Tall, Dark and Deadly Books 1 - 4

by Lisa Renee Jones

  Opening the door she took in Marco’s jeans, a t-shirt, and a leather jacket, his chin-length brown hair a bit wild, like she hoped the man would be. His gaze raked hungrily over her body, lingering at her breasts, and then on the barely there lace between her legs. “Well now, cherie, you certainly know how to greet a man.”

  She curled her finger at him. “You ain’t seen nothing yet, sweetheart.”

  Marco sauntered forward, his eyes dark, the set of his mouth arrogant. He stopped beside her, again looking her up and down with penetrating eyes, lazy and slow, in his perusal.

  “Shut the door, cherie,” he ordered in a soft, authoritative voice that was both deep and seductive. “What is between us is not for de neighbors eyes.” He ran his finger slowly down the middle of her cleavage. “ Tres belle,” he said before stepping forward, and leaving her at the door.

  Gina shut the door and turned to watch him as he casually inspected her living room. There was an air of danger to Marco that turned her on, made her hot and wet and wanting. He was sex personified with a truly stellar ass, and thighs like steel.

  She wet her lips in anticipation, but didn’t pursue, not until she got a read on him. He turned to face her, leaning lazily against her fireplace, one elbow on the mantel. The look on his face told her he wanted her to come to him. She knew the look. He wanted the power, the ultimate control. She’d played the submissive role too many times to count. For this man, she would happily play it again.

  She tilted her head, studying him, wondering how he brought out the searing desire to please in her. Never before had she reacted quite so completely to a man.

  Dangerous.

  The word danced in her head, provoking her desire and her fears, all at once.

  She took pleasure in the heat of his smoldering gaze as he watched her approach. Stopping in front of him, she let her robe drop to the floor.

  His eyes were the blue of a perfect summer sky. He shrugged out of his jacket and flung it on the couch before sitting down. He stared up at her. “Strip for me, cherie.”

  She wanted more foreplay, to feel this man’s sexy hands on her body. “And if I don’t?”

  He stood up, stepping forward in a fluid motion, his stance predatory, his eyes glinting with intent. “Then I will have to do it for you.”

  Before Gina knew what he was going to do, he had wrapped one arm around her waist while using his free hand to rip off her panties. She gasped as his hand sunk between her legs.

  “Already wet,” he said making a disapproving sound. “You make my job so easy, cherie. I thought you would be more of a challenge.”

  She laughed in disbelief. “Say that after you make me come.”

  A slow smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “Have no doubt. Come, and come again, you will, and then you will beg for more.” He tangled his hand into her hair and dragged her mouth to his. “I will make you feel so good you might think you have died and gone to heaven, cherie.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Luke discovered Julie sitting in the dim glow of a lamp in front of the gas fireplace in his living room, wearing one of his t-shirts, with a big blanket he kept in a closet under her, and another over her legs. He found himself unable to move for the impact the sight had on him. A sense of rightness filled him. She belonged here with him, and he could easily get used to seeing her here and having her in his life.

  She seemed to sense him watching her and twisted around. “Hey,” she said softly, and he could hear the concern in her voice, the uncertainty.

  “Hey,” he replied, holding up her briefcase. “Got your things from the truck.” He set it on the hall table and walked toward her, forcing himself to go slow when he’d never wanted to rush so much in his life. He had to get a grip, to pull back, to give her a chance to let down those damnable walls he wanted to tear down.

  “That’s great,” she said. “So the truck hadn’t been tampered with?”

  “No. It was fine.” Luke sat down next to her. “How are you?”

  She wet her pale lips, her face scrubbed free of make up, her hair soft and shiny and freshly washed. She’d never looked so beautiful. “It wasn’t a random mugging or car jacking attempt back there, was it?” she asked, bypassing his question.

  “No,” he said simply, tucking hair behind her ear. “It wasn’t.”

  “You said there was a body, when you called Blake from the truck.”

