Under the Covers with Paul Marron: the Golden Age!

When last we left our hero Paul Marron, he had overcome a disastrous fashion mis-step and gone back to his roots, as it were, to find renewal and new hope. Romance had rekindled in his supermodel heart, and the Romance world had begun to reciprocate, with a vengeance. Traditionally, Romance novel covers displayed the customary imaginative partition: there was a beautiful young woman in the process of being enraptured, and there was a handsome young man doing the enrapturing. During the puritanical 80s and 90s, book cover designers were chary of having their products look like actual snapshots from mid-coitus, so the positions these young couples tended to take were more athletic than functional (one - unintended? - side-effect was that often on those covers it looks like the handsome young man is rapturing the beautiful young woman ... er, Brokeback Mountain-style), but both sides of the Romance equation were accounted for. Women (and, presumably, one out of every ten men) reading these novels could either fantasize about being that ravished heroine, or they could fantasize about being ravished by that handsome young man.

Our boy Paulie changed all that. Cover designers were clearly overwhelmed by the sheer Kelvin-range of his cheeky smolder, the tectonic pout of his lips, the sexy swivel of his svelte shoulders. They discovered that when Paul Marron, sultry and perhaps a bit dishevelled, is glaring out at you from the cover of a Romance novel, he's actively fulfilling both fantasies at once - he balances the equation all by himself. Soon, dozens of Paul Marron covers were appearing every month in bookstores across the country, all sporting variously manipulated images of Paul - and only Paul. For the first time since the era of Fabio, a male model was judged sufficient to sell a Romance novel to women without any women on the cover. Who needs direct imaginative identification when you've got those intense Italian eyes lasering into you?

Kresley Cole realized this early on, and the cover of her 2008 entry in her "Immortals After Dark" series shows it! There's our boy - in this case, masquerading as a full-fledged demon (complete with forehead-horns!) by the name of Cadeon Woede, who manages to become erotically fascinated by the mortal woman Holly Ashwin even as supernatural forces conspire to reveal that she's the chosen Vessel, so called because every 500 years a woman is fated to give birth to a child who'll change the otherworldly balance of power for good or evil (yep, the female lead is called a vessel, and it turns out super-macho para-military demons like Paul can only really tell if a woman is destined to be his by sleeping with her ... this isn't a fantasy novel aimed at Gloria Steinem's night-stand). He abducts poor Holly and, um, auditions her rather strenuously, and in the course of the book she discovers that she herself isn't what she seems ... yet another exponent of the disturbing Twilight-ethos in which a young woman can only achieve self-awareness through getting rogered good and proper by a man. Although at least in this case the man was a sturdy little super-model and not a mush-faced bent-chested little Gothling ...

We go from primal supernatural fantasy to primal supernatural fantasy by turning next to Pamela Palmer's "Feral Warriors" novel Desire Untamed, which features a truly astounding cover-image of our hero in mid-crouch, buck-naked except for a lion-head arm-band. Palmer, wise woman that she is, clearly has a thing for Paul - he's appeared on a number of her book-covers, but never to more mesmerizing effect than here: caught in steamy red, muscles taut, eyes glowing, hair unabashedly Fabio-esque. In this book Paul goes by the name of Lyon, the leader of a band of Feral Warriors, the Therians, who are seeking a woman - a woman they call the Radiant, who's destined to renew their fading race (three guesses how)(sigh). Unbeknownst to her, that woman is ordinary every-day preschool teacher Kara MacAllister, who discovers in the course of the book that she herself isn't what she seems ... so yes, Palmer and Cole have essentially written the same book, with our boy Paul doing double-duty as both a sexy demon and an enormous house-cat. But the point is: look at that cover! In many ways, it's unlike any Romance cover seen before: not only is it explicitly erotic in ways that all that Brokeback Mountaineering couldn't hope to be, but it's explicitly personal - directed squarely at the reader in open invitation. It's instantly one of the very best Paul Marron covers of all time.

Urban fantasy gives way to science fiction in Susan Kearney's Rion, the second instalment in her "Pendragon Legacy" series. Here Paul goes by the name of, you guessed it, Rion, a half-breed space explorer from the planet Honor who kidnaps sexy human telepath Marisa Rourke because she unwittingly holds the key to the salvation of his ... OK, OK. So it's just possible there's a trade-off going on here. It's possible this astounding new level of Paul Marron covers comes at a price - not just to Gloria Steinem but to women everywhere, who are here reading adventure after adventure of female main characters who have no clue about their capabilities or even identities until those things are revealed to them, through sex, by a sultry Paul-avatar. And the Paul-avatar uses the (allegedly) affectionate adjective 'little' in conjunction with her name/title for the whole book. And the sex happens because she's been abducted and sprawled forcibly on the bed/chamber floor/forest sward/starship bridge. OK, OK, so this trend is pretty bad. But again: look at that cover! This one takes the Marron Gamble to new levels: there's nothing promised here except the promises implied by our hero's stunning face. That's a far cry from horny Brazilian millionaires.

We come right back down to Earth for Stephanie Tyler's Hard to Hold, in which Paul appears as Lieutenant Jake Hansen, hard-bitten (and yet gorgeous!) Navy SEAL who's ordered to darkest Africa to spirit feisty, sexy Dr. Isabelle Markham out of harm's way. Since he's ordered to do this with or without her cooperation, we're talking about our fourth abduction in just this one entry, although at least nobody's expecting poor Isabelle to save an entire planet (or are they?). And the cover doesn't disappoint: there's our boy, steamily glancing off to his right, sweaty torso clad in a tight tank top, taut little chest sporting Special Op dog-tags, handsome face drawn to sharp, intense focus. Pre-Marron, such a cover would have been unthinkable - cover-editors would have said it lacked any kind of story-line. And they'd have been right: any other model couldn't manage to convey a story-line simply by pouting there. But this particular model has been forged, as we've seen, in countless adventures - he's known apocalyptic wastelands, English country villas, immortal vampire-queens, and more than a few tightly-bound perils, and he's emerged from them all with a cover-confidence never seen before in the Romance world.

Where will it take him, you wonder? Why, to a series of ever-more-satisfying climaxes, of course! We'll seize on one in our next thrilling chapter!

Under the Covers with Paul Marron: Handling Scandal!

When last we checked in on our chisel-cheeked hero Paul Marron, he'd done the seemingly impossible: he'd bounced back completely - and quickly! - from what my dear old friends "The Guys Next Door" would have called a "Bad Hair Day" (links to either of those quoted terms would be too cruel even for me - let's just say there were dark by-waters of the '90s where only the foolhardy went, and from which few returned unchanged). Paulie had regained his mojo by returning to his roots: brooding, brooding, and more brooding! Sometimes, you just have to get out of your own way and let your perky pecs and perfect puss do what they were made to do - this is the essential life-wisdom of the male model. Our boy has let his body lead him into the strangest places: extraterrestrial paramilitary outfits, corporate boardrooms, post-apocalyptic wastelands, the shackles of ravenous vampire queens; he's seen Fortune's Wheel turn, and at times perhaps he's questioned whether or not he had what it takes to smolder for a living.

But the same pendulum-swing that brought him down so low he was toying with his hair color and considering going back to school (economics or environmental studies? Hmmm) has now begun its upward arc at last, and suddenly the feral confidence we all saw many months ago on the cover of our very first entry in this epic series. Suddenly, the Romance world knows that Paul Marron is synonymous with scandal, and it can't get enough.

A fairly sedate start to this up-tick, then, in the decorous confines of Julia London's A Courtesan's Scandal, in which Paul goes by the name of Grayson Christopher, the Duke of Darlington. In London's fast-paced story, the Prince of Wales wants his good friend Paul to act as a kind of decoy, pretending to squire and conquer the beautiful Kate Bergeron so that polite society doesn't realize the Prince himself is visiting her in the off-hours. Even here, in 1806, Paul is that classic male model combination of haughty and naughty as he accepts the arrangement and begins to lock horns - and other applicable parts - with the lady in question. Kate prides herself on her self-control, but which of us could count on much self-control around our boy Paul in a snug silk vest? Pretty soon, they're both fogging up the windows:

Kate had never felt anything more than tolerance at the prospect of physical relations with a man, but tonight ... tonight she felt urgency, a strong and natural flow of desire for Grayson. She sought his body, her hands beneath his shirt, raking down his chest and back. Her mouth was open beneath his, her tongue twirling around his. She pressed her breasts against him, and when he pushed her hands away to unbutton his shirt, she boldly moved her hand to the front of his trousers and slid her palm down his erection.

