Hollis was the ‘catch,’ because his daddy owned the lumber mill. The mill where my daddy and almost everyone else’s daddy worked. The mill that kept every other business in our little town in business.
With an ax and a cart when there was nothing here but the trees and a few cabins by the river, Hoagie started Cullen’s Lumber. Now, the town of Cullen has over fifty thousand inhabitants, all of them with a debt of gratitude to Hoagie Cullen. He carries debts of other kinds for most of them, too. Hoagie is not an easy man to like, but he’s almost impossible not to admire. I should know since he’s my father-in-law.
His son Hollis, my husband, on the other hand, was impossible to like and I never heard of anyone admiring him. Not after they’d actually met him.
A rustle went around the café as the two men prowled towards me and stopped to stand on either side of me. Uncomfortable I looked up, but I couldn’t see their eyes through their dark shades. Then I couldn’t stop my gaze from following the buttons of their white shirts, down to the dull gleam of expensive looking belt buckles and farther down to the strained Italian fabric suit pants at my eye level.
Their manner was polite and my thoughts were distinctly not. A thing that Hollis has made me do, that I never would have done if he hadn’t forced me, that I thought disgusting. He made me do it all the time, and always complained about how I did it. How I had no ‘enthusiasm’ for it. And I didn’t. Not until a shocking half a second ago. My throat tightened and I had to moisten my lips. Little Kylie glowered at me with hot pokers in her eyes.
The broader of the men was on my left. With a New England brogue he said, “Would you take us to him, Miss?”
And the other said, with the trace of Pennsylvania, “If it isn’t any trouble to you.”
They were on either side of me as I stood and I felt light-headed. There was an air of danger about these men, something that troubled the air, but one touched my hand. The touch was soft, but a shudder like a sonic boom went off deep inside me.
At the same time I felt the warmth of the other man as his accent breathed softly into my ear, “We’re here. You’re alright now.” For a moment I could only stand still. A need came over me and my eyelids fluttered as I moistened my lips.
There was nothing I wanted more than to lead these two lusty, dangerous men out of the café, in front of all the small town’s fine ladies. And nothing I wanted less than to take them to my husband.
As the two men in black followed me back out into the hot sun, a long sigh dragged out of the women in the café at once.
TWO HITMEN
ONE CLICK
GET THESE BAD BOYS
UNDER COVER RIGHT NOW
Backmatter Pierce
READY FOR
ANOTHER BAD BOY
TO KEEP YOU HOT?
LUKA
A bad boy mafia romance
“All American Asshole. Comes with one good-guy coupon”
Forbidden love, forced engagement and a secret pregnancy
Former Navy SEAL Luka is hired to protect Alexa for her mobster fiancée. Alexa is suspicious. Plus, she and Luka have a secret already and if the mobster learned about their recent meeting in a bar, it could get Alexa killed.
Opposites attract. Luka is hard, rational and tough. Alexa is intuitive and instinctual but she cannot ignore the way he makes her heart pound. Only she can see the man deeper inside him.
Secrets beget secrets and soon Alexa waits anxiously to use a testing kit from a pharmacy, which she also got in secret. Plots, double crosses, kidnapping and murder are the mood music of their torrid and stormy forbidden relationship, can they survive long enough, hold on tight enough to come together?
THIS FULL-LENGTH NOVEL has sex, violence, betrayal and double-cross in the New York underworld. It ends happily ever after for (nearly) everyone and with no cliffhanger.
Backmatter Luka
ANOTHER BAD BOY
TO KEEP YOU HOT?
PIERCE
A bad boy mafia romance
Kidnapped by a killer
“I didn’t give much thought to old man Grace’s curvy, sassy daughter when I slung her over my shoulder and kidnapped her. I wanted his club, she was only collateral. But they say that opposites attract, right?”
I have to hold the little minx close or she makes all kinds of havoc. That’s where the real trouble starts. However close I hold my feisty prisoner, the urge to hold her closer and tighter gets stronger. It uncoils like a fat, sleeping python then it lengthens and hardens and nothing will make it sleep until it has fed.
He’s hot as hell, but he’s a ruthless killer
“He took me hostage just to steal my daddy’s club. I needed to show him that I wasn’t like the paper-thin dancers and models who flowed into his arms and his bedsheets like a tide. I wanted to smack that smirk right off his chiseled face.
The longer he holds me in his power and try as hard as I might, I can’t push away the thoughts of how it will be if he turns his brutal force on me. Can I resist him?”
