She frowned.
He handed her a clear plastic bag. Inside was a tiny bottle of saline solution. She stared at the bottle.
“I just don’t understand the game, Carol,” he said as he dropped the books back to the table with a thud.
Carol turned around and leaned on the counter. How humiliating. He’d been playing her all along. He’d known since this afternoon. “Go away,” she whispered through her tear-tightened throat.
“No.” He moved up behind her. “I’m not leaving until I get some answers.”
“I don’t have any answers. I want to be alone.”
“I don’t think you do. I think you felt the same thing I felt when we were together and it scared you to death. You went out to get laid and wound up with me. I’m sorry I stood you up at the restaurant, but that was beyond my control, it’s all part and parcel to my job. I wanted to see you again. I needed to. I’ve been going crazy for two weeks trying to find out who the hell the mystery woman was. I was going to turn that damn bottle into the forensics lab so they could pull any prints and track you down that way. Do you know how crazy you’ve made me?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.” Carol fought his hands on her shoulders for only a second before she turned around to face him.
“I know you didn’t. You made it very clear what you wanted from the first. I’m the one who couldn’t accept it. I still can’t. I want to know why you pretended to be something your not.”
“Look at me!” she shouted in his face, the tears she valiantly tried to hold back nearly blinding her. “Would you have come on to a woman who looks like this?” She threw up her hands in disgust then shoved her glasses up her nose. “No. We know that. I know that. Do you have any idea how many times you’ve walked past me in that school and never batted an eye? Eighteen times.”
Tagg blinked at her as if she were speaking another language. “Carol, when I’m at the school, I’m there because I’m worried about my son, not to hit on teachers and librarians. You know how many times I’ve been to that school this year?”
Carol closed her eyes. Her humiliation was too deep and only getting worse.
“Carol, honey.” His hand cupped her face and brushed away a tear that slithered down her cheek. “Do you have any idea how special you are? Billy has talked about this Ms. Haley so many times, about how you helped him with this or that or just sat and talked to him. Gracie told me about the kind of schedule you keep. You’re always there to help someone out. A woman like that doesn’t need to put on the hair and the clothes and go to a bar to find a man.”
“Isn’t it obvious that I did?”
“No. It’s obvious that you don’t have enough faith in yourself as you are. You think you have to be someone else. I don’t want someone else. I want you. Carol Haley. Librarian. Beautiful hazel eyes and all.”
“You don’t even know me, Tagg. I’m boring. I sit around the house and read when I have the time. I—”
Tagg brushed his lips against hers. “I like reading, too. We could do it together sometime.”
“It’s just me and Boo and—”
He brushed his lips against hers again. “And me and Billy sometimes?”
“Tagg...” Carol tried pushing him away, but he wound his arms around her.
“I’m not leaving unless you can look me in the eyes and tell me you don’t ever want to see me again.”
“You’re a jerk,” she whispered, snuggling into his hard body.
“I know. It’s something you’ll have to learn to live with.”
She raised her chin and met his gaze. “You really don’t care?”
“All I know, baby, is that for three weeks I’ve been going crazy without you. I need you in my life. You fill up a big empty hole inside me. At least give us a chance to see where this goes.”
“Tagg?”
“Hm?”
“Make love to me...now.”
“And you say I don’t know you.”
With a rakish grin, he swooped her into his arms and carried her through the living room into the bedroom.
As he gently set her to her feet, his smile faded into something else. Something hot and carnal. Carol’s limbs went weak as his midnight blue eyes raked over her. Carol Haley. Cable knit sweater, old denim, and glasses. Tagg wanted her.
And then his mouth was on hers. Their tongues mated, danced. With a hungry groan from deep inside him, he jerked his mouth away. “I need you, baby,” he said between ragged breaths as he jerked her sweater over her head. With care, he removed her glasses, folded in the arms and set them on the nightstand. Then her bra was off and before her brain kicked in, Tagg had them both naked in the center of her bed.
He came down over her, his mouth on her breast, his hands skimming her flesh, making her burn. “Tagg,” she whimpered as he teased her heat with his fingertips.
His thick, solid penis pressed against her hip and she reached for him, wrapping her fingers around his rock-hard cock. His own fingers stilled and she watched as his eyes drifted shut. His jaw flexed, his face a portrait of pleasure and pain.
Emboldened by his response to her, knowing that this wasn’t just for today, not just a fleeting moment in time, but possibly forever, she pushed him onto his back and scooted down the bed.
“Babe. Babe, I’m not...Oh, God.”
She took him in her mouth. Warm silky skin over his strength. Hot and spicy. His hands went to her hair and he gently instructed her how to move. His cock hardened even more. Lengthened. And Carol’s own body responded as she felt a rush of heat from deep inside her.
“More, baby,” Tagg ground out. “More.”
