Jeanie scrambled to her feet. She turned and found herself now face to face with Calvin. He was awake. He had a gash across his chest and a murderous look on his face.
“Don’t hurt me!” Jeanie screamed at him panicking.
He laughed at her and hit her. The blow sent Jeanie onto the grass again, sprawling as a ringing sound filled her ears. “I’ve been dying to do that since I met you,” he snarled. “And now I’ll just kill you, so you cause no more trouble.”
He glared at her and grabbed her by the throat lifting her off the ground. Jeanie was choking. Her lungs were on fire and she could feel the world slipping away. As she dropped into darkness she thought of Ryan’s kiss.
Snow had settled on everything. It wasn’t deep, just a powdering that made the air taste of tin and everything look like a gingerbread Christmas scene.
Jeanie snuggled in Ryan’s arms, cozy in one of his pajama tops. They were in his cabin, lying in front of the fire, cozy and warm. She ran a finger over the scar on his chest where Calvin had sliced him with a claw.
“Are you still upset that Petersen and Snow survived?” Ryan asked his gaze still on the book he was reading.
Jeanie was amazed at how well he knew her. “A little. I mean they caused such a lot of trouble and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Why does Clan law say it’s all over when it shouldn’t be?”
“Because if you keep hitting back, eventually everyone will die. Revenge is for the stupid. Now let it go. You don’t have to fight them now, Jess and Wyatt are safe and we have Sun Valley. And it’s all thanks to you.” He put the book down and kissed her hand. “Anyway, I’m way too relaxed to think about something that happened a month ago.”
“Fine. So what do you want to do?”
Ryan grinned at her. “Come give me a kiss little girl, or I’ll feed you to the big bad wolf.”
“You’d have to fly me to New York to get that right,” she said going along with the joke.
Ryan sighed and pulled her up. Then he flipped her on her back and kissed her. Jeanie wound her fingers in his messy black hair. The kiss was deep and unhurried. Neither one was going anywhere. With practiced fingers Ryan began to unbutton his pajama top exposing Jeanie’s naked flesh beneath. He cupped her right breast and licked the nipple until it stood hard as a rock then he moved to the left. Jeanie closed her eyes and lay back feeling little explosions of what she liked to call happy hormones, rush into her system each time he touched her in a new place.
As his tongue slid down her body, peeling her out of the pajama top, Ryan stopped suddenly. Jeanie looked up.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Just nice to find no underwear in the way.”
His tongue continued moving down her, along her thighs and into her crotch. What had mornings been like before she’d met Ryan? Jeanie couldn’t remember. Not this good that was for certain. He busied himself in her, slipping his fingers in and out of her teasing her. Jeanie played it cool, letting him think he wasn’t driving her mad with desire. But eventually she couldn’t take it anymore and she pushed him onto his back.
“Your turn,” she said and began to kiss his stomach as she undid the ties on his pajama bottoms. They came loose and she pulled the fabric off him exposing him. He was hard and ready. But she also wanted to play so she took him in her mouth and sucked and massaged him until he groaned and pulled her off him
Jeanie straddled Ryan feeling him slip inside her as he had many times in the last month. They knew what they liked now, but each time was different, special. It was a dance where they made up the sequence of the steps each time and the rhythm changed as their moods fluctuated. It was heaven. Jeanie felt a wild abandon that she had never felt before. Ryan held her hips as she ground her pelvis against him making them both gasp with pleasure.
He flipped her onto her back and slid back inside. Now she wound her legs around him, holding him to her, feeling him go deeper and deeper. The moment rose and took them until neither could hold it back any longer and they melted into each other in bliss.
As Jeanie lay panting in Ryan’s arms, she looked up into his golden eyes and knew that she would never be lonely again. This was home, he was her Superman to her Lois Lane. Together they could take anything, after all they already had.
John
Bearly Saints IV
by
Becca Fanning
Meg Baker sighed as she watched the setting sun slip below the horizon. So much for all my planning, she thought, feeling the now-familiar twinges of fear and uncertainty that had plagued her from the moment she’d stepped out of the safe confines of Manhattan’s posh Plaza Hotel the night before. She had purposely waited until after Daylight Savings Time to leave, just so she would be able to take a bus that would both depart after ten p.m. and arrive in Nashville before dark.
“The best laid plans of mice and men,” she whispered, paraphrasing Robert Burns’ famous line.
Meg stared out at the passing landscape, so flat here in northern Tennessee but also so incredibly green. She had never ridden on a bus before, nor—to her knowledge—had she ever driven on an Interstate, beyond what it took to get from various airports to their city centers. Hers had been a life of chauffeured limousines, first-class trains, and first-class planes. Now, after almost twenty-four hours of seeing how the other half traveled, she was exhausted. And frightened, she had to admit, but also determined to see this through.