This standalone, novel-length adventure races with passion, pulses with action, and climaxes again and again, rises higher and higher to a full, complete, satisfying and surprisingly happy ever after ending. It’s a bad boy romance like no other and you’re going to love it.
Backmatter
How about a read on the dark side…
Severe, devastating billionaire Magnus Lord is used to getting what he wants. When he enters a top Chicago law firm and his eyes fall on Tanya White, the lovely personal assistant to the senior partner, he commands her to join him in a meeting. Abruptly he compels her to leave with him. His demands have hardly begun.
He takes her on a motorcycle, then he takes her blindfolded in a restaurant. He flies her to Florence, Italy and has her taken in public view in the Uffizi Gallery.
How much can Tanya endure? How far will Lord’s depravity drag the beautiful, curvy and innocent young girl?
AND…
Sexy Biker Thrills
How deep into the biker MC world of bare-knuckle fighting will a good-girl schoolteacher be dragged, on just one fateful night?
Young Christa has always been a really good girl.. When a friend takes her to a motorcycle clubhouse, Christa is given a blazing fast lesson on what the bad girls do, and how really bad the bad boys can get. A pair of gray eyes lock on her across the barroom, and good girl Christa’s fate is sealed.
Ax loves his bike and he loves his club, and he loves a bare-knuckle fight. When he sees Christa in danger, he senses something else that he loves.
These few short moments will have huge consequences for Christa and Ax. How far will the explosive cocktail of violence, desire and naked lust take young Christa?
Gypsy Rider
Young, beautiful, spoiled Gypsy was looking for trouble, thrills, whatever she could get. Hacker was the badass boy she knew from high school. He was cool, older and had a god-given ass. And he ignored her.
Now Hacker is a biker high up in the local motorcycle club, and Gypsy is determined to have his attention, whatever the cost.
When Gypsy takes a ride with Hacker, she learns there is a high price to be paid. She has to prove herself, in a roomful of hard, horny bikers. Will she come across with the price of the ride?
Innocent
HE IS SO NOT THE KIND OF MAN I SHOULD BE WITH
Belle. Most of her innocence was shredded when her douche boyfriend left her homeless, broke and almost out of gas in the middle of the desert.
IT’S SO EASY TO FOR ME FALL FOR A MAN LIKE HIM
Hammer is a brown-eyed biker in black leather who makes Belle a proposition. She knows that her judgement in men is off, but even she can see that she and this man are a dangerous combination.
SOMEHOW I KNOW THAT IT CAN TURN OUT DIFFERENT THIS TIME
What will he force her to go through for a job at the biker clubhouse?
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© Alice May Ball 2016
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner.
Any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, or to any actual events is purely coincidental.
All the people portrayed in this story are over the age of eighteen, and entirely imaginary. If you think that you know some of them, or that you may be one of them, then you should consider writing fiction yourself.
Cover Design by Signs of Desire for TzR Publishing
Chapter One
BONUS STORIES
MC STORIES
Belle
INNOCENT
Knights of the Lost Highway MC
Alice May Ball
For Gat, my rock.
Without you, it wouldn’t mean a thing
Her eyes flickered and flinched as the big biker laid her out on the pool table. His eyes widened at her soft, undulating breasts. With his forearm behind her knees, he lifted her red, stinging thighs up to her chest. Her hands stretched out and grasped as he pressed down.
She shook and cried out as he slapped her ass. A grin spread wide across his thick, powerful lips and he plunged his mouth onto her swollen and sore lips.
She shuddered and as she shook and moistened, his tongue fanned her. She throbbed there and her body convulsed. He sucked on her. When she moistened, he drank greedily. His long tongue probed and explored her soft opening mercilessly.
Her waves of vibration swelled to a gathering crest, her thighs, her stomach and her buttocks clenched and released. Tightened and relaxed. When her walls gripped on his tongue, her mouth sagged and his hand closed around her throat.
Through the grimy glass, the spotty gas station clerk could not have been less interested. He barely pulled his half-closed eyes from the screen. His voice crackled through a tinny speaker, “That card’s been declined, ma’am. Do you have another card you can use for payment?”
Bad news, baked dry in the Nevada heat.
It had to be a mistake. I stepped away from the pay window and called Larry. My cellphone went straight to a machine that said, ‘there is no service on this number at present.’
Perfect. I was about to put it away when I saw that a text had come in. ‘Your service has been terminated due to non-payment,’ and a number to call. I called the number.
