The Widower Seeks a Child

[The main story and bonus chapters are complete. The main story is being revised and has been revised through Chapter 33 so far. I’ll post the remaining chapters together once they’ve all been revised... Thank you for supporting the official release!] [Gentle, long-suffering beautiful widower uke] X [Possessive, eager, lustful younger wolf-dog seme] Lu Ning had become a newly widowed ger. Barely seven days after his husband’s death, his relatives were already trying to seize his property. With no children to support him, Lu Ning’s only chance of protecting his family’s assets was to quickly conceive a “posthumous child” by his late husband. Just then, someone knocked on the widower’s door in the dead of night. The visitor was Shen Ye, a notorious village rogue and the late husband’s distant cousin. His cousin had only just died, yet Shen Ye had already set his sights on the newly widowed Lu Ning. Claiming he was there to help his sister-in-law through her troubles, he climbed into Lu Ning’s bed. Lu Ning allowed it. As a widower, he had no other choice if he wanted to conceive a posthumous child. Several months passed. Lu Ning climbed out of the disheveled bed and, out of habit, put on his plain clothes. Once again, they had spent a shameful, passionate night together, and his late husband’s memorial tablet lay toppled over, drenched in moisture. Lu Ning picked it up and laid it against his still-flat belly. He had failed to conceive a posthumous child, and he couldn’t get rid of Shen Ye. The road ahead was uncertain, and he was trapped between a rock and a hard place. And then someone knocked on the door again. In the morning light, it wasn’t one of his troublesome relatives standing there, but a tall, young man. Shen Ye had brought a lavish bridal procession and draped Lu Ning in wedding clothes. “Brother Ning, stop living like a widower. Be my husband. From now on, I’ll protect you.” - Shen Ye had noticed Brother Ning when he was very young. Lu Ning was the child bride of his distant cousin, and he was so beautiful he looked like Guanyin in a temple. Shen Ye often wondered: How could someone so beautiful belong to another man? Why couldn’t he be Shen Ye’s husband, his child bride? After eight years away from the village, Shen Ye returned to find his cousin gravely ill and Lu Ning apparently having a hard time, too. So Shen Ye stayed in the village. Later, the person he had cherished in his heart became a widower, struggling to hold on to a broken, empty home while hoping to conceive a posthumous child by his late husband. Shen Ye barged right in without a second thought. Under the pretext of making a baby, he took the person his dead cousin had never been able to cherish beneath his own wing and spoiled him rotten. He also carried to his bed the person that sickly man had never been able to satisfy and had his way with him. Since the person he had longed for all these years had agreed to let him through the door at night, Shen Ye would stay for the rest of his life. The only way to make him willingly leave the widower’s doorstep was for Lu Ning to agree to enter his home. to become his husband. properly married, with a formal matchmaker and wedding. - Keeping his secret close, Shen Ye knocked on Lu Ning’s door night after night. “Sister-in-law, open up. It’s your cousin.” The newly widowed man didn’t answer. He only opened the door a crack. The night was dark, and the faint glow of incense candles cast a shadowy path across the floor. Shen Ye stepped inside. +++++ Reader advisory: 1. Both are virgins; one-on-one romance, primarily from the uke’s point of view. The uke is 26 and the seme is 20, so there’s an age gap as well as a huge difference in size and skin tone. 2. The uke’s marriage to his late husband was sexless and loveless. The late husband was the seme’s extremely distant cousin, and the seme calls the uke “sister-in-law” as a bit of roleplay. 3. This is a ger world, where the uke can give birth. According to the outline, the story ends when he gets pregnant. The bonus chapters include childbirth and raising a little one; the main story is all about the couple together. 4. They get physical before falling in love. There isn’t much serious plot; it’s mainly focused on the couple. There’s no farming or face-slapping and no drama about taking on relatives. The supporting characters are all there to move the romance along. 5. Both leads have moral flaws, especially the seme! What kind of decent person has been lusting after a married woman since childhood? He’s very, very bad! +++++ A little preview of my upcoming books: Next up: The Obsessive Has Kept His Dog in the Freezer for Three Years. * Hurt/comfort, devoted-dog seme, angst, mutual devotion, urban fairy tale, mild kink. [A broken, quiet owner uke X a real dog who takes human form seme] Set in a modern city. After the dog (the seme) dies, the obsessive uke keeps his body frozen in the freezer for years. Then the seme is resurrected as a human and returns home to save his broken, depressed owner. The seme really is a dog. When he first becomes human, he crawls around the house naked, eats dog food, wets the bed, and scent-marks the uke. The uke is very unstable and, at first, doesn’t treat the seme as human. He interacts with him just as he did when he was a dog. After that: My Meal Buddy Smells So Good. * Mutual healing, heartwarming, pure food and dining, meal-buddy romance, switches. [A restrained, abstinent man with an eating disorder X a sunny food blogger and competitive eater] Set in the future among the stars. A man with an eating disorder travels to a planet famous for its cuisine to seek treatment, where he becomes meal buddies with a competitive eater. They eat together, heal each other, and discover delicious food and a bright future in this lighthearted space-food story. There are aliens, different species, and tons of extraterrestrial dishes inspired by Earth cuisine! If you’re interested, please pop over and add them to your reading list. Love you all -3- Theme: Make it through the storm and you’ll find a rainbow!