As a world-class violin soloist, she knew she could get a job playing somewhere, if only she could manage to not be recognized, and she’d thought Nashville would be a good place to start. It was a city of music, but music so unlike what she normally played, that perhaps she could manage to stay under her father’s radar for the time it took her to establish herself in another place, another career.
Good luck with that, her inner voice said, making her stomach clench yet again.
That little voice was right, of course. If her father did not already have a private investigator on her trail, she would be surprised. Actually, it wouldn’t surprise her to see her father waiting for her at the bus terminal in Nashville, but she hoped not.
She had been careful. Her father always, without fail, disappeared into his suite at nine-thirty sharp on any night she wasn’t performing. He was rarely alone and always left orders not to be disturbed. Having lost her mother at a very early age, Meg had no illusions about what her father did with the beautiful women who seemed to always be available to him in whatever city they were visiting, and she had learned early to cherish these rare nights of knowing her father was otherwise occupied.
Meg had her one soft bag and her old violin packed and ready to go, along with her new ID and the cash she had been stashing away over the past six months, thanks to various maids and bellhops who were only too happy to change the one-hundred dollar bills her father insisted she carry to impress people for much smaller denominations in exchange for a generous tip. Dressed in jeans, simple walking shoes, and a warm, serviceable coat she had purchased from one of the hotel maids, she’d slipped out of her suite just after her father had turned in for the night, taking the stairs instead of the elevator to the opulent lobby below. Before stepping out of the stairwell, she’d donned a plain, navy blue baseball-style cap, pulling her white-blond tail out the hole in the back—like she’d seen women on the streets do֫—then wrapping a scarf around her neck to both ward off the chill night air and hide the rest of her hair. She’d thought about getting a Yankee’s cap, but had opted for a plain one, since she was headed for Nashville and didn’t want to stick out as an out-of-towner once she reached her destination. Her eastern-educated, upper-class accent would be enough of a giveaway.
Walking the first three blocks, she’d timed her arrival at Carnegie Hall so the musicians would be heading out after an evening concert, because while most of them still wore their concert clothing, with a winter coat and a violin strung over her shoulder, she fit right in with the crowd of peo
ple looking for taxi cabs. She managed to flag one down, directing the driver to take her to the 42nd Street Port Authority Bus Terminal, where she quickly used cash to buy a bus ticket to Cleveland, Ohio. She had been researching the best way to get to Nashville and had opted for a Greyhound Bus ticket, with five stops between New York City and Nashville and two transfers. In Cleveland, she had bought a ticket only as far as Louisville, Kentucky, and from there, she purchased a ticket for the final leg to Nashville. She’d done something to change her appearance in both Cleveland and Louisville. In Cleveland, where she’d had almost a two-hour layover, she’d found a meal and traded her warmer New York coat, for a lighter, short jacket in a thrift store near the terminal. She’d also traded her blue ball cap for a brown one and her white woolly scarf for something lighter weight in a buttery-yellow.
She sighed, now, praying all her efforts hadn’t been for naught. The bus in Louisville had been delayed by a half-hour, which had put them right in the middle of rush-hour traffic coming south on I-65. Now instead of dusk, she was arriving in Nashville at full dark. She would need to find someplace to stay, and she didn’t really know where to start. She hadn’t dared research hotels in Nashville from her own computer, because she was certain her father would check there first. She’d found out about the bus schedule, thanks to a former classmate at Julliard, who’d come from Nashville originally and had let her play with his new iPad, when they’d had coffee together just before Christmas. (She’d hoped it was long enough ago, that her father wouldn’t think to ask Bryan about it.)
Meg straightened in her seat and strained to see forward. Traffic picked up as I-65 merged into another wide Interstate to pass through the city. They stayed on the new highway—I-24 this time—but then shortly took an exit ramp that wound down sharply to the right before making a left turn onto the city streets.
As the passengers around her began collecting their belongings, Meg tucked the Nashville tourist book she had found in the Louisville bus terminal into her jacket pocket. She then wrapped her hands around her violin case strap and pulled her small, canvas travel bag from under the seat in front of her. There was something quite liberating about being able to carry everything she owned in these two small bags. With the exception of her violin—which had been a birthday gift from her grandmother on her thirteenth birthday—everything she carried had been purchased recently, either from hotel maids or thrift stores. She owed nothing to anyone and was free to be herself for the first time in her life.
Whatever happens, I’m not going back to that life, she promised herself. With New York behind her and Nashville ahead, she took a deep breath and waited for her new life to begin.
