Singe (29 page)

As inevitable as gravity, life brings Taryn and Nick spiraling back into each other’s orbit. As their attraction reignites, the only question remaining is whether two professional rescuers are capable of saving themselves—and each other—or if they’re diving heart first into certain disaster.

Warning: This work contains two sexy, screwed-up paramedics, a slobbery mutt, and enough countertop sex to change how you view your kitchen entirely.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Crash:

They eat in silence for a while, Taryn picking at his fries on top of her onion rings. Nick can’t think of what to talk about. Riding together leaves you with the oddest, most-lopsided body of knowledge about a person, and though he knows Falvey’s tampon brand and her favorite foods, he’s got nothing on her family or her thought processes, what she’d wish for if a genie ever said boo. It makes for a strange brand of familiarity.

Finally she sucks down the last few slippery bits of onion, propping her chin on her hand to watch him. She’s got nice eyes, Taryn, pale and witchy gray-green. Nick happens to know that underneath the makeup her eyelashes are the same golden color as her freckles.

“What?” he asks, setting down the burger.

Taryn shrugs. “Nothing.” But the line of her jaw is set like it’s something. Nick watches her sneak a mushroom off his burger, not shy about leaning into his space. “I was waiting,” she admits after a beat, picking up the thread of their earlier conversation like they never stopped talking. “For you to show, I mean.”

Nick feels himself go still.

Falvey isn’t done. “Possibly I, uh, might need a ride home later.”

Which—huh. Nick can’t tell if she means it as an invitation or not. “That so?”

Taryn raises her eyebrows, playful. “Yeah,” she says, grinning. “That is so.”

He thinks about kissing her then, thinks about curling his hand around the back of her pretty head right here in the middle of the bar. Just to see how she’d react. Nick’s not entirely sure what he’s after with Falvey, is the flip side of things, if it’s just that he’s bored and trying to scratch an itch or if it’s something else. The night of the fire, her chin tipped up and the way she said his name? He thought maybe it was something else.

They’re still looking at each other when Doc calls out to Taryn from across the bar, engaging in a series of exaggerated pantomimes that translate roughly to
I need to pee and you should too
. Falvey rolls her eyes. “Duty calls,” she tells him, sliding off her barstool. She nudges her warm thigh against his before she goes. By the time she gets back Lynette’s made herself at home beside Nick, going on about the new Italian place in Stockbridge—her husband’s out of the doghouse, apparently. Nick watches Falvey size up the situation, then follow Doc over to a table with some of the other rookies.

So. That’s the end of that, he guesses.

For a girl who was waiting on him she sure stays far away the rest of the night, beating Doc’s boyfriend at
Buck Hunter
and nursing a pint of Sam Winter, laughing like she hasn’t got a care in the breathing world. Nick can feel her though, this weird awareness of where she is in the bar at any given moment, like she’s giving off some kind of hum only he can hear. He orders another beer, minds his own business. Taryn doesn’t. At around eleven he comes out of the bathroom and finds her waiting, leaning against the wall next to the ancient pay phone like there’s no place she’d rather be.

Nick blinks. “Hey,” he says. There’s the narrowest strip of skin showing between her waistband and her shirt. “Where you been?”

Taryn smirks. “Like you weren’t watching.”

Halfway between Audra’s age and his, Nick reminds himself. Still. “How d’you figure that?” he asks, leaning in to prop an arm against the wall, close but not close enough to crowd her. It’s private here, a long, dim hallway snaking around the back of the bar, but Nick feels compelled to leave room for the Holy Ghost anyway. All these stops and starts have made him cautious. “Been watching me watch?”

Falvey tips her chin. “Just a hunch,” she supplies, shrugging with the easy grace of a person who knows she’s not wrong. Her pale cheeks are flushed, the beer or the stuffiness or both. “Anyway. Could be I need that ride now.”

Nick isn’t ready to let her off the hook. “Could be, huh? You don’t know for sure?” He’s been waiting on her, is the truth—normally he would have left an hour ago.

