Is there any erotic romance writer who sucks you into a story faster than Megan Hart? I doubt it:

First lines of Dirty:

This is what happened…

I met him at the candy store.

He turned and smiled at me and I was surprised enough to smile back. This was not a children’s candy store, mind you–this was the kind of place you went to buy expensive imported chocolate truffles for your boss’s wife because you felt guilty for having sex with him when you were both at a conference in Milwaukee.

First lines of Broken:

This month, my name is Mary, and apparently, I’m as contrary as the nursery rhyme. First I said I wanted to fuck, but now I’m refusing to come out of the bathroom. What I don’t know is that Joe doesn’t like cock teases, nor does he suffer wasting time. He’s already bought the drinks, made the compliments. If I don’t put out in the next five minutes, he’ll put his coat on and go.

I don’t know this because I only met him three hours ago in a bar downtown. His names seemed as if it were a cosmic joke, but out of all the men I met tonight, Joe’s the only one who bothered trying to have a conversation with me. That’s why I picked him. That, and the fact that he’s hot and well-dressed, with a charming quirk of a smile that tries to look sincere but mostly doesn’t.

First lines of Tempted:

Light and shadow painted him. On little cat feet, like the fog, I crept toward the bed. Tug-tugging. I slid the covers off to reveal his body.

I liked to watch him sleep, despite the way it sometimes made me want to pinch myself to prove I wasn’t dreaming. That this was my husband, my house, my life. Our perfect life. That there were good things to be had in the world and I had them.

First lines of Stranger

I was looking for a stranger.

The Fishtank wasn’t my usual hangout, though I’d been inside it once or twice. Recently redecorated, it sought to compete with a bunch of brand new bars and restaurants that had opened in downtown Harrisburg, but though the tropical theme and aquariums were pretty and the drinks cheap enough, the Fishtank was too far away from restaurant row to really compete. What it did have that the other, newer, bars didn’t, was the attached hotel. The fishtank, ‘where you hook ‘em,’ was a sort of joke with the young and single crowd of central Pennsylvania. Or at least with me, and I was young. And blessedly, purposefully, single.

First lines of Deeper:

Now.

The sea remained the same. The sound and the smell of it wasn’t different, nor the push and pull of its waves. Twenty years ago, Bess Walsh had stood on this beach and looked forward to the rest of her life, and now …

Now she wasn’t sure she was ready for what lay ahead.

Opening lines of Pleasure and Purpose: (the one I am reading now which prompted this post)

Stillness Fontaine had never been assigned to a house so modest it didn’t have a name. What sort of man was Edward Delaw, to hold such a high position within the Court of Firth and yet abide in a house as humble as this?

I feel like a real poser when I try to do literary criticism, so this may be way off, but in each of these novels (actually, the last is a novella, the first of three), so many intriguing things are communicated in just a few lines or a couple of paragraphs. In every case, there’s just plain old plot hookage: you want to know more, what is going to happen next.

But you also get important clues about character and conflict.

Like in Dirty, we get a sense of Elle’s personality, her expensive tastes, her cynicism. In Broken, we learn something important about Joe in the way Mary describes his smile. As for Tempted, we know that people never say “my life is perfect” unless it isn’t, and we want to know more about the disconnect between the Anne’s words and feelings. The first line of Stranger is great — connecting it to the title, and hooking you (it’s absurd, on the surface, to be “looking for a stranger”), but the last line of the excerpt tells us something about Grace that’s similar to Anne: she protests too much. Deeper’s hook is very straightforward: just the word “now” did it for me. there’s a now? what happened “then”? And why is it significant enough that this woman is on a beach at night thinking about it? As for Pleasure and Purpose, the whole premise is so bizarre (I’m having feminist angst over this one as I read it) to begin with — who is this woman, why is she at this man’s house? — added to the gap between the humble house and the high station of its inhabitant, that you want to know more.

I’m not sure if that’s a skill they teach at a writing workshop, or if its in the writer’s genes, but I have to end this post so I can get back to Pleasure and Purpose, because I’m dangling on the line after just a few pages.