A. P. von K’Ory – His Untamable Wickedness

Today, award-winning author A. P. von K’Ory is guesting. She’s talking about her latest release His Untamable Wickedness, book one in the Untamable series, a dark, romantic suspense. Don’t forget to enter the Rafflecopter giveaway.

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THE EROTIC ROMANCE FREED: By A P VON K’ORY

Are POVs and Perspectives different entities in writing? The answer is yes, they’re distinctively different. I’ve learnt that I need the sharpest tool in the drawer to slice through that thin separation line between them. But each of them greatly contributes to giving the story a backbone made of steel.

I discovered that same thin line separation in the power play between the loving couple and the bold freedom of twenty-first century women to fully live their sexuality without any apologies. Especially in erotic literature. With the advent of the eReader, girls and women (plus everyone else in between) could have that muscled male specimen or well-endowed and scantily dressed beauty on the book cover and read about her or his merits and exploits while sitting next to a priest on the long train journey.

And that’s what I wanted for my books even before I took the leap from non-fiction writing into fiction. Not that I gave up writing nonfiction; I simply trimmed my continents-long name to a short pen name. Then I embarked on writing that steamy story with the gorgeous Master Muscled Alpha having his way with his chosen mate. Or the curvy beauty reveling in the joys she received and reciprocated. When romance openly embraced the steamy/erotic/erotica genre in all the amalgam of tropes and went mainstream, I jumped in with my entire kit of writing tools.

First of all, the romance genre had always been one of my favourites reads, if not top of the charts. So when the publishing industry was stormed by stronger women, and their helpers, to bow to the erotic genre in all its multitude of tropes, I read all the controversial bestsellers of the day.

And was soon taken aback. I was personally disappointment in what the dozens of writers I read were doing with the acquired publishing and literature freedom to write hot stories.

Of course I enjoyed reading the stories. I devoured them. But I soon found myself reading one and the same story over and over again, from different authors but in the very same premise (the concept of the story) and plot (what happens and all the events that make up the story), except for the locations – if I were lucky – and names of the characters. Even the protagonists, both male and female, became exchangeable except for their names. Sometimes, not even that.

I grew up with limited or no technology but I loved reading romance ever since I was around four or five. Mother dear subscribed to those magazines that serialized those romance stories where bedroom scenes ended with the kiss as the door closed behind the lovers. By the time I hit puberty and was blissfully in boarding school in Yorkshire, Little Women was for the classroom while The Perfumed Garden (smuggled in) was in the clandestine department, shared with besties and besties’ besties (how else to giggle and enact raunchy scenes about the steamy bits, right?) Even Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a real naughty treat. Soon after that came the non-clandestine delicious swooning with Barbara Cartland’s heroines even though they were chased but remained chaste till the gold band was on their destined finger. So maybe I’m simply a little warped, all things considered.

The new freedom and assertiveness allows us to flaunt our sexuality, break the chains, march into the male arena and claim our man for ourselves. We are in this on our own terms, chains, whips, humiliation and all – says our new banner. We can be called sluts and whipped raw but if it was what we wanted, we jolly well enjoyed it without feeling guilty, without any apologies.

But, IMHO, this is a short sell. This has become some form of affirmative action and glorified PR for our sexual slavery. We are using our brand new (at least literary) freedom, to continue to perpetuate the stereotype since time immemorial. We are f*cking drunk on it. Revel in it and rightly so. But selling ourselves short.

In the new millennium, I felt like women had stormed the Bastille but were steering the same old course. To me, it soon felt somewhat half-mast. Like being freed only to turn around and say you can’t deal with your freedom because you never had it before in your whole life, so better get back to the well-known and regulated captivity. Place the helm back in men’s hands.

I kept reading and hoping for that steamy romance that sheds all the shackles society has used over the centuries to keep women “in their place”. I abhorred the conditioning of girls to be the ones to kiss the frog to make him a prince, put up with the Beast when they were the Beauty, or prick their fingers into a hundred-year-old-sleep until the prince comes to their rescue.

Now that eroticism in literature had gone mainstream, I wanted my version or preference to also be out there. I stopped searching for what I wanted to read from other authors. I decided the newly acquired freedom in erotic literature could use some of my own fantasies. Therefore, I began to write steamy romance because I wanted to write stories I yearned to read.

My first erotic suspense series, GOLDEN SHANA, was actually the story of the Alpha hero Roman’s quest for love that he refused to accept as love although it was glued to his eyeballs. To him it was the all too familiar BS of the Alpha male who would never accept no for an answer, let alone a very disdainful and dismissive no from a woman in whom he was interested. Roman became obsessively determined to have Shana. In his own initial words at the beginning of the quest: “Her knickers belonged to me.”

It took him five full books of chasing, fist-fights, getting abducted by a dangerous international criminal rival, and stepping over more corpses than in an airliner crash until he finally won the body and heart of his Golden Shana, and have their HEA.

