A Dirty Wedding Night

by Jaine Diamond

  I had no words.

  No. Fucking. Words.

  I’d never seen so much of Maggie before. Couldn’t believe how much better the flesh was than my imagination, and I’d spent a helluva lot of time imagining her.

  I drank in her petite curves, the soft swell of her breasts, her hard nipples a dark, dusky pink as her chest rose and fell with the force of her uneven breaths.

  Then I swallowed, hard, and ground my teeth. I shoved my hands in the pockets of my jeans.

  Had to, or I was gonna grab her, slam her down on the bed and devour every inch of that gorgeous smooth skin.

  “Guess I should take this off too.” She plucked at the see-through lace of her panties and my dick achieved a new level of hard, kinda like reinforced steel. Then her finger touched my chin, guiding my eyes up. “Go fuck yourself, Zane.”

  “Okay,” I said. “If you’re into that, I can show you a few things.”

  She made a little choked noise, shaking her head in disbelief. Her eyes never left mine and it was still there, the raw and the rage, her jaw hardening like she was fighting the urge to literally bite my head off.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she hissed. “Is that all you ever want? Seriously. What. The. Fuck.”

  Then she launched herself at me.

  Maggie was a small woman, but it took me so off-guard, it brought me to my knees as she smashed her mouth to mine. I caught her in my arms, just barely, and her legs went around my hips as she kissed me with a fucking vengeance, all angry lips and teeth, her hands clawing at my neck, her fingernails digging in.

  Holy mother of fuck.

  Maggie was kissing me.

  I gripped her tight and kissed her back like my life, my very next breath, depended on it, my heart slamming a fucking dent in the wall of my chest as my brain completely spun out.

  All I could think was, if I fucked her right here on the floor, would she hate me for it?

  Because my gut was telling me to put her down… to let her go, to back the fuck off… that this wasn’t right, that Maggie wasn’t gonna be happy about this even if she started it… but my dick just wanted to make her scream and figure the rest out later, and my dick was a bull-headed prick.

  I caught my teeth on her bottom lip and when she gave up a ragged gasp, my tongue plunged into her like a heat-seeking missile. I tasted her like I’d wanted to do for fucking years, desperate to have her, any way I could get her, angry, clawing at me, I didn’t care.

  Then it hit me, and I almost gagged.

  The taste of liquor. Pungent and sour… revolting… and totally fucking intoxicating.

  And I dove right into it.

  I screwed my tongue into her mouth like I was tongue-fucking the neck of a bottle, sucking hard, the bliss of that taste and a brutal crush of memories smashing me in the back of the skull.

  Then I caught myself. I almost gagged, again.

  I ripped myself away with such force I shoved her off.

  I spit out that bittersweet taste on the carpet and mashed the back of my hand to my mouth.

  Yeah… not the best thing to do after kissing a woman. Kinda ranked right up there with laughing at her and throwing up.

  I saw it in her gray eyes… the exact moment she started hating me. Or at least, hating me more than she already did.

  Her face shut down and she wrapped her arms around her chest as she sat there on the floor staring up at me, next-to-naked in her lace panties, looking small and so fucking vulnerable it gutted me.

  “You’re so full of shit,” she whispered.

  “Maggie—”

  “Get out.”

  And for once, there was no arguing the point. I was the world’s biggest asshole, and now she had proof.

  I got the fuck out.

  Get Dirty Like Us

  Sneak Peek: Dirty Like Brody

  Dirty Like Brody (Dirty #2)

  He was all she ever wanted. Then she broke his heart…

  As longtime manager of Dirty, the hottest rock band on the planet, gorgeous and brooding Brody Mason has had his share of beautiful women. Yet the only one he’s ever wanted is the one he never had—the one who tore his heart out.

  Beautiful and elusive Jessa Mayes appears to have it all. Talent, money, and a glamorous life. But she also has a secret. Six years ago, she ran away—from her dream career as a songwriter with Dirty, and the only man she’s ever loved—without telling anyone why.