Grayson lifted his head as if he meant to say something, but he didn't speak at first. He could only look at her with eyes darkened by his longing. She cupped him, rubbed her hand against him.

"Kate," he said hoarsely.

Fans of well-done romance can't go wrong with London, but fans of Paul will know that an arrangement such as the one cooked up here by the Prince of Wales is simply impossible - our molten little model masquerading as somebody else's love-dupe? Hardly! Paul doesn't feather his hair in the morning in order to have it tousled as some kind of consolation prize. There can only be one cock of this walk.



Paulie moves forward a generation - to 1848 - but appears to change very little in Liz Carlyle's A Touch of Scandal, where he calls himself Adrian Forsythe, Lord Ruthveyn, he of the 'impossibly' black hair and eyebrows, a stern and sultry man very much in the Duke of Darlington mode, a hard, private man who's spent a good deal of his life "Haring about Hindustan risking life and limb in the service of Her Majesty's government and its well-shod bootheel, the East India Company." Carlyle's distressed heroine Grace Gauthier (whose shipping-magnate employer has just been brutally murdered, a crime of which the police believe she might not be entirely innocent) has a decidedly mixed first impression of our brooding hero:

The man - Ruthveyn - seemed disinclined to say more, and Grace resisted the impulse to ask anything. Save for his thick raven hair, sun-bronzed skin, and a nose that was perhaps a tad too strong, he could perhaps have been an Englishman - or Satan in a pair of Bond Street boots.

Naturally, that first impression isn't quite mixed enough to stop them from flinging each other's clothes off, but to her credit, Carlyle serves up a more complicated story than the simple fireball of lust we've all experienced with Paul so many times by now. Nothing is quite what it seems in One Touch of Scandal, and beneath his rough exterior, our hero is a haunted man:

"Do you see those shadows, Grace?" He was staring at the row of houses beyond the glass. "They come creeping relentlessly across the street, every day, without fail, ever destined to shroud us as the sun sets. That is what fate is like to me. Like an impending shadow that cannot be evaded. And we know that it is coming. Sometimes, just before the veil falls, we can even glimpse what lies within. And sometimes what we see is but a chimera - or the reflection of our fears."

Since Barbara Cartland first put quill to parchment, the crux of all romance novels has been a fairly simple trade-off: the hero saves the heroine from some incipient danger (brigands, blackmailers, bad husbands, or all three), and in exchange, the heroine saves the hero from just that kind of creeping darkness. Carlyle stays true to this pattern, but she stocks her novel full of twists and turns - and even a slight element of the supernatural - so that the reader can't comfortably predict where the happy ending will come from.

One thing readers can certainly predict - especially if they're loyal Stevereads fans! - is that the pattern shown on One Touch of Scandal's covers is the one that will win the day. In the book's inset, we see our boy sprawled on a red velvet couch, frilly shirt parted to reveal his V-neck and collarbone - an almost monkish arrangement that feels like a throwback to the timidity we know Paul has discarded like some clinging turtleneck. And so it is - on the book's front cover, we see two of the essential Paul Marron elements on full display: nakedness, and indifference to whatever female happens to be sharing the frame. Those elements have never let our hero down, and they're now carrying him to greatness.

They carry him one crucial step further, in our next chapter!

Under the Covers with Paul Marron: On the Rebound!

OK, a little time has passed, and we've been able to gain a little perspective. When last we saw our hero Paul Marron, everything was fine in the lower latitudes: the curving thighs, the narrow waist, the neat little stack of abs, the bulging biceps, the deliciously rounded shoulders, that cut-glass chin and smoldering pout, those protractor cheekbones, and the sultry, piercing eyes - check, check, and check. The problem came just north of all that: in a madcap and heedless decision, our hero got his perfectly-feathered sandy-brown hair dyed blond. No doubt it seemed a good idea at the time, but no amount of Regency epaulettes, cowboy spurs, or spaceman armor could justify it in the unforgiving light of the morning after, and a young man as fashionable as Paulie must have seen that better than anybody. Friendly cousins can be blond; well-meaning village curates can be blond. But rakes and billionaires and werewolves? Let's face it: peril and peroxide don't mix. Marronites may have wondered if a shining career could possible recover - or what Paul would do next.

Turns out he did what comes naturally: to lick his wounds (and wait for that color to wash out), he returned to his jet-setting secretary-impregnating old haunt, Harlequin Books, whose always-reliable stable of loose-floozy writers has been titillating and entertaining the American book-buying public for decade after tastefully torrid decade. After being welcomed back into the fold (perhaps with some teary hugs in the office? With everybody trying hard not to look at that color?), Paul threw himself into the realms of international high finance, taking on the name Nicolas Dupre and becoming a powerful theater impresario in Australia in the wonderful Miranda Lee's novel A Night, A Secret ... a Child. Nicholas is on top of the world when he receives a card from his tiny home-town, where he was, we're told, Mr. Popularity:

Not that the girls weren't after him; they were. At eighteen, Nicholas had been tall and handsome, with wavy blond hair and Nordic-blue ...

Oh no!

Obviously, Paul moved on.

His next port of call was broiling-hot Athens, where he called himself Talos Xenakis (surely a cry for help?) and busied himself impregnating beautiful young American Eve Craig - indeed, impregnating her so thoroughly she promptly lost her memory. This concoction was called Bought: The Greek's Baby and was served up at breakneck pace by the delightful and hilarious Jennie Lucas, who's no stranger to having Paul parade around on her covers (did he seek her out? Did he plead with her - in that honking Brooklyn accent - "Jennie, you have to help me!"?), and she falls to her appointed task like a trooper:

How was it possible for a man to be at once so masculine - and so beautiful? His black hair brushed the top of his ears. He had the face of an angel. Of a warrior. His Roman nose had been broken at least once, from the tiny imperfection of the angle. He had a full, sensual mouth, with a twist of his lip that revealed arrogance and perhaps more - cruelty?

Black hair! How Paul fans must have leapt for joy! Could it be? Could their long, national nightmare be over at last? With trembling anticipation they may have turned to The Melendez Forgotten Marriage by our old friend, the winning and elegant Melanie Milburne, in which our boy has switched passports yet again and is now calling himself Javier Melendez. We find him wooing delicate little Emelia - who's also having trouble remembering things (what is it with these girls? After all, are they ever going to do anything more memorable in their lives than romp in the sack with Paul Marron? Geez):

A tall raven-haired stranger with coal-black deep set eyes stood at the end of the bed. There was nothing that was even vaguely familiar about him. She studied his face for endless seconds, her bruised brain struggling to place him. She didn't recognise any one of his dark, classically handsome features. Not his tanned, intelligent-looking forehead or his dark thick brows over amazingly bottomless eyes or that not short, not long raven-black hair that looked as if it had last been groomed with his fingers. She didn't recognise that prominent blade of a nose, and neither did she recognise that heavily shadowed jaw that looked as if it had an uncompromising set to it ...

Uncompromising indeed - now that some essential lessons had been learned: coal black, dark, raven-black, raven-haired ... surely the world got the hint? This was a new Paul - or rather, the return of the old Paul, and his rise would be higher and longer than ever before! We'll begin to come to grips with it, in our next episode!

Under the Covers with Paul Marron: Heading for a Fall!

When last we left our hero Paul Marron, he was being coaxed and shaped and stiffened in his resolve by several pairs of firm and knowing hands, and he was steadily rising toward ultimate fulfilment. The life of a pouty super-model isn't always a box of pansies; it's sometimes difficult to know where to step next. Our Paul has certainly not been conservative - he's tried his hand at just about everything, from frustrated billionaire to frustrated alien mercenary to frustrated werewolf to frustrated bondage-slave to frustrated all-purpose supernatural being, with many stops in between. There've been good decisions and bad decisions (the latter usually involving clothing - as in, wearing any), and there've been naughty, naughty ladies waiting at every turn to latch their talons on our boy (it's theoretically possible there've been some naughty, naughty men as well, but we'd hardly be in a position to comment on that), and it can all get a bit hectic. No doubt Paul could sense that his destiny was finally sidling up next to him on the solo-flex, but how to grasp it?

