by Hammond, T.
Blind Seduction
Team Red--Book 1
T. Hammond
Blind Seduction: Team Red, Book 1
First Edition © Mar 2013 by Tina Hammond
Second Edition © Jan 2014 by T Hammond
Cover Design by ebookcoversgalore.com
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever (except for review purposes) without the express written consent of the author.
This book contains adult situations, including explicit sexual content. This book is not recommended for readers under 17 years of age.
Hey folks, this is a work of fiction, the talking dog should be your first clue. All the events and characters in this book are figments of my imagination; although at three in the morning, I must admit when they scream at me to write down the stuff they are acting out in my head, I sometimes wonder about the fine line between fiction and real life.
The city of Spokane is described with a lot of accuracy, as far as landmarks, hotels, local restaurants, and parks--although I made up the restaurant, Blind Seduction. Some places mentioned by name in the book are based on places I have been, but as this is a work of fiction, I made up employee names and events which happen at these locations. Yes, I lied.
The Spokane Police Department figures into my plot, but I have no actual knowledge of the structure, policies, and/or procedures. Spokane does have a COPS Shop at the Shadle Center, but I have taken more liberties than a playboy with a drunk date in my descriptions of events, employees, volunteers, or the inside of the location (I peeked in the window once, but I have no idea what it’s like inside). My depiction of events at the Police Station and COPS Shop are a complete fabrication.
I took unintentional liberties with the actual borders for the City of Spokane; my error was pointed out by a fellow Spokanite. Some of the crime areas represented in Blind Seduction and Color Blind, were actually in unincorporated areas which should be handled by the Sheriff’s department, not city police. I apologize for the error, but for the sake of the story, it is easier to have Team Red affiliated with one law enforcement agency rather than multiple jurisdictions. I will continue the series as written and ask for the readers’ indulgence.
When I first wrote Red Rover, it was meant to be a Paranormal Romance / Adult Contemporary novel. Due to the explicit content, some readers asked for a Young Adult version because their kids expressed an interest in reading about the talking dog. I was able to modify the story enough to get close to what I believe to be the equivalency of a PG movie and still retain the elements I most enjoyed about my book.
The Team Red series is offered in two versions: “Blind” for adult readers preferring a spicier, adult-themed story, and the “Red” series more suitable for New Adult readers.
The “Blind” series is written first, then ages are modified and subtle changes made to each story to tone down adult themes and language, making them a new story, with obvious mirrored elements of the original. The Red version is not meant to be an original work, it is meant to be a modified work of its original Blind counterpart.
Books by T. Hammond
Team Red ‘Blind’ version:
Blind Seduction: Team Red, Book 1
In Love with Teresa March: A Team Red Novella 1.5
Color Blind: Team Red, Book 2
Blind Faith: Team Red, Book 3
Blind Rage: Team Red, Book 4 (coming Mar 2014)
Team Red Omnibus 1
Team Red ‘Red Trilogy’:
Red Rover: Team Red, Book1
Red Zone: Team Red, Book 2
Seeing Red: Team Red, Book 3 (Release Feb 2014)
Other Books:
Posse (Release Autumn 2014)
Acknowledgements
My thanks for the patience and perseverance of my Beta Readers: Jen Moulton, Jocelyn Sanchez, Kim Culbertson, Nita Roberts, and Pam Roberts, who helped me with gentle criticism rather than 2x4’s. Your restraint under the bombardment of emails is appreciated. A special thanks to Kim and Summer—your feedback helped make Blind Seduction a better book, thanks for not pulling your punches.
For this updated edition of Blind Seduction, I’d like to add a special thanks to Kathryn Svendsen, of the Shelf Full of Books blog, who gave me some excellent feedback on the blind, and guide dogs when she read Red Rover (the PG version of the Team Red series). I updated some of the sections, in both versions, to include information on how a real guide dog would be trained. Of course, I took liberties with my story, taking into account Red’s unique personality and situation. Any inaccuracies regarding guide dogs, their training, or care, intended or otherwise, are on my shoulders.
I am fortunate to have found a wonderful editor in Tara Shaner, of Shaner Media Creations. Her blunt feedback, encouragement, and bold red pen have made this latest edition of Blind Seduction a much better book. Thanks, again.
Special thanks to my sister, Laurie, for the best Christmas present ever!
Teresa, I think of you often; you are missed.
Contents
8 Months Earlier
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Epilogue
Sneak Peek
Thank you
An Indie Author
About the Author
8 Months Earlier
Warm breath caressed the back of my neck. I sighed at the damp heat, stirring the tiny hairs at my nape. In my half-awake state, I had a fleeting thought it was strange to be sleeping upright, braced against a hard, firm… rolling my face to the side, I opened an eye to see adoring, extravagantly-lashed eyes, gazing at me as if I were the most important woman in the world.
“Janey? Rex is staring at me again,” I complained, half-heartedly.
