Captain Charming (Tales of 1001 Flights)

by Alice May Ball

  TO KEEP YOU HOT?

  LUKA

  A bad boy mafia romance

  “All American Asshole. Comes with one good-guy coupon”

  Forbidden love, forced engagement and a secret pregnancy

  Former Navy SEAL Luka is hired to protect Alexa for her mobster fiancée. Alexa is suspicious. Plus, she and Luka have a secret already and if the mobster learned about their recent meeting in a bar, it could get Alexa killed.

  Opposites attract. Luka is hard, rational and tough. Alexa is intuitive and instinctual but she cannot ignore the way he makes her heart pound. Only she can see the man deeper inside him.

  Secrets beget secrets and soon Alexa waits anxiously to use a testing kit from a pharmacy, which she also got in secret. Plots, double crosses, kidnapping and murder are the mood music of their torrid and stormy forbidden relationship, can they survive long enough, hold on tight enough to come together?

  THIS FULL-LENGTH NOVEL has sex, violence, betrayal and double-cross in the New York underworld. It ends happily ever after for (nearly) everyone and with no cliffhanger.

  How about a read on the dark side…

  Severe, devastating billionaire Magnus Lord is used to getting what he wants. When he enters a top Chicago law firm and his eyes fall on Tanya White, the lovely personal assistant to the senior partner, he commands her to join him in a meeting. Abruptly he compels her to leave with him. His demands have hardly begun.

  He takes her on a motorcycle, then he takes her blindfolded in a restaurant. He flies her to Florence, Italy and has her taken in public view in the Uffizi Gallery.

  How much can Tanya endure? How far will Lord’s depravity drag the beautiful, curvy and innocent young girl?

  AND…

  Sexy Biker Thrills

  Gypsy Rider

  Young, beautiful, spoiled Gypsy was looking for trouble, thrills, whatever she could get. Hacker was the badass boy she knew from high school. He was cool, older and had a god-given ass. And he ignored her.

  Now Hacker is a biker high up in the local motorcycle club, and Gypsy is determined to have his attention, whatever the cost.

  When Gypsy takes a ride with Hacker, she learns there is a high price to be paid. She has to prove herself, in a roomful of hard, horny bikers. Will she come across with the price of the ride?

  Innocent

  HE IS SO NOT THE KIND OF MAN I SHOULD BE WITH

  Belle. Most of her innocence was shredded when her douche boyfriend left her homeless, broke and almost out of gas in the middle of the desert.

  IT’S SO EASY TO FOR ME FALL FOR A MAN LIKE HIM

  Hammer is a brown-eyed biker in black leather who makes Belle a proposition. She knows that her judgement in men is off, but even she can see that she and this man are a dangerous combination.

  SOMEHOW I KNOW THAT IT CAN TURN OUT DIFFERENT THIS TIME

  What will he force her to go through for a job at the biker clubhouse?

  Three steps from Heaven

  Untitled Document

  Preface

  I LIVED IN AWE AND IN fear of my triplet stepbrothers. Tyler, Amon and Brock Bone did things to the local girls that stirred up feelings that I couldn’t come to terms with. Back in high school, they had been the bomb. After they had to flee from our small town, I never forgot those three bad boys.

  Years later in the big city, I was shocked to meet my dearest steps again and all of those feelings flooded through me all over again.

  Then I discovered that they remembered me too. That they have been thinking about me in ways that I could never have imagined. When they called me ‘Sis,’ I had to come. Again and again, I had to come.

  When my Momma married Gareth, I knew that my life ...

  WHEN MY MOMMA MARRIED GARETH, I knew that my life was bound to change. He was kind, fun to be around, and the model of a perfect gentleman. The first time I met him, he crouched or bent over so whenever we talked, it was on an even level. He even brought me a little bunch of wildflowers. That was the first time anyone gave me flowers, and I’ll never forget.

  I had no idea what his three triplet sons could be so unlike him in every way—except for physically, that is.

  Gareth was big—really big—in every way, with a massive, huggy, warm personality to match. The twinkle in his eye could light up a room.

  The boys had all of that, too. They had the charm, and they were big, and in ways that I never saw of Gareth, if you know what I mean. They took any opportunity to show me.

  Amon, Brock, and Tyler would plot unspeakable things to do to the girls from school. However awful they were to them, the girls all stood in line for more, or lay and spread, to be more clinically precise.

  The feelings that they stirred deep within me were strange and frightening. I had no idea what they meant. All I knew was that, however much they teased, taunted, and tortured me, I wanted more of it. A sudden rush of explosive sensation would make me desperate for something, something I knew that I shouldn’t have, but something that I wanted very badly all the same.

  If I hadn’t gone with Ant to that art gallery, the...