One strategy felt more natural than all the rest: Paul must focus on Paul! Not in the narcissistic sense, mind you, but still - unlike most other models who've indulged in romance cover-work, Paul seemed to realize his full potential only when he was the only hard-body on any given cover. Readers so coveted his luscious little body and chiselled face that they wanted both all to themselves - and the strategy worked: books with Paul going solo on their covers sold very briskly. If our hero weren't so well-grounded, it might have gone to his head.

Look at the cover of Jayne Ann Krentz's 2009 volume Fired Up, for instance: Paul's so sure of himself, so sure his magnetism will rule the gaze, that he doesn't even bother to look at us - he merely favors us with a profile, a moonlit shot of his perfectly feathered hair, and his soft, rubbery lats. In Fired Up he's Jack Winters, descendant of the famous 17th century alchemist Nicholas Winters and latest victim of the Winters Curse, which drives the men of the family to become 'psychic monsters' unless they can lay their hands on something called the Burning Lamp (which neither burns nor is a lamp, but hey). Stroking the lamp will make everything better - but only with a little help: the lamp must be tended by a woman who can manipulate its dreamlight energies, so generations of Winters men find themselves searching for such a woman, always with time working against them. Perhaps not an entirely familiar concept, Paul desperately searching for a woman to stop him from going crazy, but there you have it.

Krentz goes at all this with the businesslike passion you'd expect from somebody who's written 200 books under three pseudonyms. She's cooked up a detailed story about rival secret societies and the various psi-operatives they watch, control, and employ, and she doesn't really have time for the precise control somebody might exercise if, for example, they only published two books a year. Maybe that's why on Page 25 our heroine Chloe is told that Paul is 36, and then on Page 47 she's told the same thing - in the same conversation. Or maybe she just doesn't believe it, any more than the rest of us do.

In any case, Chloe turns out to be the very lamp-tender Paul's been looking for - something he first guesses when mad, passionate sex with her manages to calm his inner turmoil for a while (who would have guessed that?) And together they make an excellent team - complementary super-powers and not an ounce of body-fat between them. From Paul, Chloe learns the sound a six-pack makes when you rub it really fast (for the curious, it's oddly similar to the sound of a car driving on a flat tire), and from Chloe, Paul learns how to more precisely control his powers, to the point where he can psychically follow someone else's experiences:

"There's a guard?"

"Outside the door. I remember seeing him the last time I woke up. I try to sit up. That's when I remember the restraints."

"You're tied to the bed?" Chloe asked, horrified.

"I'm shackled to the gurney with leather straps, the kind used in hospitals to control violent patients."

(That's not Paul narrating his own experiences, more's the pity)

That supernatural element is another key to the quintessential new Paul experience - he's often at his best when he's out of this world. And if a tortured psychic victim is good, surely a super-hot vampire strike-team commando is even better? That's what we get in Susan Sizemore's 2010 opus, Primal Instincts, which also features only our second truly epic Paul book-cover. All the elements are there: the deadly-serious look in the eyes, the epic pout, the bare, glistening torso, the ridged shoulders and padded pecs, the brachial vein running down the arm like a drain-spout, the washboard abs, the ready hands, the vaguely counter-culture tattoo (ah, but which counter-culture? So many possibilities...), and best of all: leather pants. Naturally, Paul and leather go together like eggs and bacon under any circumstances, but if there's one leather ensemble that says "I'm peeled all over Paul!" more than any other, it's surely leather pants. The cover of Primal Instincts scarcely needs the rest of the book: it's a work of art all by itself (the artist in question is Gene Mollica, and Paul friends the world over owe him a debt of thanks - he's no stranger to depicting Paul in various states of undress, and he's also responsible for the great covers to the "Iron Druid" series).

There is a book attached - an elaborately-realized (Sizemore may just be the dorkiest romance novelist currently working) story about secret societies of vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural creatures roaming around freely in the normal human world, unseen guardian angels warring with unseen menaces to mankind, and everybody all the while operating by their own careful rules and regulations. In Primal Instincts Paul goes by the name Tobias Strahan, and he's the head honcho of an elite vampire special-ops squad, the Prime of his vampire clan and lord of all he surveys - until Flare Reynard shows up, a clan heiress herself and an object of dangerous fascination for Paul. Very dangerous, in Sizemore's fantasy scenario, as Tobias charmingly explains:

"Tribe females belong to the strongest males. They exist to be bred. They are bought and sold and fought over. Mortal slaves are used for sexual pleasure, but every Prime knows never to become involved with a vampire female. Use their bodies, stay out of their minds. Breed them, then pass them on to the next master as quickly as possible. Try not to taste them; never let them taste you. Never even look into their eyes. There are all sorts of superstitions about how females drain Primes' strength, many examples of their evil ways. The whole point is to keep Primes from bonding with females."

To which some Paul-fans (you know who you are) will cheer, "Hear! Hear!"

And surely this is the summit, yes? A sexy, super-macho stud-vampire who spurns bonding with females and sports the tightest leather pants in the crypt - surely once our boy Paulie has reached this kind of pinnacle, he can only move from glory to glory, with no more sloughs of despair?

You'd think that, and you'd be right - except for one horrifying possibility:

What if you get drunk one night and let your girlfriends DYE YOUR HAIR?

If we turn to Jennifer Haymore's 2010 novel A Touch of Scandal (although any of Haymore's novels will equally shock - they all feature the same bizarrely transformed Paul), that's exactly what we see. Gone are the raven, feathered locks that have lured us on through alien landscapes and windswept highland meadows, and in their place stands a shock of brainless beach-bunny blond locks fit for a peroxide party down at Baywatch Central. Gone is the sultry allure of Paul's Italian ancestry, replaced by tow-headed ignominy that couldn't seduce a willing go-go boy. The fingers shudder to post the full horror of it all:



Can our hero possibly recover from such a weird fashion misstep? Tune in next time to find out!

Under the Covers with Paul Marron: the Warren Court!

Perhaps growing weary of his life as a multi-millionaire shape-shifting bounty-hunting alien werewolf bondage slave (yeesh - who wouldn't grow weary of all that from time to time?), our hero Paul for a brief while returned to Merrie Olde England where he'd been relatively happy once before. And what more natural identity to assume once in England of 1809 than that of Lord Byron?

In truth, it was only a matter of time. Our Paul shares so many traits in common with Byron, after all - stunning physical beauty, identical height and body type, same husky, suggestive timbre to the voice, same compact yet fluid physicality, same studied-yet-involuntary sensual appeal (and perhaps one or two other things that slip the mind at the moment). For the better part of a decade, Byron held a wide reputation for being the most handsome man in England. The amazing thing is that it took romance writers so long to make the connection.

And the wait isn't over yet, because the Byron our Paul turns out to be this time around isn't that Lord Byron - he's Lord Cade Byron, one of the brothers of the Duke of Clybourne, and like all his brothers, Paul - er, Cade - probably spends half his waking hours telling people he's not related to the famous poet. But although they're not related, the Byron brothers share something of the poet's mythos - they're headstrong and provocative (well, all except for egghead brother Drake, although even he has his moments), and they often choose to be snidely dismissive of the great society's norms. Also, like the poet, they attract trouble and temptresses in equal measure.

In other words, we've entered the world of Tracy Anne Warren, who writes some of the most charmingly escapist Regency romances currently on the market, and whose covers had a brief, torrid affair with our chisel-cheeked hero back in 2009, starting with Tempted by His Kiss, which opens with pretty young orphan Meg Amberley seeking shelter from a blinding snowstorm at the remote estate of the aforementioned Lord Cade Byron. Cade is holed up away from the convivial haunts of his family, brooding over his capture and torture on the Continent six months earlier at the hands of a French agent known as Le Renard. Paul only barely escaped from that encounter, and he's sequestered himself in his northern estate to let his scars (and his crippled leg) heal and generally feel sorry for himself. Meg's arrival jars him out of his reverie, and soon he's back in London - where he's shocked to recognize Lord Everett, the hero of the hour, as his former torturer. Of course nobody believe him - except perhaps Meg, and it isn't long before the two of them are facing Everett's loaded pistol, and Paul is getting a treatment that seems a bit familiar:

Everett motioned Cade toward the chair. For a moment he looked as if he might resist, but a glance at the gun Everett was still pointing her way obviously changed his mind. Moving with a more pronounced limp than he had shown for a while, Cade crossed the room, pausing to lean his cane against the nearby wall before taking a seat. At the servant's urging, Cade placed his hands around the tall back of the chair so his wrists could be tied together using a stout length of rope. Nearly finished, the man gave a last, hard tug that made Cade's muscles visibly tense against the strain.