  Now Jessa’s doing the one thing she swore she’d never do. She’s coming home—to be a bridesmaid in her brother’s rock star wedding… and face the mistakes of her past.

  It won’t be easy.

  Love this intense never is.

  DIRTY LIKE BRODY

  PROLOGUE

  Jessa

  I will never forget the first time he spoke to me.

  I remember everything, right down to the music that was playing on the Discman I had tucked into the back of my jeans. (It was my brother’s new Chris Cornell album, and the song was “Can’t Change Me.”) When the bullies started taunting me I turned it up, but I still heard what they said.

  I was eight years old, and the last girl on the playground anyone would ever guess would grow up to become a fashion model. Every day I came to school in clothes that were worn and usually a couple sizes too big for me, hand-me-downs, either from my brother or from Zane. When I wore their baggy clothes, the other kids didn’t spend so much time telling me how skinny I was.

  But they said other things.

  I was sitting alone in the playground after school when it happened, up on top of a climbing dome; my brother and his friends called it “Thunderdome” because they’d made a game of dangling like monkeys from the bars inside and kicking the crap out of each other. The bullies were standing at the bottom of Thunderdome, so I couldn’t even run away. They were big bullies. Fifth grade bullies, and while my brother, who was in seventh, would’ve intervened, he wasn’t there.

  “How come you got shit stains all over your jeans?” the dumb-looking one asked me, leaning on Thunderdome and looking bored. “Doesn’t your mom do laundry?”

  “You got a shit leak in those saggy diapers, dork?” the even dumber-looking one asked, and they both snorted.

  “Yeah, she’s so full of shit her eyes are brown.”

  “What’s wrong, baby dork? You gonna cry?”

  No. I wasn’t going to cry. My brother had a lot of friends and while they were never that mean to me, twelve-year-old boys could be relentless. I knew how to hold my own. I’d cry later, at home, when no one could see me.

  Besides… the new boy was coming over, and I definitely wasn’t crying in front of him.

  He was in seventh grade, but the rumor was that he was thirteen or even fourteen and had flunked a grade or two. Obviously, he was super cool. He wore an actual leather jacket, black with silver zippers, like rock stars wore. He smoked outside the school, hung out alone at the edge of the school grounds, and spent more time in the principal’s office than the principal. I never knew what he did to get in trouble, but whatever it was, he did it a lot.

  The other kids in my class thought he was scary. I just thought he was sad.

  Ever since Dad died, I knew sad when I saw it.

  The bullies saw him coming and they started getting squirrelly. I thought they’d run but he was there too fast, closing the distance with his leisurely, long-legged stride.

  “You guys’re so interested in shit, there’s some over here I can show you, yeah?” He stood with his hands in his pockets, his posture relaxed, as the bullies started going pale.

  I slipped my headphones off.

  “Naw, I don’t wanna—”

  “Sure you do, it’s right over here.” He toed the ground at his feet with his sneaker. The grass was still damp from a bit of rain in the afternoon and mud squished out.

  The bullies started shaking and sniveling, babbling apologies and excuses. There was a brief, almost wordless negotiation, at the end of which they ended
up on their knees in front of him.

  He hadn’t moved. His hands were still in his pockets.

  “Just have a little taste and tell me if it’s fresh,” he told them, in a tone that brooked no argument, squishing his foot in the muck again.

  Then he looked up, his brown hair flopping over one eye, and winked at me.

  I stared from my perch atop Thunderdome with unabashed, eight-year-old awe as the bullies bent forward, shuddering.

  He was going to make them eat shit!

  For me!

  I was ninety-nine-point-nine percent sure it was just wet mud, but those bullies were scared enough to believe it. And ate it, they did.

  He then told them to apologize to me, which they also did, eyes downcast and shaking, spluttering mud. One of them was crying, snuffling through his snot and tears. Then he told them to beat it and they ran away, blubbering and tripping over their own feet.

