by Belle Knight
Heald’s heart galloped in his chest. Station had a wide reach—
“Need a ride?”
Laura’s voice did nothing to steady his heart.
He told himself to act cool as he bent down to the open window.
Laura was at the steering wheel wearing a random t-shirt from somewhere and a torn up skirt that showed off beautiful thighs. A fresh bandage peeked out from the neck of her shirt. Her hair was freshly washed and, from the parts he could see, she looked scrubbed clean. She looked at him with bright eyes that sparked an instant longing inside.
“A ride with the girl who has the deadliest glue stick throw in all the world? A ride with the girl who can solder the hell out of an old ass antique radio?”
Laura grinned. “Practice and persistence. That’s all it takes and you, too, can someday be as deadly with a glue stick as I am.”
Heald licked his lips and smiled. Good god he wanted this woman. He wanted to get to know her, every part of her, and he wasn’t just talking about her body.
“Just like that?” He said, serious again.
“I called in a sub for today so we can talk,” Laura said.
But the way she said it made Heald think she meant much more than talk.
“I figure I could at least hear you out,” Laura said, but then she frowned. “Unless I read this wrong. Unless you meant it when you said I was just a quick f—”
Lightning fast, Heald opened the door and dove into the passenger seat. “Let’s talk.”
“And maybe more,” Laura said without missing a beat.
Heald’s erection came back and his jeans became uncomfortably tight.
She glanced down and he swore that her grin widened.
“Definitely more.”
He wanted her in a bad way, because goddamn, just her talking with all this innuendo was enough to get him going.
Fuck, she was going to be the death of him.
Fuck, if she hadn’t already almost been the death of him.
He smiled at that last thought and fastened his seat belt.
She pulled away from the curb.
He released his need for control. He had a lot of explaining to do. She wanted to listen to him. And maybe do more than that.
She glanced over at him, her eyes lighting him on fire.
Definitely more.
Chapter 18
Laura settled into the driver’s seat. She liked this spot. Man at her side, a delicious electricity connecting them.
The police had questioned her and quickly realized she was little more than someone who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Director Stone had come by the police station. Laura appreciated that more than she could ever let Director Stone know.
She had moved away from her divorce and thought she had left everyone else behind, but hadn’t realized that she’d been making some new connections here too.
Laura glanced at Heald. They had let him clean up at the station. He wore a clean pair of jeans and a white t-shirt that wasn’t soaked in blood. The edge of the bandages peeked out from underneath his shirt. His musky smell drove her crazy. He smelled like soap and like the musky smell of a man.
“How does that feel?” She asked, pulling away from the sidewalk.
“It’ll be all right. Your glue sticks really made him miss his target,” Heald said.
Laura laughed. Glue sticks. She’d have to tell her students all about this adventure and how her lego tossing practice had saved the day. She glanced at Heald and noticed his erection.
Okay, not all about this adventure.
“How’s your shoulder?” Heald said.
“Same as your side. It’ll be all right. A flesh wound that needed a few stitches,” Laura said. “What about your brother?”
Heald shook his head and looked out the window. “We’ll see.”
She had left the station after talking with the police, the FBI, and Director Stone, more invigorated than she had ever felt. The police had filled in a lot of the gaps for her—the extent of Station’s smuggling ring, the role the rhino horns shipment had played in his tracking system, how Station had used Heald’s brother to get to Heald.
All of it was true.
Heald really had been trying to steal the horns in order to save his brother. He had a checkered past, international company work of some kind, but no record. As far as the FBI was concerned he was clean and telling the truth.
The truth.
Under pressure, she had stepped up, albeit with glue sticks and a soldering gun, but it was more than she thought she would ever have been capable of.
She wondered what else she was capable of that she had never thought possible.
Could she trust this man who had lied to her from moment one—even though it had been to protect his brother?
“Did you really have sex with me just because—” She didn’t know how to end that sentence. Just because she was hot? Available? Willing? She could give the same exact reasons for why she’d had sex with him.
And why she wanted to do it again.
“Because you’re hot,” Heald said. “Because I wanted to touch every part of you the moment I met you and it drove me crazy when you kissed me. Because there’s something about you that I can’t get out of my head. Because we fucked and as soon as we were done, I didn’t want it to end. I wanted to start it all over again, and get to know you, and figure out how you’re so fucking smart and interesting and why you work at the museum and even now,” he motioned to the erection in his jeans, “exhausted, bleeding, hungry, all I can think about is you and how I can possibly make you believe me when I say I said all that crap to Station because I thought there was a chance it might protect you and get his attention off—”
“I believe you,” Laura interrupted, her heart beating in her throat.
“You do?” Heald said, disbelief on his face.
The police had corroborated Heald’s blackmailed role in the heist, but mostly—mostly Laura knew there was no faking how things had gone between them in that office.
