“Casey, baby, I can explain.” He gripped my arms and pressed me into the marble countertop. He tried on a sexy smile, rubbed my skin through my shirt, tried to press his cock against my thigh, but I squirmed away.
“I’ve heard this story before,” I practically growled the words as I steeled my resolve. He was a gorgeous man. There was no denying that. And whether I hated him or not, he still had a physical effect on me. But I couldn’t let that sway me this time.
“You told me you were going to leave her,” Emma hissed these words once she overheard our conversation. She shot daggers in my direction.
My eyes blurred from tears, but no way would I cry again. I glared at my soon to be ex-husband and my ex-best friend. We’d been high school pals. Corey was the star quarterback. Emma was the head cheerleader, and I was their brainy little tagalong. But how brainy was I? I’d been playing this game of denial with myself for a very long time. Did a smart girl really do that?
And the truth hit me like a punch to the gut. But then, I’d known the truth all along. Corey was using me. Always had been. After all, I was the main breadwinner. I was the one bringing home paychecks, while he made excuses about turning down good job after good job so he could go out and be the playboy.
And enough was enough. As he leaned in to kiss me, while Emma screamed like a scalded cat about him being a traitor, I pushed my tiny hands into his massive pecs and scooted out of his embrace.
Once I was a safe distance away, I snapped up my cell phone and said, “I want you both out of here in under an hour, or I’m calling the police.”
***
Two days later, Corey was gone, and our joint bank account was drained. I stared at the computer screen readout in disbelief. All zeros where there should’ve been a nice chunk of money.
“Bastard.” I blew a dark blonde curl out of my brown eyes and crumpled the empty paper coffee cup next to me. While I did so, I pretended it was Corey’s head.
He’d drained every last penny we had. Phone calls to his parents and our friends turned up nothing. The guy had skipped town, or people were lying to me. Emma had also disappeared.
Big surprise.
The mortgage on our condo was due, and I’d just received a call that morning telling me my furniture would soon be repossessed. Thank universe I had a small personal account with only my name on it. But there wasn’t enough in it to pay all the bills, and while I had a great job as a corporate consultant who streamlined businesses for efficiency, it would take a few great paying gigs to get me back on my feet.
So I called my guardian angel AKA my grandmother. She was a wealthy woman who’d made her money in real estate, and she’d also raised me after my parents left me, quite literally, on her doorstep.
Gran Margie’s cell phone message informed me she was on one of her “extended vacations.”
“Crap cakes!” I punched the END button.
“Extended vacation” meant Gran had sold off everything and moved again. I’d get a call from her in about three months to give me her new address, ask how I was doing, and invite me to stay.
Until then, there was only one other person I could turn to for help. My true, old best friend—Kerry McIntyre. She was a geek girl like me, but, unlike me, she never bowed to peer pressure. She walked her own line, and I felt like crap for falling out of touch with her over the last few years. Hopefully, she wouldn’t tell me to screw off when I phoned.
***
“Holy crap! You’ve hit the big time, Kerry!”
My eyes went wide as I took in the sprawling mansion. It was modern in design, with clean, bright white everywhere. I loved the parquet floor in the great room.
She laughed at my exclamation as she handed me a cocktail and led me to a marble topped bar with leather covered stools. “It isn’t my place. I’m just staying here, for now. The house belongs to my brother.”
And at the mention of Butch McIntyre, I nearly choked on my green olive. “Wow, what’s Butch up to these days?” I tried to sound casual about it, but my voice squeaked.
“He was modeling, and he got married.”
Modeling, married? My head spun with curiosity.
Butch McIntyre had been a scabby-kneed skateboarder the last time I saw him. He was a lanky kid with a shock of black hair and the most amazing aquamarine eyes I’d ever seen. A quiet, awkward teen, he’d loved horror movies, his skateboard, and video games. He was two years younger than Kerry and I.
I tried to picture that lanky, shy geek boy transformed into a male model. Then I thought about him being married, and my heart sank with disappointment.
“So, he’s married?”
