Box of 1Night Stands: 21 Sizzling Nights

by Anthology

  With an achingly sweet swipe of his thumb, he whisked her tears away while Alberto slipped quietly into the building.

  Javier lowered his voice to the barest of whispers. “Let me make love to you the way you were meant to be loved. If you still want to leave in the morning, I’ll send Alberto to personally escort you wherever you want to go.”

  As much as she wanted to believe him, she wouldn’t let him cast her aside after sex again. “You don’t trust me.”

  “I do trust you. I didn’t trust what I felt for you. My feelings for you scared me and I feared if I allowed them to take over, I would end up hurt. But I love you and I don’t want to lose you again.”

  Desperate to hear those words, she didn’t trust her own ears. “Say it again. In Spanish.”

  He repeated in his native tongue the words she longed for but had stopped believing she’d ever hear, and she knew he spoke the truth. She wrapped her arms around his neck and held him close, needing to soak in the rapid changes and allow the emotional roller coaster to glide to a stop.

  After a moment, he pulled back, meeting her gaze again. “I want to show you my house. Will you come with me?”

  Shock rippled through her. He’d invited her to his house, the one that he didn’t allow others inside. With anyone else, the intimacy might have happened too quickly, but her need and love for Javier had been building and simmering her whole life. She didn’t hesitate.

  “Yes. I’d be honored.”

  “So, you don’t need a taxi ride?” the driver demanded.

  “We do need one,” Javier said. “Fast as you can, down the employee path, over the dirt road, along the fence line, and behind the corral. A hundred bucks if you can do it in less than three minutes.”

  Two minutes later, they arrived.

  The cab sped away, a thin layer of dust covering Caroline and her suitcase. The oversized front porch and the whimsical ranch design loomed instantly recognizable despite being encased in darkness offset only by the light of the moon.

  “This is our house,” she whispered.

  Beginning as a cheesy high school class assignment, they’d worked on the plans together until perfecting their dream house down to the children’s bedrooms and the colors of the towels in the bathrooms.

  “I need you to make it a home. Can I take you inside?” He shifted, the moonlight reflecting the vulnerability in his brown eyes.

  She nodded and looped her arms around his neck. “Please.”

  He scooped her up in his arms. More than simply bringing her to his house, it seemed he intended to sweep her off her feet to carry her over the threshold. She hugged him tighter and kissed his neck, delighted by the romance and the emotion behind it.

  Carrying her up the front porch, he kicked the front door open. The sign, “Home is Where My Horse is,” tilted to one side. She tried to adjust it, but he didn’t pause. Neither did he stop as he strode through the living room, kitchen, and down the hall, not giving her time to take everything in.

  “This is not how you give a tour.”

  He paused in the doorway to the bedroom. “Is that what you want? A tour?”

  Lifting her gaze to his face, she knew whatever she requested he’d move heaven and earth to provide it for her. At the same time, material possessions ceased to matter. She didn’t care if they lived in the bed of a pickup truck.

  “I want to make love. I want to create an equal partnership. I want us both to believe our love will last forever.” She touched her forehead to his.

  “Sí, I want those things, too.” He lowered her to her feet, sucking her lower lip between his.

  Her eyes drifted closed, savoring the sweetness of the gesture. She caressed his sculpted cheek, then skimmed her tongue over his mouth, sighing as he opened, welcoming her.

  He took his time unbuttoning her blazer before sliding it from her shoulders. Pressing his lips to the hollow of her throat, he repeated the process with her blouse, massaging and exploring each inch of skin he uncovered. As tenderly as if he was unwrapping the most precious of gifts, he unhooked and peeled away the lace of her bra.

  She opened his well-worn cowboy shirt, exploring his muscled chest as reverently as he’d touched hers before tugging the cuffs from his wrists. Encircling him with her arms, she fit against him, reveling in the warmth of their half-naked bodies together, his heart beating steadily in time with hers.

  Reaching between them, she pushed his jeans down his thighs, filling her hand with his hot erection. He gasped then moaned as she stroked his impressive length.

  He laid her back on the bed, removing her slacks with tender care. Returning to her chest, he lavished attention on each breast, trailing kisses down to her navel.

  For a moment she closed her eyes, savoring his touch, but she wanted him to be with her, a part of her. Half rising from her prone position, she tugged him next to her on the bed. “I don’t want things to be one-sided this time. I’m going to give to you, too.”

