NSFW content: please note that our ‘hot toddies’ series contains explicit language and (very) adult situations.

Here in Australia, the weather is getting colder. We’re dragging out the blankets and brewing up the cocoa, but it’s not doing the job. We need something hot.

Luckily, Escape artists have come to the rescue. They’ve provided some of the most scorching scenes from their books for us to enjoy. As the cold winds blow outside, we’ll be heating up with some ‘hot toddies’.

Winter is coming. And so our are heroes and heroines.

From Incapable, by Ainslie Paton

They came together with all the fire and fury of a star being made. She was the elemental one, the atom of light. She’d learned his body and knew its secrets, knew to keep her hands on him, move them in a pattern that soothed, that to touch him suddenly outside that anticipated flow could surprise, madden, delight. She fused those approaches with hands that stroked then stopped to change position; a sneak attack, to squeeze or pinch; lips that dragged then wet, then stung. She was everywhere and nowhere, absence and pressure, gasp and twist and compressed desire so intense he was flattened by it, unable to do anything but receive her hands, her mouth, the sucking slide of her heat, the ache to have, have more, have all.

He gave up trying to predict her movements; gave over to the pulse of his blood, the gravity of her, drawing him into a place where his thoughts dissolved like scattered space dust, and only his body remained, a housing for energy so concentrated, so brilliant he was unbalanced, unearthed and fused to her.

She used her mouth, her tongue, her excited breath to stun him, take him higher, make his back arch off the bed. He fisted her hair, the sheet, to try and ground himself, prolong the moment.

He didn’t want to finish in her mouth, but she wasn’t giving him a choice. “Come with me.”

Here he could have what he couldn’t have in life. He curled off the bed, his abs bunching, his legs shaking, and caught her under the arms, raised her over him. She would be wide-eyed and wild, her hair all over the place, her lips red and plumped up. There was a sheen of moisture on her skin and she tasted salty, tangy from her feast on him. She pressed him down and centred over him, her heat, her juices shockingly beautiful, loosening his tongue.

“Slide hard, baby. Take us there. Show me the sun.”

She picked a new pattern, a new rhythm, this one punctuated by rolling hips and clutching thighs, her hands on his chest, her song a string of verbal tics and moans, high pitched hitches and low exhales.

She raked her short nails down his sides and dripped sweat on his stomach. “I hate you for shutting me out.” Her voice shook and her body trembled.

He took her hands and dragged her torso to his, grunting as the hot silk of her covered him, easing inside her, mouths open on each other’s, gone deaf, gone insensible from the need to thrust, knowing only the crash of their energies, the force of their joining until the cloud burst, the white blasts and the star was made.

Love can be a great healer, except when it hurts…