Introduction
Award-winning student-teacher BDSM dark romance set in modern-day Edinburgh.
Winner of the All Filthy Details podcast Star Book Award.
Edinburgh, the capital of duality. This Queen of Scotland’s cities lures visitors with her enchanting beauty, but underneath her skirts, she hides her dark underbelly. The splendid lines of her form draw the eye away from the dank patch between her clenched thighs.
And so, too, of her people. Here, image is everything.
The wealthy wear their gilded masks and close stout doors on their secrets, while the impoverished project strength to paper over the cracks that fracture them. The opulent residences of Morningside may be far flung from the poverty of Muirhouse but, on the streets, in alleyways and on corners, the two worlds collide, repel and collide again, like two pendulums on converging trajectories.
Repulsion powers attraction, and vice versa. This is the city’s story. And it is also ours.
The text arrived at 4:47 PM on a Friday, sender withheld.
Meeting scheduled regarding your dissertation. Saturday, 8 PM. Royal Balmoral Hotel, Suite 412.
Toni Amahle stared at the screen, her thumb hovering. She’d been expecting this—had been warned three days ago by the Professor’s PA that a meeting was to be arranged. But the PA had been noncommittal, giving nothing away, and Toni had dared to hope it was routine. Now the venue hit her like a fist: a hotel, not the University. A weekend evening, not office hours.
She was twenty-two, mixed-race, and the first person from her small rural community to win a scholarship to Edinburgh University. Three years of grinding work. A First Class degree within reach. A coveted position at a prestigious London talent agency waiting on her graduation—her escape route from poverty finally tangible.
All of it now balanced on the edge of a blade she couldn’t see.
She called the PA, demanded clarification. Got stonewalled—the same polite, impenetrable finality as before. No explanation for the venue. No reassurance.
Toni knew, with the instinct of the cornered, that this was about her dissertation. The one she’d submitted three days ago. The one containing the irregularities she’d prayed would pass unnoticed. If the University expelled her now, the London job evaporated. Her future—everything—turned to ash.
What she didn’t know: Professor David Charles had been waiting for this moment for months.
Fifty years old, balding, professionally respected, personally hollowed out by a divorce that left him ravenous for something he couldn’t name. For months, he’d fed an obsession that grew teeth—scrolling her Instagram at 2 AM, studying her Twitter fragments, memorizing the architecture of her life. He knew where she drank, who she dated, the precise shape of her ambition. He hadn’t engineered her fall. But he’d spent those months preparing himself to catch her.
Tomorrow night, he would be the man who held her destruction in one hand and her salvation in the other. The man who wanted not merely her submission, but her complicity. The man who intended to make her admit that some part of her had walked through his door knowing exactly what waited on the other side.
One night. No safewords. No witnesses. By morning, one of them would be ruined, and the other claimed.
But neither would walk away whole.
Intriguing, believable, flawed characters that call to you. Love the professor who is fighting his demons but willing to simply give in for the world is piss-poor right now, in his view. Why fight odds that overwhelm after decades of doing what is right and proper as it came to nothing but ash and an unfaithful wife. A man exploring his dark side can't possibly be boring. Color me impressed.
I don’t like the choice of photographs. Would rather like to use my imagination, e.g. the prof looks 70 not 50.