  “I didn’t give last time,” he said, regret etched in the small lines at the corners of his sensuous mouth. “I took. This time I’m going to give. Let me show you how much I love you.” He shifted to kneel between her thighs, kissing and licking her to the brink of orgasm.

  Oh, yes. He’d pledged his love in English and Spanish. Her doubts melted away at his words. She rose to a sitting position and helped him shift his legs so he sat as well. As much as she could have lain savoring every drop of pleasure he wrung from her, she wanted something else. “I want us to come together.”

  She straddled him, wrapping her legs around his waist. Threading her fingers with his, she sank onto his straining cock. They sat unmoving, palm to palm, chest to chest, bodies pulsing, hearts pumping in unison.

  Staring into his soulful brown eyes, she connected more deeply and completely than she’d dreamed possible. “I love you, Javier Alvarado. I always have.”

  His cock lurched inside her. “Dios, querida. I never stopped loving you. God knows I tried, but I couldn’t.”

  She trembled and shuddered around him when he came in a hot burst of passion, filling her, sealing their love.

  They stayed together long after the last moments of orgasm shuddered through them.

  Finally, Javier gathered her in his arms and shifted until they lay together, still intimately joined. “Home isn’t where the horse is. It’s where you are, Caroline.”

  She snuggled contentedly. “Even though I won’t be leaving, you can welcome me home like this anytime.”

  .

  ~ABOUT THE AUTHOR~

  Sara Daniel writes what she loves—irresistible romance and captivating family drama. She writes to entertain and to give people hope and a belief that everything can and will turn out happily ever after.

  On the personal side, she’s a frazzled maid, chef, chauffeur, tutor, and personal assistant (aka mom). She was once a landlord of two uninvited squirrels. She’s crazy about country music and the drama of NASCAR. And she has her own happily-ever-after romance with her hero husband.

  You can visit Sara at:

  www.saradaniel.com

  Strawberry Kisses

  A 1Night Stand Story

  by

  Dominique Eastwick

  Also by Dominique Eastwick

  The Duke and the Virgin

  The Marquis and the Mistress

  The Earl and His Virgin Countess

  ~DEDICATION~

  This book is dedicated to Valerie Mann who never ever let me give up on my writing and who pushed me to give my best. Thanks, Val.

  And of course, to my own personal Hero, my husband.

  Chapter One

  Mia blew out a frustrated sigh and stared at the mess around her feet. Flyers and promotional posters littered the carpet in a three hundred and sixty degree radius. Crouching down, she assessed the chaos with frustrated bemusement.

  “Could you be a dear and take some of this with you, Mia?” she mimicked in the deep voice of Kendal Huxton, owner and s
lave driver for Baron Gaming, Inc. “Idiot.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Mia glanced up from the squatting position, blew the stray hair out of her eyes while being mesmerized by what had to be the sexiest blue eyes pair she had ever seen. This was the kind of man she programmed into the games she created. This was the hero, the one everyone played to get the gold, kill the dragon, and if they were lucky, win the loot.

  “Sorry, not you—I meant me. I’m the idiot.”

  His deep laugh reverberated through her all the way down to her flip-flopped, purple-painted toes. “Here, let me help you with these.”

  She nodded, not able to say much past the lump in her throat anyway. She watched the dark wool fabric of his pants pull tight over his thighs, and try as she might not to, her gaze followed the inseam of his pants to rest on his crotch. Her overactive imagination went into overdrive wondering what this man would look like minus his clothes. With her cheeks burning, she turned away knowing her face had to be the same color as the rose carpet under her feet. Swiping her hands over the pamphlets, she pulled them into a bigger pile before her.

  “Here.” He handed her the glossy 8 x 10 posters for Fantasy Realms: Age of the Dragons. “With so many copies of these, you’re either a huge stalker-like fan of this game, or you’re one of the girls hired to turn on young boys at the gamers’ convention.”

  She didn’t know how to take the comment—nothing about her screamed sex kitten hired to turn on anyone, and it had been a long time since she’d been thought of as a girl. Before she could answer, a beautiful woman—weren’t they all here in Vegas?—grabbed the sex god by the arm and tugged.

  “You’ll be late if we don’t leave soon.”

  He glanced at his watch and shrugged “She’s right. She usually is. I am going to be late for my date.” He pointed at the papers on the floor. “You got this?”

  Disappointment engulfed Mia. “Yes, thank you for helping.”

  “And thank you for not calling me an idiot. Can I take one of these? My son is a huge fan of the game. He says their designer, Miriam Callrous, is his hero and he wants to design games just like she does when he grows up.”

