Before We Were Wicked

Book excerpt: From New York Times bestselling author Eric Jerome Dickey, “one of the most successful Black authors of the last quarter-century”* comes a novel about the how one chance meeting can change everything in this thrilling, sexy tale of star-crossed lust. They say the love of money is the root of all evil, but for Ken Swift, it's the love of a woman. Ken is twenty-one, hurting people for cash to try to pay his way through college, when he lays eyes on Jimi Lee, the woman who will change the course of his entire life. What's meant to be a one-night stand with the Harvard-bound beauty turns into an explosion of sexual chemistry that neither can quit. And when Jimi Lee becomes pregnant, their two very different worlds collide in ways they never could have anticipated. Passion, infidelity, and raw emotion combine in Eric Jerome Dickey's poignant, erotic portrait of a relationship: the rise, the fall, and the scars⁠—and desire⁠—that never fade. *The New York Times