by R. M. Walker
Saved
Between the Sheets
Leigh Kelsey • Leigh Kelsey • Katie May • Lacey Carter Andersen • Jessa Lucas • M. Lizbeth • R.M. Walker • A.C. Wilds • Candice Wright • Jaliza A. Burwell • Nikki Landis • Ann Swan • Tabitha Barret • Rae Tina • Allyson Lindt • Lina Jubilee
Contents
Introduction
Leigh Kelsey
Heinous Crimes
Katie May
Not All Heroes Wear Capes (Just Dresses)
Lacey Carter Andersen
Unlikely Reaper
Jessa Lucas
Taking It Off
M Lizbeth
Awakenings:
R.M. Walker
Saving Parker
A.C. Wilds
Bewitched Arrows
Candice Wright
Masked Illusions
Jaliza A. Burwell
A Starfire Experience
Nikki Landis
UnMasked
Ann Swan
Entropy
Tabitha Barret
Invisible Desire
Rae Tina
Humble Beginnings
Allyson Lindt
Hearts in the Sand
Lina Jubilee
Mutiny’s Rebellion
Copyright © 2019 by Leigh Kelsey, Katie May, Lacey Carter Andersen, Jessa Lucas, M. Lizbeth, R.M. Walker, A.C. Wilds, Candice Wright, Jaliza A. Burwell, Nikki Landis, Ann Swan, Tabitha Barret, Rae Tina, Allyson Lindt, Lina Jubilee
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover Design Copyright © 2019 Vampari Designs www.arizonatape.com
First Printing, 2019
Saved
Between the Sheets
The call has been made, BTS City needs help!
Hang up the cape but leave on the mask for these steamy tales.
Heroes come in all shapes but what makes them super is the size of their....hearts.
Saved Between the Sheets is full of ultra steamy complete reads. The characters may or may not be familiar, but the story won’t leave you wanting.
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Heinous Crimes
Leigh Kelsey
Heinous Crimes
Jade and her supervillain team have one goal: steal stuff, evade capture, and look good doing it. When they’re caught by Hero guards and thrown in jail awaiting execution, she’ll have to draw on all her wicked power to escape. Although being locked in a cell does give her ample quality time with her men… Maybe prison has its benefits.
Chapter One
The cell was as cold as hell and smelled heavily of mildew and piss, but at least the three of us were together. And at least Lewin had escaped capture.
“Not the nicest hotel we’ve been in,” I observed, putting my feet up on the stone bench and leaning my sore head against the cold wall. I had a million aches and pains, and my knuckles were stinging where I’d slammed them into the iron-laced cheek of a Hero guard this morning, but I valiantly ignored all of it. Pretended I was sitting on a huge bed with puffy white sheets and pillows, veranda doors open on palm trees and a beach.
“Hotel room?” Arris Kaur—alias Falconfire, and one of three people I trusted with my life—choked on a laugh. “Jade, we’re in a jail cell waiting to be sentenced to death.”
I shrugged, my eyes on the ceiling. “Same thing. It’s all accommodation we don’t have to pay for.”
Arris scratched his shaved, tattooed head. “I think we’re supposed to pay for the hotel, though.”
I laughed, the others laughed, but the sound hovered in the cold air of the cell like the sentencing hanging over our heads. Literally—if the jury sent us down, we’d be decapitated, the one sure way to keep down someone with powers.
We’d been out on a routine job, liberating a private collection of an emerald bigger than my hand to pay the rent on our place, when everything had gone tits up. Someone tipped off the Heroes and before any of us could begin to fight, Bean Sidhe had stormed in, screamed his horrific, blood-curdling scream, and we’d been knocked out cold. Then we’d woken in this cell. I still didn’t know who’d alerted the Heroes, if it was an onlooker or if we’d been betrayed.
“So what’s the plan?” Thomas asked, his hand flexing like he’d reach for the axe that wasn’t holstered at his hip. Violent to the end, and forever willing to fight. No wonder they called him Valhalla. He looked like a Norse god, too, with his silvery black hair and his impressive brawn. Nothing like Arris’s Indian beauty, jewellery-cluttered hands, and liquid silver eyes. Thom’s eyes were always shadowed, heavy with the grief that made his eyes flat, his voice joyless. I didn’t know his story, had never pried. Maybe that was why he liked me more than other people. Or because we both liked stealing stuff and getting in rough, vicious fights; we had a lot in common that way.
I flexed my hands; the wire bracelets around each wrist—and ankle—were a hateful reminder that my power was shoved so far down I kept choking on it. Those Hero bastards weren’t happy with just arresting us and locking us up. No, they had to stifle our power with this cursed metal, not only in the bracers around our wrists, but in bars on the doors and windows and strips of metal forged into the walls themselves. I couldn’t compel someone if I tried, and it was a loss I hadn’t anticipated. That sense of loss made me furious.
Plus my hair—dyed blue and normally not a strand out of place—was a ratty mess of split ends, and for that I would never forgive these bastards.
