Title: Conning Colin
Author: Brad Vance, Elsa Winters
Publisher: Zirconia Publishing, Inc.
Release Date: 6/2/17
Length: 60,000 words
Genre: Romance, LGBT
Add to Goodreads
Synopsis
Hamilton Dillon is a high class Manhattan escort, polished, well dressed, and cultured. Colin O’Neill is recently divorced, questioning his sexuality, and disappointed by his first fumbling gay hookups. So he figures, why not hire the best of the best to show him the ropes?
What he doesn’t know is that Hamilton Dillon is really Henry Davis, yet another New Yorker living on the financial edge, cobbling together several jobs to make a living. “Hamilton” has one great suit he can wear on an overnight date, but Henry’s got a good friend at GQ who makes a nice side income renting designer men’s wear for weddings, job interviews, and oh yeah, high end escorts on long weekend assignments. The “top agency” that represents “Hamilton” is really just a smartass lady in India with a Skype account, whose face Henry’s never seen. Oh, and Henry’s also the gruff and very unpolished New York Straight Man “Dillinger,” a solo porn star.
In other words, he’s not at all who Colin thinks he is. Which is just fine, until their relationship gets… complicated.
Today we have an interview with Brad Vance, author of Conning Colin. Tell us a little about yourself and your current book.
Tell us something no one else knows about your characters.
What I love about Henry Davis is that he really truly doesn’t know that he’s insanely gorgeous. He doesn’t look in the mirror and think, I’m a supermodel! There are times he turns “it” on, but he sees it as acting, like he’s putting on “someone else” when he radiates that charm and beauty.
Have you ever written something that made you cry?
Oh yeah. There’s a scene in A Little Too Broken, at Thanksgiving dinner, I can’t say more! It made me cry when I wrote it in the novel, again when I did the audiobook, and again when I wrote the screenplay. It’s corny, but, it kills me every time.
Have you ever co-written with someone before?
I’ve been brought in to work on Elsa’s ideas, but I’ve been given free rein from the publisher to take those ideas and run with them in my own direction. I want to be a screenwriter, and I know that’s going to be a very collaborative process, after the first pass at the work is done, but I can’t see myself creating that first pass with someone else – my process is pretty interior, and I think it would be pretty disruptive to have someone else popping into it during that first round.
What is the most difficult part of writing for you?
Meeting deadlines, now that I have a publisher. Writing on my own as a self-published author, I had all the time in the world to do it. But it’s good for me to have that timeline, I think – I can’t just fool around and not work on it when I “don’t feel like it.”
Name your four most important food groups.
Well, Justin’s Almond Butter is definitely a food group. I can’t eat desserts full of white sugar anymore without getting sick, so fruit is a big deal for me to satisfy my lifelong sweet tooth. Quest peanut butter protein powder goes in lots of things, and I love that. And I love poultry, fortunately, because when I’m trying to lose weight, which is all the time, it’s always on the menu.
Colin O’Neill hung up the phone, dizzy with excitement and fear. He’d done it. He’d called the number, talked to the agency, and booked a “date” with Hamilton Dillon.
He’d looked at Hamilton’s Rentmen.com ad a hundred times, at least, over the last three months. He’d looked forward to new profile photos the way a kid keeps an ear cocked for the ice cream truck. Even though all the profile pictures had been beheaded for discretion, it didn’t matter. Hamilton Dillon had a way of posing that expressed more personality with his body than most other guys ever did with their faces.
The way he sat on a park bench in nothing but a pair of running shorts and Nikes, shirtless, manspread, his arms thrown over the back of the bench, his strong graceful neck taut, telling you that the face just out of frame was tilted up towards the Central Park sunshine, that the man was reveling in his easy beauty, the unique joy that comes from being young and hot and free in New York City…
Then the way he floated in the air in those same shorts and Nikes, leaping for a football, the camera capturing him from behind in the moment the ball touched his fingers, the imminence of his success apparent, ordained, the muscles in his back bunched, the mass of his shoulders gathered together, sweat flying off his brown hair, in the seconds before you knew he landed on the lawn, arms curled around the ball, surely to rise in triumph and be slapped on the back by all his equally hot and shirtless buddies…
The way he sat at a café table, in a slim fit navy blue polo shirt, one of his sculpted vascular arms holding open a well-worn copy of The Fortress of Solitude and the other just toying with a cup of espresso as if it was the back of another man’s hand…
Colin often did something that very few men did anymore, which was to masturbate furiously and successfully to a series of still photos. And with no penises in sight, to boot. He’d done it so often over the last three months that he’d stopped donating his old t-shirts, because he needed them for cleanup duty, at least until they became hopelessly stained.
He had been divorced for six months now, amicably, from a wife who’d pretty much always known he was gay but had decided to let him figure it out for himself. Elspeth was a career woman whose need for a husband was seasonal, from the company picnic in July to the company Christmas party in December, with various client dinners in between.
He was twenty seven years old, and had engaged in sexual intercourse with one woman and two men. Intercourse was pretty much the word for it, he thought. It sounded less like passion and more like, well, cars merging on the freeway, and all three partners had been just about that exciting. (Actually less so, since on the freeway there was always the thrilling risk of death at the hands of someone who’d rather kill you than let you merge.)
Then one night, half drunk and inhibitions lowered, he’d thought, Fuck it, let’s hire a professional and see how it feels when it’s done right.
He’d paged through the escort ads on Rentmen, hundreds of them in Manhattan alone. It was mind numbing, the diversity, and it was overwhelming, the number of choices. He knew he didn’t want to visit Master Bob in his safe and private play space, and he knew he didn’t want to party with Anaconda Joe. The ones who caught his eye were, well yeah, the ones who looked… classy. The one thing he knew he didn’t want was to get ripped off.
And he didn’t want it to feel… He didn’t want to feel like he’d got a burger in a fast food drive through. He wanted it to be special, if that was really possible with a paid companion and not just something that happened to teenage boys in Hollywood movies.
But even the upscale-looking ones, well, there was something about them that… He knew it was good business, to offer yourself up as “versatile,” and available for “mild to wild,” but… Well, the more he saw what he didn’t want, the more a picture began to form in his mind of what he did want. He didn’t want someone who looked like an investment banker but whose profile also said, “Hey I look classy but I can drop it if you just want a dirty pig fest and you’ve got the money for it.”
No. He wanted someone who was one thing. Who wasn’t whoever you wanted him to be. But who was what he said he was. Classy, for real. Not “up for anything.”
And then he found Harrison Dillon.
Purchase on Amazon
Meet the Author
Brad Vance writes romance stories and novels, including the breakout hits “A Little Too Broken” and “Given the Circumstances.” Keep up with Brad at BradVanceAuthor.com, email him at BradVanceAuthor@gmail.com, and friend him on Facebook at facebook.com/brad.vance.10.
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads | eMail
6/5 – Bookslaidbareboys
6/5 – Wicked Faerie’s Tales and Reviews
6/6 – Book Lovers 4Ever
6/7 – Sharing Links and Wisdom
6/7 – Love Bytes
6/8 – Erotica For All
6/9 – My Fiction Nook
6/12 – Divine Magazine
6/13 – MM Book Escape
6/14 – V’s Reads
6/15 – Kimmers’ Erotic Book Banter
6/15 – Bayou Book Junkie
6/15 – Happily Ever Chapter
6/16 – MM Good Book Reviews
‘…what I offer is fake but what I give is real… That’s a new one!
So, it was Elsa’s idea, but Brad wrote it solo? That’s an odd-sounding publishing contract. Thought this was a co-written book? Confusing with the answer given by Mr. Vance.