  “I grabbed our intended attacker and his partner shot him.”

  Distress furrowed her brow. “Who was he?”

  “The body disappeared.”

  She stiffened. “Disappeared. Oh my God, Luke. This is…terrifying. Who did this? Who sent them? Judge Moore? This cartel leader?”

  “I don’t think it was Moore,” he said. “The man has too much to lose by the attention his wife and his divorce attorney dying would lend. And frankly, I can’t see the cartel doing it either. It brings attention to the judge.”

  “Maybe they think he’s a problem and want him out of the picture.”

  “Then they kill him,” he said. “That shuts him up. Getting him arrested makes him talk.”

  “So then who?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Someone who thinks we know something we shouldn’t or thinks we’re close to finding it out. Maybe the person Elizabeth called Dragonfly. Maybe someone we don’t even know about.” He pulled the cover away from her and eased her to her back, trapping one of her legs with his. “I’ve never been as scared as when I realized I’d left you exposed in the truck with a shooter on the loose. I could hardly breathe for fear I’d just made the worst mistake of my life.”

  She laughed but without humor. “You Walker men do the protect and serve thing well. I’m fine.”

  “Protect and serve?” he asked, pulling back to look at her. “Like you’re my duty?”

  “Everyone is your duty. That’s what you brothers do. You protect everyone. It’s what comes natural.”

  “You’re not my duty, Julie,” he said, amazed at how easily she dismissed what was between them. “Or I wouldn’t have felt like I was dying inside just thinking I might have lost you.”

  Her lashes lowered, dark half circles on the pale perfection of her skin. “Luke.”

  He caressed her cheek. “Look at me.”

  “I can’t,” she said, her bottom lip trembling.

  “Look at me,” he ordered, his voice still soft, but with a demand this time, and slowly she obeyed, letting him see the uncertainty only he seemed to create in her. “You think this is nothing, this thing going on between us, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Yes,” he insisted, teasing her lips with his, “you do. You know exactly what I mean. It’s not nothing and if that’s what want it to be, I should warn you right now. You matter to me, Julie, like I’ve never let any woman matter to me.” He claimed her mouth with his, unable and unwilling to hear her reply. No woman had ever had this power over him, this ability to hurt him, and he’d just given her more. He didn’t want her objections or her rejection. He wanted her acceptance, her passion, and some part of him knew she wasn’t ready to give it to him, not with words.

  Luke parted her lips, pressing his tongue past her teeth, tasting her with a slow caress.

  She moaned into his mouth, and the deliciously erotic sound had his cock expanding against his zipper, making him wish he’d done away with their clothes. Her fingers laced into his hair, giving him a tiny piece of her submission, so tiny, so far from all he wanted. She didn’t submit during sex, not even with him. Not in the past, but she had several nights before, and he wanted it again. He wanted that invisible sign of trust, of feeling something for him that she might not put into words, but showed him instead. With her body, her response to his touch, his kiss, his body buried deep inside hers.

  His hand slid down her back, under the shirt and around her ass before he caressed the slender dip of her waist, and cupped her naked breasts.

&nb
sp; She whimpered as he teased her nipple, her hips arching into his hand. He trailed his mouth down her jaw, over her neck, to her ear.

  ”I love those little sounds you make.” He shoved her shirt upward and she helped him pull it over her head, but Luke didn’t let her. He wrapped it around her hands and held them there, running his hand over her breasts, tweaking her nipple.

  “I can do a lot more with my hands free, you know?”

  “You can have them back after you come for me,” he said, his palm traveling down her stomach, his leg pulling hers open.

  “That’s a–”

  She gasped as he caressed and teased the silky heat between her legs. “There we go,” he said. “That’s exactly what I was looking for.”

  He licked her nipple and she arched her back, thrusting her voluptuous breasts higher. Luke sucked one stiff peak into his mouth, and sunk two fingers inside her.

  “Ah,” she panted. “I…Oh. I want to touch you.”

