{Blog Tour & Giveaway} Forbidden (Under The Skin #2) by Charlotte Stein (@Charlotte_Stein)

They say I need help. Another exorcism. This is not new. This is my life. Today, I expect to suffer at the hands of a man as warped by superstition and fear as my mother. A man who will torture me in order to save me from things that don't exist.

But the man who actually comes to me is different.

Killian is good and decent, and he sees what's good and decent in me. And I don't mean for it to happen, but every time he looks at me, his gaze sets me on fire. He brings me to the light, gives me back my life. For the first time, I see a future for myself.

A future with him.

I burn for Killian-a man who's intent on protecting me. On healing me.

He doesn't get it. The only thing that can heal me is him. But Killian will soon be a priest. Untouchable. Forbidden.

How can I ask a man to choose between me … and God?

Dot was forced to endure abuse at the hands of her strictly religious mother.  Bound and tied to a filthy bed, she has never known what it is to be really loved.  But by some miracle, she is saved by a mysterious young man who promises her a brand new life.

She struggles to come to grips with feelings that she is sure will damn her soul when she learns that her savior is weeks away from taking his sacred vows to enter the priesthood.  Because not only has he delivered her from a living hell, he has also awakened her to passion.

“I would ask that you find someone worthy of your attention and your desire. That you find someone who can give you all the things that you so sorely deserve because believe me, Dot, you deserve them. Lord knows if I had the power to give them to you I would,” he says, and though I know he intends it to soothe me no soothing happens because of it. The opposite happens. A fever happens, in my soul.”

Killian remembers what it was like to suffer at the hands of another.  That’s one of the reasons why saving Dot was so essential to him.  Her unabashed honesty and beauty are gifts more precious than gold.  But when they are together, fighting the attraction that they feel is becoming impossible and he is forced to make his choice – a life without Dot or a life without God.

“I love that he can hardly accept it. It thrills me to know that this was not what he thought it would be, either. Maybe somewhere inside him he had decided it was a sin, but if so all of that is gone now. He tells me it is gone. He whispers in my ear as he rocks, about how he never knew and never realized. “I just didn’t see that this was what I always wanted,” he says. “I just didn’t understand that all I needed was to love and be loved in return.” And I believe him. He makes it so easy to. The pleasure makes it so easy to. How am I supposed to know that he’s lying?”

Forbidden is more than just an unconventional romance.  Charlotte Stein bravely asks age-old questions about religion and sex and proves that they can both exist with equal fervor. 

Each of her characters is intensely unique. What Dot lacks in education, she makes up for with her natural intelligence.  She is unapologetically curious and without pretense and the story is that much more heart wrenching and pure because of it.  Killian is by far more mysterious - adding the perfect compliment to her.

I loved Forbidden for its realistic idealism and the beauty at its heart…

Exclusive Excerpt - 

Chapter One

I don’t know how long I’ve been up here this time. Feels like days, but it can’t possibly be. If it was days I would have peed myself. I would have made a mess or else starved to death, yet somehow I don’t even feel hungry. Though really is that any kind of surprise? My stomach is churning and churning at the thought of what might happen soon. Every time it comes into my head all of this sickness rises inside me, and only the idea of having to lie here with puke stinking me up puts a stop to it.

The room is rancid enough as it is. Momma shut the windows ages ago, and the heat is making me sweat. I can see it shining on my bare arms and taste it salt-sharp on my upper lip, and whenever I wriggle I get a wave of that familiar smell. The one I never used to get when I was young and innocent, but now get all the time.

I scrub and scrub and plaster my body in deodorant, but it doesn’t seem to matter. The ripe scent of my own body is still there, like a reminder of what makes Momma hate me now.

Not that I need any kind of reminder, what with the ropes around my wrists and ankles and the fact that I’ve been here forever. Or the way she looks at me when she comes in to see if I’m contrite and ready to plead for forgiveness. Of course I always tell her I am, but whether I do or not don’t matter.

How can you really get absolution for being possessed by the devil? I could say ten thousand Hail Marys and recite the Bible backward, and it wouldn’t make no difference. The demon she sees in me is invisible, and never seems to do nothing, so it’s not like I can just scrub him out or act like he’s not there. I can’t stop spinning the room around like in that movie with the girl who has no eyebrows.

The room has never spun around.

You ask me—if I am possessed, I got some raw kind of deal. Seems unfair to have to lie here and be so severely punished, when I don’t even get special powers. As far as I know I haven’t so much as spoken in tongues or bent over in some kind of weird way, and for darn sure my eyes have never turned black.

So why do I have to suffer?

She says it’s because I sinned, but I swear to God I haven’t said or done a single damned thing. Apart from right then, thinking damned. But I know the devil doesn’t jump into you for saying that. Most people don’t even think of it as a curse anymore. The girls I used to go to school with said all kinds of things, like the one with the F and the one with S and even worse—that one I’m not even going to give a letter to.

But none of them ever had the devil eat her soul alive.

And none of them had to wait all tied up in her bedroom, while some awful Priest comes to exorcise the evil spirits out of them.

I can hear him now, climbing up the stairs. He sounds like judgment day coming to greet me, footsteps as heavy as the hooves of the devil I’m supposed to be possessed by. Each one slower than the last, until I have to hold my breath or else pass out from the tension. Why isn’t he racing up here? How come he’s dragging his feet like this?

Because he wants to torment me before this has even begun, I think, and then all this water starts leaking out of my eyes. I pull at the ropes and wish for hands as small as mice just so I could get free. Though if I’m going to be wishing I’ll try for wings, because Lord I want to fly away from here.

