Kara was the victim of a brutal rape that occurred when she was seven. The event destroyed her family and left her fearful and distrustful of men. When Kara's brother embezzles $30,000 from Slade's company, Kara goes to Slade's office determined to talk him out of going to the police. Slade wants a peaceful, obedient, submissive with whom to share his life and in Kara he glimpses what he wants. He siezes the opportunity and makes Kara an offer she can't afford to refuse. The only way she can save her brother from certain prison is to accept Slade's marriage proposal and become his submissive. Kara faces her wedding with anxiety. She can't tell Slade she can't submit sexually without risking her brother's freedom, yet she doubts she'll be able to keep her promise to be a submissive, obedient wife. This romance explores the role of trust in even the most mismatched of partnerships and explores the complex connections between dominance and submission while it demonstrates the power of real love to heal even the deepest wounds.
Alyssa Aaron is a pseudonym that I, Laurie Sanders, (editor and publisher at Black Velvet Seductions Publishing) use for my own writing.
At first glimpse I don't look like someone that writes erotica with a BDSM flavor. I don't wear leather, or black (other than in an effort to hide my more than ample hips). In fact, I look more like someone's Sunday school teacher than an author of erotic romance. I am quiet, reserved, more inclined to sit and listen to the conversations going on around me than to actively engage...unless I have something of import to add, then I am usually quite engaged.
I am drawn more to the internal workings of people, their emotions, what makes them tick, than to their appearances and this comes through in the books I write. Though I write erotic romance with a degree of steam I try never to lose sight of my characters, their thoughts, feelings, and motivations. This focus which seems as natural to me as getting up in the morning earns me reviews like: "HIS PERFECT SUBMISSIVE is not just a fascinating story, it's a study of human nature with irresistible characters and situations that were alternately horrifying, inspiring and thought-provoking" from Romance Junkies.
It also earns me less positive reviews from people who want a more sexually focused story rather than a story focused on the characters and the evolution of their relationship.
Two of the most common questions I am asked about my novel "His Perfect Submissive" are: 1.) Where did you get the idea? 2.) How did you research the book?
I've always assumed that when people ask about the research they are discreetly asking me if I have first-hand knowledge of the dominance and submission lifestyle or whether I had to go out and ask people about the lifestyle...perhaps visit clubs...and that sort of thing.
I have been interested in the lifestyle of dominance and submission since before I knew what dominance and submission was. When I was as young as eight or nine I was aware of a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach when there were scenes of domineering men and more submissive women on the television. My first vision of domestic discipline was watching an old John Wayne western in which the heroine was spanked. My mother (a feminist and the more dominant of my parents) was incensed. She thought it was awful. She ordered my father to turn it off. She didn't think it was the kind of thing the children needed to see. I just thought it was cool. I wished I were the heroine.
Like many young people before the age of the internet I didn't know what to do with the feelings I had. I thought they were bad. Surely it was not nice to have fantasies of being tied up, spanked, teased...
I ended up marrying a man who was vanilla. That marriage endured for fourteen years. When the marriage finally ended I decided to stop being the "nice girl" and to explore the feelings that I'd carried for years. AOL and Compuserve were new then. I joined both. I joined chat rooms and followed newsgroups devoted to the lifestyle. I talked to other people who shared my interests and I learned that I was not alone in the feelings I had.
Eventually I posted a personal ad several places online. I received about 75 responses to my first ad and had several great conversations and one great but short-lived long distance D/s relationship. When that relationship ended I revised my ad and posted it again. That time I met my husband. We chatted online and on the phone for about three months. One evening he said he thought it was time we meet in person. Not being very worldly and thinking it would take some time to make all the arrangements I agreed thinking I had maybe another month before we actually met. The next day he called to say he had the plane reservations and wanted to know which hotel was nice. I was stunned, but we met, hit it off. The next week I flew to Ohio where he lived for what was to be a temporary visit. I never did return home to live after that visit. We've been together for fourteen years now...married ten.
My husband is, in many ways, like Slade. He is caring, understanding, and is very deserving of the trust I put in him.
The truth of the matter is I don't think you can really "research" a style of relationship...like D/s or BDSM or total power exchange. There are some general things that are kind of accepted as standard within each division but when it gets down to it whether a relationship is a D/s relationship, a total power exchange relationship, or whether it entails BDSM or not, it is an individual relationship comprised of the individuals within it. I know quite a bit about the different types of power exchange relationships not because I went out and researched them for a book but because I was interested in the subject on a personal level.
The idea for His Perfect Submissive sprang from numerous conversations with numerous people over a span of fifteen or so years. Something that I noticed within a lot of the lifestyle groups that I participated in was a number of women came to the lifestyle after backgrounds of abuse...parental molestation...previous spousal abuse...etc. It seemed odd to me that someone with that background would be drawn to a lifestyle that in some ways embraces physical pain.
I often write as a way to explore thoughts and ideas and I wrote His Perfect Submissive as a means to explore this connection between the abusive past and being drawn to a power exchange lifestyle. When I started writing I knew it would have to have a happy ending and I knew a scene in the early middle (chapter six or seven I think) where Slade first learns about Kara's past.
Other than that I didn't know what would happen between these characters or how they would find their way through the pitfalls of a relationship style that requires an abundance of trust when trust at all...even of herself...was foreign to the heroine, Kara.
Very soon into the writing it became clear that Kara was as wounded by the rape at 27 as she had been when it occurred when she was 7. She'd basically spent her life trying to avoid the memories, the panic attacks, men, the familiar scent of after-shave which could suddenly trigger a panic attack.
Her life had been about trying to survive the devastation done to her and her family...but she hadn't really healed.
Early in my relationship with my husband he said something that came back to me again and again as I was crafting the hero, Slade. My husband said there is a lot of difference between a boss and a Dom. I agree with that statement. There are a lot of Doms that use their status as a means to be selfish, inconsiderate, and often they are the jerkiest of the jerks. Those Doms are missing the boat in my opinion and one of them wouldn't have been a good partner for Kara.
I found Slade to be the perfect hero for her. He wasn't the kind of Dom that would require things of her just for the sake of requiring them. Everything he asks of her has a purpose...a purpose that is in HER best interest. That's the kind of Dom I like.
I chose to show Kara healing through the power exchange relationship because I saw the relationship as nurturing and supporting her...not just in a physical sense but emotionally as well. In the power exchange relationship she finds what she needs to heal. She finds love and acceptance. She learns to trust in a relationship with someone who values and cherishes the trust she places in him. But it isn't all sweetness and light. She also finds someone who won't let her hide from herself or from him...and after 20 years of trying to mentally outrun her past, that's what she needs.
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