  “Not until you give me what I asked for,” he said, his lips moving to hers, his tongue tracing the seam of her mouth, his fingers stroking her inner walls in a slow back and forth motion, even as his thumb played with her swollen nub. “Not until you give me what I want.”

  “Just so you know,” she whispered. “I’m going to pay you back for this.”

  He smiled. “I hope you do.”

  “Oh I will,” she said, “and…”

  He let go of her hands and slid between her legs to suckle her clit. She tensed instantly and began spasming around his fingers. He suckled and licked and brought her to a complete release. The instant he felt her relax, she tugged at his shirt, and he fully intended to let her pull it off of him. Only she didn’t. She knotted it at his hands.

  He laughed and sat up on his knees, arching a brow. She was on her knees too, making sure the shirt was tightly nodded. “Sit back against the couch.”

  “You do know I still have my pants and my boots on? It would be easier to take them off with my hands free.”

  “I can handle it,” she said, shoving his chest. “Sit back.”

  Who was he to argue with the hottest woman in the planet? He sat back against the couch, between the coffee table and the love seat. She shoved the coffee table away, those lush breasts bouncing with the movement, and he was pretty sure he was about as hard as he’d ever been his entire life.

  She tugged at his boot. Again, her breasts bounced. He groaned. “You know you’re driving me crazy, don’t you?”

  “You earned it,” she reminded him.

  Yes, he supposed he did, but with Julie, she always gave as good as she got. He reminded himself it was one of the things that made her so damn hot. Nothing was easy with her, but it was always fucking phenomenal.

  The instant his boots were gone she settled between his legs and caressed her way up his thighs. “Did I mention that your sounds of pleasure make me hot?” she asked.

  “Then I’m pretty damn sure you’re about to make us both hot.”

  A teasing smiled played on her gorgeous mouth. It had given him more than a few fantasies over the years and it was a mouth he knew could do some pretty amazing things. She bent over and pressed her breasts to his crotch, taking his bound hands in hers and sliding her lush curves up his stomach and chest until she urged his hands behind his head. Her breasts were now in his face and he captured one with his mouth, suckling it deeply, roughly.

  Julie moaned and held onto his head, rolling her shoulders forward in pleasure before pushing him back from her. “Stop,” she ordered, her blue eyes finding his. The connection was jarring in its intensity, the emotion between them far deeper than the erotic play of this game.

  For an instant, he saw that vulnerable side of her flash in her eyes before the sexy, sinful, confident woman claimed his mouth in a sizzling kiss, and then drug her lips down his neck. She kissed her way downward and the snap of his pants, the slide of his zipper, seemed to magnify and echo through the room.

  The instant her hand was inside his pants, adrenaline sent a rush to his head. Her fingers stroked the soft skin of his shaft, and then pulled the hard length of him free. She leaned and licked the pooled liquid at the tip and then suckled just the head of him into her mouth before tugging at his waistband.

  “You can keep the socks, but nothing else.”

  Damn, how he wanted to rip his hands free, and he could, but the desire to enjoy the woman in control gave him his own control, his own will to resist. By the time they’d worked together to free him of his clothes, he was thick and pulsing and all but going insane with the need for release.

  She bent over, sticking that gorgeous ass of hers in the air, wrapping her hand around the base of his cock. She looked at him, scraping her teeth over her lip.

  “Now what should I do?”

  “Witch.”

  “Tell me. Your wish is my command.”

  “All right then,” he said. “Suck me.”

  She smiled. “All right then, I will.” She bent down and cut him a taunting look. ”After I lick you.” She rolled her tongue around him and Luke moaned. She licked him up and down, and watching her was almost as good as what she was doing to him. She was driving him crazy.

