Ahem.
So there are some sexytimes in MADLY, as you have no doubt intuited. One of the things I wanted to do in this book was play around a little bit with what “sex” meant, and what healthy consent can look like between two adults with full possession of their faculties and libidoes.
The other day, I saw an excerpt on Facebook for a romance novel where I couldn’t tell, reading it, whether what I was reading was consensual sex or rape. Because it certainly read as a rape scene — though it was just a short excerpt, and the post didn’t make clear what the context for the scene was — but it was being presented as exciting sexytimes without so much as a nod to the fact that the heroine was explicitly asking the hero not to touch her, or to the fact that the hero was using physical coercion mixed with insulting language.
I’m not saying that’s a book I would never read, or you should never read, or that anyone should be condemned for wanting to write or read it. But it did stand out to me as sort of the opposite of what I was trying to do in MADLY. You’ll have to judge the results for yourselves!