His sister’s face saddened. “Was married. She died. Car accident.” Kerry’s eyes glimmered when she looked into her martini glass. “She was the president of the agency that represented Butch, and she left her fortune to him.”
“Oh…I’m so sorry.” I reached out and wrapped an arm around Kerry’s shoulder, gave her a comforting squeeze. “Geez, I’m a bitch.” I shook my head at myself. “I’ve missed so much that’s happened to you, and I come running to you as soon as shit hits the fan in my life, but you never said a word about Butch.”
She hugged me. “Don’t worry about it, hon. That was Butch’s story, not mine.”
I nodded, thankful for her forgiveness. Then I bit my lip as I thought of Butch, our past, again. “Will he mind me staying here? I mean … we weren’t exactly friends back in high school.”
She shook her head and grinned. “Don’t worry about it. I told him you’d be around for a few months, and he was cool with it.” She got up from the stool and drained her martini glass. “Now, I better go pack.”
“Pack?” I gave her a perplexed frown.
“Yeah, sorry I can’t stay with you.” She flashed an apologetic smile as she rushed toward the stairs to the upper level of the home. “I’m going on vacation with Burt. You’ll meet him when we get back. Promise.”
***
Read an excerpt from a sizzling Wild & Lawless release Sleeping With Beauty: 50 Shades of Fairy Tales by Leigh Foxlee
Sleeping With Beauty
By Leigh Foxlee
“I’d like to rock your world.”
Mike set the drink down in front of me and smiled, showing dazzling white teeth. His steely grey eyes twinkled.
I grinned and played along. “We’ve been over this before. You’re too young.” I flipped a straight strand of golden blonde hair out of my eyes and sipped on the concoction, complete with pink drink umbrella, he’d given me.
He hooked a thumb at a guy toward the end of the bar. “It’s not from me, sweetheart. It’s from him.”
Rock your world was the name of one of Mike’s specialties, and though I owned this place, I had forgotten what exactly the mixed drink contained. Mike was my head bartender, and I trusted him to take care of such recipes and all things alcohol in this place. He’d been with me three years and the kid had never let me down.
And considering he’s only ten years younger than me, I should really quit calling him a kid. How insulting. I can’t help myself. Sometimes I feel so much older than my 35 years.
“But you don’t look old, Kat,” Mike whispered close to my ear, as if he could read my mind. “You look like a foxy 25-year-old Jennifer Aniston.”
I waved him off good-naturedly and tried to hide my shiver. How the hell did he do that? It’s like he had a direct line into my thoughts.
“Well,” I said, pushing the drink away from me. “You can tell him thank you, but no thank you.”
Mike snickered and took away the alcohol. “Yeah, he kinda looks like a sleazy used car salesman, doesn’t he?”
I laughed. “Yeah, no offense to the guy, but he does.”
Mike moved off toward the balding gentleman, who looked like a cross between Larry David and George Bush. My head bartender looked decidedly pleased to be delivering my tactful turndown. Whether the guy really was as sleazy as he looked, I didn’t know, and I di
dn’t see the point in being intentionally cruel over a harmless gesture.
Although, by the spreading grin on Mike’s face as he returned, and the way the poor jilted guy slinked away from the bar, my employee may have elaborated on my polite refusal.
I shook my head and smiled. That man was incorrigible.
“So, how you been sleeping?” Mike opened up the small dishwasher we kept to wash glasses just under the counter.
I sighed and avoided his penetrating, compassionate gaze. “Not well.”
He shook a finger at me. “I could tell the insomnia’s back. You always get extra quiet when you aren’t sleeping well. And you forgot to do the books. You never forget to do the books on Friday.”
I bristled a bit at this, but swallowed down my defensive trigger and joked, “Well, maybe I’ve suddenly got a life, and now I’m doing the books on Monday.”
He gave that deep, throaty laugh I tried to deny had an effect on me. “Sweetie, I know everything about you, and I know you haven’t gotten a life yet.” His warm, strong finger swept under my chin and tilted my head up.
Uttered by different lips, those words would’ve come off as creepy. But, from Mike, they came off as caring, concerned, sad about my lack of social outings. I knew he worried about me. Worried that I worked too much.
