by Bella Love
SPIN
A Sexy Novella
By Bella Love
http://bellalovebooks.com
Copyright 2013 by Bella Love
ISBN: 978-0-9895498-0-6
Cover image: iStockphoto
Cover Design: Trish Schmitt/ Pickyme
http://pickymeartist.com
Copy editing: Linda Ingmanson
E-book Formatting: Jessica Lewis, Authors’ Life Saver
http://authorslifesaver.com
Smashwords Edition
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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Jane MacInnee doesn't get spun up much. She’s too controlled. Only three times her whole life, and that list began and ended with dangerous Finn Dante. When their paths cross again, eleven years after a river-side, body-firing kiss, Jane realizes she’s about to lose the white-knuckled control that's got her so far from the backwoods she's spent her life running from.
Finn knows he doesn't need to chase Janey Mac down. He just needs to show her what she's made of. Unwind her, slow and hot. And never let up, not even when she begs him. Because he's been waiting for Janey Mac to come undone his whole life.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Upcoming Books
One
THREE TIMES.
In twenty-nine years of living, I’d only let myself get spun up three times.
I almost always regretted it.
Generally, it took a lot to rattle me. Bright smile, white-knuckled control: I was like an iron ball of yarn. That was my way.
It was a pretty good way. Simple too. Just hang on tight, smile like a crazy person, and never let go. It got me places, and I probably shouldn’t have got more than ten miles past my county’s swampy line.
I stayed away from things like alcohol or emotions; neither ever went well for me. And anyhow, it’s not what was expected from a daughter of the cream of Dodge Run society.
Not that that cream rose awfully high. But still.
Cheerleading, charitable organizations, smiling when hurricanes blew through town, anything to uplift the spirits of Dodge Run, that’s all it took. Every moment of your waking life. A few dreaming ones as well.
It was tough maintaining a position atop a social pile in a swamp, but we MacInnees were strong that way.
Some might say being at the top of the social pile in Dodge Run wasn’t saying a whole lot. I’d have to agree. But I didn’t have anything else to go on, so I went on that. It was sort of like driving on fumes.
Today, though, I was reminded, forcefully, of the few times I had got spun up, when I’d felt the tight weave of my self-control loosening. The list began and ended with Finn Dante. He was like dangerous bookends to my errors in judgment.
As a kid, I’d stayed away because I had a brain in my head and a reputation to uphold. There were warnings about the Dante boys, big bad warnings.
“Nothing but trouble, those Dante boys,” Mother told me when I was eleven. “You stay away.”
“I will,” I’d promised, my skin prickling.
“They do things to women, the Dante men,” my friend Emily had said. Calling the teenage offspring of local pawnshop owner Earl Dante “men” was a bit of a stretch, but at thirteen, Emily had been wiser in the ways of men than I am to this day, so I went with it.
“Things?” I’d whispered back, even though Emily hadn’t been whispering. “What kind of things?”
Emily smiled. “Bad things. Bad boy things.”
My whole body had lit up. It scared me half to death. If the Dante boys could do that to a girl simply by being mentioned in a conversation, well. . . I’d yanked down my shirt and stayed away.
Far, far away.
Sort of.
Until fate threw us together at Emily’s fourteenth birthday party. A disco ball spun overhead, and one by one each boy was blindfolded, the girls kissed him on the cheek, and he had to guess who it was.
So when the youngest Dante boy, fourteen-year-old Finn, was coaxed down into the chair, when the black bandanna went around his blue eyes, when my body started sparking (What kind of bad things?), I darted forward before the others and kissed him not on his cheek but square on the mouth, ducking away before he could grab hold of my wrist, but not before I felt the tip of his tongue press against my lips.
The room exploded in laughter as I tripped backward, melting into the circle of kids, my heart pounding, my head spinning. He’d slid off the bandanna and looked around, his blue eyes settling on me, a small smile curving up his mouth. Then he’d said, “Ruthie,” dead wrong about which crazy girl had kissed him on the lips.
Except he wasn’t wrong. The room was laughing, the girls were making him put the bandanna back on, but he never looked away from me.
He knew exactly who’d kissed him.
And he’d tried to kiss me back.
My belly slid on a roller coaster. My whole body was fluttery, chilled, and wobbling. The moment his eyes were covered again, I’d bolted from that room and Emily’s house and vowed never to look at him again.
I didn’t either.
Pretty much.
The second time was when I drank two beers in fast succession and waxed my bikini line with Emily, my lifelong and sexually unrepressed friend, during our last week of high school.
The third (and most terrifying) time was when I kissed Finn again, down by the river on graduation night.
I guess I never forgot that disco ball.
My only excuse is that I was still spun up from the memory of hot wax near my hoo-hah and the furious despair of getting a late rejection letter from a college that had been in my last-ditch, D-list pile.
