Strangers with Benefits (Siren Publishing Classic)
Page 1
Strangers with Benefits
After a theft at the neighborhood laundromat left Sidonie Clark without her phone and cash, she had little expectation of aid from the police. But the chance encounter that night was the beginning of ten orgasmic weeks in the arms of Officer Den McTavish, the gorgeous man in blue that answered the call to duty.
Sidonie assumed his kindness was based on his sense of honor and nothing else.
She couldn't have been more wrong.
Den never expected that Sidonie was single, there was no way a woman that smart and sexy was alone. Once he finds out that she is not only single, but attracted to him, he wasn't going to let anything get in his way, even if the opposition came from her.
It only takes a single night of passion for the pair to come to an agreement on a short term liason.
What would it take for them to become more than Strangers with Benefits?
Genre: Contemporary, Interracial, Rubenesque
Length: 96,100 words
STRANGERS WITH BENEFITS
Jennifer Willows
EROTIC ROMANCE
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
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A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK
IMPRINT: Erotic Romance
STRANGERS WITH BENEFITS
Copyright © 2015 by Jennifer Willows
E-book ISBN: 978-1-63259-547-8
First E-book Publication: July 2015
Cover design by Harris Channing
All art and logo copyright © 2015 by Siren Publishing, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
PUBLISHER
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
Letter to Readers
Dear Readers,
If you have purchased this copy of Strangers with Benefits by Jennifer Willows from BookStrand.com or its official distributors, thank you. Also, thank you for not sharing your copy of this book.
Regarding E-book Piracy
This book is copyrighted intellectual property. No other individual or group has resale rights, auction rights, membership rights, sharing rights, or any kind of rights to sell or to give away a copy of this book.
The author and the publisher work very hard to bring our paying readers high-quality reading entertainment.
This is Jennifer Willows’s livelihood. It’s fair and simple. Please respect Jennifer Willows’s right to earn a living from her work.
Amanda Hilton, Publisher
www.SirenPublishing.com
www.BookStrand.com
DEDICATION
This story is for the real life Officer McTavish. Thank you for being a wonderful example of what a public servant truly can be and thank you for all of the assistance that night so long ago. And a big thanks to a fantastic editor… Kristen, you made me sweat for it!
To all who seek, may thee find.
Happy reading!
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
About the Author
STRANGERS WITH BENEFITS
JENNIFER WILLOWS
Copyright © 2015
Chapter One:
An Officer and A Gentleman
Sidonie kicked the drum of her washing machine in a fit of anger.
But the thing was stronger than its wretched appearance belied and her poor toes paid the price. “Owwww! Fuck, fuck, fuggity-fuck-fuck!”
This was the third time she had to call her landlord about the aging washer in her condo in the last two months. The dryer had no real issues, other than the fact it was ugly and beat up as heck. But for some odd reason, she would get a week, maybe even a good month where the washer worked.
When it broke down, she was forced to call her landlord, who would send her slimy son, Rick, to her third-floor apartment, where he would tinker in the back of her washer all day and bum every bottle of water she owned. The man thought he could cover up the fact that, A) he had no idea what he was doing, B) he concealed two flasks in his pants pockets, and C) he was sniffing her underclothes when he found them stuck in the drum.
He kept taking all of the lacy ones, too.
Creep.
It was a Saturday and rather than spend what little free time she had standing around as if she had nothing better to do, she decided to use her phone GPS to locate a nearby laundromat.
Her children wouldn’t be back until a week from today, but they would need clean clothes when they came back from their father’s house at the end of spring break.
Sidonie thought about the small mountain of clothes her teenagers went through and sighed.
She had not only the school clothes, but their sporting uniforms as well. Katie was an intermural cheerleader with the local league and played several sports through the year, plus her son, Mark, was in every sport he could cram in.
At least it wasn’t football season, when she had to wash twice weekly to keep up.
She rallied on and tossed the bags one by one into the trunk of her SUV until she couldn’t even see out of the back. After a quick peek online, Sidonie found a place called Queen’s Laundry, and as a bonus it was only a mile from where she lived. She stopped at the ATM on the way and took out a hundred dollars, so she would have the cash to pay her hair stylist with on Monday afternoon along with the wash money.
