Striptease
by Alison Kent

Melanie Craine knows romance isn't in the cards for her. She's ambitious, and has no time for a man in her busy life. With all of the other women at the funky gIRL- gEAR.com Web site meeting Mr. Right, someone has to keep things afloat! Then, when hot videographer Jacob Faulkner films her behavior at her friend's wedding, she's livid. Determined to make him see what's beneath her attitude, she tapes herself doing a steamy striptease...for Jacob's eyes only.

Jacob never expected Melanie to retaliate the way she did when he sent that tape! Watching her slowly remove each item of clothing from her body is the most erotic thing he's ever seen. Now that he's on board to film the gIRL- gEAR group for a documentary on successful businesswomen, there's no way he can keep things "professional." And it can't get any better when he finds out she doesn't want anything more than a sexual relationship. But will it be enough in the end?

Alison Kent's Bio

Writing about myself is a lot harder than writing about my characters and their lives. Mine is nowhere as exciting . . . wait. I take that back, because it is!

No, I don’t work for a crime-fighting organization or a fashion empire, but I make my living doing exactly what I want to do. I write. Though it wasn’t always so . . .

I often read of or heard about authors who knew they were meant to tell stories from the time they left the crib. Me? I didn’t decide what I wanted to be when I grew up until I was thirty years old — and then sold my first book at thirty-four. Still, it was obvious that I always knew I was going places.

Like so many other authors, I was a voracious reader from day one, devouring everything from Nancy Drew to My Friend Flicka, which I remember sitting hovered over the heater vent in the kitchen floor to read while my father made his coffee.

I moved on to my mother’s Phyllis Whitney, Dorothy Eden, and Mary Stewart gothics before discovering my first true romances written by Lucy Walker and set in the Australian Outback. And then, at last, when I was 18 I found ’The Flame and the Flower’. (My son almost spent his life as Brandon because of that, but I spared him and named him Casey instead!)

Why write romance? Because love stories have always been a major part of the books I’ve loved. Father Ralph and Meggie Cleary. (I did name my daughter Megan after reading The Thorn Birds! Do you see a trend here?) The aforementioned Brandon Birmingham and Heather Simmons. Wolf Mackenzie and Mary Potter.

Even more so, it’s because I love writing romance heroes. The men who sweep both heroines and readers off their feet — not to mention their authors, too!