Romance Sex in Weird Places: Where and How?

Advice So here’s a question for you, as part of my continued research for “Everything I Know About Love, I Learned from Romance Novels:” Where is the strangest place you’ve seen a couple in a romance novel have sex?

I’m not picky as to the specific sexual act (wow, could that get me into some fun trouble if taken out of context!), but I am curious which crazy or bizarre locations you’ve read about when the happy stiffy meets the eager recipient of said happy stiffy. Could be a lava-hot cavern of love, or another happy stiffy that’s tangling with the first happy stiffy – whatever. Like I said, I’m curious about location location location.

If I recall, and I still haven’t found this book so I’m not 100% sure it was a Susan Johnson novel, the strangest location I’ve read about a couple putting the love monkey in the love glove, was in a lake in England in WINTER. It had to be cold and slimy, and slimy, and COLD, but no, orgasms for all! Yeesh.

I’ve read sex in stairwells in space and on Earth, and often while the bad guys were after them (and you know when you absolutely cannot wait another moment to get your freak on, the bad guys will lose their sense of direction until you’re done), and I’ve read sex in carriages and wagons, in barns, underneath trees and, great shock of my life, in BED, but I’ve also read some very adventurous places.

What about you? Is there in your reading memory a sex location that, ha ha, sticks out?

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Random Musings

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  1. James Lynch says:

    Kudos to the person who mentioned Anne Rice’s Beauty series.  My pick would have been from the second book, where the heroine is in a crowded tavern, lying back over a giant cask, and the soldiers have their way with her at, er, both ends of the cask at once.

    Phil Foglio’s absolutely wonderful x-rated comic book XXXenophile has a story called “A Demon stration of Affection” where a randy female demon (demoness?) decides to spice things up for her male lover by teleporting them numerous places while having sex—including underwater (with giant sea creature watching) and right outside the While House.  Fun!

  2. Theresa says:

    Given the number of sex scenes on horseback, I think someone may need to volunteer to test this for authenticity….

  3. Sybylla says:

    Weirdest one for me (I think someone mentioned it above, but not by name) is Lisa Valdez’s Passion.  The h/h have sex in the Crystal Palace during the public exhibition…in the first chapter of the book, before even exchanging names.  And at the end of the book – spoiler alert – they have sex while she’s breastfeeding their child.  I know that there are probably people who would disagree with me, but that’s just a little too primal-sceney for me.

    I can’t swear to it, but I think the Amanda Quick novel that was being asked about (statue gallery, ribboned condom) is Mistress.

  4. Megs says:

    I remember being a bit confused by the sex scenes in Julie Anne Long’s Since the Surrender because they always occurred when the hero and heroine were doing something where stealth and attention were needed. Spying on the bad guys in a library? Perfect time for the hero to sneak up behind the heroine and start fingering her! Sneaking into a museum in the dead of night to uncover a nefarious prostitution scheme? Better make a detour to an antique royal bed (I think it belonged to Henry VIII?) to get it on!

  5. Elaine says:

    I distinctly remember a scene Jude Deveraux did in one of her medievals (Velvet Song, maybe? Definitely one of the velvet series). It was a major sex scene on the trestle dining table that involved lots and lots of food. IIRC, the heroine is dropped onto the table in the middle of a squishy dish, there’s a pseudo food-fight and they end up eating various tidbits off of each other’s nekkid parts. It’s been a lot of years, but I remember it was very lighthearted and fun.

    Ooh, captcha code is ‘game82’ as in a game of 82 ways to play with food during sex? Hm

  6. Amanda Blair says:

    @Anjani I think I know what book you’re talking about where coitus=time travel.  Is it Jude Deveraux’s A Knight in Shining Armor?  I remember really hating the ending to that book.

  7. Kaetrin says:

    I do not like it in a boat
    I do not like it in a moat
    I do not like it on a table
    I do not like it in a stable
    Not on a camel nor a horse
    Not in a museum or in gorse
    Or a park or in a tree
    Or where sand can get in me
    The point should really not be missed
    I must vehemently insist
    I do not like wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am
    I do not like it Sex-I-Am!!

    🙂

  8. Sandra says:

    And no one mentioned Emma Holly— In The Demon’s Angel novella, the Yama (demon) scientist heroine experiments on the human hero, making him grow wings—and they wind up having sex in mid-air while flying madly away from the bad guys.