“Fourth Avenue and Symphony Place, please,” she said to the driver, as she slipped into the back seat of a taxi she found waiting at the bus terminal and named the cross-street her friend from Nashville had given her, because she couldn’t think of anything else that would get her away from the bus station as soon as possible. It wasn’t only the fear of being followed that had her moving quickly. Unlike the New York terminal, the Nashville bus station seemed to be in a very dark, very remote part of town—definitely someplace she didn’t want to be alone at night. The taxi was cleaner than many in New York, though this one smelled of cigarettes, which rarely happened in the east.
“Dressed like you are at this time of night, you’ll prob’ly have better luck over on Broadway with that fiddle of yours,” the driver said, grinning at her.
“You may be right,” she said, opting to respond to the man’s friendly banter in like manner. “I just wanted to see the big house, first.”
He laughed. “It is big all right.”
You New Yorkers don’t know what friendly is, Bryan had always insisted. Now, where I come from, people actually make eye contact with strangers and say good mornin’ like they really mean it.
After only a few minutes in Nashville, Meg was already beginning to experience that friendliness for herself. She did remind herself that she couldn’t trust everyone—she’d be a fool to let down her guard completely with strangers—but that didn’t mean she couldn’t be pleasant to the people who were pleasant to her. And what better way to blend in? If she remained remote in this town, people would notice and wonder about her—and they’d remember her, when her father’s PI came asking about her. She doubted very much that anyone tonight would recognize her from either a description or a photograph someone working for her father might have.
In a surprisingly short time, they pulled up beside the forbidding structure of the Schermerhorn Symphony Center. It was beautiful, Meg thought as she alighted from the taxi after paying her fare with wrinkled small bills. The Roman columns marched proudly along the street, enclosing a beautiful outdoor space rather like a miniature Roman forum. It was small scale—everything she had seen of Nashville thus far seemed small after spending most of her life in some of the greatest cities throughout the world—but it had an unmistakable charm about it, and from Bryan’s iPad, she knew it housed multiple performance spaces for a variety of music styles. She sighed, wondering how one went about auditioning for a chair in Nashville’s Symphony Orchestra.
Curious, she turned right down the broad pedestrian way that ran along the front of the main hall. Trying not to think about her appearance, she hurried up the steps before she could change her mind and entered the lobby, where ushers were posted at the doors to the hall. One stepped forward to meet her.
“I’m sorry, miss, but the concert’s already started, and you can’t go in until intermission.”
She smiled. “That’s all right. I’m not here for the concert. I only wondered if I might buy a program?”
“Oh. Sure.”
He directed her to a small sales counter across the lobby, and smiling her thanks, she hurried over.
“One program, please,” she said to the young woman working the counter.
“Are you comin’ on another night, then?” the girl asked, as she made Meg’s change.
“I hope so. Thank you.”
Meg tucked the program into a pocket of her bag then made her way back outside. Can’t know the players without a program, she remembered her grandmother used to say. With a concert program, she would have both names and contact information. All she needed now was a library with computers, where she could set up an e-mail account and contact the symphony. She quickly retraced her steps down the grand stairway then turned back to 4th Avenue and turned right toward the lighted intersection ahead. Another block and she was on Broadway in the heart of Nashville’s nighttime music scene.
Like New York’s Broadway, the sidewalks were crowded with people enjoying the nightlife, but that was where any comparison ended. Besides being much shorter in length, the buildings that lined the street were no more than three or four stories high, their walls mostly red brick, though some had been painted outlandish colors. While the occasional modern tower could be seen from a distance, this old part of town, the entertainment district, was old and worn. Like an old lady, it used bright lights, decorations, and color, in an attempt to mask its wrinkles. Cowboy boots and hats seemed to be the style of choice for both men and women, and the facades of the various eateries and music venues boasted huge guitars, fiddles, boots, and hats, all outlined in flashing neon lights. Businesses ranged from boot and tourist shops to saloons and bars offering live entertainment from “real” country music to karaoke to hillbilly to honky-tonk. One or two even displayed banners bragging “smokers welcome.” She shook her head in disbelief and began to look for a place she thought she might safely enter on her own. Whatever the entertainment, she was hungry after her long trip.
Then she saw it. The sign on the narrow red-brick building across the street said “The Fiddlers’ Cave,” and she quickly moved to the corner, waiting for the light with the rest of the crowd before crossing to approach the place. The windows and door frames were painted a solid, stop-sign red, and the windows displayed vintage photos of what she assumed were famou
s fiddlers. She could hear the music pouring through the front door, which had been left open on what she assumed was an unusually balmy mid-March evening.
As she approached, she saw the welcome—to her— “no smoking” sign in the front window as well as a posted menu. They offered mostly bar food and one main dish, which changed daily. She checked Tuesday and decided she could handle a burger and fries this once, and headed inside.
Breakwater: Hyde (BBW Bad Boy Space Bear Shifter Romance) (Star Bears Book 4) Page 81