He didn’t know the truth, though. That was one thing Mike Stansfield did not know about Ms. Katherine J. Leonard. (Call me Kat for short.) He didn’t know the effect I had on people.
It started, or at least I became first aware of it, in elementary school. I was about nine. I liked to watch the other kids playing on the tire swing, and I’d always been an observer. But, this day, my friend Robbie Golding asked me to play tag with him and some other kids, and I gleefully joined the small group.
I caught Robbie. Tag, you’re it! But, as kids will do, we got to wrestling on the school grounds. It was harmless fun, until Robbie started to gasp for air. The official diagnosis was asthma, but I knew. I don’t know how, but somehow I knew. I stole his breath away, and it most certainly was not a good thing.
After that, more strange things happened. Kids would complain they felt drained after a sleepover at my house. Like they had no energy and they could sleep for a week. Me, on the other hand? I’d feel energized. As if I could run circles around the high school track field from dusk till dawn.
And when I had sex, it only got worse. Lucky me. My first time, I thankfully only gave the boy a panic attack. But I stopped a man’s heart once. I bought my first vibrator after that experience.
But here’s the sadistic irony of my situation. I’m an insomniac, and the only thing that truly cures my insomnia is sex.
Universe has a really crappy sense of humor.
Mom took me to multiple specialists, doctors of all sorts, but no one has a clue what’s really wrong with me. Supposedly it’s all psychosomatic. It’s not psychosomatic when you’re in the ER, praying your boyfriend doesn’t die from having sex with you, let me tell you.
But what do I know? I’m a simple bar owner with a weak spot for cheesy 70s films and Channing Tatum. You can also see why Rogue from X-Men is my favorite superhero, I’m sure.
“Yeah, I can’t sleep.” I asked him to make me a lime margarita. “So what?”
He shrugged, but a smirk lingered at the corners of his mouth. “The offer still stands.”
I shook my head, smiling at him as I did so. “Nope. I never mix business with pleasure.”
His eyebrow raised and he shook a finger at me while he dried a glass. “That might be part of your problem, Ms. Kat.”
“Whatever, peanut gallery.” I waved him off, downed my sour-sweet drink, and slid off my stool. I went to gather empty glasses off tables while he gave last call.
After I locked the door behind the last straggler, I said goodbye to Mike as he went out the back exit. Then I headed up the spiral staircase that led to my apartment above the bar.
I froze when I noticed the bright red door leading into my home was already open an inch. A breath died in my throat and my heart thumped like a frightened rabbit’s foot.
Who the hell is in my place?
Mike was gone, and I thought I was completely alone. I searched the narrow hallway, looking for something I could use as a weapon, should the intruder attack me. Finding nothing, I ran back downstairs to the bar, moving as quietly as I could, and snatched up a pool cue. I wasn’t going down without a fight.
Back at my apartment, I pushed the door open the rest of the way and slowly crept inside. My hand slid up the wall and I flipped the light switch up.
No one. A cheery amber glow filled the spacious living / kitchen area, revealing it was unoccupied. I breathed a sigh of relief, lowered the hand that gripped the pool cue, and went back to lock my door tight.
“Drop the weapon, Kat,” a soft, sexy voice said from behind me. “You don’t have to be afraid.”
I whirled around to find Mike standing by my lumpy beige couch. I gasped, and fear crawled up the back of my neck. What the hell was he doing in here?
“What the—” The pool cue clattered to the floor.
***
Read an excerpt from a sizzling Wild & Lawless release Hans & Greg: 50 Shades of Fairy Tales by Leigh Foxlee
Hans & Greg
By Leigh Foxlee
“I love getting head from a man with a goatee.” My boss Derek sighed out the words and sat back in his chair while I slurped my way down his erection. Through grunts of satisfaction, he continued, “I need you to do the Darmoor murder legend story this year.”
I stopped sucking, wiped a bit of pre-cum from the hair beneath my lip. “No goddamn way.”