Readers of this series will recognize the tenor of revelations about Cade/Paul. "He knew all about how it felt to lose control," Warren tells us. "To be denied free will while one trembled on the brink, a second shy of breaking, of begging, of agreeing to violate one's most sacred oaths in order to make the agony stop..."

Yes indeed!

With admirable flexibility, Paul has no sooner conquered the villain (the old knife-up-the-frilly-sleeve trick that's no doubt got him out of many a tight spot in Brooklyn) and taken the girl in his arms than he's pivoting, dodging into the nearest storeroom, and emerging as ... an entirely different Byron brother!

In Seduced by His Touch, Paul is going by the name Lord Jack Byron, a wastrel who falls so deeply into debt to a wealthy London merchant that he has no choice but to agree to marry the man's daughter Grace in exchange for a clean slate. Naturally, Paul worries that this Grace has gone unmarried all this time because she's, as he puts it, a "gorgon," but the truth turns out to be far more pleasant, as romance novel truths invariably do (Warren, who can't keep her sunny native ebullience out of her prose even at its most serious, writes infectiously happy books, despite the brutal backdrops of some of her plots). He finds her charming, and of course she returns the favor:

Glancing across the room, she found him talking with Edward and Cade. The three Byron men were all handsome, but to her, Jack far outshone his siblings. He was the epitome of masculine beauty, standing tall, dark, and dynamic in his stark black and white evening attire, his neatly combed hair already showing a charmingly rebellious bit of wave.

And lest you think Paul's quick identity change frees him from the family duty of constantly clarifying, think again:

Her aunt's eyes grew round. "Byron? No relation to the poet, I suppose?"

"No, ma'am. That particular gentleman and I share no familial ties, nor do I claim to have so much as an inkling of talent in the art of penning sonnets and odes. Let me say, however, that it is a distinct pleasure to make your acquaintance." He bowed with a practiced flair that made her aunt's cheeks pink like a schoolgirl's despite her nearly sixty years.

Ah, our Paul! Such a charmer! Where will he turn up next?

Under the Covers with Paul Marron: Frilly Shirt, Discarded!

When last we left our hero Paul (now the proprietor of a snazzy new website of his own! Those of you who are casting directors - and you know who you are - click on over and line up to offer him work!), he was beginning to grasp once again that elemental poutiness that launched him to romance-cover stardom, after perhaps losing faith for a time and finding solace, as we've all done from time to time, by taking mercenary work in distant galaxies and doing some freelance paranormal gigs in New York City. Those stints offered an anonymity that was no doubt healing, but they required a heavy price in return: they required Paul to be fully clothed. For a male model, a pound of body armor and worsted wool is far worse than a pound of flesh. Paul may have executed these various adventures with the cool hand and consummate professionalism that are his trademarks, but looking at those covers, you can almost hear his luscious pecs yearning to break out and breathe free. We saw the beginnings of that self-realization dawn on Paul last time, and what started as a trickle will soon spurt to a torrent.

Like so many epic adventures, it all begins in Egypt. 1820 Egypt, to be specific, the setting for the opening scene of the delightful Deb Marlowe's 2008 Harlequin historical romance An Improper Aristocrat, which begins with a mysterious femme fatale spying on our Paul as he sits alone in his tent in the Valley of Kings. Her motives might be nefarious, but she's an excellent judge of model-meat:

Narrowing her gaze, she studied him. Ah, yes. The light might be dim, but it illuminated a feast for the discerning female eye: a strong, chiselled profile, impossibly broad shoulders, rugged muscles straining the fine linen of his shirt.

He set down his pen and indulged himself in a lengthy, catlike stretch. Even in so unwary a pose, she could sense his power, feel the pull of unwavering confidence and absolute masculinity. Inwardly, she smiled. This assignment, which she had objected to with vehemence, was going to be no hardship at all.

Ah, yes indeed - she no sooner parts his tent-flap than she's straddling him like a subway turnstile, and our boy Paul, bless his randy soul, takes it all in stride. Howard Carter and other wimpy Egyptologists would probably have complained about the heat.

Their impromptu coupling is brought to an abrupt halt by the sound of a scream, and Paul - here calling himself the Earl of Treyford - rushes outside to find his excavation partner, Richard Latimer, lying on the ground with a knife sticking out of his chest. Despite the fact that 'Trey' (the equivalent of the Earl of Rutland calling himself 'Rut,' but Marlowe - like her literary namesake, come to think of it - will have her own way) cries out the requisite "No!" Richard dies in his arms - but not before handing over a mysterious ancient amulet and making Paul swear to return to England and protect Richard's big sister Chione.

Paul swears (in all his adventures so far, he's never yet refused a dying request, despite the fact that they always get him into trouble - you'd think by this point he wouldn't bend over a dying friend until his iPod was safely blasting Lady Gaga into his ears, so his friend could gurgle impossible quests until the cows come home without Paul being the wiser), even though he has no love for England - where polite society views him as an unprincipled rake and adventurer - and no love for the idea of playing squire to some old maid and the two children she chaperones.

Needless to say, Chione in the flesh upends all his expectations (Marlowe is wonderful at crafting set-piece scenes that come off without a hitch; the chapter-section where Paul meets Chione is a pitch-perfect hoot, complete with a zinger at the end), and thanks to that mysterious amulet - and the sinister ancient society that's after it - the two of them are quickly embroiled in one adventure after another. Readers who expect the usual dinner-and-ball-room Regency romance here will be surprised right out of their petticoats. As noted, Paul himself must wrestle with similarly toppled expectations - and other, more powerful feelings:

Trey muffled a heartfelt curse. His head was still bent in the low-ceilinged corridor, an awkward position made more so by the child resting against his shoulder. Danger lay behind and the unknown ahead, and he must face it saddled with a woman and two children. This was hardly the first scrape he'd found himself in, but it ranked right up there with the worst of the lot. And despite all this, still his body reacted to the nearness of hers. To the scent of her hair. To the sound of her breathing in the darkness. For some reason he did not fully comprehend, all of this infuriated him.

Ah, that last line speaks volumes, doesn't it? And in the end what's important isn't that inexplicable rage - that's just par for the course when it comes to brooding rakehells, after all - but rather the fact that by this point in our odyssey, we can bloody well guess why Paul is infuriated. Hell, we can see it plain as day! The old Harlequin historicals (four a month, no overlapping time-periods!) all featured a separate black-and-white illustration on the inside cover that was meant to further the action of the full-color front cover, and in the case of An Improper Aristocrat, we can see the way the wind is blowing - it's blowing Paul's frilly shirt clean off his smooth-muscled torso!

That wind is the breath of the future, and it's blowing Paul toward his romance-cover destiny! We shall follow that blowing job in the next instalment!

Under the Covers with Paul Marron: Been Down So Long!

When last we left our hero Paul, he was clearly at a crossroads in his tempestuous life and career, and perhaps he was questioning some fundamentals (well, not those fundamentals - he's still a male model, after all!) ...on the barometer of personal indecision, 'space armor' is only a notch or two above 'turtleneck' when it comes to a shamelessly shirtless exhibitionist like our Paul. So when we left him wearing jumpsuits and fighting bug-eyed monsters, we had reason to fear the worst.

And surely those fears were realized by the cover of Anton Strout's 2008 novel Dead to Me, which features Paul once again bundled up against the cold, impersonal winds of his own imagined future: he's wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt under a thick woolen trenchcoat, and he's staring meaningfully off into the distance, and his grasping hands are dripping with bright viscous goo ...

Actually, the goo is ectoplasmic energy (note to you kids out there: it's doubtful that line will work with your parents ... better to stick to the time-tested 'it's mayonaisse' keeper), because in this book Paul is going by the name of Simon Canderous, a new member of New York City's Department of Extraordinary Affairs, which handles all the supernatural menaces the Big Apple's police and fire departments either don't know about or don't want to know about. Paul brings to this job his own supernatural ability, but in Strout's book, that ability isn't 'heating up a Speedo' but rather 'psychometry' - the ability to gain psychic impressions about the past of an object simply by touching it. All throughout the book, Paul is forever touching things and getting them to spill their contents all over him.

