I keep opening my calendar just to look at the date. One week from today, Hotwife Chronicles: Exploration is officially out in the world, and I am not even a little bit calm about it.

If you read Beginnings, you already know Shane and Amrie. You watched them take those first, terrifying steps into a lifestyle neither of them fully understood yet, and you watched them figure out that the hardest part was never actually the sex. It was trust. It was learning how to want something for your partner without losing yourself in the wanting.

Exploration picks up where that left off, and it does not slow down.

This book takes Shane and Amrie further than they have ever gone, both together and separately. New people, new dynamics, a club that becomes something closer to a second home than either of them expected. They spend this whole book exploring the edges of what they can trust each other with, and I mean that in every sense of the word. Physically, emotionally, all of it. And underneath everything they explore, the same question that started this whole series: what does it actually look like when two people build something this open, this honest, and this fragile, and refuse to let it break them?

I will be honest with you. Some of the hardest scenes I have ever written are in this book. Not because of what happens in the bedroom, but because of what happens after. There is a moment in here, and if you have been following along you might already have a guess which one, where trust gets tested in a way this series has never tested it before. I did not want to write it. I knew I had to.

What I did not expect, going in, was how much of this book would end up being about friendship. About the people who become family somewhere along the way, the ones who show up for you in a lifestyle that asks you to be more honest than most people are ever asked to be with anyone. Shandra and Simon became some of my favorite characters to write in this entire series, and I think you are going to feel exactly why once you meet them properly.

One week.

If you have already requested an ARC and read it early, thank you does not really cover it. Your early thoughts, your honesty, your excitement, all of it kept me going through the last stretch of edits when I was convinced every sentence needed one more pass.

If you have not read it yet, here is your one week warning. Clear a weekend. Maybe don’t start it on a work night, honestly. Go into it ready to explore right alongside them.

Exploration releases on September 1st. I will drop the link the second it is live, and I will absolutely be checking my phone obsessively that whole day waiting to hear what you think.

Thank you for being here for this one. It has been a wild ride writing it, and I cannot wait for you to finally read it.

See you in a week.

Michael