He pressed a finger to my lip, then pressed my head full of dark curls back into his crotch. “But I need you to go out there and interview Hans. We need something more this time. More meat on the bones, ya know what I mean?”
I stroked his thick, pinkish brown cock, pulling my mouth away to mock him. “Did you intend to make that terrible pun, or …”
Once more he shoved me down on his spit-shiny glans. “Shut up and suck. People don’t want sleepy little town fluff these days. They want tawdry suburban scandal. Or, in this case, tawdry backwoods scandal. You leave after you make me cum.”
“Yes sir,” I grumbled around his penis.
Derek Tremblay was the editor-in-chief of the Sudbury Review, a medium-sized newspaper publisher in Sudbury, Ontario where I’d worked for the last three years. I was an acquisitions editor who doubled as a reporter when I first got the job, but after expertly sucking Mr. Tremblay’s cock I quickly moved up the Review’s ladder. He made me his executive editor after we started fucking. I take that as a compliment.
My name is Greg Butler, and I’m a journalist, which you probably already guessed. Well, truth is, these days I don’t go out and get the stories much anymore. I stay in my nice, cushy exec office and edit them. Believe me, it’s still hard work red penning those puppies, particularly when we get a new crop of journalists fresh in from college, but sometimes I miss going out there and getting into my work, too.
However, not a journalist at the Review wanted to cover the yearly Darmoor murder legend story. Though not an old legend, only ten years have passed since the event, it’s well known and just scandalous enough to make the little town it happened in … well … legendary.
So why doesn’t anyone want to cover it? Well, in the past we’d do a boring blanket story. Someone would go down to the archives and pull up all the old files on the murder that happened in the sleepy little suburb of Chestnut Lane, only a fifteen minute drive from my office in Sudbury. Not exactly thrilling reporting, combing through archives and sneezing your way through a decade of dust.
But to get to Hans, the center of this local melodrama, I’d have to go all the way out past Chestnut Lane, into a rural district that was bordered by an old growth forest. No one had gone to interview Hans in years, and he rarely allowed strangers in his home, or so I’d heard.
/> Hans Muller was a witch who had been accused of murdering his lover. He was cleared of the charges due to lack of evidence, but most of the Darmoor people still think he did it. Hans keeps to himself on a little piece of land at the Darmoor limits. And it looks like I’m going to be his houseguest this weekend.
“I can’t believe he agreed to it,” I said to myself as I drove through thick Ontario woods, down a rutted dirt road that led to Hans’ Victorian gingerbread home.
I parked outside a place done up in faded mint green with a porch out front that was framed in dingy white latticework. The turned porch posts were chipped and broken in places, and some of the spindles hanging from the rounded windows were missing, but the home still held its strange storybook charm. I couldn’t help but grin as I got out of the car and grabbed my canvas bag from the back of my Honda. Looking at it reminded me of fairy tales my gran would read to us as kids.
I knocked on the dark mahogany door and peered through one of the two windows in the top half of the entrance. Inside was gloomy and lacked light, but I could see someone drawing close through gray afternoon sunlight spilling in via what I assumed was the kitchen.
But no one opened up. I waited. Knocked again. Then I heard a soft yet deep voice say, “Enter.”
So I did.
Hans Muller took my breath away. I’d heard stories. That he was nothing like what you expected. I’d expected an unkempt hermit with bleary, wild eyes and a set of mismatched clothes. What stood before me in the poorly lit foyer was a blond man of medium height who looked like a New York model. Normally I liked my lovers a little less pretty, but there was something in Hans stare that drew me in and refused to let go.
His features were fine, soft. His full lips begged to be kissed. Straight, thick hair was slicked away from his face and just brushed the wide, ribbed straps on the white tank he wore. A simple pair of blue jeans hugged his slender hips. He wasn’t muscle bound, but he was fit. His wide eyes were so light blue they looked like circles of ice.
He looked me up and down, and his face remained unreadable as he did so. “Who are you, and why are you in my house?”
Rock 'n' Roll Step Dads: School of Sex (Rock 'N' Roll Step Dads Series Part 1) Page 5