“If you'd quit dozing against his cage, he wouldn’t watch you at all,” she replied reasonably. “More importantly, you’ve been slipping him dog treats—don’t think I haven’t noticed—so you’ve been elevated to the rank of goddess.”
Rather than attempting a defense, I slid a hand into my coat pocket and pulled out a broken dog biscuit, defiantly poking it through the links of the kennel partition. A warm tongue licked my fingers as soft, chestnut-brown eyes worshiped me. Rex delicately took the offered dog biscuit between sharp, white teeth.
I was visiting my best friend, Janey Declan, during the much-anticipated arrival of Stormy's third litter. Today, Halloween morning, we were treated to nine gorgeous German shepherd puppies over the course of five hours. I felt it entirely reasonable to have nodded off for a few minutes. The last thing I remembered was changing the bedding when it appeared Stormy’s labor was finally over.
The fat, blind babies wriggled blindly towards their mother's body heat. Stormy looked weary, but vigilantly nosed each of the new arrivals, as if doing a continual head count. Both Janey and I were grinning like idiots despite our exhaustion; you'd think we were the ones who had labored for so long.
“Damn,” Janey lamented, brushing wisps of blond hair
off her face with French manicured nails, “nine puppies, and only two females. I'll have to use a different stud next time if I want more females for the kennel.”
“Oh, but they are so beautiful.” I argued, crooning at the small male I held across the length my hand. “You'll have all of them sold by the time they're weaned in ten weeks.”
Janey's grin was infectious. “They are beautiful, aren't they? Look at the markings on these two.” She singled out a male and female with black saddles and dark faces. “They look like their dad. The coat pattern is already well-defined.”
This would be an AKC-registered litter; each puppy wore a tiny, bright yarn around its neck indicating birth order. As each one was born, Janey recorded the puppy's gender and coat type, matching the shade of the yarn she assigned each new arrival, to the pre-numbered list she kept on a clipboard by the whelping box. Janey hadn’t anticipated so many puppies, so we got creative when a ninth body slid wetly into the blood-smeared towels. The last puppy was given two colors twisted together, yellow and red, and Janey listed him as Orange. She would buy the appropriate color, and add it to the box of colorful spools, before she needed to replace the entwined yarn – usually when it became worn, or the pup grew out of it.
The ninth puppy, a grayish-colored runt, seemed lethargic and didn't look strong enough to survive the night. I knew Janey would put in extra time massaging and warming him to ensure the best chance of survival. I was rooting for him to live so that he could get his official orange string.
Eight pups were healthy, active, and already fighting for position as they lined up at their mother's belly, rooting for the first drops of milk. There was one sable—the runt, six standard black and tans with dark saddles and black faces, and two blacks with gold socks, called bi-colors, exact replicas of their mother. Who knew how a sable ended up in the batch? Although I'm sure Janey could give me an exact moment in each parent's illustrious pedigree where such a miracle could have been anticipated... Janey is somewhat anal about her breeding program.
I’d already picked out my puppy. I would be taking home the second arrival, who wore a thin piece of red yarn around his neck, and had aggressively pushed his little black body through his litter-mates. Yep, the pushy one! He was rooting at a swollen nipple with golden brown paws determinedly pressing down on the heads of the puppies to either side of him. Goal-oriented. He and I would get along perfectly.
“I'm worried about this little guy,” Janey stroked the back of Orange, before maneuvering him to a teat so he could suckle. “He's smaller than usual and a little thin.”
“I'm sure Stormy will have him fattened up in no time,” I consoled. “I love sable coats, but they’re unusual for your kennel.”
“Yeah, the sable coloring goes back a couple generations on the sire's side. If I look back another generation or two, I'll likely find a sable on the dam's side also.”
“It seems to me roulette and dog breeding share a lot of similarities,” I grinned. “Right when you think your choices are red or black, the ball falls in the green slot.”
“Yeah, too bad the puppy names will be Halloween themed, or I could have named him Double Ott,” Janey said, referring to the green double zeros on a roulette wheel. “I’ll have to think about something really cute to suggest to the person who buys him.”
Janey stretched and yawned, rolling to her feet with casual grace. She set a baby monitor on a shelf above the whelping box, fiddling with the adjustment on the camera which allowed her to observe the puppies from inside the house.
“Hey Teresa, you ready to go inside? I could use some hot coffee and fuzzy slippers. I think my toes are frozen.” The kennel was a converted three car garage, so it lacked the warmth of carpeted floors and insulated walls.
“Yeah, mine too.” I tried to loosen cramped muscles, stiff from the combination of a cold cement floor and failure to move in the last thirty minutes. “I want to get inside and upload the new webpage template I was working on last week. Who knew we could make a living designing websites from home? This last template will give us a total of one hundred-forty designs, and I have a flash drive full of thumbnail photos I took over the summer we can add to the images library.” I offered her the finger-sized data storage device. “Here, you take it; we’ll load it from your desk top computer. It will be faster than my laptop.”