I flexed my hands again, pointlessly reaching for my compulsion. My power was natural—well, unnatural, but whatever—and being without it was like learning to breathe with one lung. I was one of two people who could control the minds of anyone around me, and I’d grown used to doing so. I was six years old when a pervy guy tried to give me a lollipop while my dad’s back was turned. Panicked, I acted on instinct and the next thing I knew, the guy was violently thrusting that lollipop into his eyeball, yanking it out again with said eyeball attached to the sticky sweet. Whoops.
I hadn’t got any less violent in the twenty years since, to be honest, but at least I had friends now. A whole team, and three of the best friends I’d ever known. One of whom occasionally—oh, alright, fairly often—slid into my bed and helped me wake up the whole neighbourhood with my screams.
Thomas shifted, rubbing at the sores on his wrists beneath the wrapped wire, and any desire I might have had winked out, swallowed by rage. Those assholes could do this to me but not to my friends, never them.
“I’m going to kill whoever opens that door next,” I seethed. “With my bare hands if necessary.”
Arris smirked. “Good luck with that, darling’.”
I glared, if only because it was familiar and the normality had the tightness in my chest easing up, just slightly. I leant my head against the stone wall again, pulling in a slow breath, turning over a thought. There w
as nothing in this cell—nothing except the wire around our wrists that would not budge, and the clothes we wore. The few stone benches were bolted down so thoroughly that even Valhalla couldn’t dislodge them. Not that Thomas had his super strength and speed now, but if his muscles couldn’t budge them, neither could I.
But the clothes we wore…
An idea formed and I stripped off my grubby vest. It had started out white, if you could believe it. Not my choice of colour—my wardrobe was as black as my heart—but the pug-faced woman who’d stripped me and shoved a bundle of clothes into my hands wasn’t very accommodating.
That was three weeks ago, and if I hadn’t been sharing this cell with my two friends, I’d be curled into a ball crying by now. Our capture had been traumatic in itself, let alone the processing, and being shoved and dragged down hallways by self-righteous Heroes and mortal grunts. But Thom and Arris gave me strength, and kept me sarcastic which was a gift in itself.
“What are you doing?” Thomas asked warily, watching as I twisted the greyish fabric of my vest until it formed a pathetic looking rope, making sure I still knew where the neck hole was.
Arris snorted, watching me. “She’s going to strangle them with a vest. Nice, Jade.”
“Thanks.” I grinned.
It took an hour, and I was shivering in the cold without a shirt, but finally footsteps echoed off the hall outside. I straightened, as did Arris and Thomas, their eyes wide and alert. I tightened my grip on the makeshift noose but the door—made entirely of that oppressive metal—didn’t open fully. It only rattled as a mean boot kicked it and the slot in its middle flicked down to reveal an equally mean face.
The guard had to have lost a battle with a freight train at some point in his life, his bald head a dented shape and all his features squashed in, his eyes bulging. Rife with violence—I knew the look. Whenever we saw that glint in someone’s eye, we avoided drawing their attention, and if we did, we ran like hell.
“I come bearing news,” he announced with a grin.
I stiffened. Oh gods.
“Tomorrow’s the big day.” He mimed swinging a blade. “Say goodbye to your heads.” When we said nothing, silent and pale, he snorted and slammed the window shut. “Enjoy your last night on earth, little villains,” he crooned through the door.
His footsteps were a taunt as they receded. I dropped the pathetic noose to the cold stone floor, all the strength sapped from my limbs.
It started in my hands first, a tiny tremor, and then a full-on shake, and then my whole body was trembling. Arris crowded onto the bench where I slumped, Thomas right behind him, pulling my hands into his and warming them.
“This is it, then,” I said, my mouth dry.
Thomas brought my hands to his mouth, laid a kiss against the back of one. “It could be worse.”
“I know.” I nodded, not really seeing either of them or the cell beyond. “We could be apart.”
“I was going to say we could be on that job at the farm with the gold and the rolling in pig shit.”
I made a face, recoiling as I remembered it. The memory chased off the numb cold rushing through me. “That was foul.”
“It was fun getting cleaned up after, though.” Thomas’s face held the promise of a smirk, but I’d never seen him truly smile, not without a hint of darkness. “That was one hell of a shower.”
I laughed—exactly as he planned. I was so grateful to have them here with me that I nearly broke, my eyes stabbing with half-formed tears. “Thom, we broke that shower.”
“It was already falling apart, and we did leave a gold bar to pay for the repairs if you remember.”
I snorted, my belly roiling with terror, nerves, and love. I wished Lewin was here. Wished it, and hated myself for wishing it. I was glad he was safe, that the bastards hadn’t got him too. At least one of us was safe.
“You know,” Arris said, a slow smile forming on his tanned face as he wrapped a blue strand of my hair around his finger. “That dick did say to enjoy our last night on earth…”
Despite our surroundings, despite what loomed over our heads, my body heated. “He did,” I agreed, matching his grin. “And we’d be bad prisoners if we didn’t follow orders.”
