Temptations: A Limited Edition Contemporary Romance Collection

by Blue Saffire

  Caroline Murphy

  Editor in Chief

  X-perience Magazine

  Xavier told me that he’d always been interested in publishing a magazine about the lifestyle, and when he offered me the job, I’d jumped with surprisingly little thought. Which was unusual for me, but I’d been inspired to step into bravery. If things fell apart, I’d deal. Better, I knew that I could.

  Now, I spend my days writing about topics I choose. Yes, there are sexy sections on the latest sex toys and such. There are also in-depth reviews on couple resorts, of which, Xavier and I visit. There’s also a column called “No Pricks Allowed” in which Pete is the star, and I offer advice to women on surviving abusive relationship by interviewing top psychologists around the globe.

  Am I happy?

  Yeah.

  A door opens downstairs, and Xavier walks in. I smile. His beard has grown in beautifully.

  As if he can feel my gaze on him, he looks up.

  My toes curl.

  They always do when I first see him.

  Moving to the stairs, I walk down to join him, the heat of his gaze on me all the way. When I’m only a few feet away, I turn, showing off the back of my new dress. We’d gone shopping in Paris when we visited the Club X there, and I’d never worn anything that made me feel more beautiful.

  “Does my ass look big in this?” I tease.

  He grins. “Hell, yes. Ripe and juicy.”

  I laugh, grateful that big asses are the current trend. The laughter stops when he pulls me into his arms, his hands hot against my bare skin. He kisses me, our mouths sliding over the others, our tongues tangling in a dance.

  “We have a few hours before opening,” he says against my lips.

  My stomach tightens, and I lift my hands to stroke his beard. “I’d like that very much… Master X.”

  His pupils flare and I yelp as he picks me up and tosses me over his shoulder, his hand coming down on my ass. I’m giggling like crazy by the time he’s rushed me into a private room.

  But the giggling stops once he puts me on my feet and turns me around.

  There are roses everywhere.

  “Each rose represents one of the greatest days in my life,” he says, pulling me to his chest. “Four hundred of them. Because of you. And now we’re in Nice, one of the most romantic cities in the world, and if you’ll say one word, I’ll be the luckiest bastard on the planet.”

  My heart begins to pound as Xavier removes a tiny black box from his pocket and sinks to one knee.

  “Say yes, Caroline. Yes, to our future. Yes, to our hopes and dreams. Yes—”

  I tackle him, knocking him to the floor, sprawling on top of him in a pile of tuxedo and fancy dress.

  I don’t need a speech. I don’t need a pretty proposal. All I need is him.

  I’m laughing and crying as I press my lips to his. “Yes.”

  Yes, to our future.

  Yes, to our hopes and dreams.

  Just yes.

  The End

  If you enjoyed Interview with the Dom, there are more steamy interview books for you! For starters, find the hot Rockstar interview here:

  http://www.1203stories.com/interview-with-the-rock-star/

  Newsletter

  https://www.subscribepage.com/q6o9g1

  About the Author

  Rylee Swann loves to write! She is most often found in her writing cave located in Upstate New York. She has an apartment there in a magnificent old Victorian mansion. Her day job is a marketing manager which keeps her super busy.

  * * *

  Amid battling big ol’ country spiders and her job, she doesn’t know how she finds the time to write but does because it’s in her blood!

  * * *

  Her readers are the most important people in the world to her. That means YOU!

  http://www.1203stories.com/rylee-swann/

  Perfect Strangers

  Lina Langley

  Perfect Strangers © 2019 Lina Langley

  * * *

  All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

  Created with Vellum

  Perfect Strangers

  I’m straight. It doesn’t matter how good he looks… right?

  * * *

  Devon only downloaded a same-sex hook-up app because of a dare from his secretary. But he can’t hide his curiosity as the pilot of the flight he’s in decides to text him within it. A no-strings-attached encounter in an out-of-the-way inclement weather pitstop might just be what he needs.

  * * *

  But when he realizes that Captain Logan Summers isn’t just an attractive man, but a childhood acquaintance, one who might still be in touch with the people Devon has tried so hard to leave behind, he starts questioning whether this is a good idea.

  * * *

  But what if Logan Summers doesn’t recognize him? Devon doesn’t need to remind him. He can still get his experimental sex without worrying too much about it.

  * * *

  Even if it feels wrong. Even if it feels weird.

  * * *

  Even when he realizes that Logan might not be an experiment at all. Devon has to decide: will he reveal the truth of who he really is or will the two of them continue to be perfect strangers?

  1

  I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the uncomfortable plane seat headboard. I should have paid for first class—it wasn’t like I couldn’t afford it—but it felt very frivolous to spend money on something like that. That was until I realized how cramped it actually was in the airplane. There were two people sitting next to me and one of them seemed to have a cold. I could hear and smell them. I felt like I could hear and smell everyone around me. This cramped flight was already overwhelming. I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself down.