Tellingly, Paul is coming to his life of crime-fighting from a seedier past, as he relates:

I had worked hard to put my unscrupulous use of my powers behind me. Long before finding the D.E.A., I had been an impressionable, confused kid with burgeoning powers, working part time for any antique shop that would have me. Cutthroats swarmed that business like sharks being chummed, and there were plenty of sketchy opportunists more than willing to drag me into the world of big scores, petty cons, and fast money.

Has a familiar ring to it, doesn't it? A confessional ring, one might say. Paul uses his powers to confront the Sectarians, who are kind of an even-more-evil version of the Scientologists, and Strout keeps the proceedings popping along at such a snappy pace - and with such snappy dialogue - that readers of light fantasy will have a very entertaining time. He's picked just the right power for his sexy protagonist to have: it's both interesting and small-scale (it's clearly a forerunner - right down to the cover - of a whole sub-genre of hunky-hero light sci-fi/fantasy).

The ending of Dead to Me finds Paul at a costume party dressed as Zorro, with a tight satin blouse cross-stitched across his bulging chest; readers of this series might at that moment sense something, the faintest tingle of a resurgence ... after all, Paul could have dressed as Spongebob Squarepants, or Chewbacca. But no, he chose a revealing costume (which, inexplicably, isn't the book's cover image) - perhaps as a cry for help, or perhaps as the first distant hint that such help is no longer needed ... because when Paul walked away from the Department of Extraordinary Affairs after that first adventure (he'd return for three more, and they're all great fun and well worth some of your time), he left his identity crisis - and almost all of his clothes - behind him.

Luckily for all of us, however, he didn't leave extraordinary affairs behind him. He moved on to London, to a loud party in the apartment of prim-and-proper freelancer writer Isobel Jameson, who spots him from across a crowded room hears that essential question that is the start of every romance: "Who is that guy?" Brainy Isobel at first affects indifference, but you and I both know it's just plain impossible to be indifferent to our smoldering Paul, and as quick as you can say 'rock-hard deltoids' veteran romance author Anne Mather has the two of them tangling the sheets in night after night of torrid - and acrobatic - coupling:

As she touched him, Alejandro caught his breath, sucking air into lungs that suddenly seemed deprived of oxygen. "Cara," he protested thickly. "Cuidado! Have a care! I have only so much control."

Isobel's tongue circled her lips. "But you like me to touch you?" she questioned, and he gave a strangled laugh.

Readers of passages like that one (from The Brazilian Millionaire's Love-Child) might be forgiven for thinking that if our Paul ever really did lose his pouting mojo, he now firmly had it back again - except that shortly after he and Isobel give such repeated venting to their carnal desires, he up and leaves her ... with no forwarding address and his spawn growing in her womb! In the three years that follow, she grows into a smart, determined single mother and he goes and gets himself into a car accident that leaves him crippled and - worse, far, far worse - ugly. Sure, this also means, in romance-novel terms, that he's now worthy of her love, but so what? Who cares about worthy if you're ugly?

Fortunately, plane tickets to exotic destinations can take the ugly out of just about anybody, and the first thing our resourceful Paul does is hop a flight to faraway Sydney, Australia and assume a guise that's very familiar to him: the ruthless sexy businessman. In this case he's merciless tycoon Vinn Venadicci, hero of The Venadicci Marriage Vengeance, a bastard (in every sense of the word) who was born to a maid of the once-prosperous St. Clair family and is now in a position to save that family's finances - if only the family's representative, buxom young Gabriella St. Clair, can swallow her, um, pride long enough go to him for aid. Author Melanie Milburne, in page after page of spirited, more-intelligent-than-it-looks prose, has these two stubbornly avoiding the schmaltz waltz in favor of a tighter tango, sparked - of course - by mutual desire:

In the nanosecond before she spoke Gabby quickly drank in his image, her heart giving a little jerk inside her chest in spite of all her efforts to control it. Even when he was seated his height was intimidating, and the black raven's wing of his hair caught the light coming in from the windows, giving it a glossy sheen that made her fingers itch to reach out and touch it. His nose was crooked from one too many of the brawls he had been involved in during his youth, but - unlike many other high-profile businessmen, who would have sought surgical correction by now - Vinn wore his war wounds like a medal. Just like the scar that interrupted his left eyebrow, giving him a dangerous don't-mess-with-me look that was disturbingly attractive.

This flight of fantasy (needless to say, this Venadicci bravo's mincemeat face bears little resemblance to the sculpted perfection of Paul's puss) is followed by many others, and the book's conclusion is funny, diverting stuff - Milburne knows how to please (by random chance I've read a couple of her other books, and they're equally good), and more importantly, so does her Harlequin cover artist, who gives us a small taste of the Paul we've been missing: mough agape, topless, and ever so slightly exaggerated in the pecs department. He seems natural somehow, munching so amorally on poor rapturized Gabby - he looks like a predator in its natural element, which is hardly the way we've seen him lately.

But all that is about to change! Our Paul has indeed been through some kind of refining fire - he's been down so long, he can only go up! Our chronicle had faltered a bit, as our hero floundered and seemed destined to wander into a lackluster second-tier romance hero career with occasional moonlighting in galaxies far, far away. But sometimes, we need to hit rock bottom to know we can fall no further, and our Paul is done with that now! An unbroken string of triumphs lie ahead, all of them to be achieved by Paul finally believing in being Paul - to the fullest, every single photoshoot.

It's a heady ride, and it begins in our next thrilling chapter!

Under the Covers with Paul Marron, Army Drone!

When last we left our chisel-cheeked pert-buttocked hero, he was the semi-willing thrall of a seductive vampire queen, and he was industriously fulfilling the job's two requirements: driving just the right kind of stake into her, um, heart whenever she demanded it, and acclimating himself to lots and lots of bondage-on-demand. And at the skilled hands of writer Joey Hill, that particular job was becoming steamy hot - including a later volume in the series in which Paul is caressing his vampire queen while several duplicate Paul's caress her (and perhaps each other?) also.  A person could become understandably flustered.

And if our Pauly did become flustered, he certainly reacted the way we all have at one time or another in our lives: he up and joined the space militia.

His first choice was the 26th century United Authority Marines in Steven Kent's rip-snortingly good series of Clone Republic novels - The Clone Republic, Rogue Clone, The Clone Alliance, and The Clone Elite. In these books, Paul goes by the nom de guerre of Wayson Harris, who's a clone with a lemon twist - he's got a mind of his own, and so he's got a price on his head.

The books follow Wayson through a nonstop series of adventures facing off both against human extremists and nasty alien invaders, and through it all, Steven Kent gives us lively dialogue and some fantastic action-sequences. The niche of military science fiction is one I've yet to explore here, at least not to an extent that would mirror the sheer enjoyment I've derived from that niche since David Drake was a hippie and Gordie Dickson would do readings for beer. I'll get to it one of these days, but in the meantime, those of you who like military sci-fi could do a lot worse than to seek out this author's books, where tense exchanges like this one are the order of the day:

"If General Glade thinks you're something special, that's his problem, asshole!" Moffat continued. "You got that? You may have friends in high places, but I have friends of my own, asshole. Do you hear me? You try to make yourself a hero again, and I will flatten you into a specking statistic. I will turn you into K.I.A. roadkill so fast you won't have time to wet yourself." As he said this, he placed a hand on my shoulder.

He should not have put his hand on me. Now I found myself angered to the point that I began to have a Liberator combat reflex. The hormone was beginning to flow through my blood, soothing me and pushing me to attack at the same time. Struggling to keep my temper in check, I brushed Moffat's hand from my sleeve. "I'll keep that in mind," I growled, still hoping to keep my growing need for violence in check.