  I stared down at my savior as his unkempt hair fluttered in the breeze. He wore a Foo Fighters T-shirt under his leather jacket and his jeans were ripped, like mine. “You can go home now, you know,” he said, like maybe I was slow.

  I just sat there, picking dried mud from my jeans.

  “Aren’t your parents waiting?”

  I didn’t answer. I knew better than to answer questions like that.

  When other kids found out what happened to Dad they either made fun of me or worse, they felt sorry for me. And Jesse said not to tell anyone Mom was sick again. He said if they knew how sick she was, they might take us away from her.

  So I said, “I’m waiting for my brother.”

  He glanced around at the empty playground. “Who’s your brother? And why isn’t he here kicking those little shits up the ass?”

  “Jesse,” I said. “My brother is Jesse. He’s in detention with Zane.”

  He took a step closer, teetering on the edge of the sandbox. “Yeah? How come?”

  “They… um… got in an argument with Ms. Nielsen because she said I can’t come to school in dirty clothes. They do that a lot,” I mumbled, wishing maybe I hadn’t said all that, except he looked kind of impressed about the detention thing.

  He looked at my jeans; I’d gotten them muddy when I sat in a ditch to listen to music before school. I could pretend it didn’t hurt me if he said something mean about it, but that didn’t mean I wanted to hear it.

  Why didn’t he just go away?

  “Well, you can come down. Those little shits aren’t coming back.”

  I picked at the hole in the knee of my jeans, where my kneecap was poking through.

  He leaned over, resting his elbows on Thunderdome. “What’re you doing up there?”

  “Playing Thunderdome.”

  I knew how stupid it sounded when no one else was there. It wasn’t like I didn’t have any friends to play with when my brother wasn’t around, but they all had parents who picked them up after school. Anyway, I thought it might impress him. Thunderdome was outlawed by the teachers and we only played it after school.

  He stepped into the sandbox. “How do you play?”

  “It’s quicksand!” I squealed. “You can’t step in it!”

  “Oh. Shit.” He jumped up on the dome. “Almost lost a shoe.” He looked up at me and his hair fell over his eye again. Blue; his eyes were a deep, dark blue. He climbed to the top of the dome and sat across from me.

  Maybe he wasn’t making fun of me; he just didn’t know the rules of Thunderdome.

  “It’s okay,” I told him. “You’re safe up here with me. I’m the princess.”

  It was true; my brother and his friends always let me be the princess so I’d stay out of the way while they played, and sometimes they let me decide on the winner in case of a tie. But I figured it sounded more important if I left that out.

  He pulled out a cigarette and lit it with a shiny flip-top lighter that had been scraped and dented all to hell, and started smoking. His hands were scraped too, his knuckles split and scabbed over. His fingernails were too short, chewed all down into the nail bed, his cuticles all ragged and blood-encrusted. They were a mess. But his face…

  He was so… pretty.

  “What happened to your hands?”

  He didn’t answer. Just smoked his cigarette and looked out across the school grounds, his arms wrapped around his knees, watching as parents picked their kids up in the distance, along the road in front of the school.

  “A princess, huh?”

  “The princess.”

  “So who’s the prince, then?”

  “Don’t need one.”

  He looked at me. “Then who’s gonna save you if you fall in the quicksand?”

  “I will.”

  “What if you can’t?”

  “Then you can,” I said. “If you want to. But you might get stuck in there, too.”

  He stared at me for a minute. Then he smiled, slowly, and it was like the sun coming out from behind the clouds.

  “Then I guess we’ll sink together.” He took a couple of drags of his cigarette, his eyes squinting through the smoke. “You got a name, princess?”

  “Jessa Mayes.”

  “Jessa Mayes,” he repeated. “Don’t ever let those little shits talk to you that way, yeah? Next time they try, you make a fist, like this.” He showed me, clenching his fist until his split knuckles looked like they might burst. “And you hit ’em, right here, in the nose, as hard as you can. You do it hard enough, they’ll go down. Then you run away. You do that once, they’re not gonna bother you again.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not supposed to hit people. My brother says sticks and stones—”

  “Yeah?” He flicked the ash off his cigarette and spat on the sand below. “Well, your brother’s a pussy who doesn’t know shit.”