“Maybe I just didn’t want to interrupt your evening.” Falvey shrugs, uncrossing her arms and pushing off the wall like she intends to lead the way to the parking lot. Only then she stops short.

“God, seriously, are you ever gonna make the first move?” she asks, one hundred and ten percent out of the blue. Her laugh is unexpectedly nervy. “It’s been my turn twice.”

Nick’s eyebrows damn near hit his hairline. “Your turn—Christ, Falvey, this isn’t a game of Go Fish.”

Taryn smirks, mirroring his expression, but underneath the clowning she looks nervous. “So? Tell me to get lost then.” She’s still standing inside the cage of his arm.

It’s easy to make the first move when you’re as sure of the other person as Falvey is of him, Nick reminds himself. He ought to tell her that and walk away.

He doesn’t.

Her mouth tastes like Sam Adams and medicinal lip balm. Nick fists his hand in her messy red hair and holds on. “There you go,” he says finally, pulling back. God, she’s only been broken up with Pete a couple of weeks. “First move.”

“Mm-hmm.” Taryn blinks at him, those green eyes taking on a gold tint in the dim light of the hallway. Nick can hear the sounds of the bar drifting around the corner, Springsteen and a spray of Jerry’s horsey laughter. “Congratulations.”

Nick blows out an irritated sigh. He knows he got to her, the slightly labored way she’s breathing and the blush that’s crept down her chest. But fine. If she wants to be a pain in the ass, then she can be a pain in the ass. “You want me to drive you home, or what?” he asks.

Taryn’s pale eyebrows lift. “In a minute.” Nick’s dropping his hand from the wall when she grabs it, lacing her fingers through his. “I told you,” she says, when he looks at her curiously. “I did it twice.”

She did it— Christ, Nick’s pretty much had enough of fucking around here.

Maybe Falvey has too, because she kisses him right back this time, letting him lick his way into her mouth and press her up against the wall. Nick can feel her everywhere at once. When she nips along the edges of his tongue, he lets out a growl before he knows he’s going to do it, hips pressing hers back into the plaster. Taryn gasps.

“Good?” he asks, then doesn’t wait for an answer. Instead he tucks one hand against the nape of her neck underneath that waterfall of hair, back where the skin is so hot and so soft it’s all he can do not to turn her around and set to sucking, not to haul her into the bathroom and pull those tight jeans down around her thighs. Taryn grins a cheeky grin against his mouth.

“Knew you had it in you,” she murmurs.

Nick catches her bottom lip between his teeth and tugs. “You’re a brat, you know that?” One thigh slides between hers to investigate, pressing up. She’s warm there too, all these secret pockets of body heat.

Taryn keeps smiling. “You have no idea.”

Sea, air, land, the bedroom...this SEAL is always in command.

As Hot as it Gets

© 2014 Elle Kennedy

An
Out of Uniform
Story

After watching his teammates settle down one by one, Navy SEAL Jackson Ramsey is ready to say goodbye to the single life. He’s even met a woman who intrigues him, challenges him, and turns him right on—Mia Weldrick, the funny and beautiful gardener he can’t wait to get to know better.

Except Mia isn’t interested in dating him, which means it’s time for Jackson to unleash his Texas charm and do some serious wooing.

With a teenage brother to raise, two jobs, and, frankly, a complete disinterest in sex, Mia has no room in her busy life for a six-foot-five SEAL with a naughty streak a mile wide. But one hot kiss from Jackson has her imagining all the dirty ways she could fit him in.

It isn’t long before their no-string fling transforms into something more. As desire unearths emotions and deeply buried secrets, Mia has to decide whether to give love a chance to grow, or let it slip it away.

Warning: This Southern gentleman is wickedly
un
gentlemanly in the bedroom. He likes it rough and kinky, and he’s not afraid to make his sexual demands known. Anal, spanking, voyeurism, and other surprises await you in this last and dirtiest
Out of Uniform
installment.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
As Hot as it Gets:

By the time Jackson paid the bill and helped her out of her chair, Mia was ready to flee. She couldn’t get caught in the spell he was attempting to cast on her. As wonderful as he was, seeing him again wasn’t an option.

