine tell the hero that it is okay if he sticks his pee-pee into her unchartered waters without a condom because she is on the Pill, I will scream. Please don't tell me that these authors honestly believe that safe sex is only to prevent pregnancy. Actually, I once had an angry email from an author that convinced me that this could indeed be the case for some authors, shudder. They genuinely believed that the Pill is a method of protection during sex. I'm going to say this in caps because I've been saying this for so long, I think it should be tattooed on the forehead of these authors:

DO NOT MENTION CONDOMS OR SAFE SEX IF YOU HAVE NO INTENTION OF HAVING YOUR CHARACTERS HAVE SAFE SEX. DON'T INSULT MY INTELLIGENCE WITH THAT "OH, I'M ON THE PILL, SO THROW AWAY THAT JOHNNY AND COME ON IN!" NONSENSE. WHEN IT COMES TO SAFE SEX IN FICTION, IT'S ALL OR NOTHING - PROTECTION OR NONE AT ALL.

Okay, so I get what she's saying. But. Let me ask this: name ONE romance novel you have read where the hero/heroine had safe (condom) sex and then later one or the other admitted they had an STD.

I can't think of one!

Let's get real. Safe sex in "Romance" novels is pretty much there to address the whole pregnancy issue. I can't think of a single romance novel I've read where the condom sex thing was really there to prevent one or the other from getting an STD. Romance novels are fiction. In a happily ever after fiction world, STDs don't exist. So this whole thing about the Pill vs condoms...doesn't even register for me.

Would I want to read a romance where one or the other has an STD? Ah, no. Because that's not a happily ever after moment for me. "Here, I love you, honey, but I have AIDS. We'll have an HEA until I die." (Sounds like a Nicholas Sparks book...which we all know is NOT romance.) So um, yeah. In romance novels, I really don't have a problem with this. Obviously, because my characters have had condom sex and non condom sex. I think a conversation between the main characters addressing the issue is important, but so long as both characters are on the same page and no one's taking advantage of the situation, I'm good with it.

Now one thing that DOES irritate me about the whole safe sex thing in romance novels is when the author makes a big deal about the characters having safe sex the first time they're together, then never mentions it again. I'm often left thinking, "Um, wait. Now they don't even think about it again? And no one's using a condom, and they aren't discussing if she can get pregnant. WTF???" If you're going to bring up the whole safe sex thing, then carry it through and at least have them discuss it later. If you don't want to even mention it, I'm fine there too, just so long as the author is consistent.

How about you? What's your take on the whole safe-sex issue in romance novels?