    Not a romance, but Douglas Adams’ So Long… and Thanks for the Fish has similar scene, without the bad guys, but with spectators from a passing jet. This is the HGG book with the fabulous description of Mark Knopfler’s guitar playing.

    The Quick with the rose petals is what finally turned me off her. I read several back in the day, but the improbable sex scenes got to me after a while.

  9. Tee says:

    That one in “All the Queen’s Men” by Linda Howard, the hero wants to cement his cover story that they are in the office of the bad guy having sex, not to steal secrets.  He gets her in the mood by licking her and can’t get her to scream, goes ahead and has real sex with her and wants them to get caught in the act by the security forces on the estate.  Instead, she is too breathless and they end up finishing on the couch, uncaught until they were leaving the office, useless as cover story.

    There was a series romance book, the heroine is afraid in the dark and gets trapped in a stuck elevator.  I think she and the hero end up having sex before they are rescued the next morning, just barely finishing before the rescuers freed them.  He didn’t use protection and she ended up trying to track him down related to an accidental pregnancy.

    One from a few years ago, there was a medieval story where a guy was chained in a dungeon.  The heroine wants to avoid a forced marriage, so she goes down to make a deal with the prisoner to get rid of her virginity and get ineligible as a bride.  Maybe called “Forbidden”?

    There was another Linda Howard book, the couple crashes in the wild.  Heroine is a photographer and the hero is her pilot and/or guide.  They have no showers or clean clothes for weeks, barely enough food, yet somehow plenty of energy and okay with the stinkiness.

  10. FranW says:

    Yup, like Natalie L upstream, my most enduring memory is of a romance novel in which they boink while riding a horse.  I can’t remember the book, the author, or anything else about the story, but the whole trotting-twat-meets-cantering-cock thing remains burned into my brain.

      A friend and I (we were both horse-mad girls at the time) tried mightily to figure out if it was do-able, and despite our best efforts and wildest imaginations, we had to admit that no, there is no way in hell a man and woman can have sex while riding a galloping horse.

  11. Jennifer says:

    – the Jill Shalvis book where the h/h have sex under the desk during an earthquake is Aftershock

    – in the latest Vivian Arend book ‘Falling Freestyle’, there is sex in the snow during a skiing holiday – and the man tears a hole in the woman’s long johns for ‘access’

  12. N says:

    I looked and maybe I missed it, but I think nobody has pointed out that in SEP’s It Had To Be You, Phoebe and Dan did it on the fifty-yard-line of an NFL stadium.

  13. cate says:

    Let’s not forget Marsha Canham, with her wonderful Pirate Porn !  Think frigging in the rigging, in The Wind and the Sea.
    Spamword Space 42….Which is the number of spaces I’m going to have to clear,for all the new rec’s I’ve found on this subject !

  14. Kistie says:

    Linda Howard takes tops for me with After The Night bathroom courthouse scene…  I giggle everytime I read it:)

  15. Anita Chax says:

    Christina Dodd’s third book in her fortune hunter trilogy (Thigh High, I think) has the H and h do it in a bank vault. The H spreads the notes on the floor to make an impromptu bed… Steamy stuff!!

  16. DiscoDollyDeb says:

    I would have bet cash money that at some point in the comments someone would have made reference too that old urban legend regarding the Newlywed Game:

    Host:  Men, where is the strangest place you’ve ever made whoopee?

    Contestant:  That would be in the butt, Bob. 

    But unless I missed it, no one did.  Perhaps, alas, you bitches are all too young.

    BTW, it’s almost 100% sure that in a Regency romance if someone notes the beautiful little cottage/summer house/folly/ha-ha/pavillion/other enclosed shelter on or near a small lake or brook or stream or meandering river, there will be at some point in the proceedings sex going in said building and/or body of water.

  17. kytten says:

    I once read a historical where they had sex in the basket of a crashed hot air balloon. That was pretty insane.

  18. Literary Slut says:

    Can’t remember author/title, but centaurs were major characters.  Human heroine on horseback + male centaur getting it on with human heroine *and* female horse simultaneously = twosome? threesome?  The mind boggles.

    How about in a tree *with* the tree?  Pollinators of Eden by John Boyd.

    I read some warped SF/F in my troubled youth.

  19. Cat Marsters says:

    Joy, I’ve never been to South Carolina so I don’t know what your waves are like.  But in the UK there are definitely days when it’s pretty easy to stand up in the waves.  So unless it was a particularly stormy day, I wouldn’t have thought that was a problem.  Though still salty and sandy and ewwww.

