Dim the Lights: Islands of DesireLiquid ChocolateHer Wild and Sexy Nights

by Lindsay Evans

  “Thanks, Mom. I’ll talk to you later.”

  Blaine disconnected the call and turned his attention to Mika. “I hope that you believe me now. Ashley is just a friend and nothing more.”

  Mika hesitated. “Yes, I believe you.” She smiled.

  Blaine leaned down, hugged her and kissed her on the forehead.

  “Here are your crutches and pain medication,” the nurse said, returning to the room. “Are you taking her home?” she asked Blaine.

  “I sure am.”

  For once his mother’s meddling had paid off.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Mika’s world had shifted yet again, this time for the better. She had thought that she had lost Blaine forever. The past few days had been pure bliss, with Blaine waiting on her hand and foot. He cooked breakfast, lunch and dinner while she lay in bed with her foot propped up on pillows. She used the downtime to work on her cookbook.

  “Do you need anything?” Blaine asked, coming into the room wearing an apron.

  “Hey, Blainey!” she teased.

  “Don’t call me that. Only my mother is allowed to call me Blainey. I’ve long since outgrown that nickname. When I was a boy, it was okay, but now I’m a grown man and—”

  Mika cut him off. “Yes, you are a grown man. You’re my man and I love every inch of you.”

  Blaine hadn’t officially asked Mika to be his woman, but his actions spoke louder than words. “Yes, I am your man. Now what can your man do for you?”

  Mika put her index finger to her chin and said, “Mmm. I can think of a few things.”

  “Like what?”

  “For starters, take off that apron. Your kitchen duties are over. Now it’s time for your night shift.”

  Blaine took off the apron, and began taking off his pants, but stopped. “Are you sure, you’re up to a little hanky-panky?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. It’s been days and my ankle is feeling much better. Now get over here,” she said, putting her laptop on the nightstand.

  Blaine quickly undressed and got underneath the down comforter next to Mika. “You have on too many clothes,” he said, taking his finger and sliding off the strap of her gown.

  Mika kicked the comforter off with one foot, wiggled out of the gown and moved closer to Blaine.

  “Come here, beautiful.” He engulfed her in his arms and lay her down on the pillows. Blaine tenderly kissed Mika’s entire face, saving her mouth for last. His lips touched hers with love. Blaine fed Mika his tongue, French kissing her with passion. His body was heating with desire with each passing second.

  Mika wrapped her arms around him, hugging him tighter while at the same time exploring his mouth with her tongue. They kissed until they were on the verge of exploding, each wanting more.

  “I should make some liquid chocolate,” Mika said, coming up for air.

  “We don’t need it tonight. Tonight you are all the chocolate I desire.”

  Blaine began massaging her breasts, one and then the other. He trailed his massive hands down her stomach around her back and underneath her buttocks. The feel of her soft bottom in his hands made him even hotter.

  “You feel so good.”

  Mika reached down and began stroking his manhood. “So do you. I want to taste you.” Mika began moving down toward his manhood. When she reached his groin area, she kissed the tip and then wrapped her mouth around his manhood. He filled her entire mouth as she sucked and teased him with her tongue.

  “Oh...baby...you’re going to make me come,” Blaine said in between breaths.

  But Mika didn’t stop.

  “Hold on.”

  Mika stopped and met his gaze with a confused look.

  “I want to make love to you.” Blaine reached over to the nightstand, took a condom out of the drawer, opened the package and rolled it on his pulsating manhood.

  He then covered her body with his, mindful of her leg and careful not to put too much pressure on her body. He slowly began grinding his hips.

  Mika could feel him getting harder and harder. She wanted him in the worst way and couldn’t take their foreplay any longer.

  “Please make love to me,” she whispered in his ear.

  “With pleasure, my love.”

  Blaine inserted his manhood into her wetness and pumped slowly at first. Once they found their rhythm, he picked up the pace.

  Mika wrapped her arms around his neck bringing him in closer. His member filled her up as they made love at a fast and furious pace.

  “Oh, Blaine, I love you so much!” she exclaimed.

  He held her head, and looked into her eyes. “I love you, too, Mika.”

  Sweat dripped off of their bodies as they rode the wave of ecstasy. Blaine felt his imminent release, but held back. He wanted to please her first. “Are you there?”

  “I’m almost there...” she said, her words trailing off.

  Blaine increased his pace, pressing farther into her.

  Mika grabbed hold of his firm butt with both hands.

  “Am I hitting the spot baby?”

  Mika’s eyes were clinched shut as she held on tight. “Ohh... Yeah.”

  Blaine rotated his hips harder and faster.

  “Yeah...” she cried out.

  Tonight, nothing stood between them and their shared passion as they came hard together.

  Blaine rolled to the side and then pulled her to him. They lay in a cuddling position basking in the afterglow.

  “That was beyond good,” Mika said, after she had recovered.

  “Yes, it was. We make a perfect match.”

