by Vivian Arend
Meet me at the train museum after dark. Dress for 1957.
When Mandy joins an online dating service, she keeps her expectations low. All she wants is a distraction from the drudgery of single parenthood and full-time work. But the invitation she receives from a handsome man who won’t share his real name promises an adventure—and a chance to pretend she’s someone else for a few hours.
She doesn’t want romance to complicate her life, but Mandy’s monthly role-playing dates with her stranger on a train—each to a different time period—become the erotic escape she desperately needs. And a soul connection she never expected.
Yet when she tries to draw her lover out of the shadows, Mandy has a fight on her hands…to convince him there’s a place for their fantasy love in the light of day.
Warning: Contains sexy role-playing, theatrical application of coal dust, and a hero who can rock a pair of brown polyester pants.
Enjoy the following excerpt for Big Boy:
He always meets me at the gate. The chain link swings open, and I pull my car through at a crawl. I don’t look to the left where he’s standing. I don’t want to know who he is yet.
Until I step onto the train, he’s nobody special.
“Are my seams straight?” I ask, pausing in my walk so I can tip the arch of my foot toward the floor of the train car and point my toe. I glance over my shoulder, the epitome of coy.
I’m Marilyn Monroe from Some Like It Hot tonight. I coaxed Lisa into sewing the black satin dress for me, adding fringe from a flapper costume I found at Goodwill. Lisa says that in this dress, my ass looks like two puppies fighting under a blanket.
The banked fire in his eyes tells me that’s a good thing.
He wears a leather jacket and a newsboy cap. He carries my luggage. When we get to my berth, I’ll tip him, and he’ll smirk at me the way he does.
Rocky is his name. I asked when I handed him my hatbox.
He’s five or six inches taller than me, his body lean and sculpted by hard work. I bet he looks grand with his clothes off.
I toss him a smile, another form of gratuity. “Well? Are they?”
He shakes his head as if I’m doing something to him, and it’s painful, and he’d like me to stop. But all he says is “They’re straight, ma’am.”
I’m ma’am tonight. I like that.
I think it means I’ll get to be in charge, but I’m wrong.
As soon as we pass through the narrow doorway of the berth, he’s on me, his hands spanning my waist, sliding over the curve of my hips. His skin catches the slick material of my dress. He puts his lips on the pulse at my throat and lingers there. I hear him draw in a deep breath, reverent.
I missed you too.
And then his mouth is moving down, down, until he reaches the tightly cosseted swell of my breasts.
“Stop me if you’re gonna stop me, lady.”
I want to lift my leg up and wrap it around his hip, but I can’t lift anything. I’m wearing a garment designed for mincing around. I know, because I designed it.
“You’re awfully fresh.” I can feel the smile on his lips as they brush my nipple through the satin. The tease.
“You married, ma’am?” He addresses the question to my cleavage.
“You care?”
“I don’t truck with married women.” He lifts his head to tell me this, his hound-dog eyes all soulful and dark. He’s lost the cap. I see it on the floor where our feet have tangled together, Glen-check wool next to beat-up cordovan oxfords and two-tone pumps with bows on the toes.
I spent days finding the right shoes.
“A cad with principles.” I furrow my fingers through his hair. He’s slicked it back, but I loosen it. I like it falling in his eyes. “That’s rich.”
“Who says I’m a cad?”
He squeezes my ass, his long fingers pressing close to where I want them but not close enough.
“Jeez, fella,” I say on an exhale, dropping my head to the wall behind me and letting my eyes drift closed. “I sure as hell hope you’re a cad.”
I imagine the vibration of the train in the wall behind my back as he peels the satin off my shoulders and puts his mouth on me. As he drops to his knees and pushes the dress up my hips. The fringe ought to be an impediment, but he’s the sort of man who can handle a little fringe.
He’s not a cad, though. Not really.
The babysitter is sick, and I hate her.
This makes me a bad person, I know. She sounds so pathetic on the phone, frog-voiced and snotty, and I’m supposed to comfort her. It feels like emotional blackmail. Why do I have to be nice to her when she’s ruining my day?
“I can still come if you want me to.” She means I want to stay in bed and watch reruns of bad television. “I just don’t want to get Josh sick.” Only a very bad mother would expose her child to this pestilence. A very bad, very selfish mother.
I’m not a bad mother. Not usually. But there’s no room in my life for sick babysitters. I have to teach in forty minutes, and I haven’t done my class prep yet. I have office hours afterward, meetings with nine separate students to talk about papers they haven’t started thinking about writing. I have a dissertation chapter to finish if I’m going to manage not to get fired when I come up for my contract renewal in the fall.
Sometimes Josh gets the short end of the stick, but I console myself with the thought that I get it a lot more often.
I’m not a bad person. On the other hand, I’m not such a good one that I’m going to tell my babysitter to stay home. This will be a life lesson for her: Don’t say yes when you mean no.
Maybe if I’d learned that lesson sooner, I’d have told my sister no when she asked me if she could put me in her will as her children’s guardian. Then, when Paige and her husband and my three-year-old niece, Ava, got killed by a drunk driver, I wouldn’t have become the mother of a nine-day-old infant.
But if I’d done that, I wouldn’t have Josh now, and not having Josh has become inconceivable.
Sweet as pie, I ask the babysitter, “Why don’t you come on over? He has a strong immune system. If you feel really crappy, you can show him cartoons.”
Of course, Josh gets sick the next day.