The UNTAMEABLE series is my second erotic thriller story. When I started writing the story of Leo and Adrian in the series, I went for a story that was darker and sexually a little more violent than the GOLDEN SHANA series. But I still aim for the discerning and gender-positive story. As always I paired off diverse people: the uber-rich ultra-strong American Leo and the professional British Royal Marine assassin Adrian. What I always endeavor to achieve is that if submission isn’t synonymous with weakness, then it’s up to the author to handle it in a way that makes this clear. It’s not enough to simply say it isn’t. Worse still, IMHO, and insulting in a way is to have the Dom tell his sub that it isn’t. In addition, in modern days it’s not the frog we have to kiss. It’s the financial inequality that we have to deal with, even when the women have the same jobs and qualifications as the men. Girls are still made to grow up believing they are less worthy than boys. In books, girls and women are trimmed to identify with “someone just like you” while the boys and men are encouraged to identify with James Bond and Superman – never someone just like them. Boys and men are whipped up to aspire higher, way higher than themselves.

This led me to writing love stories where the woman is Alpha, no damsel in distress, and financially and socially independent. The brand of woman who gets invited to the Met Gala on her own rights, not as a decoration on a man’s arm. Young female readers should get to know and love the headstrong woman who kneels before her man only when she herself wants to kneel, not because the man orders her to do so. Leo willingly kneels before Adrian but from a position of power and deep affection. And Adrian gives any man who so much as looks at Leo the nastiest what-for. My heroines still go for the Alpha male. That’s a given. It’s wired in every woman since time immemorial to seek the protector who’ll fight and fend off danger while she’s taking care of the existential duties that put her in a vulnerable position. That’s nature, not nurture. Women, Alpha or Beta, sprint away from wimps.

On the other hand true Alpha men have no need to be freaking ego-drunk a-holes either. If he’s leader of the pack, he’d better be confident enough to wield that power with dignity.

I personally find tremendous pleasure in having the Alpha hero go through more than his abs, chiseled chin, money, and the power that comes with it, to fall for the woman who makes him feel edgy, and not totally in control. It’s a heck of a turn-on to see Master Alpha struggle to align himself to his strong, independent, Alpha woman’s standpoint. In the UNTAMEABLE series, Leo and Adrian’s story, I also made both protagonists totally, insanely flawed. They’re both each other’s combustible tinder for a monumental fireball. Or like a fuel tank and a match.

As Leo says: Adrian is a permanent damage control. And Adrian: To try to contain and control Leo is like trying to contain and control the fierce f*cking wind.

I simply love the exhilaration of the mano-a-mano battle for control. Until the compromise point, by which time things are already exploding all over the place to hell and beyond.

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Title: His Untamable Wickedness
Series: Untamable, book one
Author: A. P. von K’Ory
Genre(s): Romantic Suspense, Dark Romance, Erotic Romance
Length: 300 pages
Release Date: June 30, 2022
Publisher: AuthorMeProfessionals Press

LEO
A three-letter word made me a murderess at the age of eight years. But having experienced the curses of that word, I was done with men as I grew up. All men.  Except to outplay them in the New York financial arena. Then Crowned Sex enthroned in gorgeous velvet charm and lustful gallantry storms into my life.  Spewing volcanic lava on my monumental arctic ice block. With the unapologetic fierceness of a savage god. Wearing crackling thunderbolts straight from the god Zeus. Explosive has nothing on it.

Adrian isn’t hot, he’s fucking hellish. He embarks on melting my ice block at the speed of lightning. But I was done with men.  I was done with sex. For ever. I. Was.

ADRIAN
I scented her darkness from the moment I was told  about her. The sight of her sealed my decision. She was the woman created for my own darkness. I set off to protect her even from herself. Protect her to claim.

Fuse her darkness with my own. For. Myself. I’d fended women off me with bazookas when I was done but they weren’t. I wasn’t prepared for the battle I soon fought. Not only with her but also with her family. And New York’s billionaire gangsters who own entourages of corrupt cops and politicians. With every battle I won, she started new darker wars around me. You ate or you were eaten. Not even starving was an option.

NOTE: Although the blurb is in the first person, the story of Leo and Adrian is written in the third person. This story contains adult material including explicit sex and violence. You’ve been warned.

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He caught both her flying arms, used her momentum to spin her around onto her back on the couch and landed over her.

Smack bang between her legs.

Pinned her hands above her head and every f****** struggle she tried only forced her to rub against his hard body.

Furious, her thighs tensed but with nowhere to go except around his hips. He planned this. She f****** bet he planned this to the last minute detail.

“You double-faced bastard, get off me!”

“No. You put yourself here. Right here under me, Leo.”

“Get the f*** off m—”

He slammed his crotch right against hers and ground in.

She screamed as some unknown force kindled her center and the sensation rushed simultaneously south to her soles and north to her scalp.

She stiffened, trembling. Then whimpered. Then—

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P von K’Ory writes the kind of books she herself would like to read and is passionate about, whether romance, psychological thriller or nonfiction. She is the winner of six awards from four continents, the last one being the Achievers Award for Writer of the Year 2013 in the Netherlands. The Selmere Integration Prize was awarded her in 2014 for her engagement in helping African Women in the Diaspora cope with a variety of domestic and social problems. The Proposal, a short story, won the Cook Communications first prize in 2010 and is published in an American anthology Africa 2012. In 2012, she won the Karl Ziegler Prize for her commitment to bring African culture to Western society in various papers, theses, and lectures. Again in 2012, her book Bound to Tradition: The Dream was nominated for the 2012 Caine Prize by the Author-me Group, Sanford, and in 2013 she was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Von K’Ory is married to an aristocrat and politician of Franco-German descent, has a large extended family. She lectures Economics and Sociology in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. She’s migratory and – weather willing – lives in Germany, France, Cyprus, and Greece.