by Tessa Bailey
Aaron Clarkson is gunning for you.
And nobody could stand in his way.
* * *
Rita’s legs were beginning to shake when Jasper guided her hands to the wrought iron of his headboard, wrapping their entwined fingers around one of the thin, curved poles. Since they’d retrieved her luggage from Buried Treasure and sped home in the truck, Jasper had spent the last hour taking her to the edge of heaven. Only to guide her in a floating gulfstream back down to earth and start the process all over again.
“I told you, didn’t I?” His voice was rough and smooth, all at once, in her ear. “Told you I’d make love to you, just like this. With our fingers wrapped nice and tight around the headboard.” A leisurely grind of his hips turned biting at the end, eliciting a slap where their flesh connected. “What else did I say?”
“You…” Rita wet her lips, enjoying the strain of her arm muscles on the pillow, the sweaty glide of their bodies as Jasper rolled up and back. “You w-were going to say things in my ear. Things you can’t say in the light.”
Rita shifted her hips so the base of Jasper’s erection would make contact, both of them groaning when their sensitive spots rubbed, glided, rubbed. “That’s what I said,” Jasper panted, dropping his mouth to her breasts, laving her right nipple with a skilled tongue. “And I’m a man of my word.”
“I know,” Rita whispered, wishing her arms were free so she could run greedy hands down his back, yank him deeper. Hold him. “I know you are.”
Jasper plowed slowly into her, receding, driving forward again. “When I saw you on the side of the road, Rita”—his perspiration-soaked head fell into the crook of her neck, but he lifted it to say the next words in her ear—“I saw my wife. I knew.”
A sound she couldn’t describe—maybe an overjoyed whimper—left her mouth. She turned her head to kiss Jasper, falling into some deep, dark rabbit hole of passion when he made love to her with masculine lips, an eager tongue. All the while, his lower body pumped, robbing her of reason. Except for one circular thought that spun in revolutions inside her head. “The way you looked at me, like no one else was there. No one has ever looked at me like that.” Her fingers tightened on the headboard, a quickening beginning in her middle. “If you had kept on driving your bike, right out of Hurley…just kept going. I would have held on tight and let you take me.”
“Rita.” Hard kisses rained down the side of her face. “Rita.”
His movements hastened, the headboard beginning to bump the wall each time he demanded entrance into her body. She started to spiral higher, her thighs lifting to take Jasper deeper, back bowing, sobs breaking past her lips. “Jasper.” Her eyes widened when one of Jasper’s hands left the headboard, drifting down to surround her throat. That familiar thrill only he had ever brought to the forefront blazed bright, her release so close, so close. “Please.”
Jasper’s eyes were glassy, filled with lust as his grip tightened. Just enough to propel Rita into oblivion. “Feel that, Rita? That’s the grip I’ve felt around my heart since you got here. Don’t ever let go. Please.”
“Never. I never will.” Managing to get her arms free, she threw them around Jasper, holding him as his body imploded on top of hers, loud, male growls bathing her ears. His body undulating, working his need free in stilted, feverish thrusts. The headboard gave a few final slams against the wall.
A short time later, sweat drying on their bodies, hearts beating full with contentment, Rita turned on her side to face Jasper. “Is that what the kids are calling ‘reading the specials’ these days?”
Jasper rolled her into a bear hug, his husky laugher already as familiar as a favorite song. “You want specials, beautiful?” The house settled with comforting creaks around them, as if it had been waiting, hoping—and now it was satisfied. “I was thinking for Sunday brunch, we could serve belgian waffles—”
“With blueberry compote, drizzled butter-cream sauce…and bacon. Always bacon…”
“Always.” She felt Jasper grin into her hair, prompting her to do the same against his neck, enjoying its vibration. “We can test it out in the morning.”
“In the morning,” Rita sighed out. “Every morning.”
Legs twined together, arms holding one another close, they agreed without words to drift off together. After all, come tomorrow, they had a restaurant to run.
They woke up with the dawn. Smiling.
Look for the second book in Tessa Bailey’s Romancing the Clarksons series, Too Wild to Tame, available in September 2016.