But clearly her date had other ideas.

“So, when can I see you again?”

Mia stifled a groan and walked through the door he held open for her. When they stepped outside, the late-evening breeze snaked beneath her hair and cooled her warm cheeks.

“Jackson…” He was so tall she had to peer up at him to meet his eyes. “I had a good time. Seriously, I did. But this doesn’t change anything. I’m still swamped with work and taking care of Danny. I don’t have a lot of free time.”

“I’ll take whatever you can give me,” he replied in a cheerful voice. “One dinner a week, lunch every other week, I don’t care, darlin’. I just want to keep seein’ you.”

For Pete’s sake. The man truly was tenacious. She’d told him that she was pretty much a single mother, confessed her indifference to sex, and he still wanted to see her again?

“I’m not looking for a relationship,” she said feebly. “Or a fling.”

“I know that.”

“Then what’s the point? Why bother spending more time together if it won’t go anywhere?”

“Because I want to. Because
you
want to.”

She fiddled with the little brown pocketbook she was using as a purse, snapping it open to retrieve her keys. “It won’t work. I’ve got too much on my plate to commit to anything more. And besides, I feel bad getting your hopes up about, you know, potentially getting jiggy, because it probably won’t happen.”

“Why, ’cause you think you won’t like it?”

Because I know I won’t.

She bit back the words before they could slip out. Truth was, she’d completely underplayed the whole sex thing during their discussion earlier. She found sex so boring and unsatisfying that she’d even raised the subject with her old therapist. For a long while she’d thought there might be something wrong with her, like maybe she was an asexual weirdo who’d never be able to function like a normal sexual being, yet the fact that she could give herself wild, breathless orgasms without any trouble contradicted that.

She was just so apprehensive about getting intimate with anyone again. She’d slept with four men in her life, and each encounter had been more disappointing than the last.

“Y’know what, I’ve got an idea,” Jackson said before she could respond.

She shot him a questioning look, but rather than elaborate, he took her hand and started leading her toward the side of the building. The warmth of his fingers seeped into her palm and made her feel achy again. God, she didn’t understand this effect he had on her. At all.

But although she was incredibly tempted to explore it further, she didn’t want to set herself up for any more disappointment. It wasn’t as if she’d never experienced arousal before. She did, all the time. The second she acted on it, however, the sensations seemed to dull. And forget about achieving orgasm. Only one lover had made her come before, and getting there had been a struggle, to say the least.

“What are you up to?” she asked warily.

He practically dragged her into the small parking lot behind the restaurant, which was packed with cars. Jackson scanned the lot, then broke out in a grin. “Look at that,” he drawled, “even our vehicles know we make the perfect couple.”

Mia followed his gaze, groaning when she noticed the black pickup truck parked right beside her blue one. “Let me guess—that’s your pickup?”

“Sure is.” Still grinning, he led her toward the trucks, then let go of her hand and crossed his arms over his broad chest. “Here’s the deal, sugar.”

“There’s a deal?”

“Yup. I want to go out with you again. You’re being difficult. So here’s what I propose.”

“Gee, I can’t wait to hear this.”

He ignored the sarcasm and swept his tongue over his bottom lip, an act so sexy she shivered.

“I’m goin’ to kiss you.”

Her breath hitched. “What?”

“I’m goin’ to kiss you,” he repeated. “And if you like it, then you have to agree to see me again.”

Damned if her heart didn’t start pounding. The heat in his whiskey-colored eyes seared right through her clothing and sizzled her flesh, making her feel hot and dizzy.

“You’re nuts,” she stammered.

“Maybe, but that’s the deal, sugar. You claim that nothin’ gets you goin’, not even a kiss. You also said you had a good time tonight, did you not?”