by Lili Valente
It’s ridiculous, but also weirdly sexy, a combo that makes me giggle even harder.
“Stop,” I beg, choking on laughter. “Oh God, stop it, please. It’s so wrong.”
“But it’s about to feel so right.” He spins, catching me around the waist and pulling me into his arms. Before I can protest, his lips are on mine, and electricity dances across my skin.
“Say I’m your sexy bunny,” Dean murmurs against my lips.
“Never,” I say, a wicked smile curving them. “You can’t make me play this sick game, you bad, bad bunny.”
“Oh, but I think I can, jellybean,” he growls against my neck, nipping my skin with his teeth before he pulls away. “Want to make a bet?”
“A bet on Easter Sunday.” I tsk in disapproval as Dean shuts the bedroom door behind us. “That’s pretty scandalous. But I was on Santa’s naughty list last year, so I guess I’m up for it. What’s your wager, rabbit?”
“That’s ‘bunny,’” he corrects, stalking toward me as I inch closer to the bed. “Mr. Bunny, to you. And I’ll bet you all the candy in my basket that I can have you begging me to give you my hot beef carrot in ten minutes or less.”
I snort. “That’s the grossest thing I’ve ever heard. There is no way I’m going to beg you for anything, least of all your hot beef carrot.”
“You will beg me for my hot beef carrot,” Dean insists, slowly unzipping his suit, revealing the toned chest beneath. “I’m going to make you so desperate, you’ll be begging for my magic bunny stick if I tell you that’s what it’s going to take.”
“All right,” I say, pulse racing as he shrugs the suit off his shoulders. “Assuming you’re right, Mr. Bunny, what do you win if I give in and beg?”
“Oh, I’ve already won, woman.” He pulls me into his arms, cupping my breast through my silky Easter dress. “I get to spend the afternoon naked with my smoking-hot wife. It doesn’t get any more made-of-win than that.”
I link my arms around his neck, melting the way I always do when I look into his eyes and see how deeply I’m loved. “You are the sweetest, Mr. Bunny. I think I’ll keep you around until next Easter. Maybe longer if you’re lucky.”
“Good.” He tugs my zipper down and guides my dress off my shoulders, sending it sliding over my hips to pool on the carpet at my feet. “But like I’ve told you before, jellybean—I’m not sweet. I’m a dirty bunny, and I’m about to prove it to you. Get your pretty ass on the bed, make those panties disappear, and get ready to beg for what you need.”
Biting my lip, I crawl onto the bed, slip my panties down my thighs, and lean on the pillows, crooking a finger Dean’s way. “Come and get it, Mr. Bunny. Your ten minutes start now. If I’m not begging for your hot beef carrot by the time the clock reads two fifteen, I’m claiming my prize. And I want a lot more than some dinky basket of candy.”
His eyes dark, Dean eases onto the bed, wrapping his hands tight around my ankles, making my pulse spike. “And what is it you want, Mrs. Roberts?”
“I want you bare,” I whisper, sliding my bra down my arms. “Bare and inside me. I think it’s time to start trying for number two, don’t you think?”
Dean’s expression softens with gratitude, assuring me that he’ll never take the miracle we’ve found together for granted. “I don’t know, babe,” he says, slipping out of Bad Bunny character as he adds, “Are you going to hate me later if we conceive while I’m trying to make you beg me for my hot beef carrot?”
I laugh as I shake my head. “Not even a little bit. In fact, I think that may be the best ‘how we conceived’ story ever.”
“I love you,” he says, returning my grin and raising me a wicked wink. “But I really am going to do my best to make you beg.”
“And I’m going to love every minute of it,” I assure him.
And I do.
And nine months later, when Patrick Roberts is born, Dean and I agree that there’s a hint of bunny in the shape of his perfect little button nose.
Keep reading for a sneak peek of
The Bad Boy’s Temptation Trilogy
Olivia and Colton’s story!
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Sneak Peek
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Olivia and Colton’s story!
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The Bad Boy’s Temptation Trilogy
PROLOGUE
Colton
They say hindsight is twenty-twenty, but Colton Brody figured it was something better than that.
Hindsight was a magnifying glass, blowing up his past mistakes until they were so large there was no way he could forget them, let alone escape them. But of all the mistakes he’d made, underestimating the good girl next door was the greatest.
In hindsight, he could remember the exact moment it happened.
The moment when what should have been a hot, no-strings-attached fling became the only thing he couldn’t walk away from….
He should put a stop to this right now.
He should turn around, walk out of Olivia’s bedroom and never look back—do not pass go, do not fuck his little sister’s best friend.
Instead, Colton stripped Olivia’s jeans down her legs and tossed them away, taking a moment to soak in the sight of her lying on the brightly colored quilt with her curves on display, wearing nothing but a white bra and a tiny scrap of lace between her legs.
She was so beautiful she took his breath away.
And there was no way he was leaving her bedroom anytime soon. Not until he’d had her every wicked way he’d been fantasizing about and a few more he was going to make up as they went along.
“Very different than what you were wearing the last time I saw you half naked,” he said, teasing his fingers back and forth along the waistband of her lace thong, summoning another shiver from Olivia that he knew had nothing to do with the slight chill in the room.
