A Heap of Free Gay Romance Stories with Hot Summer Days!

Yep, it's that time of year again! Roughly 130 of your favorite M/M romance authors have gotten together via the Goodreads M/M Romance group to take requests from readers and write stories of "coming out in love, being out in love, and committing out in love." All in the spirit of the M/M Romance slogan: Don't Read In the Closet.  

This is the second M/M Romance free reads project. You might remember the first from last December, when 25 authors got together to write stories for Stuff My Stocking (download it free at Goodreads or ARe). 

This year, we have roughly five times the fun, but the setup was the same: Readers used both a photo and a related text prompt to make requests to the writing community at large, and writers beat and clawed and scratched at each other to snatch up their favorites. (I lost out on three perfect photo prompts before I finally landed the one I ended up loving and writing.) 

Be sure to keep an eye on the Hot Summer Days thread all through July and August, where the mods will be posting twenty-thousand words' worth of new stories each and every day! Already-posted stories include reader favorites like Kim Dare and Jade Archer, and there are stories yet to come from AJ Llewellyn, KZ Snow, Aleks Voinov, Clare London, Amy Lane, Mark Alders, and over a hundred more! And, of course, me ;-)

Speaking of me, here's the photo prompt I picked:

I'm sure you'll be shocked--shocked!--to hear that when this photo went up, people actually came looking for me on Twitter to make sure I wouldn't miss it. Thank you to those folks--you know who you are :-D

And here's a little teaser of my story to come. I don't know when it's going up, so if you want to read the rest of it, you'll just have to check back in the Hot Summer Days thread and read through all those awesome free stories until mine comes up. A terrible hardship, I know. And no excuses about not belonging to Goodreads or the M/M Romance group--it's easy, fun, free, and as friendly as folks can possibly get.

But enough with the alliteration. Here's a page from Jungle Heat, below the jump.

Pete checked his watch again, then took a long look around for . . . well, anything, the constant chirp and hum and rustle of the jungle a strange comfort in the daytime for all the irritation they caused him at night. “09:08 boys,” he said. Diego was pulling on his harness over his ghillie suit. Mitchell was strapping on his spurs. The thought of their upcoming climb made Pete almost glad he’d drawn the short straw, but only almost—no sniper worth his salt was happy playing flanker. Everyone wanted to pull the trigger, or at least spot for the trigger-man, especially now they had shiny new XM2010s. He’d never fired one in the field.

“Don’t worry, Petey,” Diego said, tossing him a wink as he shouldered his pack. “You’ll get your turn soon enough.”

“I’ll take a picture for you,” Mitchell said.

“You’ll take a picture for high command.”

Mitchell shrugged and ducked his head to hook his flipline to his carabineer, but not quickly enough to hide his blush or his goofy smile. “I may take orders from the brass," he said, "but in my heart it’s all for you, babe.”

Diego snorted. “You two lovebirds want the nest? I’ll wait down here.”

Fuck, yes. But he settled for, “I drew the short straw, remember?”

He tried not to look too disappointed as he watched his team ascend the tree.

To be continued (eventually) at the Hot Summer Days thread . . .