If I weren’t tied I’d jump right out the window, wings or not. I’d suffer two broken legs and a snapped neck, if it meant I didn’t have to face whatever awful thing he’s going to do to me. Beat me, most likely, because Momma would never get anyone who wasn’t going to beat me. He’s going to stripe me from here to tomorrow—which I could take.

It’s the other stuff that worries me more.

The boiling holy water and the drowning and the branding with crosses. She says he’ll do that, all of that, and I believe her so completely I make myself bleed. My wrists are bleeding and my ankles are bleeding and I’m crying when the doorknob starts to turn. I scream for someone to deliver me from this hell, and just as I do the door swings wide.

He comes in, and after that I don’t know what to think.

I go silent straight away, but not because I’m choked with fear. I would be if he was the image in my head—seven feet tall and old as sin, with eyes like winter at the ends of the earth. Then I’d be scared and screaming still. But he’s not that way at all.

He looks like some ordinary man.

He ain’t even wearing the robes and the collar and that. He has on this old beaten leather jacket—one that is far too hot for the weather here, if his flushed face is anything to go by—and even more astonishing a pair of jeans. I swear to God he’s wearing jeans like he just did some fancy thing that jeans-wearing people do.

And he is young.

He’s so young I don’t even realize what’s going on at first. I’m too busy gawking at his black, black hair and his lack of an angry beard and his kind of smooth everything. He steps forward and I marvel at how vigorous he is—not heavy and lumbering at all. And when he reaches for the rope around my right wrist, all I can do is look and look at his nice hands.

They’re big, but they’re not the least bit wrinkled or riddled with veins. He could be just a few years older than me—maybe twenty-five? He could be younger, even though that seems crazy. Momma would never bring someone like this to deal with me. She would laugh at someone like this. She took us away from the church because the new Priest was all young and into love and forgiving, so this makes no sense.

And then I realize what he’s doing, and it makes even less sense than that.

He’s untying me. He’s doing it fast too—like he knows Momma might come in any second and stop him. Only I can see Momma in the door with her face all pinched and her hands wringing and wringing and she doesn’t take a single step toward him, so maybe his quickness is something else.

It seems like he’s horrified about something.

I think the horrified something might be me. He mutters a word as he sets me loose, and I’m pretty sure the word is barbaric. But him believing that and not wanting to thrash the devil out of me is so not what I’ve been thinking all this time that it kind of won’t sink in. I keep trying to look around him to Momma, waiting for her to step in.

Or for him to change his mind. Maybe this is all just a trick or a trap, and suddenly he’ll get out a switch to line my skin. Could be he has something worse on him—like a thick leather belt or some kind of whupping device—and I can feel my body bracing for it. Hurt like a son of a b-i-t-c-h when Momma went at me with that rolling pin one time, so Lord only knows what will happen with this man wielding something bigger.

He comes closer and I wince away from it.

Only I’m wincing away from nothing at all. He doesn’t lash me or strike my face. He gets his hand underneath my bare bruised legs and the other around my back and then he says, “Put your arms around my neck.”

Takes me a while to understand what he means, though. I sit there thinking--this must be some other new kind of punishment, and the minute I do as he asks, pain will make me pass out. He might have shockers behind his ears or something like it, and even after I find out he doesn’t I’m wondering.

I wonder right up until he lifts me into his arms.

After which my thoughts go kind of still and stunned. No one has ever lifted me up before. Could be my dad did once, but I can barely remember him. And Momma sure never—she would have hated touching me this much. She would have complained about me making her hands all dirty, yet somehow the Priest don’t seem to care.

He holds me all firm against his good clean clothes—that leather smells like old books and the shirt underneath just the same. And when Momma moans and asks what he’s doing in a weak sort of voice, he answers like it’s only sensible.

“I’m taking your daughter to the hospital,” he says, even though it must be miles to Sacred Heart and I will have to go all the way in his car in my worn thin housedress and my stink of a too-hot room and my red hair so lank it looks black.

People will laugh at him, I reckon.

Yet he doesn’t seem to care at all.

He doesn’t even care when Momma goes to bar his way. He tells her, “Step aside, Mrs. Emerson,” and for a second I go hot and cold thinking of someone disobeying her and provoking her wrath. Then I remember: he isn’t just someone. He’s a man of God and he has all the things she believes in on his side, and no amount of hand-wringing can change that.

She has to do as he says, and she does. She lets him go on through and down the stairs with me in his arms, though it’s only once we’re outside that I really feel what’s happened. The breezy autumn air hits my fevered skin and I breathe out for the first time in years.

The breathing out sounds kind of like a sob. It comes out loud at any rate—so loud I know he must hear it for what it is. But if he does, he gives no sign. He just keeps on walking to his car, while I look back over at the clapboard place I lived in all these years. Somehow I understand that I’m not ever coming back to it.

This is it now, this is my freedom, and it looks like a Priest in his old sedan, with my momma running out in her black skirts calling to me. “Dorothy,” she screams, “Dorothy,” and in my head I’m already turning into someone else. They will ask at the hospital and I will say.

My name is Dot.

About The Author - 

Charlotte Stein is the acclaimed author of over thirty short stories, novellas and novels, including the recently DABWAHA nominated Run To You. When not writing deeply emotional and intensely sexy books, she can be found eating jelly turtles, watching terrible sitcoms and occasionally lusting after hunks. 

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