"Everyone has an artist lying underneath their skin. It needs to be awakened."

Another reviewer describes this book as "sexy but wholesome", and those were precisely my thoughts on finishing it.

Alicia is rejected by her family when she comes out to them, then she loses her job when her employer downsizes. Things are looking grim for her when she gets falling-down-drunk in a bar and is taken in by two women she had been flirting with. The women, Danna and Pearl, own a Victorian-style house in the suburbs, in which they hold art auctions and run a bordello staffed by the artists and servicing a select female clientele.

Every denizen of The Victorian we meet is delightful, and I almost wish the book had a hundred more pages in which we could get to know more of them before drama happens and the reader is (reluctantly in my case) steered away from the sex and love and art to deal with external challenges facing Alicia and her new friends.

Lydia L. Vaughn writes wonderful, warm -and- hot sex scenes and there are plenty on offer here, culminating in a lavish "house party" for artists.

I really enjoyed this book and I'm very keen to read more from the author.

Highly recommended to anyone who enjoys steamy WLW fiction. ( )