Screams and blood and the gory agony of too many gruesome deaths.
That’s what his dreams consisted of these days. Though tired to the marrow of his bones, he dreaded closing his eyes.
Who the fuck could blame him? They were calling him the fucking Soul Reaper in the surgical ward, for Christ’s sake. In the last month, he’d lost half his damn patients. Injuries had been extreme and extensive lately. IEDs had been blowing with scary regularity, rendering victims all but dead before they ever made it to him. Hell, their own base had taken more than its fair share of indirect fire over the past week. Tensions ran high and tempers burned hot among his brethren.
At first, he’d tried to tell himself that this God awful feeling he held in the pit of his stomach wasn’t going to last forever. Called up from the National Guard, his tour of duty was slated to be only fifteen months long. As one day had bled into another, however, he realized that time moved at a different pace in this pit. Nine months into his deployment, he’d learned a hard lesson.
One day could feel a thousand hours long when you were surrounded by the violence of war.
He now understood why his dad, a Korean War vet, had said that war was, indeed, hell. Those pitying looks he’d received from the old man when he’d gotten his orders to report to Kandahar made a lot more sense to him now.
Allowing his eyes to drift toward the stack of letters on his makeshift desk in the corner, his heart sank. He knew he owed the people that loved him some kind of communication. A letter, a phone call … some kind of reassurance that this fucking place hadn’t broken him. He just felt so damned disconnected from life at home. Phoning home and making small talk with his brother and dad while he’d spent the past month losing at least a patient each day just felt wrong. He’d always been a shit actor and his relatives would see right past his lies anyway. So, he’d maintained radio silence.
He knew he owed them far better than that, but dumping his own worries and fears on their heads didn’t seem fair, either.
Then, there was Faith.
Even thinking her name was enough to constrict his heart.
His memories of Faith McKinnon were the only thing on the planet that kept him sane most days. Beautiful and pure, she was his beginning and end, his alpha and omega, the one constant his heart could depend on during the darkest hours of the night. Closing his eyes, he could imagine the feel of her long, silky blonde hair wrapped around his hand as he had plundered her soft mouth on the day he’d left for Afghanistan.
She’d promised to wait for him, and he’d vowed that he’d give her forever when he returned to her.
At thirty-four, he’d had nearly a decade on her, but that age difference had never worried either of them. What they’d felt for each other was real, tangible in way he’d never experienced with anyone else. They’d been together for a year and dated for a couple of months prior to that before becoming exclusive. Hell, the Turner and McKinnon families had been friends for years, farming together and sharing a church for as far back as he could remember.
They’d fallen naturally into a relationship when she’d graduated from college and come back home to Paradise to work in her family’s business, the I Don’t Care Café. Part restaurant and part bar, it was the only place in their small community-oriented town to sit down and get a decent meal and have a beer. Run by Faith and her three sisters, the small enterprise thrived.
After Faith’s mother and father had died a few years ago, the girls had decided to sell the farm, but kept the popular mom-and-pop diner and bar. The third of four sisters, Faith had been happy to join with her siblings and keep her Momma and Daddy’s longtime dream alive. Patience, Faith, Harmony, and Honor were without a doubt the closest siblings he’d ever known. Almost identical in looks, their long blonde hair and beautiful features well-known in their small community, the four ladies were tied together by blood and by love. They’d do anything for each other. Working together came naturally for them.
His wonderful fiancé had already lived through enough tragedy and pain to last a lifetime. First, there’d been the unexpected deaths of both her wonderful parents at the hands of a drunk driver. That horrible disaster had happened the summer she’d turned sixteen. He’d been finishing up his residency at the time at Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, but he’d taken time off and traveled home for the funeral. He could still remember holding her at the funeral home as she cried her eyes out against his shirt. Even then, there’d been a connection between them, although it had never been inappropriate.
He’d held her again two years later when her youngest sister, Honor, had been abducted after a local high school football game. A county-wide search had immediately commenced and as a young doctor, he’d immediately volunteered for the search party. His little squad had consisted of himself, his brother, Abel, his father, Seth and Ezekiel Monroe. Zeke, now the sheriff of their tiny town, had been the first to spot the sinkhole where Honor’s kidnappers had thrown her then unconscious body into the ground. As the only trained medical professional among their search party, however, Cain had been the first one to go down into that pit with her.
What he’d seen had changed his life.
It had changed the life of every man out there that night.
A peaceful town at the base of the Smoky Mountains in the Appalachians of Tennessee, Paradise and its residents had never seen evil up close until that terrible dark night. Crimes in their small hamlet were rare, and when they did happen, mild in nature. What they found… the memory still turned his stomach.
Badly beaten, Honor had been barely aware of her surroundings. It had been instantly obvious that the youngest – and tiniest – McKinnon girl had been violated in the worst possible ways. He’d covered her with a blanket and done what triage he could in the limited space they’d had while they’d waited for an extraction team. Mostly, though he’d just stroked her hair and begged her not to die while he prayed to God that He’d allow her to live.