I got the machine again, telling me that there was no service.
Practically the middle of the desert, I had enough gas for about twenty miles and that was it. Eight dollars and forty cents in cash. I figured my best, safest option was to drive back to the one-street blur that I passed through about six or seven miles back.
I remembered thinking Here’s somewhere I’ll never need to see more of. I was out the other side, back into dusty desert scrub before the thought was even finished.
Now I turned around and drove back. I found a post office that doubled as a bus station. An empty diner with peeling paint the color of rust right next door. With a sorry-looking grocery store by the gas station at the other end, that seemed to be the town, pretty much.
It must be a riot here on a Saturday night.
Driving back from a visit to Tuscon, my tiny denim skirt and a thin t-shirt with no bra was fine for driving. I hadn’t expected to be out of the car any longer than it took to buy gas, why worry? That was way back when I still thought I could buy gas.
The little diner looked like most of my available options. I parked out front. In the dusty lot were two cars, in no better shape than my little brown Honda, and a motorcycle.
I could get a coffee and sit. Take a rest from driving. Then some miraculous idea would pop into my head out of nowhere. I knew better than to try and think more than a few minutes ahead. Life with Larry had me primed for emergencies.
Over the door a little bell jingled as I stepped in. The young hottie who was serving didn’t seem to mind one bit how I was dressed.
He was wiry and trim, about nineteen, with his hair razored into tribal swirls to match the ink on his arms and his neck. His skin was tanned and smooth. The little white apron looked out of place, hanging below his lean, bare midriff, but not in a bad way.
He watched as I took a seat facing the window.
His rolling gate brought him slowly to my table and I looked a second time to check; nope, the little apron looked fine as his big thighs slid behind it.
“Hi,” he said, pencil and pad in hand, “I’m Beanie,” he grinned a little as he jabbed the pencil at a name tag on his broad chest. I carried on watching his midriff. Make sure nothing bad happened to it, you know?
His soft gray eyes lit when I lifted mine. “Coffee,” I said.
A tight smile waved through his lips. As he walked away I turned to watch his ass. He was too young for me. I thought probably I ought to tell that to myself a couple of times.
I watched the traffic, what there was of it. A truck rumbled by every few minutes. Occasionally a car. A biker on a big, black Harley ducked his head to peer through black shades into the diner as he thundered past. I guessed he was Beanie’s buddy.
The bike out front was likely Beanie’s, too, then. I was getting to feel right at home. Just as well, since I probably couldn’t call anyplace else home, not just right then.
So finally, Larry had maxed out my card, busted our cell contract and probably made a moonlight dash from our little apartment in Boulder Colorado. The last two months, I knew there was something off about him saying, “I’ll take the rent. Give me the cash and I’ll drop it by to Mrs. Oakham.”
I guess I knew but I didn’t want to believe it. Whether that was because I didn’t want to believe he really was such a slimeball, or if I simply didn’t want to accept the fact that my own judgment was so messed up. We all just believe what we need to believe. Hold on to it until something drags it away from us.
When I met Larry, I was such an innocent.
That jerk. It wasn’t the rough treatment that I minded so much. I’m a grown up, you know? What I hated was him being a dick about it. Daddy used to hand out ‘slaps’ as regular reminders of something. I don’t remember what.
Daddy didn’t hover, dithering, holding himself back. He didn’t lash out and then collapse in tears, crying that he didn’t mean it and it wouldn’t ever happen again. When Daddy hit you, he meant it and you knew it.
Aside from the nails on chalkboard whine of a man demeaning himself, you can’t argue or discuss with someone who’s constantly swearing they didn’t mean it and they’ll never do it again. They make themselves the victim.
Asshole.
When I asked for a refill, Beanie brought the pot. He lowered his voice to say, “I’m only supposed to refill you with a food order.” Cute. There was nobody out here to hear him but me.
I watched the traffic some more. I’d have to find a payphone. Call Jamie in Tuscon. Listen to her saying, “I’m not going to say I told you so…” But then what, ask her to drive out here, Oh, and could you bring some money, please? Else, what, call Daddy? NO way.
“I got an order of scrambled with a stack.” He was there again, “I must have got it wrong. Don’t suppose you’d like them, would you? They ain’t going nowhere.” I looked up at Beanie. I thought, There’s nobody else here, Beanie. Who could they have been for?
Three Hitmen: A Triple Bad Boy Mafia Romance (Lawless Book 2) Page 17
