I bit my lip. I'd seen male nudes depicted in oils and in marble of course - many times - but no artork had ever prepared me fo this, the real thing. The materials involved - or perhaps artisitic sensibility  - had always depicted such bodies as smooth, without contrasts of texture or colour. Nothing had prepared me for the rough black hair speckling his thighs, how it met and merged with the dense unruly curls at his groin, or for the line of hair that marched up from there to flare into a fan at his chest. Nothing had prepared me for the animal solidity of him, the muscularity, the sweat and the dirt, the salty musk of his skin, the dark tint of his flat nipples, the flushed ruddiness - or the size - of his male parts.

Classical sculpture lies.

Plot:  Cassandra Otley is a young Englishwoman living at the very end of the 19th Century. Her father, an impoverished accademic, is hired to catalogue the library of the Margraf of a remote castle in the Balkans (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.) and Cassandra is to accompany him out there and assist with the work. But her father dies of pnemonia before they set off and Cassandra, left without any money or livelihood, makes the journey alone in the hope that Margraf Goran will still give her employment. He's reluctant, to say the least, and their relationship is strained. She both fears him and is fascinated by him. Both of them have secrets to hide; hers is a penchent for reading the spicy contents of unsuitable books within the library; his, that he's a werewolf...

And then the wolf-hunters arrive.

Notes: Bound in Skin is a novella (17.5K words) and properly falls within the Erotic Gothic Romance subgenre, rather than being straight erotica. There are 6 other novellas in the collection. My story's main sexual theme is  frustration and desire. And love.  My two protagonists fall for each other rather stormily.

I always wanted to write a werewolf story like this; historical setting, gauche and vulnerable but gutsy heroine, damaged and dangerous hero with a good heart. This anthology was the opportunity I'd been waiting for!

This is weirdly enough one of the most autobiographical things I've written. I have been a library worker (a boring job, and I spent far too much of it thinking about sex!). I've also been a frustrated young woman with more book-knowing than experience, aware of exactly what it was I wanted but with unachievably high standards. To write this I reached back to that time of aching yearning and raging sexual hunger that was constantly in collision with my sense of self-preservation and ego. I just don't buy the myth that girls who haven't had sex yet are "innocent," as if it takes a man to physically implant sexual desire into them. Girls want sex too! So this novella is dedicated to myself at age 18, and to all the other seething virgins out there.