Love Struck Bad Boys - 3 Novel Box Set

by Amber Burns

  “I figure the next time I’ll see you is my walk down the aisle.”

  “Getting cold feet?”

  He laughs. “Just the opposite. Iris has got me running around to worry about cold feet. Between her and Rochelle, I’m wearing out all my shoes.”

  “Well, you certainly look content.” And he does. It’s that glow that I want, the glow of family fulfillment radiating off of me for others to notice, the way I’m noticing in River.

  “Not complaining. Take care, A-man.” We bump fists and he nods his farewell to Vanna.

  “A-man?” she echoes when River clears the door.

  I shrug, a silly grin pulling my lips, my hands reaching out to haul her into my arms. I kiss her and dip her back, our mouths mashing, all teeth and tongue and mess, but Vanna clings on to my neck and completely opens up for me and it’s the most beautiful thing we’ve made yet.

  “Mhm, are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I mumble around her throat, my nips leading me across her collar, back up her throat to her chin and another searing kiss.

  I break our latest lip-lock and sweep Vanna off her feet. Finally I get the chance to observe her dress aloud.

  “My aunt chose it for me. She wouldn’t take a ‘no’.”

  I chuckle. “I can imagine.” From what I’d seen, for once, I can’t blame Vanna for her gullible, easily persuasive and people-pleasing nature.

  I’m kissing a trail starting at her ankles, working up her calf and sticking my head under the white tutu-skirt thing covering her –

  I pause and groan. “Vanna, you’re going to kill me.”

  She lifts her skirt, finding my eyes. “A fucking thong? Really? Your aunt?”

  Blushing, she nods furiously, releasing the skirt and leaving me to stare her lower half.

  I munch her mound straight through the black triangle covering her mouth. She yelps, hips thrusting forward at my contact, and the panting I love floating down to me.

  “Amos, ohh,” her hands, searching out my head, is rubbing my scalp in encouraging circles. “That’s, ahh, w-wonderful…”

  I’ve had enough. I want to taste her, not feel the hard press of her swollen clit or get a teaser of her juices soaking a spot of her crotch; I want at her.

  I fluff out of her skirt, moving back on my haunches to remove the skirt with her help. The thong comes next. I hook it around my fingers and stretch it, keeping my eyes on her.

  “I’m going to buy more of these and you’re going to model for me, but right now,” I toss them aside, leaning in front of her pretty pussy. “Right now I’m going to feast on you, baby.”

  I inhale her, my nose brushing her clit, tongue stroking her walls, searching for that special bundle of nerves. When I can’t find it alone, I add my fingers, two stretching her and freeing more of her tangy secretions.

  She comes quick; too quick for my taste as I rush to catch her juices, cleaning her and raising to give her a kiss, wrapping her tongue around mine letting her enjoy the experience of herself in my mouth.

  So much for talking.

  The only talking I want to do is the kind where I answer her mewls, wails and moans with my grunts and groans.

  Oh, baby.

  I’m painfully hard. I move away to free myself of my clothes.

  I didn’t prepare a condom, not expecting to have Vanna, bottomless and spread out, looking ready for round two in our hotel bed. I say as much once I’m over her.

  She ghosts her fingertips over my lips. “It’s okay. I said I’m on the pill.”

  “Right,” I look down, cock in hand, angling my head to her cunt when I pause. “By the way, I’d love nothing more than to fill you up and see you pregnant with my kid. Just saying,” and then I unsheathe myself in her, not sure which action earns that delightful gasp, my cock or my long-secreted confession.

  “Amos!” she wails my name on release, testing the walls with that cry, and bringing me bursting out of my body and spiraling down right alongside her. My thrusting slows and then stops all together. I roll over, carrying Vanna with me, turning us around so I don’t crush her.

  That’s when I notice she’s still half-dressed.

  I chuckle, my eyes drooping. When I wake, Vanna’s sleeping over my chest, her hair spread out and her lips pressed to the edge of one of my wing tats. I smooth the hair from her face, watching her make a weird, exceptionally cute face. I fall asleep keeping vigil over her.

  Next time it’s my turn to be surprised by Vanna, her dark eyes on me, finger tracing my lips. She replaces her digit with her mouth. I groan, helping her slide up my chest, pushing our lips closer together.

  I realize her nipples, hard and bared to me, are rubbing my chest in a delectable, cock-twitching way.

  “When did you?” I murmur around her seeking, demanding mouth.

  “When you were asleep,” she whispers back, kissing me silent.

  She’s around me before I’m up for air, rising up over me, taking my cock like a fucking sex queen. Up and down, she rides my shaft, bringing us to climax one after another, yet the closest we’ve come together.

  My arms are ready to catch her as she snuggles against me, resuming her position over my chest, hands massaging my pecs, head buried in the pillow beside me.