  “I agree. When we get back home, I’m going to create a special chocolate blend just for us.”

  “I can’t wait.” He smiled.

  “And I know just what I’m going to call the mixture.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “Dim the Lights. If it wasn’t for that game, we probably wouldn’t have gotten so close, so fast.”

  Blaine kissed her on the lips. “You’re right. No matter where we are next year, let’s promise to dim the lights and expose our innermost feelings for each other. It’ll keep our love fresh for years to come.”

  Mika snuggled closer to Blaine. After a litany of blind dates gone awry, she had finally found her soul mate and she couldn’t have been happier.

  * * * * *

  HER WILD AND

  SEXY NIGHTS

  Theodora Taylor

  Contents

  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 One

  Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Please don’t cry, Kayla Edwards said to herself as the plane took off. She turned to face the plane’s small window and squeezed her eyes shut. But it was already too late. Tears spilled through her closed eyelids, despite the fact that she was sitting in a luxurious first-class cabin and was headed toward a dream vacation in Paris, France.

  She couldn’t help but blame the passenger who had taken the seat beside her. She’d been all right for the most part, besides the occasional feeling of sadness and anger, during the first leg of the trip from Los Angeles to London. But the seat beside her had been empty then. She’d just been settling into a good thousand-mile stare out the window when an English flight attendant had called out, “Hold it. We’ve one more coming down the ramp.”
>
  A few minutes later that empty seat made a heavy stretching sound as someone sat down. Though she’d done well up until then, the sadness of having that seat filled by someone other than Marcus rose to the surface so fast she barely had time to think. “No, don’t cry,” she whispered before the tears fell onto to the armrest of her white leather seat. And despite her best efforts, she couldn’t make herself stop crying as the plane rose into the air at a forty-five-degree angle before righting itself into a straight line.

  She took several deep breaths, trying to get her emotions under control. He’s not worth it, she told herself. Marcus Thornhill wasn’t worth a single one of her tears.

  He hadn’t been that great of a football player, a second-string kicker known more for his good looks than for his actual skills on the field. And he’d been an even worse boyfriend. Always broke because he spent most of the money he made on clothes, flashy cars and eating out at places purposefully chosen because of the paparazzi who hung out there. During the four years they’d been dating, he’d become increasingly obsessed with his “brand” to the point that he’d refused to go out with her if she wasn’t dressed up with a face full of makeup and every hair on the weave he’d insisted she get in perfect place.

  What if someone sees us together and takes a picture with you looking like that? he’d asked, completely serious. Though later, after the huge fight that ensued, he’d insisted that he just wanted the whole world to see how beautiful she was.

  And fool that she’d been, Kayla had believed him. She still remembered him as the nervous boy with the Midwestern accent that had come into the Los Angeles Suns payroll office and asked if there was a place nearby where he could cash his check because he wanted to send money back home to his mama in Kansas.

  Suzie, her boss and best friend, had warned against dating football players when she’d first started her job as a payroll administrator for the Los Angeles franchise team. “Their egos are like vacuums and it’s a full-time job being one of their girlfriends. Plus, most of them cheat like you wouldn’t believe.”

  But she’d thought Marcus was different. They’d had so much in common, both being dedicated to family and both having the same racial background—but actually now that she looked back on it, she realized that was all they had in common. And their differences had only grown as the relationship progressed. Marcus’s ego had indeed become one of Suzie prophesized vacuums as her own grew smaller and smaller, until she was completely revolving around her boyfriend, dressing the way he wanted her to dress, going wherever he wanted to go.

  But it still hadn’t been enough. Two days ago she’d used her lunch hour to make a packing list for a six-night, seven-day grand-prize trip to Paris she’d won through a fund-raising raffle for the school that Suzie’s son attended. It had been a trip Marcus had grudgingly agreed to take with her, even though “They don’t know anything about football in Europe, and I’m not even on that ‘Parlez-vous français?’ tip.” Still, she’d wanted to have both of their bags packed early to help make the trip go as smoothly as possible.

  She’d also been hoping this trip would breathe new life into their relationship, shake things up from what had become a rote routine of either going out to the hottest new club or staying in at her condo and watching ESPN. She was only halfway through the packing list for the trip, when Suzie had called her into her office.

  Girl, I don’t want to show you this, Suzie had said after closing the door behind her longtime friend, but I’m your friend first, so I know I have to.

  She’d turned the monitor around to display the front page of a popular gossip website, dedicated mostly to giving snarky dissection of sports news and breaking scandals. Kayla blinked and leaned forward in the guest chair on the other side of Suzie’s desk. Splashed across the monitor was a picture of Marcus with a woman she recognized as one of the new Suns cheerleaders, a buxom blonde barely out of college, who’d needed help filling out the simple direct deposit form. The headline of the blog post read Hot New Couple?