I stretched my aching legs, hauling myself to my feet with a groan. As I bent to turn off the woefully inadequate space heater we’d been using, I remembered the heat lamp suspended from the ten foot ceiling, and guessed she would want it turned on to keep some of the chill from the birthing area. My pre-coffee brain was amused at the imagined vision of her hopping up and down to reach the pull chain for the switch.
Janey, my best friend since kindergarten, glared at me. Yep, mind reading was a given when you've been friends this long. “I am so not gonna jump for it,” she told me. Obviously, there was no entertainment value to be had here, so I reached up and tugged the switch on for her while berating myself for not thinking of it sooner.
Janey resembled a real-life Barbie doll, more pretty than beautiful. A wholesome, blond, blue-eyed woman with a startling intelligence in her eyes when one cared to overlook the outside packaging. Her outrageously voluptuous 5'3” figure was encased in a few layers of thermal-wear with heavy work boots on her tiny, size six feet. Even after five hours of kneeling in the kennel, managing the messy birth process, she appeared polished. If I were a jealous woman, I might be inclined to hate Janey for her looks, but she was the most friendly, giving person I had ever met.
I tugged my waist-length ponytail self-consciously. For some reason I always looked like I had walked straight into the wind, with my hair askew and my clothes loose and rumpled about my tall, lanky figure. While my athletic 5’10” frame was noteworthy, polished was not a word people thought of when they looked at me.
We stepped out of the whelping box, roughly the size of a bathtub, and I latched the swinging mesh door behind us. Across from the new arrivals, Goofball (not his real name, which was longer and much more dignified) lay stretched out on his back, legs spread immodestly with his paws in the air. I'm pretty sure he was snoring. Most of the dogs were already out in 0 enjoying the crisp morning air.
“By the way, Red is mine. I'm snagging the name Druid too.” I had already paid my deposit and been promised first pick of the litter. Once Janey decided on a Halloween theme for this brood, she and I had fun coming up with a list of possible register names for the puppies: Sorcerer, Pagan, Wiccan, and Oracle. The list got longer, and sillier, after a couple glasses of wine and lack of sleep.
Flipping off the light switch, Janey chuckled, “I seem to remember someone telling me last night she wanted a female pup.” We paused outside the kennel door as Janey tugged the latch to be sure it was securely fastened.
“I gotta go with the pushy one,” I explained. “Besides, there are only two females in the litter. I know you wanted to a keep a female for the kennel, and you have a female requested by a customer. Dru and I will be absolutely perfect together.”
There was a flash of lightning, followed, almost immediately, by a sharp clap of thunder. Janey shivered; she had always hated thunderstorms. It was probably the only thing we didn't have in common, besides our looks of course.
The temperature was only slightly warmer than when we had ventured out to the kennel at five a.m. to monitor the puppies being born. The clouds were dark and swelled with water, the wind fiercely bowing the treetops. What a miserable day this was shaping up to be. It was almost ten o'clock, and I hadn't even had my first cup of coffee yet.
Being cold is the absolute worst. I shook my fist in mock fury at the sky. “Bring back the sun!” I was rewarded by a splash of rain hitting me in the face. Janey had already sprinted across the yard, unimpressed by my show of machismo.
With a final rattling check of the secured latch, I started toward the back door of her house as the sky let loose with a fury of its own. There
was a loud snap of lightning. I registered the scent of ozone, and almost simultaneously, heard the crack of something large being broken apart with tremendous force. Time slowed, or maybe paused entirely; my heart beat with it. Janey stood frozen on the porch and stared back at me, horror in her eyes. I glanced over my shoulder and the world went black.
Chapter One
** Tuesday, July 8th **
The window seat in my bedroom was my favorite spot in the house. Not long after I bought the large four bedroom multi-level, I'd sewn a thick quilted cushion to pad the over-long, extra-wide bench seat. To complete my cozy alcove, I purchased a tactile, colorful selection of pillows to accent the dark green fabric. It was a plush nest, with a warm chenille blanket to snuggle into, while I watched magnificent storms roll in from the west. The rest of my room was done in deep golds and coffee browns, mimicking the wooded ten acres surrounding my little slice of the Inland Northwest.
I had grown up in the area surrounding Spokane, Washington. After a few years of college in wetter Seattle, I happily returned home to my trees, lakes, and mountains. Most importantly, I returned to four seasons instead of blasted perpetual drizzle. Seattle had been like living in an Ansel Adams photograph; everything in gloomy shades of ash. If it wasn't damp and over-cast, Seattle was drenched in a dark gray downpour. The trees and undergrowth had been more green and lush than in my favored Spokane, but who could tell with those charcoal skies and the incessant rain? Perhaps, after a few more years, I could've learned to say “rain” without a snarl in my voice. Biased? Maybe. I enjoyed the cold, snow-covered winters, the mild springs, hot summers, and stormy, wet autumns in my part of the state.