By the time they’d gotten her body raised back to the surface, all three of Honor’s sisters had joined them, and it had been Faith’s tearful gaze that he’d met first after he’d climbed out of that hole. He’d held her while the paramedics had loaded her sister into a waiting ambulance and she’d clutched his hand all the way to the hospital as they’d followed in the back of Zeke’s squad car.
Neither of them spoke a single word to each other during that entire ride, but that’s the moment he’d realized just how deeply he cared for the younger woman with whom he’d been doomed to fall deeply in love.
He’d watched as Faith had gone off to college and rejoiced when she’d come home all grown up, all long legs and soulful eyes. She’d been a knockout and he hadn’t been the only man who’d noticed. He’d just been the lucky son of a bitch that had gotten to her first. It was after a night spent watching half the male population of Paradise flirt with her during one of her shifts at the bar that he’d made his move, inviting her out to a dinner that had led to a movie that had somehow ended with his tongue halfway down her throat, kissing her like she was the last woman on Earth. Despite their volatile sexual chemistry together, he’d kept things casual between them for as long as he could, offering her the opportunity to look around the town and see what other options she had available to her. He’d even ground his teeth and watched while she’d dated other men.
Finally, when he’d been convinced that she was ready for a deeper commitment, he’d suggested that she limit her adventures to him alone. He smiled as he remembered how happy she’d been when she’d laughed in his face, a secretive smile affixed to her lips. Cain had wasted no time asking her what that sneaky grin was about and was shocked when he learned that his darling woman had merely been humoring him with the pretext of dating other guys. She’d taken great delight in sharing the truth with him. Those assholes that he’d worried himself nearly into early heart failure about had all been friends of hers, and she’d always been clear with each of them about one t
hing. Her heart was already taken.
By him.
Cain Turner.
He’d been the man that had taken her innocence that night that they’d decided they belonged to each other. In the bed of his dimly lit bedroom, he’d peeled off her clothes and worshipped her body with his. He could still feel the tight clasp of her pussy gripping his cock that night when he’d irrevocably linked their lives together and made her his. Clamping his jaw as he remembered the hot feel of her soft lips beneath his, he felt his dick harden behind the pants of his uniform.
She’d been liquid fire around him, her wet pussy greedily sucking at him, drawing him inside and casting an unbreakable spell that he hadn’t wanted to fight. There’d been pain for her, but it hadn’t slowed his sweet angel down at all. When Faith wanted something, nothing stopped her. And she’d wanted him.
“Christ!” he bit out, sweating as he ripped off his soft cap and drove his fingers against his scalp, his present surroundings invading the sweet memory of his past. Hurling his cap at the wall and stomping toward the small john attached to his room, he started the shower and stripped out of his dirty clothes, leaving them in a heap on the floor.
He needed to decompress to think clearly. Just a few minutes to get his head on straight and then he’d be able to do what needed to be done, he promised himself as he rubbed the heels of his hands against his forehead.
Stepping underneath the lukewarm spray, he turned his face up toward the water and palmed his dick. Working it in his hard grip, he closed his eyes and concentrated on the image of Faith’s naked body the last night they were together.
And as the water slowly rinsed the dirt from his body, he remembered their tender goodbye.
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Sneak Peek - Hard as Stone
Copyright 2014 by Sarah O’Rourke; all rights reserved
Jacob Stone was going to hell.
Everybody knew it; it was so far from a secret that it wasn’t funny. Oh, his mother still lit candles for him in the hope that somehow he’d find salvation for his sins. It was a well-known fact around his hometown that his sainted Momma regularly slipped a little something extra into the offering plate to keep his mortal soul in the fervent prayers of his parish priest. She still had a vain hope that her erstwhile son would somehow find the path to true redemption.
Yeah, that’s right. His mother kept a priest on the payroll in a bid to save his soul from perdition.
Personally, he thought it was a waste of good money, but hope continued to spring eternal for his Momma and old Father Anders. Jake ‘The Widowmaker’ Stone, however, held no such delusions about what his eternal life would hold after he passed from this mortal realm. In all likelihood, fire and brimstone would be his new reality. It wouldn’t be much different from his present.
The stains on his soul were permanent and dark, but he could live with that. He’d taken down a lot of bad men by being the best asshole he could be. He’d drank with thieves and murderers, caroused with hookers and whores, and snorted coke with some of the slickest drug pushers to ever deal in the United States – all in the pursuit of truth and justice. In short, he did whatever he had to do in order to separate the head of the monster from the proverbial crown. Just ask anybody that had worked with him during his twenty-year tenure with the United States Drug Enforcement Agency.
Jacob Stone always got his man, no matter what it took or what he had to do. In his world, the end did indeed justify the means. Cold and merciless, he’d earned the Widowmaker nickname the old-fashioned way. Many a criminal had met his demise after tangling with the wrong end of Jacob’s Glock, and he’d left a trail of weeping widows in his wake.
What could he say? If you did bad shit, meeting an ugly end couldn’t be that much of a surprise, could it? He wasn’t a man for which showing mercy came easy.