I’d never thought I was smart and my test scores confirmed it, but I wasn’t dumb either: this meant I’d be spending the rest of my life in Dodge.
I’d never been as angry as I was that moment. As scared. I felt trompled on. It wasn’t a matter of social status; it was a matter of survival.
It was a matter of failure.
Even Sue Ellen Minor and her big, perky breasts had got into college.
I hollered. Loud.
Then I flung myself into the annual graduation celebration with a sort of furious, vengeful cheer. I was all risky and fired up. I stumbled, sort of literally and mostly accidentally, into dangerous Finn Dante down by the banks of the smoky green river that hosted a couple of alligators and a whole lot of premarital sex.
Finn was trouble. A year older, ten years more experienced, he was more trouble now than he’d been at fourteen. Only I had no idea how much.
We almost got caught. I stood there, frozen
with fear. The college plan was dead and gone, but if I was seen with a Dante boy, kissing a Dante boy, getting felt up by a Dante boy, the contingency plan of life here in Dodge would be ruined as well.
Even Sue Ellen Minor didn’t lift her skirts for a Dante boy.
Also, my mother would eat me alive.
I stared at him through the shadows of a black willow tree. He stared back. I could see it in his glinting, amused eye; he was toying with outing me to the others who’d stumbled down to the riverbank. Such mischief wasn’t beyond him. Dante boys were known for doing things just for the fun of it. Bad, dangerous, fun things.
In the end, he just moved away, drawing thirty-eight female seniors like moths after him, and a good portion of the males too.
But despite the way he’d toyed with my future, I hold a fondness for him. Because in our brief—extremely brief—conversation before I went up on my toes and kissed his mouth, he made me realize that staying stuck in Dodge was a choice.
“It’s just a town, Janey Mac,” he’d said, all lazy and half smiling in the moonlight. “There’s lots of towns. If you don’t like this one, pick another. If you don’t like the way those colleges turned you down, get a back-up plan. If you don’t like cheerleading, do something else.” His gaze dragged down my body like a stick through embers, and I started sparking. “There’s not much need for cheerleaders anymore, Janey, now that school’s over.”
He didn’t know so much. There was always a need for cheerleaders.
Still, this was an exciting thought. A fiery thought. I felt hot and fluttery, and attributed it entirely to the new-sprung hope of a Back-Up Plan and not at all to the sensual heat of Finn Dante.
Pretty much without thinking, I pushed up on my toes and kissed him. In thanks. In grateful appreciation. Nothing else.
Pretty much.
I might have started that kiss, but Finn most definitely finished it. Finished me off like a glass of wine, and I went down hot, wet and willing. We used every tool at our disposal, mouths, tongues, hands, zippers. God knows how far it’d have gone if we weren’t interrupted by the group of juniors and seniors tripping down to the tree-lined riverbank that divided our town in two—the have-nots and the wanna-be’s.
I was the wanna-be’s. Finn was the have-nots. But corny as it sounds, that night I thought Finn Dante had it all.
I’m not sure I ever recovered from that kiss. I suspected things about myself after that kiss. Things about what I might be capable of. Things that scared me. Things that felt turned off, right in the middle. Like a light switch flipped off.
Like a genie stuffed back into a bottle.
And that was its real danger.
I never dated another bad boy. I did, though, get out of Dodge.
My mother almost died at the notion of a back-up plan that involved community college, and I almost died at the realization I’d be living with my loving, perfectly coiffed, slightly maniacal mother until…when? I got married? The thought chilled. Got a job? What kind of job here in Dodge?
Then I recalled my dark, riverside conversation with the have-not Dante boy, the only one who’d ever told me, “Go for it,” and notwithstanding that he meant to stick my hand down his pants, I decided he was right.
There had to be another way for a girl who could manage other people’s lives so well and smile through hurricanes.
Turned out there was. If I was willing to work hard.
I was.
I found a new town and intended to become the best damned event planner in the entire San Francisco Bay Area, maybe the world. For the moment, though, I was the best damned event planner north of Alameda, south of Vallejo, elbowing my way into Piedmont. But I wasn’t stopping there. Which is why I was now stuck in traffic in a rental car on a mountain pass near Tahoe, sitting in a sheen of my own sweat, covered by a film of construction dust, contemplating how I was going to save my dream client, the one who was going to catapult me onto maps. Social maps, money maps. Lots and lots of maps.
I was all about the maps.
I never expected to run into Finn Dante again. And certainly not on the only other day in my life when I’d been pushed straight to the end of my rope.
Because that was some kind of voodoo, and I did not believe in magic.
~ Finn ~
IT WAS HOT.
Summer was here with a vengeance, pulling sweat from pores. I saw the line of traffic from half a mile away, a hot line of brake lights lit up like angry red eyes in front of me.
Construction. Again.
If I was lucky, after a wait of fifteen or twenty sweltering minutes, I’d pass through, bumping and shuddering at four miles an hour through the rocky maw of the half-finished road they’d been working on since last September.