A preview follows.
Chapter One
Welcome to hell,” Aaron muttered, maneuvering the Suburban to avoid a patch of ice on the narrow road. In the passenger seat, Old Man lifted his white, furry head—and if dogs could grimace, Aaron’s new, unexpected pet was nailing it. Their eyes met across the console, one fuzzy eyebrow twitching as if to say This is where you bring me, human?
Aaron sighed and went back to scanning the street for the campsite. The term man’s best friend was apparently up for interpretation. He’d barely achieved grudging respect with Old Man between New Mexico and Iowa. Still, the bare minimum of mutual appreciation was more than he could garner from the other occupants of the Suburban, wasn’t it? When it came to his siblings, he took what he could get. Although now only three Clarksons remained, as opposed to the four they’d started the journey with. A cross-country journey with no discernable purpose.
Unless you counted fulfilling your mother’s dying wish as a purpose. In Aaron’s opinion, they were simply indulging a whim that might have been different had their mother been in a different mood or written the fateful journal entry—which had put them on the road to New York City—on a different day.
Rita, his oldest sister, had shaken them in New Mexico, making for greener pastures—or rumpled bedsheets, depending on whether you were a realist or a romantic. Aaron still considered himself the former, even if he’d definitely felt a minor blip of something gooey over the whole inconvenient business. With Rita shacked up in the desert with her boyfriend, only Aaron, Belmont, and Peggy Clarkson remained. Sage, too, although the wedding planner wasn’t related by blood. Some people are just naturally lucky.
Aaron caught sight of the campsite turnoff up ahead and gave a loud cough—his way of waking up the other travelers—before easing the rust bucket that passed for transportation to a stop outside a small redwood building marked TALL TIMBERS RENTAL OFFICE. Okay, it wasn’t the Ritz-Carlton, but with the Iowa caucuses set to begin the following morning, every fleabag motel from there to Des Moines had been booked out. Fortunately, they were only a short drive from some of the event sites, where his fellow politicians would begin holding rallies for the local constituents starting bright and early tomorrow morning.
Or they had been his fellow politicians at one time—his equals—before he’d gone and fucked his rapidly growing career to hell. Now he’d come to Iowa to fight his way back in, by fair means or foul. For the first time in his life, Aaron was desperate. Desperate enough to share a cabin with his brother in the backwoods of Iowa in a place with a half-lit vacancy sign.
Jesus Christ, don’t let this downswing last forever.
“Are we there yet?” Peggy asked on a yawn, her stretching arms visible in the rearview mirror. “I’m starving. Is there a bathroom?”
“Yes. What’s new? And probably,” Aaron answered, pushing open the driver’s-side door to climb out of the Suburban, followed closely by Old Man, who trotted off, presumably to take a leak and maybe chase a squirrel or two. This was how their arrangement worked. Aaron chauffeured the dog around, fed him, and didn’t meddle in his business. Old Man would show back up when he was good and ready.
Aaron stopped short when he saw that Belmont had somehow already beaten him out of the vehicle, all without making a sound. His brother stood still as a monument, hands tucked into his jean pockets, running cool eyes over the wooded campsite. “Good enough for you?” Aaron asked, moving past his
brother at a crisp pace, eager to drop off his luggage and hit the bricks. If he wanted to find a way into the first function tomorrow morning, his work began now. Would have started last week if Rita’s boyfriend hadn’t sabotaged their only ride out of New Mexico.
As expected, Belmont didn’t answer him, but Aaron hardened himself against giving a shit. Ever since Belmont had knocked his tooth out and cost him four hours of dental surgery, their relationship had gone from dwindling to nonexistent. In a barely conscious gesture, Aaron prodded the sore tooth with his tongue, watching as Belmont turned and helped Sage from the Suburban, in the same fashion a reality-television baker might transport a wedding cake. Even Aaron found it impossible not to watch his brother and Sage orbit each other, like two slow-motion planets. They were simultaneously a frustration and a fascination. Frustrating because they refused to just admit the attraction and bang—at least that Aaron knew about—and fascinating because Sage seemed to be the only person capable of getting reactions out of Belmont. Hell, Aaron had busted his brother’s nose and barely gotten an acknowledgment.