  “Why were you in the desert?”

  “For AD,” I feel her confusion and remember, in my lust haze, who I’m talking to. Dropping the leatherneck lingo, I say, “Active duty.”

  She rises up slightly. “You’re a soldier?”

  “Ex-Marine, actually, and yes,” I’m smiling. “Does that make me ineligible?”

  “No.” Vanna swats me, her head dropping back down. “It’s just I realize I know so little of you. Even something as important as you being a former Marine...” Her despondence is staring me in the face, and I’m right there with her.

  I sober up pretty quickly. She senses the change around me. And once I have her attention I say my piece.

  “Ditto, babe,” I kiss the V between her brows, glad to see the knot loosening and fast. “But, you know, we can have all our lives to learn about each other.”

  “I don’t… I guess,” she finishes off, gaze holding me. Putting it like that is a tall order of expectation, and for two people who’ve known each other for two weeks I don’t expect her to wrap her arms around me, kissing all the doubts and the worries away.

  Vanna bites her lip, and I’m waiting for the blow. The part of me that screaming at me to have shut my mouth is also the part that falls flat on his face. “I skipped my morning pill.”

  And it is morning. I clue into the light trying to seep through our thick room curtains.

  More importantly, it’s the best stand-in proposal or vow, the best promise we can give each other.

  “Let’s start with today then.”

  “Today,” she murmurs, accepting my kiss, making it her own and then forcing me to finish what I started for a third, equally rambunctious round.

  Much later when we drag ourselves out of bed, into a shared shower – where we almost get distracted again, Vanna is answering the door, in the crazy get-up picked out for her aunt.

  I’ve already promised to buy her a change of outfit on the drive to Atlanta as soon as she’s confirmed she’s tagging along for the long haul.

  “Vanna?”

  I stir at her name from an unfamiliar, distinctly male voice. Rousing from the bed with my charged cell and missed calls from Iris, Wes and Violet, I lean behind Vanna, arm round her middle to see who’s messing with my girl.

  Vanna’s reassuring smile eases my flared up tension. “Brody, this is my boyfriend, Amos. Amos, Brody, a high school friend.”

  The name sounds way more familiar than the boyish face or the mismatching baritone greeting me.

  “We’re celebrating our two-week anniversary,” Vanna replies smoothly to Brody’s inquisition; a throwback to the time where I told our Pearlwater lake guide we were celebrating our one-week then.

  “That’s great,” this
Brody makes the same uncomfortable expression as that guide did too to our news. “Sorry to have bothered you. I guess someone up front made a mistake with rooms. Yours was marked in the already checked-out category.” Around him we see the hotel room service cart.

  “No worries, man. You just caught us on our way out now.” We step out in the hall, Vanna says her goodbye and hand-in-hand we hit the lifts where I take the opportunity to draw Vanna into my arms and kiss her for that two-week comment.

  “Why did I get a strange sense of déjà vu back there with that guy’s name?”

  “Oh, Brody.” My girl’s got a mischievous, un-Vanna glint in her eye.

  “Spill, babe, or endure my sweet, slow torture to the truth.” I nip her chin to make my point and she giggles, suddenly exceptionally shy.

  “Remember asking about my first…?”

  It dawns slowly. Brody’s lucky the lift doors open on the ground floor.

  “It really was mutual.” Vanna is saying through the lobby, hand locked in mine.

  “Whatever. What are the chances your ex is here and of all the hotels?” I blow an angry, shallow breath out. “He’s not the guy you were marrying – ”

  Vanna’s shaking her head. That’s a negative.

  Cool it, Amos. Just what she needs now, a jealous boyfriend.

  I try to calm down. I don’t want Vanna to run now. I have so much to give her, and this ugly side of me doesn’t count.

  Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale.

  Too focused on controlling my rising emotions, I’m thrown for a loop when Vanna tugs me back, slips in front of me, leans up and kisses my jaw, a cue for me to make it easier for her to touch my lips.

  PDA, even a light variant, Vanna’s really changing and, checking to make sure she’s smiling, I know it’s a positive change, not for me, her parents or siblings or anyone else, but for herself.

  “I know we made a promise to take things at our own pace, in whatever order that takes us,” as I speak I notice Vanna bringing a hand to her stomach, a knowing smile connecting us, “but let’s make another promise. From here on out we’re sharing past without judgment, present with all the joy and love in our hearts, and, no matter what it brings us, future together.”

  The Rockstar’s Obsession

  A Love Struck Bad Boys Romance

  By Amber Burns

  Copyright © 2016 by Amber Burns

  & Scarlet Lantern Publishing

  All rights reserved.

  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.

  This book contains sexually explicit scenes and adult language.

  All characters in this work are 18 years of age or older.

  1

  Some things would never change.

