by Lili Valente
“She is a tyrant,” Caitlin agrees affectionately. “Good thing she’s cute.”
“Crazy cute,” Sam agrees, smiling as Caitlin runs across the grass to scoop Juliet up in her arms, blowing kisses against her daughter’s cheek until Juliet giggles.
Sam has grown closer to all my family in the past year, but she and Juliet have a special bond. They are kindred spirits, strong girls who know what they want and aren’t afraid to let the world know about it. Though Sam has more patience. Most of the time.
“You didn’t tell her did you?” she asks, tilting her head to look up at me, the setting sun making her eyes sparkle, taking my breath away.
“You look like a movie star right now. I swear you do.”
Her smile shifts to the right. “That means you didn’t tell her.”
“I figured it could wait,” I say, kissing her forehead. “I don’t want to ruin the day for her. She’s going to be sad to see us leave, even if it is only for four months.”
“I know.” Sam lifts her chin, bringing her lips closer to mine. “But if we don’t have our adventure now, we’ll have to put it off for another twenty years.”
“Not true,” I say, kissing her, loving that she tastes like sunshine and happiness, exactly the way a bride should taste on her wedding day. “When they’re teenagers, we could leave the kids with Caitlin and Gabe for a few months and sneak off. Teenagers suck anyway.”
Sam smiles. “That’s why they need parents around, to keep them from sucking. And I’m sure Caitlin and Gabe will be busy enough with their own obnoxious kids.”
I bring my hand to her flat stomach, still finding it hard to believe our baby is in there, growing bigger every day. “I can’t wait until I can feel her kick.”
“Or him,” Sam says. “It might be a boy, a boy as gorgeous and wonderful as his daddy.”
I shake my head. “Trying to butter me up so you’ll get laid tonight?”
“Oh, I’m getting laid tonight,” she says, eyes narrowing as she grins. “I have a letter from the doctor saying it is completely fine for us to have sex. I went to her office this morning and made her write it out, even though she thought you were crazy for worrying.”
“I’m not crazy,” I say though I’m secretly relieved. It’s been hell keeping my hands to myself the past week since we found out. Unexpectedly, knowing Sam is pregnant with our baby has given me a hard-on that won’t quit.
“You are crazy,” she says, hand drifting down to pat my ass. “But also very, very sweet.”
“Are you fondling my ass in public?”
“Yes,” she says, still grinning. “I’m allowed to do that now that everyone knows we’re married. It’s one of the perks. At least for the first year. Public butt fondling is forgiven if you’re a newlywed.”
I slide my hand around from her belly to her bottom, fighting to keep my body from responding too obviously to her closeness. “I didn’t know that. I like that perk.”
“I thought you might, but I—”
Sam doesn’t get to finish her sentence before Juliet collides with our knees, wraps her chubby arms around our calves, and howls, “Cake, pease cake, pease cake!” in such a pitiful way you would think the kid hadn’t been fed in a month.
“Yes, Jules, I’m so sorry,” Sam says, scooping Juliet into her arms with a laugh. “It is past time for cake. Let’s go get some. Right now.”
“Yay! Cake!” Juliet’s tears vanish, replaced by a big grin that makes her blue eyes sparkle just like Sam’s.
I stay where I am for a minute, watching my wife carry my niece across the grass to the small tent where our wedding cake sits waiting to be cut. The way Sam holds Juliet so naturally, slung low on her hip with a hand cradling Jules’ diaper-clad bottom, she looks like she was made to be an aunt, a mama.
She looks soft and sweet, but I know she is also a fighter and a survivor. I know she is as strong as she is tender and that I don’t have to be afraid that life will break her again, not as long as we’re together. And there is nothing I need in the world aside from that.
Aside from the one I love.
Halfway across the lawn overlooking the ocean, where the sun is setting slow, as if it hates to miss a moment of this perfect day, Sam stops and turns back to look at me and mouths, “I love you, too,” like she knows what I was thinking.
And I’m sure she does.
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A LOVE SO DANGEROUS.
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Gabe
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The blonde dances like a woman possessed—arms up, head tossing from side to side, hair flying, hips swiveling with a sensual abandon that has the men surrounding her twisting their necks to get a better look at her ass, but she doesn’t seem to realize she’s causing a commotion.
Or if she does, she doesn’t care. She isn’t dancing for the people watching. This dance is about her and the music. She’s feeding off every pulse of the bass, every eerie note the female singer croons about castles in the sky. The girl dances like this moment is all there is, all she needs, all she’ll ever have, and I know right then—I have to have her.