    And cold. Really cold! A Texan friend of mine once visited and we took her to Southwold, where we saw a man attempting to surf. It was February. The waves were the size of thimbles. There were so many things wrong with the scenario that if a talking bunny had hopped by, my friend wouldn’t have been any more convinced she was going mad.

    I’ve written thirty-odd erotic romances, so I must have something to offer here. A cave cut off by the sea. A collapsing building (actually that wasn’t in an erotic, and I got some shtick for it). The Palace of Versailles, which was underwater at the time. The Forum in Rome. A stable in Lapland. Think my personal best is probably the back of a gryphon in full flight.

    (Er, I say personal best. I mean sex that I’ve written. I’ve never flown on a gryphon.)

    I remember the Jude Deveraux horse sex. Thought it was weird at the time. And I was going to nominate Mr Impossible for the tomb sex (was it a tomb? I think it was). Mmm sexy mummified remains.

    I keep thinking of Phoebe from Friends. Asked where the strangest place she’s ever had sex is, she replies, “Michigan.”

  20. RebeccaJ says:

    Not an entirely strange location, but one sex scene that has always stuck out in my mind was when the “hero” “punished” the heroine by turning her away from him—having sex from behind—against the railing of a boat….

  21. D’oh!  I neglected to mention my own books!  In The Bride and the Buccaneer, the H&H have sex in a hammock—sort of.  It’s a sex act, and it’s in a hammock.

    And I would hardly classify sex in a bathtub as exotic, but your mileage may vary.[g]

  22. Carin says:

    In Shannon Stacey’s exclusively yours they have sex on a 4 wheeler.  That actually didn’t seem strange at all – I’d spent the whole book expecting a scene like that!  There is a running joke in that book about the married couples taking extra quarters to the showers to have sex there.  I’ve been in campground showers and that one kind of grossed me out!

  23. lorelai says:

    I love Phoebe’s line about Michigan! I read somewhere recently that Lisa Kudrow didn’t have sex until she was married, which was after she started Friends. If that’s true (because we all know everything on the internet is true), I thought that was interesting since the character of Phoebe was supposed to be pretty sexually liberated, so to speak.

  24. helen says:

    On a horse. I think it was a Johanna Lindsey book.

  25. Kismet says:

    Definitely on a horse. Being a horse person, I just don’t see that as A)sexy B) the least bit comfortable or even C) workable.

    And on that note, Haylofts are also bad places to even think about. Too hot and sticky and hay itches and leaves red welts on exposed skin. Ewww.

  26. karalee says:

    I remember a Angela Knight novel with sex in an anti-gravity room!  Certainly allowed for some interesting positions! Just can’t remember the title.  However, I do remember the scene.

  27. Tamara Hogan says:

    Jennifer Armintrout said:

    the hero went down on the heroine while she was sitting on the front seat of a Conestoga wagon, breastfeeding her baby, which wasn’t the hero’s.

    OMG, I just snorked up a mouthful of coffee. Suddenly the sex scene I just wrote, where the h/h get it on in a truck parked in Tobie’s overflow parking lot, seems…positively tame.

  28. DianeN says:

    I once had sex in an Adirondack chair in an open air greenhouse on a riverbank during a summer thunderstorm. And also under a full moon on a silky blanket in a cemetery.

    Oh, wait, this isn’t about me??

    Never mind.

  29. Aika says:

    From a novel with Japanese erotic short stories, can’t remembe either title nor author. Two kept sticking in my mind:

    Heroin is running away for one reason or the other and hides in a hollow tree trunk. The soldiers dispatech to fetch her unconciously build up their camp beside this tree she is hiding in. They get bored and relieve themselves by using a knothole in the tree trunk. And of course the knot hole is not only a knot hole. And of course she couldn’t get away becuase they would catch here then… She enjoyed it anyhow. And the logistics stay a miracle to me as well…

    From the same book, another story. Slightly messy concubine ends up with her lower half in a muddy palace pond while a carp (one she always fed with peas – so there seems to be some kind of relationship between them x-) ) sucks her clitoris (mistaking it for a pea). Strange things are going on out there…

  30. Barbara W. says:

    Host:  Men, where is the strangest place you’ve ever made whoopee?
    Contestant:  That would be in the butt, Bob. 
    But unless I missed it, no one did.  Perhaps, alas, you bitches are all too young.