“Don’t tease me about my granny panties,” she said, her voice breathy.
“I’m not teasing,” he said. “I like granny panties. On you, anyway.”
“You know what kind of panties I like? Panties that are on the floor.” She lifted her hips in a clear invitation, one he chose to ignore as he lengthened himself on top of her.
Her panties were staying on and so were his boxers.
If he didn’t keep at least that much of a barrier between them, he wouldn’t be able to resist sliding inside her and he didn’t want to rush. He wanted to take his time, to drive her out of her ever-practical mind with wanting him.
Cupping her white-lace covered breasts in his hands, he bit down on the scrap of fabric between them, using his mouth to tug her bra lower on her ribs, making her gasp as the lacy fabric grazed her nipples. He glanced up to see creamy white skin and small pebbled tips the same cotton-candy pink as her lips, and for a moment, he forgot how to breathe. She was stunning, perfect, and obviously desperate for his touch.
Her breath came faster, her breasts rising and falling as she met his gaze across the landscape of her body.
“You’re beautiful,” he murmured, bringing his mouth to hover above one nipple, circling the taut flesh with his tongue. “So beautiful.”
Olivia arched into his mouth with a moan, making it easy for him to reach behind her back and loose the hooks on her bra. As he transferred his attentions to her other breast, teasing her nipple with slow deliberate flicks of his tongue, he drew her bra straps down her arms, baring her completely to him.
Taking his time, drawing out each delicious taste, he licked and sucked and nibbled, worshipping her breasts until she squirmed beneath him and her fingernails dug into his biceps, leaving grooves behind.
“Please, Colt,” she begged, her hands trembling as they came to cup his face. “I can’t take any more.”
“But we’re just g
etting started,” he said, sliding his hand down the front of her panties, groaning when he felt how slick she was.
He teased through her swollen folds, gathering her wetness onto his fingers before bringing them to his lips and sucking them inside. He closed his eyes, relishing the salty, almost mineral flavor of her arousal. She tasted like heaven and he knew immediately that a single taste wouldn’t be enough.
“God, Colt, please, I need—”
He silenced her with a kiss, probing her mouth slowly, thoroughly, letting the taste of her desire mingle with the sweet taste of her tongue before he began kissing his way down her body. He kissed the long, smooth column of her throat, the graceful curve of her clavicle, and the hollow between her breasts, deliberately avoiding the nipples that poked into the air on either side of his face.
He would get back to them soon, but right now he had another destination in mind.
He kissed her stomach, where her pulse beat fast and heavy, and then he was close enough to smell her and control was a thing of the past.
Fisting both hands at the center of her lace panties, he pulled hard. The fabric rent in two with a satisfying ripping sound, but not nearly as satisfying as the cry that escaped Olivia’s lips or the dark fire burning in her eyes as she looked down at him and whispered, “I was hoping you would do that.”
As he settled between her legs with a wicked grin, he made a mental note to invest heavily in Olivia-sized underwear. He needed to hear her cry out like that a hundred more times at the very least.
Be hard to fit in a hundred times before you leave.
Colt pushed the thought away. He didn’t want to think about leaving town, not when he was inches away from tasting Olivia again.
Slowly, but firmly, he pushed her thighs apart and lowered his head, kissing her as intimately as one person could kiss another.
And for the first time in a long time, it was intimate. This wasn’t just about making her come or ensuring she was ready to take him.
As he cupped her bottom in his hands, angling her hips so he could thrust his tongue deeper into the core of her sweetness, he realized that this was more than sex, more than another notch on his bedpost or a way to forget the ugly things he didn’t want to remember.
He wasn’t fucking Olivia; he was making love to her.
And he couldn’t seem to stop.
But maybe that was okay. Maybe that’s just how it was when you fell into bed with an old friend.
Not that it really mattered. There was no way he was stopping now, not until he’d made Olivia come screaming his name.
That was the way it had started.
With a pair of ripped panties and Colton so focused on making Olivia come her brains out he didn’t realize he’d just sustained blunt force trauma to the heart.
But now, with everything that mattered hanging by a thread and the woman he loved running from him so fast he couldn’t follow her trail, all he could think about was that moment, the moment before he realized how far he could fall.
Or how fast he could lose the only person who mattered.
CHAPTER ONE
Before the Bad Boy gave in to Temptation…
Olivia
Olivia Page woke up at twenty after seven and rolled over, stretching in the winter light filtering through the calico curtains, blissfully unaware that she was about to have the most embarrassing week of her life.
Worse than the time she threw up onstage at the Lover’s Leap annual Christmas pageant, earning herself the nickname Puking Page for the rest of fifth grade.
Worse than the time she sneaked off to pee in the woods at a high school bonfire and was caught midstream by her best friend’s big brother, aka the hottest guy in school, aka her lifelong crush and the last person she ever wanted to see her squatting behind a bush.
Worse than the time her computer coughed up racy pictures from the depths of her hard drive during a PowerPoint presentation at her accounting firm in Chicago, displaying them onscreen for her entire—all male—team to see.