A second later I’ve dumped forty dollars on the table and I’m out of my booth, moving smoothly down the circular staircase to the dance floor, my double shot of whiskey forgotten. I ease off the last step and head straight for my girl, not surprised when the men and women in my way sense me coming and instinctively shift out of my path.
Over the past few months, I’ve stopped giving a shit about almost everything and I’ve started fearing nothing. One thing I’ve learned in that time is that average folks are scared of people like me. Humans are hard-wired to possess a certain degree of fear. Fear keeps us safe from predators. Fear keeps us out of the path of oncoming traffic and our fingers out of the flames. People who aren’t afraid are dangerous, unpredictable, like a field full of landmines you’re better off not trying to cross.
But I have a feeling my tiny dancer is the kind who enjoys danger.
I reach her as the bass line is escalating, thumping faster and faster, becoming a desperate, hungry pulse that fills the club and reverberates off the walls. Her hips keep time, wiggling in tight circles that make it impossible not to imagine her blond curls tumbling around her bare shoulders while she rides me, faster and faster until we both explode.
Judging by the expressions on the faces of the two meatheads in matching polos hovering behind her, the jocks were having similar thoughts, but when I move between them and the object of their desire, they step back. Their lizard brains can probably tell picking a fight with me wouldn’t end well, even if my biceps aren’t the size of watermelons.
Not sparing my competition another thought, I shift my focus to the girl’s flying hair and undulating hips and let go. I let go of everything—the residual irritation from the time I wasted with Shannon, the burning in my gut from my latest fight with my parents, the heavy gray weight of the undeniable things I drag around behind me every minute of every day, and the frustrated ambitions that hover around me like a poisonous fog. It all vanishes, leaving nothing but the girl and me and the music.
I’ve been dancing less than a minute when she turns—pivoting toward me and moving in close—and I know she’s felt it, the draw of two like-minded creatures, a pull a hundred times more powerful than the opposing poles of a magnet.
Some may say opposites attract, but when it comes to human nature, like craves like.
My girl shifts closer, so close the hair flying around her face lashes the bare skin below the sleeves of my tee shirt, leaving a pleasant stinging sensation behind. The smell of her—cedar and soap and darker, smokier things—fills my head,
ratcheting up my awareness. It’s an unexpectedly masculine smell, but I like it. It suits her, somehow. She might be smaller than almost every other girl on the dance floor, but her ferocity is evident in every hip swivel, in every confident thrust of her thin arms into the air.
By the time she fists her hand in my shirt, pulling me to her, I’m already halfway to being hard. Her curves pressing against me finishes the job, but she doesn’t pull away when my erection brushes against her belly. In fact—from what I can see of her pink lips between the flashing lights and the hair swirling around her face—I think she smiles.
A suspicion of a smile is enough for me to wrap my arm around her waist and lift her slim frame, shifting my jean-clad thigh between her legs.
She stiffens slightly as I urge her closer, until every roll of our hips sends my thigh into intimate connection with her heat. Her fingers claw into my shoulders and I catch a glimpse of her full bottom lip trapped between adorably jagged teeth. She sighs and throws her head back, giving me a glimpse of her pale throat and a jaw so delicate I could fit it in one hand.
Her head snaps back up a moment later, her hair flying around both our faces, and I feel the last of her resistance vanish. She gives in to the moment, to the music, to the way our bodies fit so perfectly together it’s as if God made us to dry hump on the dance floor of the only semi-cool club in northern South Carolina.
I pull her closer, driving my fingers through her hair as our foreheads touch. Her nails dig into my skin so hard I can feel it through my tee shirt, her breath is warm and sweet against my lips, and the soft sound she makes as I tighten my fist in her hair is enough to make my skin go fever hot all over.
I suddenly can’t wait another minute to be alone with her. The music that was fuel for the fire is now a giant gnat buzzing around my head, keeping me from being able to hear the sexy little breaths my girl is making as our dance gets progressively more erotic.
“Let’s go somewhere,” I say in her ear—perfect seashell ear so sweet looking I can’t wait to trace each curve with my tongue. “Get out of here.”
She shakes her head as she pulls away, giving me my first good look at her face. “I can’t, I…” Her words cut off, replaced by a shocked expression I’m sure mirrors my own.
And I don’t shock easily. Not any more.
But finding out the wild, uninhibited stranger, who’s been grinding on my leg in public, is the most uptight good girl I’ve ever met—a girl so good she nuclear bombed her entire life to enable her ghetto family’s bullshit—is shocking stuff.
Still, I recover before she does, and smile.
“Caitlin.” I shout to be heard over the new song, a hip-hop number less pulsing than the techno number before it. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”
“You still haven’t seen me,” she says, swallowing hard. “This never happened.”