Some philosophized that ending a life weighed heavily on a man’s conscience. Mourning, however, was not in Jacob’s nature. More often than not, he found himself questioning the decisions he’d made to leave some of the scumbags alive rather than dead. Sure, they’d been spared his bullet, but they faced the criminal justice system’s prosecution. And hell, prison would seem like a day at Disneyland for some of the creeps he’d put behind bars – hardly a fitting punishment for some of the filth he’d dealt with. He found himself nostalgic for the days when punishment could be meted out with a simple bullet to the head at a lawman’s discerning discretion. To his credit, he was well aware that this was not exactly the attitude God was looking for when admitting souls into the Promised Land.
Not even close.
He simply didn’t give a fuck. Not anymore. If the price of bringing his late sister’s murderer to justice was his soul, he’d pay the cost without question. No sacrifice he’d have to make was too great to see that fucker go down in flames.
At any rate, he was well aware that his final eternal destination would most likely be plenty warm.
He could live with it.
Or, he thought he could.
Until the day he actually exchanged words with Harmony McKinnon.
That was the day everything changed for him. That was the day that he lost his soul-deep certainty that he could continue to masquerade as a monster in order to slay the bigger beast.
Now, he’d never been one of those pansy-asses that waxed poetic about love at first sight. Hell, no. But even he couldn’t deny that something inexplicable happened the instant he’d first laid eyes on the special woman that was Harmony McKinnon, and he couldn’t help the foolish grin that spread across his face as he recalled that first conversation.
~~***~~
He was sitting on the cracked leather bench seat of the restaurant booth closest to the back wall - the same spot he’d claimed every afternoon for the past ten days - when he first saw her. For nearly two weeks, he’d waited for this moment to catch a glimpse of the woman that might prove the key to bringing down one of the largest drug cartels in the nation and putting some of the worst criminals he’d ever run across behind bars. Most importantly to him, though, the woman he watched just might be the pawn he needed to nail his sister’s killer.
He was pleasantly surprised; she definitely wasn’t what he’d thought he’d find when he finally located her. In fact, she was the exact opposite of everything he’d expected, he thought to himself as he watched her womanly body move toward his table at the back of the restaurant. Sure, he’d reviewed the pictures that were in the file that the DEA had put together on her, but none of those snapshots had done her an ounce of justice. In photographs, you couldn’t tell just how touchable her peaches-and-cream complexion looked or how her long blonde hair shimmered. A man couldn’t see just how gently her rounded curves caressed the light pink tee shirt and faded blue jeans she wore like a second skin. And that smile of hers… let’s just say that those full, rosy lips of hers would make the wet dream he knew he’d have tonight a bestselling box office attraction if it was ever filmed. Fuck, seeing that smile up close and in real time was enough to make even a monk’s cock stand up and pay attention.
Harmony McKinnon was one mouthwateringly delicious fucking temptation – especially to a man that hadn’t had his dick wet in over a year. Back-to-back cases had kept him off the dating front for far longer than he was comfortable with admitting, and at his age, one night stands no longer appealed to him. The simple truth was that the woman facing him sent his too-long ignored libido sailing into overdrive, and his stiff dick was insistently reminding him on the state of affairs beneath his leather belt.
His personal penis problems not withstanding (there were worse problems to have than a hard dick, after all), there was an upside to his current situation. After many hours spent searching for a way into the McKinnon family fold, evidently, he finally managed to find the inside track he needed with the closely-knit clan last night. In the bar fight last night, he’d protected Harmony’s sister. It’d been dumb luck; he hadn’t orchestrate
d the brawl – not that he was above doing that. He just hadn’t thought of it. No, instead, he’d merely been in the right place at the right time and lent a capable hand in breaking up the scuffle. Those actions had endeared him to at least two of the four McKinnon sisters, all of whom owned the bar/restaurant together. Judging by the dazzling smile Harmony had aimed his way when he’d walked into the restaurant a few minutes ago, it was a good indication that this could be his first big break since arriving in Paradise.
Now the woman he was here to watch was steadily making her way toward him. One plate was held aloft above her head as she weaved her way through the tables dotting the floor of the somewhat busy restaurant.
He just needed to sit there and wait.
“Well, hi there, stranger,” Harmony McKinnon greeted him as she reached his side. “I was hopin’ you’d come in this afternoon so that we could thank you properly for your help yesterday evenin’.” She offered him another friendly smile as she bent and deposited the plate in front of him.
Jacob held his breath as her full breasts hovered just in front of his face and the light feminine floral scent of her perfume teased his nose. Reminding himself that this woman – no matter how sweet she smelled -- could very well be part of the criminal enterprise directly responsible for his sister’s death, he kept his face impassive as she straightened.
“So, you’re the motorcycle-ridin’ knight in chafed leather that rescued my little sister from a hell of a fall last night, huh? I’ve been hearing an awful lot from my sister, Patience, about the leather-wearing stud that stumbled into Paradise a few weeks ago. Now, my other sister Faith is singing your praises, too, after saving her the way you did last night. I told them both that I needed to meet the guy willing to go to bat for two women he didn’t even know.” Harmony spoke softly, her soft cornflower blue eyes meeting his own with a steady gaze.
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