  “Suck me,” he groaned. “You–” She took him into her mouth. Oh and how she took him. The woman knew how to please him, and she’d practiced plenty during that summer month they’d spent together. She sucked, and pumped, and used her hand, her lips, her tongue, until he couldn’t even hold his eyes open, the pleasure was so intense. He leaned back, his head on the cushion, and when he would have said ‘harder’ and ‘faster’ she was already there, and so was he. Release came over him, intense and ripping through him with biting, painfully good pleasure. Slowly, he relaxed, the tension in his muscles easing. Julie climbed on top of him and he tore his hands free, wrapping his arms around her and kissing her.

  “You know you drive me wild,” he said, “but not because of this. Because of you and us, and-”

  She pressed her lips to his, silencing his words, and he was certain it was because she didn’t want his confession, because he’d let her slip back into the sex goddess routine too quickly. But then she surprised him, and murmured, “I know.”

  He pulled back, forced her to look at him. “You know what?”

  Her lashes lowered, then lifted. “That it’s more than…me driving you wild or you driving me wild. I know.”

  They stared at each for several intense seconds before they were kissing again, wild and hot, a craving that had to be fulfilled. And when it shouldn’t have been possible, he was hard again, thick with need.

  “Let’s go to the bedroom,” he said, before he forgot that they needed a condom.

  She reached behind her, stroking his shaft. “I like it right here.” She started to lift herself and he stopped her.

  “Condom.”

  “I’m on the pill.”

  He went still at that, at the idea that she hadn’t been before but she was now, at the implications there had been someone else in her life.

  Her fingers curled at his cheek. “I’ve always been,” she said. “I’ve just never told anyone…until now.”

  What he’d thought was a sign that he meant nothing to her only moments before, now seemed like a gift. “I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to be inside you as much as I do right now.” He kissed her, and wrapped his arm around her, lifting her. She pressed him to the slickness of her core, before slowly inching her way down. When finally she settled fully on top of him, him buried inside her, they lingered, their mouths a breath apart, the energy in the room crackling with electricity and tension.

  He pressed her down, thrusting into her, and a slow, sensual dance began. It built into something fierce, something that made them one, neither of them in control. Passion built until they were frantically touching, kissing, moving, and when they reached the edge of pleasure, she went first, and he followed.

  They collapsed into each other, and clung together. No word
s were necessary.

  ***

  A long time later, Luke lay with Julie on their backs in front of the fire, pressed together.

  “You said you were on the pill as an extra precaution,” he said, the subject weighing on his mind. For the first time in his life, he was thinking of what settling down, what a wife and kids might be like.

  “Yes,” she said after a long pause.

  “Because you don’t want kids?”

  “I…no.” She rolled to her side, away from him to face the fire. “I don’t.”

  He turned to her, hugging her. “Because you had a bad childhood.” It was the only thing that made sense. She volunteered for children’s events, she worried about the children of divorces.

  “Too often parents let their kids down.”

  “You aren’t your mother.”

  “No,” she said. “But there are plenty of kids I can help who have parents like mine, or kids like the ones tomorrow night is about, who need me and people like me.”

  Damn. Tomorrow night. This was not the best time to talk about this, but he wasn’t sure there was a better one either. “Let’s talk about tomorrow,” he said, sitting up and pulling her up with him.

  “What about tomorrow?”

  His gaze slid over her breasts and he felt the stir of his body. Luke grabbed the shirt she’d tossed aside. “I can’t complete many coherent sentences when you’re this naked and this gorgeous.”

  She didn’t respond and he could see the concern in her face. She tugged the shirt over her head before repeating, “What about tomorrow?”

  Luke grabbed his pants, bypassing the boxers he couldn’t locate to pull them on before he sat down on the couch. “We have to assume that tonight was a hit on one or both of us, and that they will come for us again.”

  “So you want me to do what? Go into hiding?”

  “Yes,” he said, in no uncertain terms. “I want to keep you here or take you underground somewhere.”

  “You need me to get to Judge Moore and the cartel. And I need my job.”

  “Surely, you have enough success to be allowed to work off-site for a while.”