When the fending off of other men's advances became too much for Paul - when he could no longer keep his needs in check - he left the U. A. Marines and shipped out with the Macht, a mysterious, mountain-bred race of warriors on the world of Kuf, in Paul Kearney's gripping, fantastic novel The Ten Thousand (gotta love a classical reference, especially made by somebody smart enough to realize that Xenophon is, in fact, the father of military science fiction). Here we call him Phiron, the commander of a unit of Macht hired by Prince Arkamenes of the Asurian Empire to make war on Arkamenes' brother the Great King and take his kingdom from him. Arkamenes is that staple of military science fiction - the courtly fop who doesn't at first understand the sublime coolness of the men he hires. He has all the low opinions of the Macht that you'd expect from such a figure:

"Well, Phiron, what plan is this you've hatched for me now?"

Phiron stepped out of the brisk-marching column. He wore his cuirass and carried a spear. Like all the Macht, he stored his shield and helm in the wagons while on the march. He was growing a beard; Arkamenes thought it did not suit him, but then no Kefren noble grew hair on his face. What an ugly race, he thought. So stubborn and steadfast, so small in mind, unprepossessing. They might be brothers to the Juthan, were it not for their colouring. And yet, these hairy, ugly little creatures were the stuff of Asurian legend. Deep down, Arkamenes knew full well that no Kefren army, not even the Great King's Honai, could have come out of that river and broken the enemy line as these things had. There was an implacability about them that had to be seen to be believed. His money had been well spent.

Readers of this sort of thing will catch echoes of everything from the Sardaukar of Dune to the Dorsai of Gordon Dickson, but then, science fiction done well is a homage-heavy genre. The point is, Kearney's stuff is done well, so the echoes honor their sources.

Well, that's one point. Another - and surely more important - point is that when some effete nobleman can call our Paul an "ugly little creature," it's clear that our hero has strayed very far from his natural habitats. It's fairly clear he was seeking out anonymity by joining the ranks of the space cadets, but what anonymity can there be for one so shapely? It bespeaks a fundamental confusion when a lodestar of so many female (and perhaps a few male? Can such things be?) fantasies should attempt to cross the road and find solace in science fiction. And to his credit, Paul eventually realizes this. When next we meet him, he'll be on far more natural terrain.

Under the Covers with ... who?

Several card-holding members of the Silent Majority have written to make sure I know that our intrepid hero, Paul Marron, is not the only good-looking young man to appear on a long series of Romance covers. Of course Fabio has been mentioned, as well as less corpulent but no less magnificent figures such as Steve Sandalis or Frank Sepe and a host of others.

Given the fact that I've been selling these things since the reign of James I, this information naturally came as no surprise to me - although I'm always grateful to know that people are reading Stevereads! Yes, Paul Marron isn't the only guy who's made a nice little side-career in prettying up the real estate of Romance covers, and while I'm naturally partial to my guy (I realize these things are tricky to quantify, but I'm prepared to assert that I've settled on the best-looking young man to show up repeatedly on paperback covers), the point serves to bring up an interesting tangent to our little adventure ongoing adventure story here. Because the Steve Sandalises and the Frank Sepes and the Fabios are of course the rarity even in today's publicity-hungry days. In the blissful 72 years of the mass market paperback's existence, thousands of handsome men (and a surprisingly number of those who were most certainly otherwise - hope springs eternal, I guess, although the gambit looks considerably more pathetic when removed from the low lighting and alcoholic haze of the bar...) have graced book covers and gone entirely uncredited.

This has been intentional, naturally: publishers want their models to be anonymous so readers can mentally substitute themselves into the fanciful scenarios of those covers. The opposite effect is achieved if you put somebody with name-recognition into those images - then readers can't help but just think of that person (Daniel Radcliffe, Jared Padalecki, or whomever), and a significant element of wish-fulfillment is aborted. Plus, anonymous comes a bit cheaper than name-brand.

And yet, an irony attends - because some of those anonymous faces catch on - readers like them and want to see more of them. They're still anonymous (most of the time - faithful readers of Romantic Times will still be in the know, but most supermarket shoppers will just think "Oh, it's that guy! I like him!"), but they're obviously somehow conducive to fantasy. Some young men just have that kind of face - and the body doesn't hurt either.

So you have the odd situation of many, many young guys becoming well-known while remaining anonymous. Stroll down the aisles of any Annie's Book Stop and you'll see handsome face after handsome face - all without even so much as a paltry cover-credit.

Our young man today is one such candidate out of thousands. He's been on many dozens of covers - fans have obviously called for him - and yet he's no household name, no Fabio, no Frank Sepe ... and certainly no Paul Marron.

He has his preferences, as we can see, his preferences and his types. He's fairer-haired than our Paul, with a longer and less pouting face and a nose only a handsome young man could carry off at all. He has soulful, accessible eyes - not the dark pits of sultry menace our Paul has. And he smiles - indeed, he looks like the type who has to be told not to smile - and not just the occasional wry "I'm going to bed you without even telling you who I am" cocky half-grin of our Paul but the open, sunny smile of the American Midwest. This young man could not pose with a whip or a broadsword, and one suspects he doesn't even own a pair of leather pants.

And he's very likely not as chiseled as our Paul (although to be fair, who is?); I've seen him on dozens of covers, but never, to the best of my recollection, topless (or anything-else-less) and seldom even in a clingy T-shirt. In fact, he's a favorite of ample clothing – the vests and ruffled-shirts of the Regency period, or else a rancher's big fleecy jacket. All we need to do is recall how utterly miserable our Paul looked when sensibly layered to guess we're dealing with a completely different personality here.

Well, perhaps not completely different – our anonymous interloper clearly shares something of Paul's sexual voracity! The somewhat ridiculous cover to Criminally Handsome is the only one I've ever seen in which he's alone, and virtually every time he has female company, he's got designs on that company. Designs, and a signature move – he's doing that not-so-subtle hand-slide in almost every setting, a wonderful gesture that's both assertive and non-threatening. It's smooth; one can't help but think our Paul would approve, even though he'd never stoop to being so polite himself.

But who is this young man? Although I'm certain there are people out there in the wilds of the Internet who know him (hell, maybe he's got a blog of his own … perhaps even, gulp, a book-blog), I certainly don't. In this instance, I'm in the exact same position as any other random reader: I see these covers, and I say “Oh, that guy! I like him!” He doesn't seem to be working in the industry anymore, but for a while there, he was almost as ubiquitous as our Paul.

Speaking of whom! When we last left our hero, he was being tied up and shackled with abandon by a voluptuous vampire queen – and learning to like it. But this seemed to trouble him, and there were hints of a backlash on the horizon. Tune in next time to learn all about it!

Put up your Dukes!

Several of you have written (privately, of course - wouldn't want to clutter up the Comments field with anything so unseemly as comments, now would we?) with questions about our tumultuous ongoing inquiry, Under the Covers with Paul Marron. The questions have taken a variety of forms, from those of you naughty enough to wonder if I myself have had the pleasure of wrapping that taut little model-body in sturdy clothesline to those of you who've questioned whether or not Paul and I might be sampling the Love That Dare Not Pout Its Name. Prurience, it seems, is the currency of the Internet. Shocking.

But one of the more presentable questions has concerned not so much flexible muscles as flexible reading: do my indefatigable researches for Under The Covers constitute the whole of my sojourns in the Romance genre?

This one I can answer: not so! Not hardly! More romance novels are published every year than any other kind of fiction, and more of them have been published in the past than any other genre, even murder mysteries - even westerns. Whole bookshops are devoted to their resale (like my beloved Annie's, but also many more, a species of bookshop once chronicled for the Romantic Times by my erstwhile colleague Rebekah Bradford), and sports arenas could be filled to the cheap seats with slim, florid-covered novels who came, sold in their hundreds, and vanished in a season. Unlike science fiction or even murder mysteries (to a criminally lesser extent), romances do not linger - the genre has fielded virtually no 'classics' of the type that stick around, constantly re-packaged for new generations of readers. The books are mostly chaff - here today and tomorrow in the fire.

The reason is social conventions, of which romance as a subject has multitudes, murder mysteries far fewer, and science fiction by definition almost none. Social conventions change quickly, sometimes multiple times in one generation, and romance novels based on those conventions quickly lose their appeal. It's assumed by most publishers that the virtuous nurses of Betty Neals' romance novels of the early 20th century can have little to say to the raunchy vampire grrrrls of the early 21st.

The great exception, for obvious reasons, is the historical novel. Set your torrid romance in the present day and you'll be the curator of a period piece faster than you can say "Peyton Place." Set the same story in the Middle Ages, and your book could outlast its contemporaries by a season or two. The few romance novels that have ever managed to live on and get reprinted have almost all been historical novels, and despite the ubiquity of those raunchy vampires, a great percentage of romance novels published every year take place in Ye Olden Times.