Sidonie pulled in and noticed a teenage boy that reminded her of her son goofing off in the lot. She parked and began to drag out her bags before she rea
lized that she would have to carry them in one by one.
Instead of making a bunch of trips, she elected to grab two and drag them across the lot. She would just have to toss the bags in the washer, too. After she had lugged the first bags in, she took two more.
By the time she went for the last two bags, she decided to grab her phone and her money from the center console, so she didn’t have to come back out.
But when she stuck her hand inside the console, it was empty.
“Fuck!” She tossed the car, looking under every cushion and floor mat before she realized she had just been victimized.
Sidonie burst back into the laundromat and looked at the elderly attendant.
“Excuse me, ma’am?” Sidonie hissed at the lady behind the counter.
She was mad, but it wasn’t the woman’s fault Sidonie lacked common sense enough to lock her car, so she took a deep breath to calm down.
“Yes?” the stocky woman asked as she tugged the front of her bobbed wig.
“I need your phone.” She sighed and tugged on her baseball cap.
“Why, baby?” the woman asked, her wig slightly askew.
“Someone just broke into my car.” And she was only the dummy that made it easy for them to take her stuff.
“Here.” The woman handed Sidonie a cordless model that she assumed was white, but was grimy from age and copious use until the plastic was a mottled gray with illegible backlit buttons. The phone made her wish for a set of wet wipes and antibacterial soap.
“What’s the non-emergency number?”
“911,” the lady quipped.
Whatever. Dialing the emergency number seemed inappropriate, but she had no other number to call, so she dialed and waited for the operator to pick up.
“911, what is your emergency?”
“Someone broke into my car.”
The operator took basic information—the address of the place that she was located, her name, and the make and model of her car. When she was advised an officer would be there shortly, Sidonie sighed and hung up the phone before she offered the receiver back to the attendant.
“I’m sorry, honey.” The woman sighed and put the phone back into the cradle next to her seat.
“Don’t be.” Sidonie took a deep breath, a pitiful attempt to calm down. The whole mess was her fault. If she had only locked her door, this would have never happened in the first place.
Nearby, a woman about her age folded clothes rapidly. The other woman seemed like she was in a hurry for the amount of stuff she was trying to speed pack. There was at least double what Sidonie had brought with her.
Sidonie leaned over, grabbed two of the bags she had brought in with her, and stuffed them haphazardly in the trunk. She walked back in and grabbed the last two.
The quick folding girl pushed a rolling bin filled with clothes toward the door and Sidonie held it open for her to shuffle the crate out.
“Thanks.” The girl didn’t stop as she said it, just kept rolling past her and toward a white station wagon.
Sidonie let the door close behind her and watched the boy from the lot toss one garbage bag of clothing after the other into the station wagon. When they finished, Sidonie walked over to her trunk and stuffed her bags inside.
She knew he did it. But she didn’t have a lick of proof and the ghetto nature of the location was apparent enough that she didn’t want to find herself at the business end of a pistol after she made a hasty accusation.
No sooner than she pushed the last bag into cabin space, the station wagon pulled away and a police car pulled in.
When the officer got out of the car, she couldn’t see him for the lights on the front, just a thick silhouette that appeared to be all man. The cop had to be built like a brick house. “You just missed them.”
“The people that took your things?”
“Yep,” Sidonie said bitterly.
“I’m sorry. What was taken?”
“My cell phone and a hundred bucks.”
The officer whistled. “That sucks. Did they break in?”
“Yeah. It does. Suck, that is. And no, like a simpleton, I left the car unlocked while I was unloading.” Admitting her idiocy aloud to another human being stung.
“It happens to all of us. Okay, do you have location services on the phone?”
“Yes.” Sidonie rattled off the name of service that came with the phone when she bought it.
He stepped out of the light and she got a good look at the man.
Wow.
Sidonie was a black woman who had seen her fair share of police brutality against black people. In her opinion, the best officer was one that passed her by instead of riding behind her.
It was safe to say that she didn’t pay the police too much attention.