Moving on.
“Right.” Aaron tugged at the starched collar of his shirt. “These cabins are shit cheap, but after the extra nights in the motel back in Show Low, not to mention the car part, I think we should limit it to two rentals. Sage and Peggy in one. Me and Bel in the other.” He traded an uneasy look with his brother. “I don’t plan to be here much, so you can brood in the dark and write sonnets—or whatever it is you do—until the cows come home. Just don’t use my good aftershave.”
Being the plan man felt good. This was his role in the Clarkson clan. The asshole with the directions. The one whose lack of a functioning heart gave him the ability to make hard decisions on everyone’s behalf. Aaron was more than fine with that job description. History didn’t remember the nice guys; it remembered the sons of bitches that got things done.
“Do you need help?” Peggy asked a little breathlessly, setting down her oversized suitcase. “You can bring me along to charm people. I’m very charming.”
Beside Peggy, Sage nodded. “She can’t help it.”
Aaron wondered if Sage realized she was a stunner herself—albeit on a far less flashier scale—but mentioning it would result in getting another tooth knocked out, courtesy of Belmont. He didn’t have time for that. “I’ll let you know if I need help,” Aaron said, knowing he wouldn’t. “For now, let’s stick to the plan. Once I’ve secured a position with the senator, you three can keep driving to New York. I’ll meet you there for New Year’s.” He picked up his leather duffel. “For now, let’s go rent some cabins. As if the last time we camped together in California wasn’t disaster enough.”
As he’d known she would, Peggy laughed, following in his wake toward the office. His younger sister was desperate to bond them all on this trip and, while it would never happen, sometimes Aaron had a hard time turning off his greatest talent: telling people what they wanted to hear.
“Aaron sprained his ankle in a gopher hole carrying me back to camp after I was stung by a jellyfish,” Peggy explained to Sage. “Mom was too busy perfecting her s’mores technique to keep track of us. Rita staged a protest of the outdoors and wouldn’t come out of the tent. Belmont, where were you?”
Refusing to look curious, Aaron nonetheless paused with his hand on the wooden handle of the office’s front entrance. Belmont might have no qualms about ignoring everything that came out of Aaron’s mouth, but when it came to their baby sister, feigning deafness wasn’t an option. “I fell asleep on the beach.” His voice sounded like a creaking boat hull lifting on the water. “When I woke up, you’d gone to the hospital.”
Silence passed. “I don’t remember that,” Peggy said, a wrinkle appearing between her eyebrows. “How did you get hom—”
Belmont moved past them, pushing open the office door and ducking inside. Aaron stared after his brother a moment, weighing the impulse to tackle his hulking ass from behind and maybe divest him of a tooth this time around, but he managed to hold back. Instead, he nudged Peggy with his elbow. “Hey, it’s your fault for surpassing your one-question-per-day maximum.”
This time his sister’s laughter was forced. “Silly me,” she breathed, moving past him to join Belmont inside.
Aaron turned his head to find Sage looking like a deer caught in a pair of high beams. “What about you, Ms. Alexander. Are you the outdoorsy type?”
“I’ve planned some outdoor weddings,” she answered softly, still not giving Aaron her full attention. Pretty unusual, considering she was a woman with a pulse, but he’d had eighteen hundred miles to stop taking it personally. Aaron started to ask if she was planning on standing there motionless all day, but she hit him with a look. “He doesn’t mean it.”
Aaron braced a hand on the doorjamb. “Who doesn’t mean what?” Aaron asked, even though he already knew the answer.
“Belmont. He doesn’t mean to cause everyone frustration. This trip…being away from his boat…he’s trying. Really, he is.” From the way her breath caught, Aaron knew she’d locked eyes with the man in question over Aaron’s shoulder and through the glass windowpane. “While we’re alone, I just wanted to say thank you.” She spoke in a rush now, which probably had something to do with the footsteps that grew louder, pounding toward the exit. “For complimenting my dress yesterday. It was really nice. But if you do it again—or flirt with me to make Belmont angry anymore—I’ll break your nose.”