  I gaped at him.

  No one talked about Jesse like that. The other kids all thought he walked on water because he could play guitar.

  “I can’t make a fifth-grader eat crap.” My face was getting hot and I looked down at the sand. “Maybe you can. I can’t.”

  When I glanced up again, he was taking something off his jacket. He held it out to me. “Take it,” he said.

  I took it from his outstretched hand and examined it. It was a little silver pin shaped like a motorcycle. It said Sinners MC on a banner that wrapped around the tires. There was a woman on the motorcycle but she wasn’t riding it, exactly. She was facing the wrong way and reclined back, her back arched, shoving her boobs out.

  I was eight.

  I had no idea what Sinners MC meant, so it never occurred to me to wonder why he had a pin that belonged to an outlaw motorcycle club.

  “You wear that,” he said, glancing over my shoulder, “no one’s gonna mess with you.” He was looking in the direction of the school, his eyes narrowing as he dragged on his cigarette.

  “Smoking on school grounds again Mr. Mason?”

  I turned to find a teacher stalking toward us, one of those shit-eating bullies in tow, red-faced, looking anywhere but at us. “What will your parents have to say about this?”

  “Can’t wait to find out,” he muttered. His blue eyes met mine as he tossed his cigarette aside. Then he smiled at me again.

  I smiled back.

  He leapt to the ground, jumping over the quicksand and landing in the grass.

  “See you around, princess.”

  I watched him shove his hands in the pockets of his jeans and walk away. But it wasn’t true; I didn’t see him around. He never even came back to school after that day.

  Not for two whole years.

  Those bullies never bothered me again, though. None of them did. And I was pretty sure it wasn’t because of some pin. It was because of him.

  Because he’d made two fifth-graders eat shit for being mean to me, and no one wanted to eat shit.

  The next year, when a new girl in my class asked me about my motorcycle pin, she didn’t believe me when I told her where I’d gotten it. As if I’d made up the whole thing
about the badass boy in the leather jacket who saved me from a couple of bullies—then mysteriously vanished from school, never to return—just to impress her.

  But I knew he was real.

  I had his pin, and I had his picture. In the seventh grade class photo in the school yearbook he was standing right next to my brother, staring down the lens of the camera like he was ready to take on the world… and make it eat shit.

  His name was Brody Mason.

  He was the love of my life.

  If only I’d figured that out a lot sooner than I did.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Jessa

  I was late. For my brother’s wedding.

  And because I was late, the universe seemed to be conspiring to make me even more late. All three legs of my flight had been delayed. The last was the airline’s fault, the second, the fault of the weather, but the first… well, that was all me, so it was kind of a domino effect.

  Once I’d finally touched down in Vancouver—thirteen hours late—it seemed to take an unusually long time for my bags to come down the carousel, and by the time I’d gathered my things, piled them onto a baggage cart and steered my way to the exit doors, I’d been traveling for over twenty-four hours. More than enough time to ponder how pissed off my brother was going to be.

  I was weary and uncomfortably hot, sweating in my leather boots and faux fur jacket. I’d worn a thin T-shirt layered over a tank top and knit leggings with the jacket and boots, not sure what to expect with the weather. Vancouver was having a weirdly cold winter but the snow and ice was now gone, replaced with a faint, drizzling rain. The air that greeted me was cool and fresh but not cold as I walked through the sliding glass doors. And everything felt… familiar.

  Much more familiar than I thought it would.

  I took a breath and tipped my face up to the cloud-bruised sky. I glimpsed the peaks of snow-dusted mountains in the distance. And I felt an overwhelming sense of… joy.

  Aside from the fact that I didn’t actually want to be here, that I was carrying the burden of a gut-gnawing sense of dread—the kind that came with knowing you were about to come face-to-face with things you’d never really figured out how to face—it felt good to be home.