Secret Garden by Miss Irene Clearmont

Book Details

Secret Garden – An author of romance novels, suddenly successful with her last couple of novels, Donna is finding her relationship with her husband ever more strained. On the one hand he just wants to sit all day at home and do nothing, on the other hand he is resentful of his wife’s new found success.

Her idea is to get a small place somewhere out of Vegas, a place where she can concentrate on her writing, sit on a rocking chair and watch the sunsets as she writes the next novel. A chance meeting with Chloe and her mother, a fuck in the back of a rig and new discoveries about her husband Arnold change all of that.

Donna is about to discover herself, fall into a fantasy of illicit sex and discover that even what happens outside Vegas has to be kept secret. The romance is about to begin and this time Donna is the main character…

Setting: SW USA

F/m, F/f, Trans/m, BDSM, Corporal Punishment, Blackmail, Dominatrices.

Strength 8/10 – 41,000 Words

Written 2015 Re-edit 2023

Excerpt: Secret Garden

First Verse – First Person

I write romantic fiction!

Sometimes historical, occasionally chick-lit, topical or once in a while just sexy and erotic, but usually just what my publisher tells me will sell the best! Sexy, two-in-a-bed thrillers that follow the course of star-struck lovers and chart their romantic dilemmas.

I admit that I create those chunky page-turners that have covers that attract middle-aged women of a certain mind-set, mock oil paintings of powerful heroes who clasp pouting large-breasted women protected by their lover’s enfolding and muscular arms. With over fifty published novels adorning supermarket shelves that are carried by bikini-clad women onto beaches. I feed the lurid fantasies of thousands of bored but passionate housewives. So, I can consider myself something of a success!

Of course, as ever, the reality of my life was not fit for my own fiction. A dog, a husband and a medium sized house in the clutter of suburbia in Las Vegas. I was bleeding out my passions in black ink and failing to make my own dreams come true. The fact is, that I had no dreams to speak of and all of my passions were mental rather than physical, but I knew that there was something out there for me.

This hobby, the one that became a steady source of income, did not really change my life. Hubby worked in a hotel, holidays were always in Florida and the car was always second hand. The money was never really that good until the breakthrough moment came when somehow I made the bestseller lists and became something else, an author whose name on a cover guaranteed sales, a writer who became a mass market phenomenon.

‘Garden Of Sorrows’ was that huge breakthrough for me.

I remember that, as I was writing it, I had so many other things on my mind and it seemed nothing but another potboiler, but somehow it struck a chord in my readers and perhaps the cover was what caused so many to reach out to the shelf and tuck the book amongst their groceries. Whatever it was, a change happened that transformed everything, because the readers that had passed me by, started buying my back catalogue and the avalanche began.

I was invited to signings, conventions and publishers’ parties as the money started to roll in and the recognition swelled. Arnold, my husband, gave up his job, the dog had puppies and the house was fitted with a new kitchen. While I found myself the focus of attention, stalked by fans and publishers, Arnold discovered the pleasures of being a wealthy layabout while I had to hire an accountant to deal with my income and taxes, organize my life around the prominence of being a well-known writer.

The next novel was the follow-up to that first hit.

‘Garden Of Souls’ moved up the lists like a rocket and was another bestseller just a week after publication, but the interview-article that I did for ‘Time’ confirmed that I had arrived at last. Suddenly I was spending my time touring from Pittsburgh to Chicago, from London to Los Angeles giving interviews, meeting the fans and doing breakfast television interviews. It seemed that my reading public just could not get enough of the Donna Grove who took them to distant places with romantic hunks with just a few casual strokes of the pen.

For me it was heaven, a taste of fame, a moment in the spotlight. The pressure from my publisher, however, could not be denied, I just had to write the next in the series and there was no denying them even though I never took an advance and had no contract to speak of. Two months after ‘Garden Of Souls’ started to dip in the charts, I started to plan the next novel.

Arnold and I decided to buy a small house somewhere isolated where I could get away from Las Vegas and work in peace, but like all of these things, what starts as intention is distorted by reality… What I bought in the end was a tumbledown old motel that lay on the course of the old route sixty- six. A hundred miles from anywhere, ten miles off the highway complete with a hundred acres of scrub, an abandoned gas station and a desolate walled orchard that I planned to become a garden to mirror my novels. Arnold hated it, but then he had a special need to stay in Vegas!

I felt that the isolation would improve my productivity, Arnold said that it was boring. I pictured days with my old fashioned typewriter on the porch and a rocking chair; he complained that he would have to drive thirty miles just to get gas.

That was our first argument, the first time that I made a decision in which he was not fully with me. This is a good place to start my next novel, the one you are reading now. ‘Garden Of Secrets’, though the title isn’t a hundred percent certain. This is the one book of mine that will never be published! The one that is autobiographical and tells a tale quite different from my usual oeuvre, the one I finally wrote on my porch using the old typewriter.

That was after I met Chloe and Evelyn of course, but I am getting a little ahead of myself here!

Somehow, it seems so right to address the reader in the third person as if, though it is me that tells the story, the people who inhabit my head and those I know merge gracefully; the borders of truth and fiction are so much closer than most people realise.

There is one last note for me to add. I do not regret what I have done and who my friends are now. Now I have the freedom to live my life the way that I want, to play as I want to play, to change places with all of those masculine conquerors of my fiction. It is closer to paradise than I could have ever imagined, but the road was not smooth and my transformation was a path of fear and love. As you will see…

Excerpt from: Secret Garden