After three winters in
Antarctica, Simon Bancroft is an old hand on the ice. The harsh weather and
extreme isolation aren’t for everyone, but he enjoys the tight-knit community at
McMurdo Station… and lately, he’s enjoyed watching the hot new researcher, Asher
Delaney, who’s recently arrived to study the aurora. But Simon’s just a
janitor. Asher doesn’t even know he exists.
When Simon’s friends
propose a wager, he gets a chance to introduce himself to Asher at last. But
Asher defies all of Simon’s assumptions, and suddenly he finds himself
reevaluating everything he thought he knew about Asher, himself, and falling in
love at the bottom of the world.
World of Love: Stories of
romance that span every corner of the globe.
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Cat gives this one 3
Meows with a 2 Purr heat index...
This was a sweet romance
set in another world. It is interesting and I learned a lot about living in a place
I hear little about with a job I had never heard of. The story is sweet and
predictable with interesting side characters as well.
Excerpt…
THERE WAS a running joke
in Antarctica about sex—
First he took off her
jacket. Then he took off her sweater. And then he seductively slid her
coveralls off her shoulders and down her legs. And then he stripped off her
thermal shirt, and her jeans. And then she lay before him on the bed, wearing
nothing but her base layers, wool socks, and hat.
Simon huffed out a laugh,
thinking about it, and propped his elbow on the table so he could rest his chin
in the palm of his hand.
“You’re staring again,”
Miranda said. “And you’re drooling into your spaghetti.”
“I just….” Simon gazed
across the dining room toward a boisterous, overcrowded table in the corner. “I
just want to take his jacket off, if you know what I mean.”
Miranda threw a roll at
him. “You’ve got it bad, Si.”
“Yeah, I know.” He sighed
longingly. The group at table he’d been observing stood up all at once,
everyone collecting their trays. Simon held his breath as they walked
by—as he walked by.
Asher Delaney was the
epitome of rugged. At six foot six, he was one of the tallest men on the base.
He was so muscular that rumor said the US Antarctic Program had needed to
special-order him one of the big red jackets that everyone on station wore,
before he deployed down to McMurdo Station—the largest of the three United
States bases on the continent—for the winter season. He had dirty-blond hair
that darkened along his jaw when he went a few days without shaving, and green
eyes that lit up whenever he was talking to one of his friends.
He looked like a
lumberjack or a linebacker, not a scientist. And he looked like he could
absolutely wreck Simon in the best way imaginable.
“You need a boyfriend.
Bad.”
Simon rolled his eyes.
“Not interested,” he sang. “But I wouldn’t say no to a good, hard fuck.”
Miranda rolled her eyes
back at him. “You should talk to him.” When Simon leveled an incredulous look
at her, Miranda held her hands up defensively. “Look, we’re stuck here for four
more months. We’re in the middle of nowhere, and it’s pitch black outside even
if you wanted to go do something in the vast, frozen wilderness. I’m just
saying, you should see if he’s interested.”
Simon grabbed the
projectile bread missile from where it had landed on the table and began to
tear it apart. “Sure, until he rejects me. And then it’s four months of
awkwardness and misery.”
Miranda shrugged. “Or he
doesn’t reject you, and it’s four months of crazy hot sex while putting to use
some of the twenty-thousand condoms lying around station.”
And wasn’t that a nice
mental image? Normally McMurdo Station housed about 1,200 residents during the
summer, a combination of researchers and support staff. But winter in
Antarctica brought a much smaller winterover crew. The reduced staff meant that
everyone had their own dorm room, and there were a lot of
interesting ways he could pass the time if he had someone like Asher to pass it
with. Plus, the US Antarctic Program didn’t joke around when it came to
condoms; there were enough for Asher to pound Simon’s brains out every night
for the rest of the winter, and twice on Sundays.
Damn, Asher probably
fucked like an animal too. All that muscle….
Of course, then reality
had to crash back down. “He doesn’t know that I exist. And even if he’s
queer—which he probably isn’t!—he could do way better than me.”
It was like a
jock-and-geek high school story: Asher, the handsome scientist who spent his
days studying the aurora and being brilliant… and Simon, who washed dishes and
kept the buildings on station clean.
“Simon.” Miranda pulled
him out of his thoughts, leaning forward to yank the mangled roll out of his
hands. “He’s never going to know you exist if you don’t talk to him. And if you
repeat this, I’ll deny it to my dying breath, but… you’re hot.”
Simon made a face at her.
They’d had this argument half a dozen times already in the month that they’d
been at McMurdo.
And logically he knew she
was right. But the chance of rejection was too high. Asher was big, strong, and
sexy. He looked like he could roll off the set of an action movie and then
calculate some rocket science in his spare time. Simon… was Simon. He’d
probably just embarrass himself. And Miranda had no idea how hard it could be
to avoid someone on base if things didn’t work out.
It was Miranda’s first
winterover, but Simon’s third. He felt like an old hand at this point, and he
understood the social and political landscape of a winterover in Antarctica and
how it differed from life back in the States.
The two had quickly gotten
close. They’d been on the same flight down from New Zealand, and Simon had
offered to help out when Miranda got lost among the identical brown buildings
trying to find her assigned dorm. But after four weeks, Simon had to admit that
she felt more like a sister than a friend.
People bonded fast on the
Ice. There wasn’t exactly a whole lot else to do in the middle of nowhere.
“Just talk to him,”
Miranda implored. “Once. I beg you.”
Simon sighed and poked at
his spaghetti. “I’ll think about it.”
Elyse Springer is an
author and world traveler whose unique life experiences have helped to shape
the stories she wants to tell. She writes romances with LGBTQIA+ characters and
relationships, and believes that every person deserves a Happily Ever After.
Her asexual F/F romance Thaw was an Amazon #1 Bestseller. When she’s not
staring futilely at her computer screen, Elyse spends her time adding stamps to
her passport, catching up on her terrifying TBR list, and learning to be a
better adult.
enjoyed the excerpt
ReplyDeleteThank you for the excerpt! It looks great =)
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