Laura reached over and cupped his erection with one hand.
He jumped at her touch and pulsed against her palm. She shivered and felt an ache grow inside as she became wet.
“I believe you enough to start over.” Laura returned her hand to the steering wheel. As she crossed through an intersection, she took a right into the parking lot of a hotel.
She wasn’t ready to take him to her place yet.
Not yet.
But she was ready to fuck him again and see if she could get him out of her system—or not.
She thought not.
She hoped not.
Afterwards, they could talk and see if this was something they wanted to try again—and again.
She shivered at that thought.
It was all so out of control, all so up in the air, dangerous, so unlike her, but she liked this part of her, for now.
And she believed that he had been willing to die for her in that office, so she was willing to give him a second try.
Plus the sex had been hot.
She was desperate to know if it was going to be as hot the second time around.
Glancing over at Heald, she noticed the his muscles filled out his white t-shirt. She was pretty sure the second time was going to be pretty hot too. She parked the car.
Her husband had cheated on her with his secretary.
So cliché.
She had met a hot, bad boy and fallen hard.
So cliché…
…But that was one cliché she could live with.
Bonus Scene
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The Smuggled Wild series continues...
There are more romantic suspense standalones in the Smuggled Wild series. Here are the first three chapters from another special couple's encounter with each other and the illegal animal trade.
Smuggled Wonder (excerpt)
Chapter 1
Ashley stared down the new ram from between the bars of the crate.
King’s head put him almost to her own head. His two horns curved in wicked spirals. His partner stood almost as high. They both approached the crate wall as if expecting her to feed or scratch them—or head butt her.
Her hands on her hips, she tapped her left boot on the ground and considered her next move. The tour bus would arrive soon, spilling out several dozen cheese tourists, including the guy from the bank who would decide whether or not she got that business loan.
She was running out of time.
“You see that?” Janice said.
The old woman had her grey hair tied back in a messy bun. She stood next to Ashley in dust covered jeans and green polka dot rain boots.
“Yeah,” Ashley said, sighing.
The rams were not giving them compliant signals.
She shifted her weight inside her own blue striped rain boots. This was California dairy farm country. Sure, people wore cowboy boots, but why muck up a nice pair in the mud and shit when plastic rain boots would do just as nice and clean up even easier?
She stepped closer and King tracked her, looking eager. It meant he wasn’t afraid of her. It meant he didn’t respect her. It meant he was dangerous and might even be deadly.
The crate smelled like hay and piss and wool. She tasted the cinnamon from her breakfast oatmeal finished not two minutes before this ram, King, and his nethered companion, Gandalf, had arrived in the back of a pickup truck.
She was King’s new caretaker.
He was the ticket to her dreams.
Her cheesemonger dreams, to be specific.
There was something special in his genetics she wanted breed into her trio of ewes. The combination would turn out some of the best sheep milk in California—and some of the best sheep cheese in the world.
Sheep wasn’t big yet in California, not like goat, and not like anything close to cow—but Ashley thought it would be. Someday.
The problem?
Well, the previous owner had called King the most aggressive damn ram of the past thirty years of his sheep-rearing life. And Gandalf, his neutered sheep companion, wasn’t much better.
But it didn’t matter.
The genetics were rare, and right, and she didn’t have a lot of options.
Scratch that, she had no options.
Loud engine noised whirred behind them. A bus began its ascent on a narrow lane that would lead the tourists straight to Janice’s dairy shop door.
Too bad no one was manning it right then. It was just Ashley and Janice—and Janice’s dogs. Had been that way for seven years, other than seasonal help here and there.
“Ashley,” Janice said, a warning note in her voice that Ashley knew too well. It meant worry and care and hard work and love—but mostly hard work. “Leave him until the tour is over. We’ll deal with him later.”
Ashley shook her head, tendrils of brown hair flying from her loose ponytail. “If I don’t get him inside the paddock now, it’ll be dark—and even more dangerous.”
Ashley flicked her brown eyes back to Janice. Both of them were slim, toned with muscle, though Janice was in her sixties and it showed in the lines of her tanned skin. Ashley was still in her late twenties, smooth, strong, though her hands were plenty calloused with the work the small, artisan dairy farm required everyday.
“You go on and meet them,” Ashley said returning her attention to the crate. “I’ll finish up and be up there soon.”
“It’s your cheese, girl,” Janice said, putting passion into her words. “You should share it, talk about it, make it sing in their mouths. Not me.”
“Janice—”
Ashley had spent the last seven years apprenticing at the Sweet Weather Dairy Farm and though the owner, Janice, was like a wonderful, old aunt, she had been hinting that it was time for Ashley to think about something more for herself.
Something of her own.
“It’s time to stop hiding, girl. It’s time to get back out there.”
Ashley frowned.
