Dance With Me, My Lovely
Jaye Roycraft
ImaJinn, Oct 2007
ISBN 9781933417295

They first lay eyes on each other at the male strip club, The Pony Express. Lucius Santangelo, who in his undead life is Garran Lux and Cate Greenbrood, a psychic practitioner of the shamanic arts, are attracted to one another. Garran uses the club as a hunting ground to find a woman. Cate and Garran connect on the psychic plane and she sees a vision of a dead woman whom she believes is a person from his past.

Garran is in trouble because more and more his vampire side is in control causing him to be the hunter that his human impulses keep in check. He decides to go to a magic practitioner and by luck or destiny he picks Cate. She believes he needs a soul retrieval so they journey to the Land of the Dead where she sees him as a desiccated corpse. They don't find his lost spirit and return home. They give in to the passion that flows between them and she starts to make another journey to the Land of the Dead where she learns the truth of what he is and turns away from him just like the woman in the vision did that they met on the psychic plane. Only by accepting what he is will those two have a chance to make a relationship based on intimacy work.

Jaye Roycraft is one of the best paranormal romance authors writing today. She slowly builds up the relationship and that of each others powers to make the reader feel as if they are part of that unseen world. This is a sizzling fantastic vampire romance but the lovemaking is necessary to the storyline. Cate is Garran's equal in power which is one of the reasons this novella is bloody delicious.

Harriet Klausner