This leads, of course, to some fairly hilarious anachronisms, as anybody who's ever relished John Mortimer's pitch-perfect story "Rumpole and the Bubble Reputation" will recall. But some writers at least try to do their due diligence, making a heroic effort to sort out things like wall-sconces and crusades and the Ton before they start with the heavy breathing. And to be honest, sometimes the anachronisms fall by the wayside when the story is good enough - or when the author is (not one critic pointed out the six things that couldn't possibly have happened in Wolf Hall, for instance - including me).

Or when the subject is - in our case today, the over-mighty subject. Yes, we're talking about Dukes, those rarest and mightiest of English peers. In the real world, there've been hardly any dukes in history, only about 500 or so total individuals, and in the world today there are fewer than 25 still alive (I myself have only met a baker's dozen of the creatures over the years, and I've only known two of them well). But you'd never know that from reading romance novels, where you can hardly unfurl a reticule without rapping a duke across the snout (Duchesses are almost equally common, as those of you will know who recall my love of Eloisa James' novels)(including one, as you can see, that sports a now-familiar face!). Take three relatively recent reads of mine, harvested from the close-packed aisles of dear Annie's.

From 2004 we have Adele Ashworth's Duke of Sin - the Duke in question here being William Raleigh, Duke of Trent, Earl of Shreveport and Kayes, Baron Chesterfield ... and husband of Elizabeth, the wife he'd been rumored to have murdered. It's 1856, and this Duke is situated in lovely Cornwall (where no dukes at all live in real life), and he's the object of the widow Vivian Rael-Lamont's unwilling attentions. Unwilling and coerced: at the novel's start, Mrs. Rael-Lamont is approached by an actor (an actor!) with an irresistible offer - if she uses her considerable feminine wiles to filch from the Duke of Trent his prized manuscript of an unknown Shakespeare sonnet, the scheming actor won't publish to the world that her husband is ... still living! And this is the key to the historical's appeal: even in Grace Metalious' day, such a bit of blackmail would have no force at all: publish and be damned, and all that. But if you set a thing in the past, all kinds of naivete become believable, and so poor Vivian sets off for the Duke's library, about which we're told, "Despite the fact that the library had been decorated in a purely masculine flavor, as befit a library, this one was simply gorgeous." The predictable complications ensue, but Ashworth keeps it all controlled and carefully moving, right up to the intensely foreseeable ending. No pronouncements about Dukes as a breed are made by Duke of Sin, and this one particular duke turns out to be not so bad a chap.

Quite the reverse seems to be true of the title character in 2006's The Decadent Duke by the redoubtable Virginia Henley. Here the aristocrat in question is the Duke of Bedford, although from the rather opulent cover illustration, you might think he was the Duke of Soloflex. Whatever the designation, it's him and his dashing younger brother who have Lady Georgina Gordon's interests peaked:

"John Russell? He's the Duke of Bedford's younger brother," Charlotte said. "The Russell brothers were orphaned at an early age and brought up by their grandparents, the Marquis and Marchioness of Tavistock. Strange how dissimilar brothers can turn out to be. Marriage is anathema to Bedford, yet John couldn't wait. Against his grandmother's express wishes, he wed Elizabeth Byng in Brussels when he was only nineteen. He was a young ensign in the Footguards, and fought in Belgium."

"Speaking of grandmothers, Elizabeth Byng's grandmere was a Lennox," Charles remarked. "So John's wife is a distant relation of mine."

"Lud, I wouldn't be surprised if the entire British aristocracy were related through intermarriage," Charlotte said dryly.

And indeed, genealogy is paramount in The Decadent Duke in a more technical and researched way than you'll usually find in a romance of this kind. Real historical characters by the dozen flit through Henley's pages, whereas the typical hisotorical romance exists in a happy Trollopean kind of abstraction whose main appeal is its freedom from the need to research. Of course, as noted, the end result of that freedom can be full of annoying howlers, but you can't let that ruin your fun. And if we're talking about fun, we should certainly close things for today by reaching for the lady whose books epitomize it: the aforementioned Eloisa James, whose novels fizz and bubble like fine champagne. James has written a sparkling series of novels starring various high-spirited duchesses, but in her 2006 novel The Taming of the Duke it's the male of the species in the spotlight, namely Rafe, the Duke of Holbrook - and his recently-revealed brother Gabe:

"Raphael and Gabriel," Rafe said. "Bloody hell. I had no idea."

Suddenly the rather serious set of his brother's face shifted to a grin. "The discovery that you are name for an archangel drove you to curses?"

It was in his smile that Rafe found the difference between his brother's face and his own. For Gabriel Spenser's grin had a charming seriousness to it that had never been part of Rafe's personality.

"What could our father have been thinking?" Rafe demanded. And then he caught, lightning quick, the shift of his brother's eyes that showed he knew perfectly well what the old duke had been thinking. "Next thing you'll be telling me Holbrook dandled you on his knee."

"Only until age eight or so," Mr. Spenser said, adding with a touch of something like prudence, "Your Grace."

"Bloody hell," Rafe repeated, "And don't call me Your Grace. I've never taken to the title."

James knows her facts well enough to know only dukes, of all the British aristocracy, are called "Your Grace" instead of "My Lord," but her main focus in this book, as in all her books, is to provide the perfect hour's amusement. You can tell this even by her chapter headings, like "A Chapter In Which Brazen Jokes About Holes Would Be Appropriate (But Your Author Refrains)" - here's an author with no greater ambition than to please you (and perhaps provoke a wistful sigh)(because she's a great big softy). And since every age has its cares, these delightful historicals deserve to survive, although the odds are against it.

I'll keep reading them, just as I'll keep ranging far and wide over the field of romance (and most other genres, of course) - but it's true: lately, my concentration has been focused on a the fictional odyssey of a certain Italian-extraction male model. We'll return to that odyssey all the more refreshed, I think, from having detoured just briefly into the world of dukes and duchesses.

Under the Covers with Paul Marron: The Vampire Queen's Servant!

When we last joined our hero Paul in his book-cover odyssey, he was in a dystopian future in which he was slowly learning to express his smoldering inner self in two key ways: skimpy clothing and discreet bondage. Both of these key ways might have felt a bit risky for a young man who, despite an exhibitionist streak a mile wide, is essentially a shy person – but jobs beckoned, and nothing in the Undergear catalog calls for its models to be roped to one of the swaying palm trees or gritty fire escapes in the background of their shots (one suspects the magazine's sales would quintuple if they did). Fulfillment had to be sought elsewhere.

Then in 2007 author Joey W. Hill came along, and Paul got the chance of a lifetime. Not only could the whole skimpy clothing/light bondage motif get a sexy purple spotlight turned upon it, but there could be the added safety-precaution of relative anonymity. On the cover of Hills scorchingly erotic novel The Vampire Queen's Servant, we see the broad, muscular, naked back of a man; a woman's nails are raking appreciatively up his trapezius, and his tense, fisted hands are cuffed at the small of his back. The man's face is turned entirely away from us – only those who are already very familiar with Paul's appearance (perhaps even in similar poses? Who can say?) would be able to identify him.

But surely his identity is not a surprise to those of us who've been Under the Covers with Paul Marron so long? The compact musculature, the stiff, bristly brown hair, the defiant demeanor – only our Paul could smolder so effectively without even looking at us!

He smolders throughout the book, too. In Hill's addictive story, he's Jacob, part-time carney and one-time vampire hunter, who voluntarily becomes the sexual thrall of Lady Elyssa, the vampire queen of the book's title. Lady Elyssa is a thousand years old, and like everybody who hits that magic number, she needs a constant supply of beefy sex slaves – a handsome, defiant young man who'll obey her every whim, cater to her rather feisty sexual appetite, and submit to any kind of bondage she happens to think up. And in exchange, said slave gets a drastically prolonged lifespan and an eternally-young bedmate. It's like Renfield, only without the bugs – and with a whole coffin-full of kinks.