    I remember DiscoDollyDeb!

    Mine isn’t so much a place, but a place and thing.  I read an anothology just a little bit ago and one of the shorts was about an incarnation of Medusa.  She was so turned on by a stone gargoyle on top of a building that she hoisted herself out over the edge of it and had sex with it.  Her stuff brought it to life (turns out it was cursed), but I never imagined being up on the edge of a building, impaled on a big stone cock would be that arousing.

  31. Jeannie says:

    Ms. Adair likes putting the strange location sex in her T-FLAC books. I read the one with the jungle scene and also there was one on a dogsled (not moving) but still bundled up in some very tight quarters.

    I had a boyfriend once who would choose odd places and crack me up at the same time. Tiny shower stall – “kinda like doing it in a coffin, huh?” Woods – “just grab that limb, this’ll only take a second” Hotel balcony – “God, I hope this doesn’t wind up on Youtube!”

    My point being, when the mood strikes and you’re super hot for one another you tend to make it work. But still…a horse?!

  32. Lindsay S says:

    Not too terribly strange, but I just finished a book by Elizabeth Hoyt where the hero interrupts the heroine’s wedding and they go to the vicar’s office to chat and end up having sex there while the vicar and her three brothers are right outside (banging on the door, at one point). The book was good and the scene fairly hot, but it colored me amused. And hey, God did say “be fruitful and multiply”, so what better place……

  33. Tracey says:

    help me!

  34. cate says:

    @ Aika, that’s The Pillow Book of Lady Onagoro by Alison Fell

  35. Wanda says:

    One of the Harlequin Blaze books from September involved underwear that was essentially a chastity belt with GPS inside. A group of friends had a pact to abstain from sex and would moniter each others’ GPS to make sure no sex happened (because they could also see if the underwear was removed for any length of time). So of course that meant the h/h would be traipsing through the Brazilian rain forest or white water rafting, decide to hell with the pact and then get it on. Keep in mind the Heroine has had the underwear on for days or weeks at this point. I guess it wasn’t the location so much as the situation that was unusual (and a bit unhygienic).

    Not really romance related, but there is a saying that Canadians are people that know how to make love in a canoe. Even being Canadian, I can’t really figure that one out.

  36. Lori says:

    In at least 2 of Sarah McCarty’s Hell’s Eight books the h/h have sex on horseback. In the first one the h/h have the buttsex on a horse. Um, no.

    In Tara Janzen’s Crazy Hot the h/h do it on the hood of a muscle car—-with the engine running. Can you say “toasted buns”? As someone mentioned earlier, they also do it in the car lift, which is visible from the street. They also get it on while hiding in a warehouse from bad guys who want to kill them. That book is just a festival of weird time & place sex issues.

  37. JamiSings says:

    @DiscoDollyDeb – It’s not an UL any more. There was a special on wild game show moments and they found the clip! Only, I believe she said, “In the ass.”





  38. Mortaine says:

    It’s not a romance novel, and it’s actually quite skeevy and disgusting.

    In one of the Bio of a Space Tyrant books (Piers Anthony), the main character (I can’t bring myself to call him a hero) has wedding-night sex with his virgin bride in a space station bathroom, in space, because it’s the only place where they both fit. He sits on the toilet and she sits on him.

    But sex on a toilet isn’t the thing that makes this scene disgusting. They’re only able to fit in there because she’s so tiny, being all of eleven years old.

    As I said: skeevy and disgusting.

  39. lizzie(greeneyedfem) says:

    Sex scenes where the sex seems to give the h/h a magical bubble of privacy always give me pause. I remember one Regency (Kinsale? Beverley? Chase?) where the couple has sex standing up in a big fountain outside his family home—like, RIGHT outside. They’d been having dinner or something and she steps outside, he follows her, and they get it on. It was a hot scene, I remember, but part of my brain kept thinking about all the people who could happen to walk by or look out a window. Estates have many, many servants, people!

  40. Cat Marsters says:

    I’ve just remembered an erotic short story—for the life of me can’t think of the author or title, but I think it’s something to do with ‘Cajun’. Hero and heroine have sex in a swamp. There’s an alligator not far away (but he’s scared off by the hero’s shape-shiftery alpha maleness). Great pains are taken to remind the reader of the mud and the stink. Granted, I’ve never been in a swamp, but I can’t possibly imagine it turning me on. Especially with an alligator watching.

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