  IF I HADN’T GONE WITH ANT to that art gallery, then I might never have met Tyler again.

  I wasted seven months with that jerk Ant. Seven months listening to his rambling crap about his blog, about art, and basically all about his ego. When we first met, I was perfect. He adored every curve and every slope of my luscious body.

  ‘Ceris, you could wear a sack and I’d still fall in love with you.’ He said. Back then. All of my habits were charming, and everything that I had to say was something to treasure, something that he really wanted to hear.

  Fast forward seven months, and the ideas that I gave him really have helped him to get some credibility for his stupid art blog. My lowly “Evil Day Job” at Dewar Hackett PR involves some social media work, so I know a few of the tricks. Soon enough, he’s getting invited to SoHo gallery openings and the artists want him to visit their studios.

  Now he’s beginning to feel important, and he starts thinking that I ought to cover up a bit more, maybe hold back when I’m talking to artists’ agents and dealers, and, do I really need another piece of cake?

  At the start, our love life was wonderful, thrilling, unexpected and fresh. Ant lusted after every part of me, every new situation, and every new possibility. We practically lived our lives in each other’s bedrooms. Lately, what had been lusty, slamming, hot, shouting, drenching wet sex, was now a dry, empty dustbowl. Tumbleweeds would have livened it up. Then, last night in the bar, he gave me the ‘we need some space’ speech. FUCKERRRR!

  The cracks had been starting to show for a couple of weeks, and at Map Ping’s opening at the Gush gallery, I saw the writing on the wall. It was my networking that got him the invitation, me tweeting about the fact that his blog piece was quoted in Art & Artists magazine.

  Me telling Ping’s agent that Ant is ‘the go-to blog page for the pulse of the TriBeCa art beat,’ or something equally ridiculous, landed him the quoted piece. Actually, the more I put that kind of puff around for him, the more he grew into it, and now he really is the go-to blogger for the pulse of the up and coming TriBeCa art beat. For whatever that’s worth.

  I never had an easy time with boys or men, and I’ve been wary since school. In high school you were either called ‘frigid’ or you were called a ‘whore.’ The girls who got a bye were the super-popular Miss Perfect cheerleaders, most of whom really did act like whores.

  I heard that some of them actually went on to become whores. When guys came up to me, they were usually looking for an easy hookup. One boy, Aaron, he was so cute and I did literally dream about him. He was the biggest in his year, had shaggy brown hair, and sweet, sincere blue eyes.

  Well, they looked sincere. Turns out you can’t always tell. He told me all the sweet shit you want to hear and we made out in the back of his daddy’s car. The next morning I overheard him telling his buddies how fat I was and mimicking my voice saying, ‘Oh, Aaron,
you’re so big,’ Which I never said.

  In the equipment stakes, he was on the smaller side of medium in fact, I just was too devastated to step up and say that to all of his friends, like I know that I should have done.

  So Ant got in under my defenses. He shot me a lot of charming lines and – dammit, if he didn’t mean any of that, if it was all just bullshit, why did he pursue me the way that he did? OK, it’s in the past, but it can still sting.

  The minimal, third floor Gush gallery bustled respectably with lively people with edgy hair and makeup, dressed mostly in black. The art crowd was out for Map Ping’s private viewing, enjoying champagne, canapés, and their brittle laughs, and making me feel dowdy and drab.

  Little red stickers appeared by a few pieces to indicate that sales had been made and Colm, the gallery owner, was running about, directing Juliette, his willowy blonde assistant, towards the clusters of potential buyers. At gallery events, most of Ant’s energy went on cultivating agents and journalists, but this time he spent an unusual amount of his evening with the artist.

  I was out among the throng and flying the flag for Ant’s blog and twitter feed. That involved pretending that I knew what the art was about, which in Ping’s case wasn’t hard. Not compared to pretending that I cared about anything, really.

  Map is an adorable person, gorgeous, and she’s making a heroic transition from a shy, geeky boy to a sassy and admirable woman, but her deconstrictivist nihilism – meaning she broke stuff into very tiny pieces then stuck the pieces on cardboard – it went way under my whelm. I was looking at a piece that consisted of sparse, shimmering dust entitled, Manic Monday, when a dark, honeyed voice behind me said, “Now, here is a work of art.”

  I spun around so fast, the front of my breasts pressed through my bra and silky top into the crisp white linen on the huge chest of a devilishly handsome man. He was tall, with golden brown hair and beard and with a wicked grin spreading across his wide, full lips. His gleaming brown eyes made my stomach drop. The look in his eyes was so familiar, but I couldn’t place him.

  When he took my hand, I felt so tiny in his grasp, and the touch of his fingers sent a shock all the way down to my knees. My hips tilted involuntarily towards him as he said, “I wasn’t talking about the piece on the wall.”

