Available now from Loose-Id, this e-novella is an erotic riff on Jane Eyre.

My advice, if you really, really love Jane Eyre and consider Jane the archetypal romance heroine–don’t buy this book!

If you find Jane Eyre fascinating and intriguing and you’ve found yourself wondering about the book and its characters (and isn’t that the litmus test of a great novel, that it awakens your imagination and invites you to return?) then buy it. Oh, and having a dirty mind helps.

Big thanks to Christine M. Griffin for a fabulous cover and for taking my suggestion of making Rochester look a little more shopworn. And here’s a PG-rated excerpt, the very beginning of the book:

Reader, observe.

Through the icy vastness of space, down to the hazy blue sphere set against velvet darkness, find a small, triangular island, the jaunty, miniscule neighbor of the huge landmass of Europe. Dark smears of smoke indicate its cities, but much of it is still green.

Go farther in, narrow down to a wilderness of gray and green, and find a brown track of road. The insectlike figures of men at work pick up their tripod-mounted instruments and step aside as the London coach goes by.

These land surveyors don’t realize the work in which they engage is for a daring new enterprise that will make the stagecoach and its way of life obselete, the stuff of legends. In a few years their children will run out to see the new wonder of steam technology, the iron horse, roar by at unimaginable speed, shrieking amid its billows of smoke.

A jolly, bluff sailor king is on the throne. Only one man in five can vote. Anyone, man, woman, or child, may be hanged for stealing a loaf of bread. The slave trade has been made illegal, but slavery in the colonies still thrives, and in those smoky cities children of five labor long, dangerous hours in factories. At the London clubs, fortunes and estates are gambled away.

It is a time of contradictions, change, secrets, passions, and cruelty.

And now let us look inside the coach, creaking by at its efficient average of ten miles to the hour in a gust of horse dung and sweat, as the surveyors turn back to their work.

The occupants of the coach, a man and a woman, are even less aware of the gigantic changes about to sweep the country. They have more pressing business. Tell them that within a few years the man’s most recent crime will earn only a short spell in jail rather than the hanging or transportation he has so narrowly escaped, and they’ll laugh in your face.

And then, they’ll empty your pockets, one way or the other.