Cailin’s Heat Ratings
Sweet like grandma’s sugar cookies – The essence of a sweet romance is found in the ardent looks and blushing responses of the romantic couple. The subtleties of the heart are explored without recourse to sex, explicit or otherwise. Just like grandma’s sugar cookies, a sweet romance can be enjoyed by any age, including young teens.
Mild salsa – How hot is it? That’s the question that mild salsa lovers ask when offered potentially spicy food. They don’t like anything that’s too hot. Mild salsa romance has sex, but it’s never explicit and can take place behind closed doors. There are no graphic scenes like the equivalent of biting into a jalapeño seed. Couples kiss and touch each other, feeling the requisite softness or hardness, but body parts are never described. This level is Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr kissing on the beach in From Here to Eternity. They’re having an affair, but all we see are steamy kisses.
Steamed milk – Warm milk is supposed to help you go to sleep. This level isn’t about getting put to sleep. It’s steamed after all, but it’s still milk. The characters have sex in full view of the reader, but euphemisms replace the explicit terms found in hotter reads. His erection is his arousal. Her pussy is her cleft. Steamed milk turns overpowering hot sex into a delicious latte, smooth, creamy, and tasty.
Dark chocolate decadence – Seduction is the key to this heat level. There will be warm, melt in your mouth sex that will leave you hot and bothered, but it won’t be kinky or raunchy. The romance builds to the moment when the temptation to shed clothes overcomes whatever has kept the main characters from slipping beneath the sheets. While there are fewer sex scenes than in the hottest level, they are explicit and a sensual indulgence for the reader’s mind whether the lovemaking is slow and smooth in a plush bed or hard and fast up against the wall.
Ack! I think I burnt myself – This is the hottest level, and it really sizzles. You can expect explicit sex, sometimes with the grungy terminology guys would use. Oh, that dirty talk! The sex can be kinky, but it’s still very sensual, and romance is a key ingredient to the story. The sex is central to the characters’ story arcs, but not the stultifying blandness that inserts tab A into slot D. Still if explicit bothers you, stay away.