I smile wider. “Oh, come on. You seemed to be enjoying yourself. I was. Sure you don’t want to come back to my place?”
“No way in hell,” she says, her mouth going tight around the edges, the way it did when she’d turn in her seat during study hall and demand that my friends and I shut up, because “some people need to get their homework done before work, assholes.”
Back then, she was so uptight it was easy to ignore how pretty she was, but now that I’ve seen her dance, smelled her intoxicating scent, and had her breasts flattened against my chest as she writhed against me, I don’t want to ignore it. I don’t want to let Caitlin walk away without finding out if there’s more wild child hiding beneath her chilly exterior.
When she spins and hurries away without so much as a “fuck you,” I follow, stalking her across the dance floor.
I’d never pursue a girl who legitimately had no interest, but I know Caitlin wants me, and I want to feel her fingernails digging into my shoulders again, this time with no clothes between us. I want to feel her breath hot on my lips as she calls my name when I make her come, and come, and come again, until neither of us can hold a thought in our heads and there is nothing in the world but how good it feels to fuck.
Hot, sticky, sweaty, no-holds-barred fucking until the sun rises tomorrow morning.
I have my share of addictions, but this is my drug of choice—the hunt, the rush as I see how fast I can get the woman of the night naked and willing. It usually doesn’t take long. Ten minutes, fifteen—maybe an hour if she’s one of those sweet, Southern types who still gives a shit if a guy thinks she’s a “bad girl.”
As far as I’m concerned, there is no such thing as a “bad girl,” simply girls who’ve embraced their sexuality and refuse to feel shame about it, and those who haven’t. But, if we must call women who like to come with a variety of consenting partners “bad girls,” then I’m a fan.
Bad girls are one of my favorite things and—despite what I know of Caitlin’s past—every second of that dance assured me she’s my kind of woman. I’m the one pursuing her across the dance floor now, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find myself handcuffed to her headboard by the end of the night.
In fact, I’d enjoy it.
A LOVE SO DANGEROUS is
Available Now.
About the Author
Author of over forty novels, USA Today Bestseller Lili Valente writes everything from steamy suspense to laugh-out-loud romantic comedies. A die-hard romantic and optimist at heart, she can’t resist a story where love wins big. Because love should always win.
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When she’s not writing, Lili enjoys adventuring with her two sons, climbing on rocks, swimming too far from shore, and asking “why” an incorrigible number of times per day. A former yoga teacher, actor, and dancer, she is also very bendy and good at pretending innocence when caught investigating off-limits places.
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You can currently find Lili in the mid-South, valiantly trying to resist the lure of all the places left to explore.
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Find Lili at www.lilivalente.com
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Also by Lili Valente
Racy Royal Rom Coms
Royal Package
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Red HOT Laugh-out-Loud Rom Coms
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Bang Theory
Banging The Enemy
The Rock Star’s Baby Bargain
Learn more here
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The Hunter Brothers
The Baby Maker
The Troublemaker
The Heartbreaker
The Panty Melter
Click here to learn more
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The Bad Motherpuckers Series (Standalones)
Hot as Puck
Sexy Motherpucker
Puck-Aholic
Puck me Baby
Pucked Up Love
Puck Buddies
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Sexy Flirty Dirty Romantic Comedies (Standalones)
Magnificent Bastard
Spectacular Rascal
Incredible You
Meant for You
Click here to learn more
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The Master Me Series
(Red HOT erotic Standalone novellas)
Snowbound with the Billionaire
Snowed in with the Boss
Masquerade with the Master
Click here to learn more
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Bought by the Billionaire Series
(HOT novellas, must be read in order)
Dark Domination
Deep Domination
Desperate Domination
Divine Domination
Click here to learn more
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Kidn
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(HOT novellas, must be read in order)
Filthy Wicked Love
Crazy Beautiful Love
One More Shameless Night
Click here to learn more
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Under His Command Series
(HOT novellas, must be read in order)
Controlling her Pleasure
Commanding her Trust
Claiming her Heart
Click here to learn more
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To the Bone Series
(Sexy Romantic Suspense, must be read in order)
A Love so Dangerous
A Love so Deadly
A Love so Deep
Click here to learn more
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Fight for You Series
(Emotional New Adult Romantic Suspense.
Must be read in order.)
Run with Me
Fight for You
Click here to learn more
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Lover’s Leap Series
A Naughty Little Christmas
The Bad Boy’s Temptation
Click here to learn more
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The Lonesome Point Series
(Sexy Cowboys written with Jessie Evans)
Leather and Lace
Saddles and Sin
Diamonds and Dust
12 Dates of Christmas
Glitter and Grit