  This trip was only going to take a couple of hours, which was something, I reminded myself. I didn’t know why I still had to do these fucking trips, the product was selling itself and I didn’t like being the person who trained people for it. We had sales people specifically for this purpose. If it had been completely up to me, I would have stayed home and binge watched the PBS Special Build This House episodes on my DVR.

  I looked at the tiny monitor in front of me and wondered if I would be able to spend the entire flight playing one of those shitty trivia games. I was terrible at them, but at least they were engaging enough to distract me.

  The woman next to me sneezed. She turned her head, but just barely, and she ended up spraying her snot on my shoulder. I closed my eyes tightly and tried my best to keep calm. I clenched my fists at my sides and took another deep, quivering breath. She coughed this time, covering her face with her hand and looking at me with watery eyes.

  I tried my best to smile, but it was as if I couldn’t bring the muscles in my face to actually do what I needed them to do. I stood up and began to powerwalk to the bathroom. People were still shuffling in and out, and I thought I might be able to change my seat. A couple of hours was still too many, I thought.

  I found a flight attendant and tapped her on the shoulder. “I need to upgrade to first class,” I said quietly. “Do I need to go back to the gate?”

  She stared at me, her brow furrowed. “Is there a problem?”
<
br />   “Yes,” I said, glancing at the once-again sneezing woman. “I can’t seat in my assigned seat.”

  The flight attendant narrowed her eyes for a second, then smiled at me. “Okay, sir,” she said. “You’ll have to check in at the gate once again. Passengers are still boarding so—”

  “Is this necessary?”

  “I’m not able to upgrade you in the flight, sir,” she said, her voice sugary-sweet. “You could try to do it online. But I do have to ask you to go either go back to your seat or back to the gate.”

  “Fine,” I said. I should’ve taken up Valerie when she asked me if I wanted to upgrade my flight, but I had been too stubborn. I began to walk back to my seat, but the woman in the middle seat was having a coughing fit and the idea of sitting next to her made me feel a little queasy.

  I continued powerwalking all the way to the end of the flight, sliding into the tiny bathroom with my phone in my hands. Upgrading wasn’t actually a problem, but how much it was did give me a pause. I should’ve been used to spending that much money, but I still remembered having to save for a year before I could buy a bike.

  My parents had wanted to help me, they just weren’t able to, and I couldn’t blame them. They worked hard to provide for me and I could still remember the trips to the food bank in a different city, so no one would see us in Danville. My parents were respectable people, hard workers, and the idea that their neighbors might know they need help was absolutely unbearable to them.

  The way my mom stretched the last of our fruit by making apple salad and lemon-flavored desserts with condescended milk. I had liked them when I was a little boy, but as I grew older, they were too sweet and they began to smell like vomit even when I was in a different room. My mother tried to switch up her cooking, but the damage was done. I couldn’t even smell lemon-flavored desserts anymore and every time I went home, I would volunteer to bake something else.

  Anything else.

  Not that I went home often. I tried hard to steer clear from Danville ever since I had left and I had mostly been successful. I had too much to do. At least my parents understood that.

  It still felt weird and wrong that I would spend hundreds of dollars on something as simple as a seat I’d only be using for the next couple of hours. One thing I knew for sure, however, was that I couldn’t afford to get sick. I didn’t have time to get sick. There was just too much to lose. I still needed to make appearances. I was a few years away from being able to let other people run my company, no matter what Valerie said, though I had no idea what I would do once I wasn’t working every day.

  I sighed and looked at my phone. It had taken me only a minute or two to upgrade to first class, but my phone was still in my hand and I didn’t want to put it away yet. I needed to distract myself from the flight. I looked down at it and thought about checking my email, but before I could, I got a notification from the hook-up app Valerie had made me download before going on the trip.

  She had made it sound like a joke. I’d been drunk and gullible, and I’d decided to show her that I wasn’t afraid of something as silly as a same-sex hook-up app. I told her I wasn’t interested, but she called me a chicken. She had been wine-drunk too, because she wouldn’t have dared say anything like that if she’d been stone-cold sober.

  I had almost completely forgotten about it. The plan was to delete it from my phone when I got on the plane, but I had been so very busy getting to the airport and planning my trip that I hadn’t gotten around to it.

  I smirked a little as I clicked on the notification. I was a little curious, and I wanted to take a look before deleted the app, which I was going to do the moment I saw the message.

  The first thing I looked at was the photo. It was just a picture of the guy’s abs. He looked like he worked out a lot. There was a towel wrapped around his waist and he was standing in front of a mirror in what looked like a gym. I clicked on his profile to see if I could see any pictures of his face. There were no pictures of his face. There was a picture where he was facing away from the camera and he was covering the top of his head with an old-fashioned pilot hat.