She took more of him and he pressed his hips up toward her. Seeing her handsome, tough, Detective Taggert at her mercy, she felt powerful for the first time in her life. In control of her own destiny. And her destiny lay here. With him.
She glanced up at his face and found him watching her with hooded eyes. A deep moan worked its way up from her belly and her entire body flushed with lust and heat for this man. She needed him. Inside her. Now.
She nipped the softer tip of his penis and he jerked, his hands tightening in her hair. She reveled in it. In his restrained power. Crawling up his body, her heated center rubbed against his thigh, feeling his hard muscles, his rough man hair, leaving a moist trail of secret kisses. She nipped at his muscled stomach, rubbing open-mouthed kisses over his lightly furred chest, taking a flat, hard nipple between her teeth and licking it.
With the speed and power of a great predatory cat, he rolled her onto her back and came down on top of her. “My turn,” he growled as he thrust into her.
With a cry of pure ecstasy, she threw her head back into the feather pillow and gripped his rock hard ass in her hands. He pumped into her, each movement harder, fiercer than the last.
Her body tightened and his muscles bunched beneath her hands. “Liam!”
When she looked up into his pleasure-pained face, Carol knew there was no one but Tagg. Never was and never would be. He’d branded her with himself. His strength and sweetness, his lust and caring.
He grabbed her legs and pulled them up over his hips, his weight resting on her as she clung to him while every nerve ending in her body hummed like a live wire.
“Now,” he commanded, then clamped his lips onto her neck and sucked, his teeth marking her as his.
She screamed as a lightening bolt of heat and icy pleasure shot through her. Her nails dug into his shoulders as she held on. The world spun and rainbows burst behind her eyelids.
“Carol,” he growled. “Baby.” His thrusts were hard, frantic. Then his body went taut and with a shout, his hot cum filled her.
* * * * *
Tagg sucked in deep breaths even as his limbs shook with the force of his release. Calm. Warmth. Safety, even. The sensations settled over him, one by one. His Carol.
All his.
Carol’s grip slowly lessened on his shoulders and he wondered how long the imprint of her lit
tle nails would remain on his skin. She was a tigress.
A chuckle rumbled through him. Sweet little librarian. Hellcat in bed.
“What?” she asked, still panting. “What’s funny?”
With as much energy as he could muster, he propped his head on his hand and gazed down into her precious face. “It’s all an act.”
“What is?” Her eyelids slowly fluttered open and the languid look in her eyes, her thoroughly ravished tousled hair, had him hardening again, even before he’d ever left her body.
“The little librarian thing.” He grinned. “It’s all an act. I now know the real Carol Haley.”
She chuckled and the sensation tickled through him. “Don’t tell anyone.”
He leaned down and grazed his lips over hers. “This secret is just for me.”
She moaned and arched against him. “I have another secret.”
A nip to her full bottom lip. A lick to the top. “Tell me.”
“I think I’m madly in love with you.”
Fully hard again, he slowly rocked against her hips. She whimpered and he felt another surge of her hot cream slick over him. His heart had never felt so full, his life so complete. He brushed his lips over hers. “Good. I think that makes us just about even.”
The End
Author Bio
Anna Leigh has been reading and penning romance for as long as she can remember. After she met and married her very own real-life hero, romance took on a whole new meaning. She now knows married life can sizzle and romance can be erotic—even in her own home. Now her writing has taken on a spicier flavor, and while hubby's off at work, she lets her imagination soar…
Anna loves to hear from her readers. You can reach her at [email protected] or visit her website at www.annaleighkeaton.com for all her upcoming and previously published works.
Also Available from Cobblestone Press, LLC
Five Alarm Neighbor by Anna Leigh Keaton © 20006
Chapter One
Steve Sheldon.
Gracie Terrence stared through her windshield at the man who starred in every torrid late-night fantasy she’d had in the past two years. Tight ass always in blue jeans that fit like a glove. Rock-hard chest. Biceps that could squeeze the stuffing out of her. He sat on the porch of their duplex in one of her wrought iron chairs, his feet propped on the wooden railing.
Even with the car windows up, she could hear the steady thump thump of the music blaring from his side of the house. Another firemen party, she figured. Almost weekly he had a night of loud music and even louder men at his place.
She didn’t mind the parties in the summer when they hung out in the backyard. Inevitably their shirts came off, their sweaty, muscled bodies flexing in the sunlight as they played kamikaze volleyball. But these winter parties royally pissed her off. Especially when she had a stack of midterm papers to grade before returning to school by seven-fifteen the next morning.
She hadn’t left work until nearly nine tonight. Her body lacked food and her head still pounded after hours of forcing herself to read page after page of adolescent bullshit on the meaning of Romeo and Juliet. She gripped the steering wheel with her chilled hands and bonked her forehead against her fists. The pizza sitting on the passenger seat in its cardboard box was undoubtedly cold and congealed by now.