She assumed, at first glance, that he was a multi-ethnic white guy. One of those that was a quarter German and half Russian with a tidbit of Italian twist sort of thing. He had short hair, almost blue-black, but with a faint hint of a curl, that due to the length translated as a ripple of steep waves and it was perfectly combed in a part at one side.
But at the second glance, his eyes were dark, but they had an odd Japanese slant and tightness at the corners that made her question his ethnicity deeper than she had at first sight. He was a decent enough height, maybe four inches taller than her average five foot five. But he was well built for his frame, stocky with heavy muscles that filled his shirt sleeves nicely with little room to spare.
And his hands?
They were big and matched the rest of him. They let her know his frame was partly due to genetics with a bit of work on upkeep to keep his body fat low.
Sidonie was so caught up in his good looks and muscular build that she didn’t even hear his next question. She assumed he introduced himself as she shook his hand, but she didn’t hear a single word leave his lips, despite seeing them move.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Clark?” He looked at her as if he wondered about her sanity.
“Sorry, I went off there for a sec.” She must have left her brain at home. That was the only excuse that made a lick of sense.
“I see. Can you try and login for me?”
She gave him her work e-mail address, and if that one didn’t work, she could try the junk email she had that she used to sign up for stuff she wouldn’t read later, like newsletters and savings at stores that she liked to shop at.
Then she gave him her generic password and hoped it worked.
Bingo!
The login, thankfully, worked as she watched as the screen popped up with her prior phone.
“That’s not it. Try under accounts.”
He did and the screen showed her new phone number and the phone that was missing. The officer scrolled over for a location update.
But when the map popped up, it showed the same place they were located.
The elderly attendant walked over. “Excuse me, but the lady over there said she saw the boy throw something into the water behind those trees.”
The officer nodded. “No problem.” He walked over to the copse of trees and looked down.
Sidonie followed, more so because she felt lost and didn’t know what to do with herself than out of sheer helpfulness.
He flicked on the flashlight and stepped into what appeared to be a small creek that at one time would have been a deep tributary for the Cape Fear River, but now only contained a few inches of dirty water and a ditch that was taller than she was.
She watched his shoes clog up with the muck from the half-dry creek.
After ten minutes of slow strolling through the embankment, he shook his head. “I don’t see anything.”
“Uggh. I can’t believe this. The money was bad enough but the phone has half of my life on it.” It was a terrifying thought that the ass who stole her phone would have access to everything. She only had a swipe lock on the screen, so there was nothing stopping them from her information.
Her bank accounts.
Her employer se
rver login information, every bit sensitive and confidential.
Her dividend statements.
Her credit cards.
Payment information.
Her online shopping accounts.
They would even have her address.
Pictures of her and her children.
“That was some ghetto shit,” the officer said with a small smile. The statement surprised her. He was delightfully casual with a bit more flavor than she would have assumed at the look of him.
But she couldn’t deny the accuracy of his statement. “Yeah. I agree with you.”
“Just give me your ID and let me take down the information and I will write a report up so you can have your insurance replace your stuff.” She really didn’t want to give him her ID, but she had no choice.
The photo was taken on a really bad day, but the renewal came up and she procrastinated for much too long, and then she caught the flu. She was barely able to walk that day and in all honesty, she was halfway toasted on meds.
“That’s fine.”
The officer, dang, she wished she remembered his name, looked back up at her. “You can finish washing if you need to. I can bring this to you.”
Sidonie realized she must look like a fool, standing over the cop while he filled out paperwork.
“Sorry. I didn’t get to wash. I just put the clothes back in the car.”
He made a slightly surprised face. “Oh. How much would it cost to finish your laundry?”
“I don’t know, I just assumed it would be fifteen, maybe twenty bucks. The rest of the money I took out to have my hair styled.” Sidonie shrugged.
“Well, let me help you with the clothes at least.”
Sidonie popped the trunk open and grabbed two bags, even though she had no idea why. She didn’t want to spend another minute in the laundromat after this episode. But it was better than doing nothing and at this rate, her arms would look like Michelle Obama’s in no time, even if the rest of her was all softness and no muscle.