He sleeps badly, waking up every hour and calling for me. I set up a humidifier in his room, rub his back and soothe him to sleep, but by the third time he wakes, I’ve given up on the idea of getting any sleep myself. I rock him in my arms for hours, singing folk songs when he gets fussy.
He tucks his head against my neck, breathing warm against my skin, and I feel so guilty. So inadequate.
I should’ve canceled my office hours and stayed home with him. I should put him in daycare, but I can’t afford it. My salary is pitiable, and I have loans to pay off. So I make do with a couple of babysitters, telling myself he’s better off at home, spending as much time as possible with me.
But when I’m at home with him, I’m a distracted mother, always trying to get away with as much work or as much cleaning as I can. He wants nothing but me—my attention, my love—and I want to give it to him, only I want so many other things too.
When Paige and I were kids, we both thought we’d have big families one day. I imagined a husband and three children, every little girl’s version of domestic bliss. Then I went to college, and I spent the summer after my sophomore year as a camp counselor in Colorado. The job was relentless. Cabins full of eight-year-olds for three weeks at a stretch. They never stopped needing me for one second. I felt like I was suffocating.
That’s when I decided I wasn’t cut out to be a mother. I was always the better student, anyway. I focused on school and let Paige focus on motherhood. She found her husband, her scrapbooking group, her happy domesticity. I went to grad school and fooled around in an unserious way with unserious boys.
I pet Josh’s back, breathing against the solid weight of his sleeping body pressing into my neck, my breasts, my belly. I wouldn’t trade him for the world.
I want
him to have everything, but all he has is me.
Lisa’s students call her Lisa. Mine call me Professor Sharp. I suspect this is no mere accident. I’m a nice person but a hard grader. I kick them out of my classroom for texting, and I tell them things about Indian nations and white-male privilege that disturb their comfortable worldviews.
My students walk into my classroom expecting odes to the American frontier and walk out disgusted with their ancestors, incapable of waving a flag or watching a Fourth of July parade without deconstructing it.
Some of them dislike me for this, but the best ones love having their eyes opened. They sit in my office and wax enthusiastic about prejudice and abuse, nattering on about how the readings I’ve assigned them have recast the way they look at everything.
I used to be like them. It’s hard to remember now, but that sort of critical idealism is what got me into grad school in the first place. These days, I fill my grocery-store cart up with packaged baby foods and state-government-subsidized milk, and it’s harder to get fired up about any of it. The condition of my bank account and Josh’s diaper seem to be about all the worries I can handle.
I’m a professor of American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay, the most recent hire in an abysmal job market. I got the job three months before I got Josh. I was packing up to move when Paige died and everything changed.
Now I’m in my second year in Green Bay, and I like it well enough. It’s the sort of place people don’t move away from, which means I’ll be an outsider even if I live here until I die. Which I might. There are pitifully few jobs in my field, and I hadn’t liked being on the market. So many sharks fighting over so little chum.
I’m Mandy to my friends, Amanda to my mother when she calls, which is not all that often. She lives in Oregon, and she’s mourning Paige’s death with long stretches of silence and solo camping trips that worry me. I’ve tried to talk her into relocating to Wisconsin so we can have each other for company and she can help me with Josh. She says she needs the quiet and the high desert to heal.
Josh calls me Mama, which is my favorite name. I love him with a ferocity that scares me. I once made myself retch thinking about what would happen if he died in a plane crash or got sick or abused.
But having a baby is like having a bad boyfriend. Josh will kiss me one minute and smack me in the face with a sharp-edged block the next. If he could talk, he’d say, I need you, Mama. I need you so bad.
It wears me out, being needed.
Lisa calls me a martyr and tells me to stop trying to save everybody and take care of myself.
I do, I tell her. I do.
But it’s not exactly true. One night a month, I let somebody else take care of me.
Rocky Mountain Rebel
Vivian Arend
The best type of growing up involves getting down and dirty.
Six Pack Ranch, Book 5
Vicki Hansol made different choices than her less-than-reputable mom and sister, yet her fiery temper has left her branded with the same town-bad-girl label. When she desperately needs a change of scenery, her get-out-of-town-free ticket arrives—and requires she face down one of her deepest fears.
Easygoing Joel Coleman has nothing to complain about, but he’s never really done anything to brag about either. The youngest member of the Six Pack Ranch is looking to make some changes in his life that include stepping out from under his twin brother’s shadow.
So when the bold beauty with the smart mouth approaches him with a proposition, Joel is intrigued. Her request for him to teach her to ride soon takes on a whole new meaning. All that passion in his arms, his bed, in the barn…hell, anywhere he can get it? Bring it on.
But tangling the sheets leads to unanticipated complications, and by the time the dust settles, everything family means is going to be challenged.
Warning: Saddle up for some youthful vigor applied with great enthusiasm. Ropes, rails and raunchy sex—there’s more places to get dirty around the ranch than first meets the eye.
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
11821 Mason Montgomery Road Suite 4B
Cincinnati OH 45249
Rocky Mountain Rebel
Copyright © 2013 by Vivian Arend
ISBN: 978-1-61921-540-5
Edited by Anne Scott
Cover by Angela Waters
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: May 2013
www.samhainpublishing.com
Table of Contents
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
About the Author
Look for these titles by Vivian Arend
Also Available from Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
About the Author
Look for these titles by Vivian Arend
Also Available from Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
Copyright Page