Or not.
I slowed as I came up behind the car in front of me, slowly braking. Cars sat at half angles, slowly and angrily trying to veer into turning lanes, which were just as backlogged. The car in front was driven by a woman—or rather, was being sat in by a woman. Slim, female arms lifted up over her head in a sweaty stretch, then crossed at the wrists, elbows bent. Long hair spilled down over her arms.
That looked good.
It would be bad, of course, I thought idly, long hair in this heat. I always shaved mine short come summer. Winter I grew it long again, but in the brutal summer days, you had to grab coolness whenever you could.
But that hair. . . . It looked good. Real good. Vaguely familiar. Last time I’d seen hair like that had been eleven years ago.
Since I had to sit behind her, I was glad she kept it long and hot.
She slowly maneuvered her car into the right lane and came to a full stop. I inched forward into the space, putting my battered red pickup directly beside her much less battered sporty thing. Like everyone else, I killed the engine. Hot silence spread out. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her start to wrap that fine long hair up into a knotted bundle on top of her head.
Too bad.
Tinny bars of music drifted in from the cars around me. I closed my eyes, ignoring how the seat stuck to me through the thin cotton, ignoring the dusty rays of afternoon sun beaming in through the window, the way the dashboard radiated heat back at me.
I listened to the strains of music and thought of that long hair falling down over my hands.
Through half-closed eyes, I saw her sit forward suddenly and start arguing or pep-talking herself in the rearview mirror. Her eyes narrowed at her reflection.
Then she bent her arms and slid her fingers up the back of her shirt and began to take off her bra.
I smiled.
Because I knew exactly who she was now. Tightly wound Janey Mac, so pretty she scared all the boys, so totally unaware of it. Pretty Janey Mac, so tightly wound she practically whirred.
Until that night down by the river, when she’d dared herself with my mouth and lost. Or won, depending on how you looked at it.
I smiled and added the image of her without her bra to the one of her hair falling down all over my hands, not fantasies anymore, but hot memories of the riverside and Janey panting under my mouth.
Two
~ Jane ~
MY CURRENT CLIENTS were the Peter J. Sandler-Rosses.
I usually juggle a biblical multitude of clients, but when you have the Sandler-Rosses, who made their money in DC and spent it in California, and their twenty-year-old daughter is about to shuffle off her minority and come into a hefty portion of her inheritance, and you’re the one planning the birthday celebration, you make room in your schedule. A lot of room.
I made room. I travelled east, deep into the wilderness of California-Nevada state line. It wasn’t quite the gates of Hell, but it bordered them. I knew a couple people from our area who’d dared come so far west. The Escapees, we used to call them.
Not me, though, I don’t run from things. I was called to Destiny Falls.
I accepted the challenge, because I’d done a couple jobs for Mrs. Peter J. in the past, and now the
Sandler-Rosses trusted me, they needed me, their event was going to be a disorganized mess without me, and if this wasn’t what I was put here on earth to do, I don’t know what was.
Mrs. Peter J. Sandler-Ross had a powdered face, a terrifying knowledge of the incomes of her neighbors, and a daughter in need of a twenty-first birthday party that would put their friends to shame. And as she and Mr. Peter J. deeply disapproved of their daughter’s friends, dredged up at college, who frequented hellholes with names like the Red Cat Tavern and Tommy’s Sports Bar, they would be inviting “another sort entirely” to their gala affair on behalf of their very beautiful, very rich, very heiress daughter.
Mrs. Peter J. also had a strong tendency—a mania—to change things at the last minute. Big, expensive, unwieldy things.
“Thirty more?” I’d repeated slowly, earlier this morning when I met with her for an “emergency check-in.” I should have known right away. You don’t “check in” with emergencies; you operate on them. “Thirty more guests?”
Mrs. Sandler-Ross pushed open a set of French doors with a flourish. “Yes, thirty!” she said brightly. Hot, humid air puffed into my face.
I followed her out to the flagstone porch and off onto a sweeping lawn. Our heels sank into the plush green grass like knives poking into an Easter Peep. Grass was hell on heels. I wasn’t a huge fan of grass.
“Mrs. Sandler-Ross,” I said as I staggered across the lawn behind her. “Thirty more people is a lot more people. It will require a few”—an excrement-load of—“changes. The celebration is in two weeks, remember?”
“I remember.” She smiled over her shoulder at me. “You see why I wanted you to come out early? And do call me Lovey, dear.”
Many names had occurred to me. Not one of them resembled Lovey.
Mrs. Peter J. had that can-do, nothing-can-stop-me-not-even-the-law spirit of the high-beta rich who went bust in the last market crash. In every market crash. Except the Peter J.s hadn’t crashed. They were flourishing, getting stronger, more powerful, bionically capable of wreaking havoc on my best-laid plans.