Gracie drew in a calming breath. She’d simply ask Steve to turn down the music. She’d let him know she needed some sleep, and feeling the bass vibrations from his half of the house was not going to help her accomplish that.
The porch light illuminated him as his raised a bottle to his mouth. As he tossed back a swig of beer, she focused on the strong column of his throat. Steve. Her pussy tingled at the thought of seeing him, speaking to him, hearing that deep voice. She squeezed her thighs together, making the sensation last a second longer. She’d wanted him since the day he moved in two years ago.
And then there was the memory of what she’d glimpsed for a few precious moments last summer, a sight burned into her brain so deep it would never leave—the sight of him magnificently naked.
She’d returned early from a teacher’s conference and had caught him playing in the backyard. Stretched out on a lawn lounger only a few feet from her kitchen window, he’d been...
Sitting there, inside her car, the memory pulled a moan from her throat. She ground her ass against the seat, reached between her legs and pressed her fingers against the seam at the crotch of her jeans. She tilted her hips upward and rubbed her clit the same way she’d done that afternoon as she’d watched him slowly, tenderly stroke his engorged cock. It had been long and thick, curved ever so slightly at the tip, perfect for hitting the right spot every time.
She’d watched as he’d pumped himself, saw his speed increase. As his face had tilted back into the sunlight, his eyes shut, and his features became a portrait of pure animal heat, she’d shoved her jeans to the floor and sunk her fingers inside herself, coming with a force that shocked her to the core.
But then, after that mind-blowing orgasm, when Gracie’s gaze had returned to him, hoping to catch sight of him coming, wanting to throw open the back door and pounce on him, to milk him dry with her mouth...
Gracie pushed her head against the car’s headrest, pressing her hand against her pussy and stifling a frustrated growl. She brought the picture back. Not of the woman who’d draped herself over Steve that day and rode him as if he were a wild bronco, but of the look in his blazing blue eyes as he stared through the kitchen window at her.
He’d seen her.
He’d watched her come.
And even as his hands gripped another woman’s hips, his dick pumping into her, he’d watched Gracie. Damn, he’d been so hot. Daring her to look away. Never in her life had she been so scandalized. Or so turned on.
She’d wanted to join them, to walk out there and straddle his face and make him eat her while he fucked the other woman. But the good girl schoolteacher inside her wouldn’t let her move. Never had she had such lascivious thoughts.
He’d licked his lips as if he knew what she was thinking. A slow flicker of his tongue. She’d felt it then as surely as if he’d touched her clit with a hot, wet, deep lick.
She wanted to feel it now. Spreading her legs as far as she could in the confined space behind the steering wheel, she shoved her hand into her jeans. Her breathing sped up, heat rushed to her face, to her limbs, even though the temperature outside was in the low teens. She jammed her fingers inside her pussy, and pressed her other hand against the steering wheel. The red haze began to move into her periphery.
“Yes,” she moaned, remembering how he’d raised an eyebrow at her, taunting her to come again.
Then he’d mouthed two words. Words that had sent her hand back to her clit. “Suck me.”
The woman had climbed off him, went to her knees at the side of his chair, and took him in her mouth. God, he was so huge, and she took every inch of him. His balls were puckered and round, ready to release their load, and yet his gaze never left Gracie.
He’d slid one hand up his rippled abdomen to his dark, pebbled nipple and squeezed, as his other hand did the same to the woman’s tit. Gracie had mimicked the action and squeezed her own hard nipple through her silk camisole.
His eyelids had drooped ever so slightly as he thrust his hips, his cock disappearing into the woman’s mouth again and again.
Then he’d come with an animal growl she heard even through the closed window. And yet he’d watched her until she’d climaxed again.
The thought sent Gracie over the edge as she threw her head against the seatback and came with a whimpered cry, rubbing her clit until every last bit of the orgasm had drained through her.
“Damn him,” she whispered into the dark car. “Damn you, Steve Sheldon.”
She gasped for breath even as the chill of the cold night settled against her heated skin.
The blonde bombshell with Steve that day had been Erin Rinehart. His fiancée. And even though Gracie k
new he was engaged, and even though they’d never once made mention of that steamy afternoon, she wanted him to fuck her more than she ever wanted anything else in her life.
But with his wedding just weeks away, that was as far from a possibility as the next Great American Novelist winding up in Gracie’s freshman English class.
I’m not a home wrecker, Gracie thought with disgust as she pulled her hand from her underwear. Even if she lusted for him, she wasn’t one to have an affair with a taken man. She’d never survive the guilt.
Watching them, being a third party to their intimate afternoon, had been as close to the line as she dared step.
With a heated flush to her face, she wondered, once they were married, if there’d be many afternoons in the back yard.
Jeez, I’m a sick woman.
Anna Leigh Keaton & Madison Layle - Serve & Protect 02 - One Night of Paradise Page 9