Janice wasn’t just talking about the bus about to spill its passengers onto the farm. They’d had this discussion plenty of times. Janice liked her men and couldn’t understand how badly Ashley had been burned the last time. How scared Ashley was to trust anyone, especially a man again—especially herself again.
Didn’t matter how many times Ashley explained it—running away, hiding herself, starting over—that’s exactly what had saved Ashley. She’d left the state and come to California. To here. To this farm, and by luck, Janice had needed a farmhand and had a decrepit little one room farmhouse on the property that she let Ashley fix up and call home.
She still hadn’t forgiven herself for taking even that long to leave him. He’d hit her once and Ashley had left. But for years, she had taken the emotional abuse and owned it and thought she deserved it.
“You got to stop hiding,” Janice said again, emphasizing every word.
“This isn’t that.” Ashley wiped sweaty hands across her jeans. “You know it’s not about trusting men. It’s about trusting myself. I don’t trust myself.”
Janice motioned her head at King. “He trusts you.”
“Yeah,” Ashley said wryly. “A little too much, I think.”
Janice laughed, releasing the tension between the two women. “I trust you.”
Laughing voices and conversation floated down the hill from the dairy shop front.
Ashley looked Janice straight in the eyes. “I know you do—”
The bus was unloading its passengers—a great gaggle of people who had paid good money to wine and cheese taste and get educated about farms along the way.
“So let me be the farmhand you hired seven years ago.” Ashley waved at King and then at the bus. “I got him. You start them off and I’ll swoop in like a sheep girl fresh from the barn. They’ll like that. Authentic farm-life.”
Janice laughed but then turned serious. “You better get up there quick after me. I want the cheesemonger present the first time the world tastes your cheese.”
“Bitch, you know it! You better wait for me!” Ashley called after Janice’s retreating back.
Janice laughed again, all the way up the hill to the bus. People milled around her and she began ushering them inside, pointing the way to the bathroom, to the garden area, and announcing the tour would begin inside in five minutes.
Five minutes.
Ashley turned back to King and Gandalf.
Two years ago Janice had let Ashley start her own mini breeding program. Ashley had gone so far as to DNA sequence her ewes. After many bleary-eyed, late nights of research, she figured out what it all meant and what she wanted to do with that information. When she discovered the genetics she was looking for, it seemed to only exist under lock down on special, super competitive, super high security sheep farms in Europe. It didn’t keep her from haunting every livestock exchange or ranch sale and running up quite a DNA sequencing bill every month.
She figured her quirky little sheep cheese dream would never come true.
And then King showed up.
King’s previous owner had been sporting a leg cast from King’s last head butt, and had only shaken his head in disgust when she’d requested a DNA sample for testing. He hadn’t cared about the results.
King was exactly what she was looking for—Ashley had sequenced the DNA as a condition of purchase. Whether King’s father or mother had been smuggled into California illegally at some point, or whether King was a strange coincidence of mutations, the only one who knew how special he was—w
as Ashley.
But none of that mattered now. King was hers.
Or he would be if she could get him out of the damn crate without killing herself—or him.
There wasn’t time to put up the right fencing to guide the two rams to their intended paddock. The truck couldn’t drive closer for risk of getting stuck in the mud. She was looking at maybe fifty feet of space between the truck and the open paddock gate.
That was a lot of room for things to go wrong.
“Fuck it.” Ashley picked grabbed a wooden broom stick with the brush part long ago broken off, then picked up the metal top to a glorified trash can used to store farm supplies from the rain.
She hefted her dull sword and shiny shield into position, pursed her lips and whistled a loud piercing call that carried across all 250 acres of the farm.
Tasting acid in her mouth, she opened the damn crate. She sunk her blue striped rain boots in the muck and braced herself.
Chapter 2
King and Gandalf rushed out. King lowered his head, spiral horns mean and deadly looking. Gandalf galloped after him, head lowered too.
Shit. She couldn’t take two at once.
Thinking quick on her feet, she waited until the two rams were almost on her, ready to trample her into the muck. All sound vanished except for the blood pounding in her ears and her heart galloping in her chest.
Ashley gripped the broom stick until she lost all feeling in her hand, then pivoted out of the way at the last second as King barreled by. Using the garbage can shield as her own version of sheep horn, she threw her weight into his shoulder, flipping him on his side to the ground. His hooves flew up, one of them glancing off her thigh, but she didn’t have time for that because Gandalf was there, taking advantage of her distraction. There wasn’t time to do anything else but bring the stick down as hard as she could across his sensitive nose and brace herself for impact.
Gandalf put on the brakes, shaking his head from the way his nose smarted. He’d gotten in too close for her to do any real damage, plus she didn’t WANT to damage either of them. She wanted to get them safely into their paddock, and maybe, if she was really lucky, earn some respect from them.