  My New Jersey hometown looks as if the years hadn’t passed. A little more than sixteen years later, I wish I could say it’s the same for me.

  Tense Finger had changed that for me, for my bandmates, my friends. It had altered everything. Funny, a rock band could do that.

  Far from Hollywood’s easy fun, fast money and even faster living is Orange Compass, the antithesis to the fortune and fame after our band kicked off its multi-million debut.

  It’s like déjà vu central.

  There are the same neat row houses, the snowy lawns and driveways, and the welcome sign toting seven thousand some. I cross in through Main Street – unavoidable if you want to get from the end of the town off the Garden State Parkway to the other end, to my destination.

  Finding parking isn’t hard. Slamming the driver’s side, I look up at the hulking front of the school building and face the memories showering over me no differently than the flurries pouring from the heavens.

  “Let’s get this over with,” I’m mumbling, slamming the rental car close and trekking forward, seeking cover in the unlikeliest of places. Stamping my boots clean of fresh snowfall, I make for the office, the directions coming to me as naturally as breathing.

  For anyone who hadn’t studied at St. Bernard & Justice, the private school’s main campus could be a maze. Nestled in the outskirts of town, it allowed the school to expand its many features for its student body.

  Boasting two large football fields that together could give Fenway Park a run for its size, St. B & J also has two swimming pools, a state-of-the-art music auxiliary campus and a cafeteria that could feed the population of one thousand three times over if normal families could afford the ridiculous annual student fees.

  God knows what else they added since I kissed this halls goodbye two decades ago. Once, long ago, I had planned never to see the glass-and-dark wood, creepily sterile office again; having spent my fair share in the cushiony seats waiting to be disciplined by the vice-principal.

  My hand clenches a little longer than necessary on the handle of the office’s entrance. I inhale through my nose, and exhale hard and fast tugging open and stepping into the office.

  Greeted by warmth that banished all thought of the dismal weather outside, I ignore the teasing lull of falling for the spell pulsing in the room from the optimal central heating to the brilliant smile from the office administrator.

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  There’s a glint in her eye and she’s slowly rising out of her chair, hands consciously moving down her front. I peg her to be about another decade off me, but that doesn’t stop her from holding that wide smile, probably her idea of putting me at ease. Too bad it’s got the opposite effect.

  “Yes.” I approach cautiously, stiffly.

  I’m hoping I’ve imagined the whole thing. Yes. She isn’t staring at me and she’s definitely nowhere near close to wiping off the drool from her mouth. No if she’s looking it’s for another reason.

  I chalk it off to being underdressed.

  On my way to LAX, it hadn’t occurred to me to stop by a store and pick up a hat and some mitts, maybe trade my leather jacket for an actual coat. I know my dark, floppy hair is wet and curling about my ears from the snow. I shaved before I left home, but all I have to do is brush a hand over my jaw to confirm the shadowy bristles. And considering I didn’t get any shut-eye on the connected flights into town, my eyes have to be bloodshot. That and my contacts feel grimy in my sockets and I’m blinking too much for my own good.

  Fuck.

  I’m a walking mess.

  That I blame on the nerves. One call and two days later I’m standing in Orange Compass, clearing out my schedule of movie premieres, press conferences and a live V-Day performance. No one, especially me, had been happy about it.

  And why the hell would I be happy about it?

  I had nothing and no one left in this place. Well, almost nothing and no one.

  “I’m here to pick up Lolinda Lopez. She’s supposed to be here after school.”

  The office marm nods and takes her sweet time sitting back and consulting her computer. It takes her that much longer as she divides screen time with occasional glances up at me.

  “Ah yes, Lola’s here. She’s got a meeting with her counsellor. They’re done at five – that should be soon.” She’s smiling at me freely once more, palm tucked under her chin, bright red nails drumming a beat over her cheek. “You look familiar… How are you related to Miss Lopez?”

  I bet I do. All you need to do is type my name in that computer of yours…

  Out loud I say, “I’m a family friend and her godfather, ma’am. Mr. Lopez asked me to stop by.” I don’t add Lola’s father gave me no choice, calling me nearly three thousand miles away to do that job…and more. I have yet to find out what the more is. “I’ll wait outside for her then.” I thank her and peel out of there.

  I am not sure what’s got me weirded out more, her failed attempt at seduction or the attention she’d given me. Of all five years the school, I hadn’t once been given that sort of
care, dedication.

  The last office administrator I recall had abhorred me. My office visits were so frequent she once called ahead when I hadn’t done anything, pulling me into the vice-principal’s to sort it out.

  Guess some things have changed.

  I scowl at both thought and memory, chasing them back into the recesses of my mind as I pause in front of the counsellors’ offices. For a student body this large, I never understood the reasoning behind only two counsellors alphabetizing the students by their last names and splitting the group into half amongst them.