Thomas’s eyes flashed, brushing another kiss over my hand. This one tingled right into my bones, searing the feeling of his kiss onto every nerve. Maybe the last kiss I’d ever feel.
I flinched from the thought, flinched physically too, and Arris gathered me against him, his arms tight.
“If I could see a way out, I’d make you take it,” he murmured.
I knew. Arris might have been fiery and passionate and ever-joking, but he was serious when it came to the safety of the team. When it came to my safety. “I’d make you both take it with me,” I said quietly, resting my head on Arris’s chest and holding tight to Thomas’s hand.
“Do you think he’s safe?” Lewin, our missing link.
“Yes,” they answered at the same time.
I sighed, rubbing my tired eyes with my shoulder. “Are you just saying that because it’s what I need to hear?”
Instead of answering, Arris took my chin and tipped my face up for a slow, thorough kiss. It wasn’t the first time we’d kissed but it had never been like this before. All the strength sagged from my bones and I melted against him, letting the kiss pierce the black pit of terror inside me. I pressed closer to his lithely muscled body, my lips moving over his, his tongue sweeping my bottom lip—and I grabbed a fistful of his prison-issue shirt on instinct, my villain-fast reflexes saving him from tumbling off the edge of the stone bench and cracking his head open.
“Floor,” I mumbled against his mouth, shivering as his hands gripped my bare waist, my vest in a pathetic noose somewhere across the cell. “This bench is too damn small for the three of us.”
“Agreed,” Thomas rumbled. “I’ll be gallant and let you lay on me, Jade.”
I grabbed his face and kissed him rough and quick as I climbed off Arris. “You spoil me,” I murmured, my voice coming out husky.
He shrugged a big shoulder, his words playful but his voice flat. Like the threat of execution weighed his thoughts, too. “Only the best for my partner in crime.”
I snorted, straddling Thom’s hips when he laid out on the concrete floor. It must have been hell on his back but he wasn’t complaining, especially as I slid my hands under his shirt and up over his pecs. Shivering in the cold cell air, I bent over him, fastening my lips to a sensitive part of his neck and delighting in the way he grew hard beneath me. Any amusement burned away by the hot press of arousal.
Thom grabbed my hips, bruising tight and searing my chilled skin. He groaned a low vibrating noise as I grazed my teeth over his throat, responding by digging his thumbs into the hollows of my hip bones. My eyes nearly rolled back. This—this was why I loved having a team member I knew intimately, who knew me intimately. Arris, though … we’d never done more than make out. Lewin hadn’t even kissed me; and I’d never been brave enough to kiss him first. But I wasn’t ashamed to admit I wanted all of them.
But Thom… he dug his hands into my waist again, chuckling under his breath when I moaned and rolled my hips over his. I shivered, my desire skyrocketing at that deep, self-satisfied sound. He knew exactly how to wreck me, and delighted in doing so.
Fingers combed through my hair, across my scalp, and little sparks of sensation zipped down my spine. Arris. I sighed against Thomas’s skin even as I opened my mouth to warn Arris—and right on cue, his deft fingers snagged in a nightmare of a knot.
I snorted, lifting up to look at Arris. His expression was comical—it was clear he didn’t know whether to admit defeat to the knot or keep fighting the battle. “I wouldn’t,” I advised him with a smirk. “Three weeks with one shower and no brush is hell on a girl’s hair.”
Gently, Arris extricated his fingers, hunger flashing across his bronzed face, setting those mercury eyes on fire as they skimmed down my bare chest. I swallowed the sali
va that filled my mouth, my breaths quickening and liquid pooling between my legs.
“Arris,” I breathed, heat spreading through me from his fingers as they slowly caressed my face, my neck, my shoulders, and Thomas’s hands as they explored the soft curve of my stomach. The sensation of both of them … I felt touched everywhere, felt pushed to the very brink of sensitive, and I shuddered.
“I need you,” I rasped, and wasn’t sure which one of them I meant.
“You’ll have us,” Thomas promised. As if his vow had unleashed them, mouths affixed to my bare skin. My core ached. The touch—the need—was so vast it threatened to swallow me.
My next inhale was ragged. I didn’t care that I was in a jail cell covered in power-suffocating metals. I didn’t feel that loss of power right now, I was teeming with too much arousal and energy, physically shaking with it.
And all they were doing was kissing me…
Oh, this was going to ruin me.
Chapter Two
By the time Thomas and Arris had kissed every inch of my chest, stomach, back, and had stripped off my prison-cheap trousers, I was soaked. I knew, even though his ability was oppressed by the cell, Thomas could smell my arousal through whatever innate power heightened his strength and senses. His nostrils flared and his eyes flashed with hunger as he surged to claim my mouth, his tongue demanding submission from mine, sweeping and flicking with rough, claiming strokes.