Sage delivered the final word of her promise just as the door swung open, Belmont’s shadow appearing on the staircase where Aaron stood with Sage, with what felt like a bemused expression. Fair enough.
“Come inside,” Belmont rumbled. “Please.”
With a final nod in Aaron’s direction, Sage pushed a handful of hair over her shoulder and sailed past, somehow managing to keep a thin sliver of daylight between herself and Belmont as she moved through the doorway, joining him and Peggy inside the rental office.
Aaron dropped his head back, imploring the bright blue Iowa sky for patience, consoling himself with the fact that as soon as he got away from his family there would be peace. Maybe not in the classic sense, but at least he would definitely be in a situation he could decipher and handle.
A prickle at the back of his neck had Aaron pausing once again, one foot inside the door as he looked toward the woods, but he shrugged it off and continued into the office, holding up his credit card in a signal for his party to make way, allowing the plan man through.
* * *
What brought Aaron to the edge of the forest in the middle of the night? No idea. His excuse for pulling on rumpled dress pants and crunching through the woods was to look for Old Man, but when dog found him first, their party of two had kept on going. Now, the mutt walked alongside him, throwing him an occasional What the fuck? glance.
“You’re free to go back, you know. I don’t remember issuing an invitation.”
Sniff. Sniff sniff.
“What is that? Morse code?”
Okay, Aaron had some idea what had sent him on Nature Quest. He just had zero notion of what he hoped to achieve by walking to the site of tomorrow morning’s Breakfast and Politics, a nationally televised, invite-only event for which he was most definitely not on the list. Oh no, he was on only one list, and the word NAUGHTY was in permanent ink at the top. Presidential hopeful and Iowa senator Glen Pendleton, however, would be in attendance, and Aaron needed to get the man’s ear. Before Aaron had flushed his career down the toilet back in California with one bad decision, his boss had confided that Aaron was on the short list for adviser with Pendleton himself. A big-ass deal when the man already had one foot in the White House. What he’d needed was the youth vote—and that was where Aaron would have come in, if he hadn’t neatly erased his chances.
Tomorrow, he needed face time with Pendleton. The question was how.
As Aaron and Old Man reached the perimeter of the forest, a series of connected buildings came into view. The lo
cal high school, which would serve as the site of Pancakes and Politics come morning. Already news vans were parked outside. Police vehicles. What the hell was his goal here? To get arrested for trespassing?
Old Man seemed to be asking the same question with a silent look, so Aaron moved in the opposite direction of the congregated vans, prepared to head back toward the cabin and get some much-needed sleep. The kind that would allow him to bring his A-game in the morning. As if he ever brought anything else.
Just as he turned, Old Man stopped, ears pricked, nose twitching. A noise behind them. Aaron heard it, too. A long slide, followed by a soft, feminine hum. Better than the sound of a gun being cocked, but definitely not what he expected to hear in the pitch-black woods at midnight. Aaron stepped back behind a tree, giving himself a good view of the school’s closest building. He watched as a leg dropped over the southernmost windowsill and dangled a moment before a head ducked under the frame. The figure jumped to the leaf-padded ground without a single crunch, the hum never ceasing or losing its melodic rhythm.
Girl. There was no question. In the dappled moonlight, he could make out curves beneath tight-fitting clothing. Slight ones, but nice ones. And even if his attention hadn’t been magnetized by the tight jut of her ass—fuck, he’d been a while without having a woman’s cheeks in his hands—the hair would have tipped him off. It was everywhere. Even the muted darkness couldn’t hide the wild, colorful nature of it. The mass of it fell to midback, interrupted every inch or so with a corkscrew curl or a braid or a ribbon. Her hair was schizophrenic. Looked like it hadn’t been brushed in a while, but maybe the lack of diligence had been on purpose.
Old Man chose that moment to make a sloff sound, which jolted the girl, sending her careening back against the building. She slid to the ground into the shadows before Aaron could get a good look at her face, and for some reason the delay made him anxious. What kind of a face went with hair like that?