With Olivia’s knack for mortification, her superstitious, tarot-card-reading mother worried that her daughter might be cursed.
But Olivia knew she usually did her part to earn her shame.
Her father had warned her that she was going to make herself sick if she ate two of his salted-caramel-drizzled funnel cakes right before the Christmas pageant. And by age fifteen, she’d been aware that she had the smallest bladder in the universe, but she’d drunk two apple ciders at the bonfire anyway. And most mortifying of all, she had allowed her ex-boyfriend, Clarence, to take pictures of her wearing skimpy lingerie.
He hadn’t stolen the snapshots while she was sleeping; she had posed for him and regretted it ever since.
She’d known it was a bad idea—Clarence wasn’t The One, and one should never trust anyone but The One with racy pictures—but she’d let herself be bullied into posing for her ex. He’d been grumbling for months that she wasn’t as uninhibited as he would have liked for her to be. She had assumed a sexy photo shoot would prove once and for all that she wasn’t in the running for Vanilla Geek of the Year.
Sure, she worked with numbers all day, did Sudoku puzzles for fun, and considered a weekend spent wandering around the science museum edge-of-your-seat entertainment, but she had her sassy side. She added Sriracha to her Brussels sprouts, drove five miles over the speed limit when she was in a hurry, and had run every extreme obstacle marathon in the tristate area—from the Mud Run to the Warrior Dash to the Run For Your Life Zombie 5k.
She had layers, hidden depths, and an adventurous side waiting to break free.
But Clarence hadn’t seen her depths or made an effort to peel back her layers. He had taken the sexy pictures, shared them with his creepy lawyer friends, and broken up with Olivia the next day, ensuring she couldn’t walk past his firm’s office without her cheeks turning fuchsia with a combination of rage and embarrassment.
Some of the rage was for Clarence, but most of it was for herself.
She was ashamed that she’d let herself be bullied into something that made her uncomfortable. The entire mess with her ex had made her vow to live more authentically moving forward—no more changing to please a man or apologizing for the things that made her happy—and that was before she’d received the call from the Lover’s Leap hospital about Kelly.
Olivia sat up in bed, rubbing at her eyes as she glanced around the room.
Evidence of her older sister was everywhere—from the papier-mâché animal sculptures hanging from the ceiling to the bright pink calico curtains to the empty terrarium in the hobby room where Kelly’s pet skink, a lizard named Sir Licks-a-Lot, had once made his home.
Kelly had always lived wild, free, and in bright, uncompromising color.
But now she was gone and Olivia was alone, with nothing but the objects her sister had left behind and her memories to keep her company.
“Miss you,” Olivia said softly, closing her eyes as a rush of comforting warmth spread through her chest in response.
She could feel Kelly’s spirit here in a way she couldn’t when she was in Chicago or at her parents’ new house in Florida. It made her glad to be back in Lover’s Leap, even if she had no idea how to run a curiosity shoppe or how to keep a house this ancient in working order.
But she would figure it out.
She would restock the shop, get this piece of Evergreen Lane open for business, and she and Old Vic—Kelly’s nickname for her fussy Victorian home—would find a way to coexist. She wasn’t going to let her sister’s mark on the world fade away. She was going to keep Kelly’s legacy alive and live wild and free enough for both herself and the best friend she’d lost too soon.
Inspired by the thought, Olivia swung her legs out of bed only to squeal as soon as her feet hit the floor.
The freezing cold floor.
She glanced over to see the space heater in the corner dead to the world and cursed. It must have overloaded the electrical system in
the night again. Now she was going to have to go outside and flip the circuit breakers and hope the aging wires would hold on long enough for her to make tea and toast.
The entire grid was going to have to be replaced, but there was no way she was getting an electrician out to give her a quote until January. Between the Frozen Dead Dude festival coming up and Christmas Eve the day after, the entire town would be in full-time party mode for the next week.
The town’s annual celebration in honor of a local man who had been cryogenically frozen and entrusted to his daughter’s keeping—Frankie stored Pops in a Tuff Shed near downtown Lover’s Leap—was usually one of Olivia’s favorite times of the year. It was a time for bowling with frozen turkeys, racing coffins on wheels through downtown, daring friends to join the polar bear plunge, and enjoying some silly fun before celebrating Christmas.
But even though she was looking forward to racing coffins with her best friend Daisy, she couldn’t help wishing that not every handyman in town was taking the week off.
Crossing her arms tight to hold in her body heat, she hurried to the closet and wiggled her toes into a pair of zombie house slippers that made her feet look like they were being digested by the undead.
Kelly had always had a thing for brightly colored clothing and anything that made her laugh. The pj’s Olivia was wearing were bright blue with pink humping unicorns all over them. She’d been wearing her sister’s clothes for the past week—the airline had yet to locate her missing luggage—and enjoyed feeling close to Kelly, but she didn’t want to be seen in public in pajamas, let alone humping-unicorn pajamas.
Olivia padded down the stairs and opened the front door just far enough to stick her head out, her sleep-fuzzy thoughts sharpening as a rush of frigid air swept into her face. It was going to be a cold one, the kind of day that made even the most hardcore skiers take time off the slopes to stay home and snuggle by the fire.