  My breath caught in my throat, and all I could manage to say was, “Oh?”

  He lowered his voice and said, “I was talking about you.”

  My breasts heaved and they were still almost against his hard stomach. His warmth was close enough for me to feel his heat on my chest. Other parts of me were heating up, too. His strong, deep voice made the whole of me vibrate as he leaned forward in a slight bow and he said, “How long has it been since we saw each other last?”

  This was a regular art-show-opening gambit. In fact, it wasn’t unheard of in downtown parties, generally. Still, it made my heart thump. This gorgeous, cultured, and obviously wealthy man surely couldn’t be hitting on me.

  “You’ll have to refresh my memory,” I said with a smile.

  “Ah, well,” he said, “So what do you make of…” he waved a hand absently at the display of deconstructed vases, “Of this?”

  “I think that Map is a fresh and energetic talent.” That’s not the perfect art-biz playbook response, but it’s a fair approximation. The trick is to say something that sounds very appreciative and is peppered with cutting-edge buzz terms, but without giving away any actual opinion of your own.

  The time that I have been helping out on Ant’s blog has taught me that nobody in the art business actually knows anything at all, and the only opinion that really matters at an opening is the one that’s expressed in the little red stickers.

  He wasn’t prepared to be thrown off by my evasive answer.

  “You think that grinding commonplace objects to dust is modern post-Dadaism with a touch of Warhol? A little Cornelia Parker, maybe?”

  “With a strong seam of garbage running through it,” I said.

  He smiled again. “You could say that it’s a heap of trash.”

  “I’m not sure that isn’t what I said.”

  He looked at me a moment. “A golden, fairy-tale beauty. You certainly are a rare find.”

  Pretty talk. I’ve heard it before. It’s usually one kind of malarkey or another. Some guys can’t help themselves; they spot a willing victim for some charm and they just pile it on. Forceful flirting, played in a low register.

  I don’t remember hearing it delivered by quite such gorgeous lips before, or in a voice as deep and silky as his. There was a deep, lazy drawl in his voice, and it made my insides vibrate. It’s a voice that you could just curl up in, and the look in his eye was level and hungrily sincere.

  My thighs tingled and my knees were unreliable at best. Here was a man you wanted to be hugged by—cuddled, squeezed, and kept safe and hidden by.

  He really didn’t look or sound like he was feeding me a line, but whatever, right? Anyway, I was spoken for at that point. Because that was the day before yesterday, before Ant showed his true colors.

  And that was the moment when I spotted Ant, coming out of a door halfway up a stairway. Map was following him out and Ant’s face was flushed. Map seemed to be yanking up her fly. Her fly?

  To my gorgeous companion, I said, “Please, would you excuse me for a moment? I’ll be right back,” and I followed Ant. He vanished into the crowd on the next floor up, and it was a while before I caught up with him.

  Had I seen something that was just odd, but entirely innocent? Was Map not quite as far along in her transformation as she had implied? If so, had Ant omitted to mention his bisexuality to me? WTF? When I finally reached him through the sparkly throng, Ant was slugging a glass of champagne like he was parched and it was water. He gulped it and he nearly spluttered when he saw me.

  “Hey, Ant, what was that?”

  “What was what, the champagne?” He swayed a little, and his expression was defensive.

  “No, not the champagne, Ant. What were you doing with Map?”

  “What are you talking about? Look, can we discuss this later?” He moved to brush past me.

  I blocked him and I said, “Is there something to discuss?”

  “No. That’s not what I meant.”

  “What did you mean, Ant?”

  “I meant that, whatever it is, can we please talk about it later. I’m here professionally, you know? I’m trying to get some business done here, OK?”

  I said, “Me too, Ant. So as your social media coordinator, perhaps you should bring me up to speed on the business that you were conducting in the room on the stairs with Map, so that I can update your Facebook friends and the Twitterverse about it.”

  “Look, it’s nothing, OK?” He was getting flushed, and that meant angry.

  “OK, it’s nothing.” I said, “Look, there’s Map now.” I waved to him. Her. To ‘Map,’ but she acted as though she hadn’t seen me, and ducked away. I looked back to Ant, and he was barging off in the opposite direction, towards the exit.

  I went down the steps after him, but he shouted back, “I’ll call you tomorrow,” and he was through the door to the street.

  I reached the door and saw Ant with his collar up, hurrying along the store windows into the rainy New York night. I was debating whether to go after him, and on the point of deciding against it. As I was about to turn back into the gallery, a rattle like rolling garbage cans came from down an alley, just ahead of where Ant was.

  He jumped back, his face drained and pale. Then he flattened himself against the window. Two big shapes came slowly out of the alley. I couldn’t make out their features, but they were huge men.