Naturally, Paul is willing to make the trade, although at first he can scarcely imagine the full degree of helplessness Lady Elyssa will force him to endure – nor really experience it either, since at first he persists in performing nightly escapes from his chains/cuffs/shackles. These escapes confound Lady Elyssa, and Hill is very skilled at conveying that her confusion comes at least as much from her own reluctance to punish her errant manservant for this cheeky behavior as it does from wondering how the heck he does it.

The bondage Paul accepts here is total – he's suspended, chained, stretched, immobilized, and toyed with. Actually, since Hill isn't coy I shouldn't be either: Paul is rogered by Lady Elyssa, rogered repeatedly, rogered good and proper, and he does plenty of rogering in return. If Hill had written this book in 1907 instead of 2010, she'd have been jailed, tried in a kangaroo court, and burned at the stake on Boston Common. Even in our more depraved-enlightened times, reading The Vampire Queen's Servant is virtually guaranteed to produce extremely pleasant palpitations in pretty much any part of you that's inclined to palpitating. Passages like this one are among the tamer ones:

He'd never been forced to submission by a woman, never gotten aroused by it as she'd made him respond. At least to himself, he was forced to admit the thing imprisoning his cock made him hard mainly because she'd wanted to put it on him. It made him think of how she'd described the pleasure of slowly binding a servant, letting him feel his gradual descent into helplessness. The clasp of the cock harness kept the image of her hands there. The fascinated desire in her eyes ran through his mind, over and over.

The oddest thing about the book is that in the midst of all these exotic accessories and gyroscopic body parts, there's an actual story, and Hill is, I suspect, such a geek that at times the story almost threatens to actually distract the reader from the presence of Paul grimly struggling against ropes and chains only a few paragraphs away – something I, at least, wouldn't have thought possible. Lady Elyssa is very old and very powerful, ruler of a distant vampire bloodline, and she's in a constant power-struggle with the Vampire Council, where she's not an official member but rather a kind of unaligned rival power. Hill has worked out the details of her imaginary world precisely (or else she's spent time at a certain retail bookstore-chain whose power structure is rather eerily echoed here):

The vampire world was divided into Regions, groupings of territories won through battle or influence during the formation of the current vampire society, before the Council had been appointed. The heads of those Regions were known as Master vampires. A vampire who accumulated enough wealth and influence might be awarded an overlord title and a territory inside the Region by the Council, preferably with the consent of the Region Master. Vampires lacking the power or experience to be an overlord applied to reside in a territory. The overlord then put then in charge of different business interests. In return the vampires gave the overlord a percentage for his protection and backing. The overlords served the Region Master.

Odd but true: if Hill didn't have a rather depraved set of ants in her pants, she could easily write some very good vampire novels. Even considering the shackles and chains, she's done just that.

And what of Paul, I hear you all asking? Is this the great awakening that will lead him to find his true book-cover destiny? Is this the beginning of the Age of Paul that must be the culmination of any series such as this?

Oddly, no. Having leaped to embrace the twofold path to fulfilling his destiny, it's possible that Paul felt he'd gone too far, too fast (or perhaps the unspoken implications of the cover of one of Hill's sequels – in which not only is Paul now clearly recognizable but he's sharing space with another man – were too risque). What followed The Vampire Queen's Servant, as we'll see, was a spasm of conservatism – and a jump in genres – that must have left many a Paul fan quite confused. We'll begin sorting it all out, next time.

Under the Covers with Paul Marron: Scarlet!

Just when we might have been fearing for Paul – just when we might have been wondering (and perhaps he wondered too? Do pouty super-models wonder about the future, or do they live in the perpetual present?) if our hero was fated to helm multi-national corporations and woo unconvincingly unwilling secretaries for the rest of his shelf-life – along came just the change he was waiting for, and all it took was the Apocalypse.

Well, not the Apocalypse exactly – but close to it. In Jordan Summers' 2008 “Dead World” novels Red and Scarlet (and the later sequel Crimson), the near future setting looks fairly grim: war is brewing between the forces of corrupt government (here embodied in the slimy, ruthless politician Roark Montgomery – think Malcolm McDowell in his hammiest late period and you'll have it perfectly) and the hidden society of the Others, humans with seemingly supernatural abilities derived from long-forgotten scientific experiments (like the ones that gave rise to male models in our own world? Summers is wisely silent on the issue...).

In the first book, Gina “Red” Santiago is a member of an elite tactical squad – she's a dab hand at unarmed combat and a crack shot with her laser pistol – sent to a small town to root out possible Others-related trouble. There she encounters Sheriff Morgan Hunter, but one glance at the cover of Red will alert readers that she only maybe also encounters Paul. In that first book, a terrific little adveture story told in Summers' winningly hard-boiled way, not only does “Red” learn something amazing about herself, she also falls in love with hunky Sheriff Hunter, who's hiding a fairly big secret of his own.

Which is to say, they're both werewolves. Morgan's been doing it a long time, and eventually he starts tutoring “Red,” whose transition from 'us' to 'them' is predictably bumpy. But it's only in the series' second volume, Scarlet, that we start to view a new and exciting reality of our own: it's only in Scarlet that we begin at last the journey to Planet Paul.

The first step in that journey is right on the cover. Instead of neatly-pressed linen or (gawd help us) turtleneck sweaters, we see a dirty tank-top stretched taut over Paul's chest, we see his gorgeous face looking straight at us and tilted slightly down for maximum brooding impact, and most importantly, we see the glint of near-future semi-apocalyptic light glinting off the bare, sweaty flesh of his throat and shoulder. This is no memo-dictating business tycoon.

The actual text of Scarlet follows suit. In the narrative, “Red”s former employers – and the insidious Roark – are after both her and Paul, and it seems like they've enlisted the entire world to help out. Our heroes are almost alone (there are two heroic supporting characters, but, hilariously, they spent most of the book humping like bunnies rather than helping out) against impossible odds. But that doesn't stop Summers from doing what so many of our previous writers have hesitated to do: releasing her inner Paul-lust. On the surface, passages like this one might be intended to represent “Red”s point of view – but it's pretty obviously the author herself – and by extension the rest of us – who's getting swept away:

The wind picked up. Morgan had his dark head thrown back, letting the desert breeze caress his skin. Wildness surrounded him, oozing out of his pores like the sweet musk that covered his body. The man was magnificent in his rugged beauty. His wolf brushed his flesh in a primitive caress. Despite his civilized reserve, it always lurked just beneath the surface, a barely leashed sexual being that was impossible to ignore. Even now he drew her to him without trying, the aura of dominant power second nature.

But as gratifying as it is for it to finally make its appearance, naked Paul-lust isn't the only crucial element that's been missing so far. The full glory of Velvet Haven has many components – one of them is Paul in full 'rugged beauty' display (in reality, one couldn't really call Paul's fine, miniature features rugged – but in fiction, the translation works), yes, but another is taking that beauty and beating the stuffing out of it. We must not just have Paul's masculinity unbound – we must have it then promptly bound up again.

So it is in Scarlet, where the forces of the evil Roark capture Paul, rough him up, and chain him to a wall for weeks. This is certainly a good start. When “Red” is captured and thrown in his cell with him, she's appalled by the shape he's in and, werewolf to werewolf, asks the natural question:

“Why didn't you shift? You could at least have healed your wounds so you could escape.”

“He [Roark] has the place under electronic surveillance. He vowed to broadcast the vid-clip if I shifted. It would play right into his plans to expose the Others. I couldn't do that. The whole world is worth more than a single individual.”

Red swallowed hard as the full import of their situation hit her. “Not to me,” she whispered.

(That “Not to me” is quintessential Summers – there are neat little lines like that one scattered throughout all three of these books)

Summers has often commented that the genesis of the “Dead World” novels was a simple question: what if Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf were the same person? She meant the question to get at the heart of the 'tough girl' sub-genre of urban fantasy that's now dominated by the Sookie Stackhouse novels of Charlaine Harris, but it serves equally well to bring us closer to the heart of Planet Paul. Little Red Riding Hood is small, shapely, visually arresting, and readily victimized; the Big Bad Wolf is brawny, brooding, strangely magnetic, and easily drafted as an anti-hero. The two halves of Paul, in other words – but what if they were the same person? Novels that have seized on only one half or the other have failed to achieve maximum Paulification.

Scarlet and Crimson share the distinction of being among the first books to show us the path to that goal, but they won't be the last! Now that we've had a taste of that potential, how can we be satisfied with less?