  I went back to his message and smirked as I finally read it.

  “Hey! I just saw that you’re in my flight. Don’t forget to turn your phone off.”

  I stared at the message, trying to make sense of it. I was smirking at the message when I realized I needed to go back to my seat. The plane was about to take off and I didn’t want to be caught in the bathroom when it did. I was still staring at my phone as I left the bathroom and began sprinting toward the first-class cabin. I was vaguely aware I had already put my bags in the overhead compartment on top of the seat I had before, in the economy cabin, and I would have to wait until everyone got off to retrieve them.

  At least first class was spacious, though, and no one was going to sneeze on my clothes. Hopefully. I sat down on the window seat and sunk into the massive seat. Then I looked back down at my phone and couldn’t help but smile. I never smiled on planes, so all of this was strange. I liked it, though, even if it was unexpected.

  I bit down on my lower lip. This was probably a mistake, but there was no chance I was not going to reply to a message like that. My plan was still to delete the app the moment the plane got back on the ground, but fuck. That was just too much of a golden opportunity.

  “Thanks,” I typed into the little text box. “I probably won’t turn my phone off. I’m a rebel.”

  I was grinning as I sent that message. There was no way for the pilot to know this, but I was definitely not a rebel.

  My phone vibrated in my hand. “Okay, but if the plane goes down, it’s on you.”

  I smiled again. I turned my phone off, then put it in the pocket in the back of the chair in front of me. I close my eyes as the flight attendants started to get the flight ready for takeoff. I knew it was probably going to be a straightforward flight, but takeoff always made me nervous.

  I tried to drift up to sleep, but I knew it wasn’t likely to happen.

  Still, it made me happy to think that the pilot was in the cabin, looking at his phone, thinking about one of his passengers reading his messages.

  2

  I was right. I couldn’t sleep a wink, even as everyone around me seemed to turn off the lights and begin to doze off. I felt the pit grow in my stomach before the turbulence started. I knew the plane had fallen in the air, that we had lost some altitude. That was when the fasten your seatbelts sign came on, the beeping cutting through the mostly silent flight.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” I heard over the intercom. “We are heading into some choppy terrain, but it’s nothing to be worried about. Please go back to seats and fasten your seatbelts. Thank you very much, this is your captain, Capt. Summers.”

  He sounded happy, perky even. He also sounded a little bit familiar, which was a little disturbing. I had been focusing so much on not being nervous when the plane had taken off that I hadn’t noticed just how familiar his voice was. I had been thinking about him then, when I had seen his message, but more as a concept rather than as a person. The pilot who was flirting with me, even though I was definitely not gay. Not that there was any way he could know that.

  Now he was on the intercom, trying his best to reassure many nervous passengers. Including me. Mostly me, I thought.

  I took a few deep breaths. I was trying my best to stay calm, because the last thing I wanted to do was call attention to myself in a situation like this. Then the voice came on the intercom again, loud and clear. It had only been a few seconds, but it felt like the chirpiness was gone from his voice. “This is Capt. Summers. Crew, prepare for landing.”

  I looked down at my watch. There was still about an hour to go before we got to our destination, so I had no idea why the pilot was telling the crew to get ready to land. Something must have gone wrong, I thought, then looked out the window. I had noticed the darkened skies before, but it wasn’t until I began intently watching the sky that I could see little bursts of light. My
breath caught in my throat a little bit as I realized this was a really serious thunderstorm. That was probably why the plane had lost altitude. Not that I knew anything about flying. I just knew I didn’t like being trapped in the sky while everything seemed to go to hell around me.

  I looked down at my watch again. It was early in the day, which took a while to sink in. I knew that it got darker earlier during the winter, but this was still early in the afternoon and it felt like we should’ve had some light.

  “Dear passengers,” Capt. Summers said over the intercom once more. “I regret to inform you that we are going to have to land in Cleveland Hopkins international Airport. Unfortunately, conditions are getting worse and air control is grounding almost every flight.”

  I could hear groans all around me. I would’ve been one of those people, but I wasn’t actually looking forward to this meeting. I didn’t care too much if I missed it. I just didn’t like the idea of being stuck in a plane during a thunderstorm, which seemed like a weird thing to happen in the middle of December. I was thing about that as Capt. Summers began to maneuver the plane into landing. It shuffled and moved, throwing my body around in my oversized first-class seat. I could feel the pressure drop in the pit of my stomach. I swallowed as I closed my eyes.

  It would’ve been so much better to send somebody else, I thought, my mouth dry. I could afford it. I was the head of my company, and I shouldn’t have had to deal with it.

  That’s what I had employees for, I told myself as the plane continued descending deeper and deeper into the pitch-dark sky.