  In the article, the writer supposed that Marcus Thornhill must have dumped his longtime girlfriend, Kayla Edwards, because he was seen the night before swapping spit with the cheerleader at one of L.A.’s hottest new clubs. And just in case Kayla had even been thinking for a minute that this was all made up by some shady blogger on a slow news day, there were several more pictures of Marcus tonguing down the cheerleader in the front seat of the Mercedes Kayla had paid the bill on last month because he had “miscalculated” some expenses.

  Upon arriving home that evening, she’d immediately thrown all of the clothes Marcus had left at her place into the Dumpster outside her condo and gotten the locks changed. That meant she could just ignore him when he showed up at her door demanding to know why she changed the locks, then insisting that he’d been drunk and that the cheerleader had been all over him, then asking if he could at least get his clothes, then screeching like a girl when she told him exactly where they were.

  She’d gotten the last laugh, but it hadn’t been worth it because she was now the laughingstock of the entire Suns office. She’d endured so many snickers and pitying looks from her coworkers when she’d come out of Suzie’s office on Friday that she’d skipped lunch just so she could finish her work and get out of there as early as possible.

  What an idiot she’d been. She angrily swiped at her tears now. That empty seat had come to represent the four years she had wasted on an empty person, and when someone else had filled it she could no longer hold back her tears.

  “Not a fan of takeoff either, hey?”

  The man now sitting beside her had an English accent but not one of those nice, posh ones that the British judges on reality competition shows always seemed to have. Rather, he had one of the grittier ones that made her think of the violent English crime comedies that occasionally made their way to American box offices. He’d dropped the h on hey and his deep voice sounded more like an angry growl than the sophisticated dulcets she’d heard coming off the other English passengers in first class.

  He didn’t appear to belong here either. Curious, she turned to look at him and found she was right. His body was roped with lean muscle, and he wore jeans and a plain gray T-shirt. He wasn’t bald, but his hair was shaved extremely close to his head. And even though he didn’t look to be that much older than she, his brutal face told a story of way more life experience than she had. He had a crooked nose that had obviously been broken at least once, presumably in a fight, and piercing black eyes that stayed on her with unnerving focus.

  But none of this made him unattractive. In fact, he oozed potent masculinity to the point that she could see women throwing themselves at him, more than willing to take a walk on his wild side.

  “No, I actually like planes,” she answered carefully, wondering why a man who looked this dangerous would be making small talk with a woman in a modest broom skirt and Suns T-shirt who’d just had her weave removed in favor of simple twists that brushed her shoulders. A woman whose ex had described her as plain when she didn’t wear makeup, like now.

  He shrugged. “Well, I don’t like ’em. Don’t like to be driven around by other people ’less I’m on the ground and a lot of times not even then.” He rolled his shoulders back. “I could do with a drink. You, too?”

  It was technically a question, but his gruff voice made it seem more like a command.

  “I don’t think they can serve drinks before the fasten-seat-belt light goes off.”

  “No, it’s all right,” he assured her, waving down a flight attendant.

  And it was. The flight attendant arrived two minutes later with two glasses of champagne for them. She seemed not only happy to do so, but also handed her seatmate his glass with a sexy wink.

  Kayla was surprised by the obvious flirtation, but she didn’t blame the woman. The man sitting next to her might not have been pretty like Marcus, but
there was something übermasculine about him. The confidence that comes with being completely in control of one’s world.

  “You’re one of those guys that’s good at fixing things, aren’t you?” she guessed.

  With an amused look, he turned in his seat to face her. “I happen to come from a long line of electricians. Five generations for the power company, including me dad, me granddad and all me uncles. So say you had something sparking off in your flat, something that would be dangerous for you to manage by yourself. You could ring me, and I would most certainly come round and fix it.” And just in case his tone wasn’t enough for her to pick up on the sexual innuendo, he looked her up and down, his eyes going over her more thoroughly than an MRI. “Why? You have something that needs fixing?”

  Her entire face burned as she answered. “No, I was honestly just asking because, quite frankly, I don’t belong here—I won this trip, you see—and since you appear to not belong here either, I was just wondering about your background. That’s all.”

  He looked her up and down again, obviously not convinced.

  “Really,” she added, feeling like he was dissecting her with his eyes. She raised her glass in an effort to change the subject. “Thanks for ordering us the champagne. I’m Kayla, by the way.”

  “I’m Mick.” He clinked his glass against hers. “Yeah, cheers. Here’s to moving on.”

  She took a sip but squinted her eyes at the unusual toast.

  “That’s what you’re doing, right?” he asked. “Moving on from the last guy? Can only assume that’s why you’re crying into your window if you don’t bloody hate planes like meself.”

  She hesitated, not wanting to divulge too much personal information. But why not? she thought. The champagne felt nice and warm in her stomach, and she’d probably never see this guy again after the plane landed. “Something like that. I was stupid enough to date a football player.”

  Now he squinted, obviously confused. And she remembered, “Oh, you guys call soccer football over here. I forgot. I meant I was stupid enough to date an American football player. Do you know anything about American football?”