Dear Reader,

 

 

If you've never read my books before, please know I consider myself a reader first. I read to escape this world, as I have since I was a child with a mother who was physically, mentally, and emotionally abusive enough to give me a diagnosis of PTSD and anxiety from existing in a constant fight-or-flight state until I was twelve. I prefer hot sex but no darkness. Then I had two years of hell. I have to tell you when I started writing mafia romance, I did it because of readers urging for the Sabatini family to continue on. As I have dated a soldier in the Outfit and those people actually existed, I was kind of afraid. But when life gets dark and you sit there thinking to yourself, yeah I'm okay with dying because I do not want to deal with one more doctor or blood draw ever again, the darkness is almost appealing to dive into and get lost in. In the story, as bad as things got, it all ended in HEA and I needed that. In the darkest of dark, love brings light. 

 

At around five I was sexually assaulted by a relative at least twice, but it might have been more. Since it wasn't penetrative and it was a woman, it didn't seem so bad. But the things she said while she was doing it made it clear she was also being SA'd by her father, and hearing those words at such a young age really messed with me. I'm sure I acted out, but I don't remember much from that time. I didn't understand, obviously, yet your mind, even at five, does know something is not right. At the same time it rebels against the idea that people who say they love you hurt you, so it tries to twist the truth into something different.

 

My parents never knew what happened to me, and my father is the kind of father I'm grateful for. If he had known he'd be in jail, so I never told them. 

 

I believed it wasn't that big of a deal. So many had endured worse. I still had the crap from my mother to deal with, which I did in several years of therapy. The physical abuse from my mother was far more traumatic, so I pushed the sex thing down and kept going. Even though I knew in the back of my mind that some of the stuff I was into, wasn't quite right and influenced it. Then I would remember my first boyfriend telling me, "Whatever turns you on, baby, is no one's business, and as long as you aren't hurting anyone it doesn't matter." So I brushed it off and ignored it. 

 

Admission: There was no plan when it came to this story. I knew I needed something interesting in the back of Beautiful Broken Obsession to get people to want to read the next book. It was going to be an enemies to lovers romance, and dark, so I asked myself how dark can I make it? Aleksander seemed just a bit too cavalier about the whole selling people thing. I thought he needed to be taken down a bit—okay, brought to his ass not just his knees. In a thought process that took less than ten minutes, I decided to make my heroine sold by his father as a child to a pedophile who is a wimp. After finally achieving his dream of buying a little girl, he does nothing more than touch her, and he does jerk off to her and on her before pretending nothing happened. At twelve she is too old for him, so he goes back to the Levins to purchase a new girl and sell her, as she's still valuable as a virgin. He was unaware the Levins got out of the skin trade and Aleksander makes him pay for it. 

 

I ended up back in therapy because of this story. Because thinking of writing this is daunting. Writing it led to more tears and pain than I could have ever imagined I still felt about everything that happened all those years ago. 

 

I wanted to shelve it. There is no one way to heal or feel about SA of any type, and there are so many types of assault and abuse. Yet what I went through is probably the most common and insidious. What if I wrote something that hurt someone? What if it was someone's thirteenth reason why? I actually sat down to write an apology that it would be a different plot altogether, but it turned into a realization. Just like my plus-size women deserve a HEA, those who went through and other types of SA, we all deserve a HEA no matter what lies inside our dark and dirty fantasies. 

 

For the skinny girlies who are lucky enough to not know what it's like to be fat, there is no fat phobia. Except what a fat person gets to deal with while simply attempting to exist in this world. No one wants to have an inner voice that tells them they are ugly, not worthy of love, or any of the other crap that runs through our minds. We didn't put it there, others did and we have to live with it. If you have a problem with it, then that's a you problem. I will not apologize or warn anyone about it. 

 

Sum it all up:

 

Child SA by male without penetration and is shown on page as she relays her experience to her partner

human trafficking 

DD/lg (I've never read these before so it might not be all of what someone who has read them is expecting. I just wrote what the h needed in the moment and she needs and wants a daddy.)

casual drug use mentioned

Consensual nonconsent

Dubious consent

tied up

toy play

Discussion of BDSM in regards to safe words and sexual fantasies but NOT BDSM or a healthy depiction of a BDSM relationship

Kidnapping

Spanking of mons and ass 

lactation/adult partner breastfeeding