  Fumbling through the pile, she grabbed a few posters and reached out to give them to him. “Sure, take as many as you like.”

  “One should do it. He probably got one signed today, anyway. He has been at the convention all afternoon with one of his buddies.”

  “Oh no, the autograph signing is tomorrow, if you want….”

  “G , we’ve got to go.” The woman grew more insistent and annoying by the minute. Good lord, didn’t she know Mia wanted him for just one second more? That’s it, one second—is that too much to ask?

  “Take a Valium, Sylvia.” “G” threw a frustrated look at the beautiful woman before standing up, causing Mia to strain her neck to see his face. He tapped the poster in his hand once. “Thanks again.”

  Yes, it was too much to ask. She sat on the floor of the very expensive hotel, watching the man of her fantasies walk away with a beautiful woman, on his way to give something to his son before going on a date. Wow, even for her that seemed fucked up. And exactly why she preferred her small house in the middle of nowhere with her two dogs, three cats, half dozen chickens and her state of the art, every-gadget-you-could-think-of computer system.

  She gathered up the remaining papers in a disorganized heap, hit the elevator up button with her elbow, and smiled a smile she didn’t feel when the elevator attendant asked her what floor. And while she watched the numbers move toward the thirty-fifth floor, she exhaled a second sigh of frustration.

  Mia understood ROM, RAM, hard drives, html codes and anything that had to do with computers. Hell she could create larger-than-life animated characters for her games that people loved and wanted to become, or as the army of gamers refer to them as simply “toons”, But with all her knowledge of what made real men and women want her toons, she didn’t relate those same real people well at all. And that was why she had, at the urging of her ever nosy, always loving, and very pregnant-for-the-seventh-time sister, agreed to sign up for the dating site, 1NightStand.

  1NightStand, the exclusive, high-end dating service for people with money who couldn't find a date on their own. The reviews for Madame Eve's services were spectacular and guaranteed an experience both discreet and without embarrassment. So tonight, she had a date, and though that didn't mean sex was in the cards, her odds were stacked higher for it tonight than they had been in years. And she was in Vegas, so if she couldn't take a gamble there, where else could she?

  Her happily married sister thought her single sister needed to get laid by something that didn’t require batteries. And to be honest, it had been a very long time since a real man had touched her, let alone brought her any kind of pleasure. Hell, it had been a long time since a man showed any interest in her at all. She might be a teenage gaming boy’s wet dream, but she seemed to leave most grown men limp.

  She exited the elevator and headed down the long hall to her suite, a suite that with any luck she wouldn’t be sleeping in tonight.

  Chapter Two

  Gavin threw his cell phone on the king-size bed. She was late, over thirty minutes late, and he had a sneaking suspicion he’d been stood up. Which was actually fine with him since the woman from the convention center earlier kept popping into his head. With her full lips and fuller curves, she’d made him hard within a second of talking to her. He'd asked for the poster not because he knew his son would love it, but to hide the raging erection he showed the world.

  She was everything he loved in a woman, soft and round where she should be soft and round. His tastes in the ladies always ran with larger, more feminine ones, rather than skinny, boyish girls. And perhaps that was the major reason things hadn’t worked out with his waiflike ex-wife Janice. He wanted someone he wasn’t afraid to fuck hard for fear of breaking. When Janice had been pregnant with their son, he’d been in heaven, but she’d been miserable, and the few times she’d allowed him access to her body, she’d complained the whole time. Nothing was a bigger turn off than a woman who pointed out all her flaws. Flaws he as a man found appealing.

  But this woman seemed comfortable in her skin—she didn't wear a lot of make up and though she hadn't been showing much skin, what little he had seen sent his blood pressure skyrocketing. If his suspicions that the night's date wasn't going to work out came true, he would simply track down his mysterious gamer girl. Since he knew which company she was there with as well as where she would be, he had every plan to track her down the next day.

  When thirty minutes came and went, he texted Madame Eve, the mysterious owner of the exclusive dating service 1Night Stand to tell her he was out of there. He took one more look around the room, picked up his worn black leather overnight bag, and headed down the hallway to the door. The familiar chime of his phone told him he had a text waiting. Instead of a message begging him to understand, or saying she would set him up with someone else, he found one requesting he stay and give it some time.

  Be patient, mon chère, sometimes what we most want doesn’t always get there when we expect it to. You must trust me, if you wait just a little while longer you will not regret it. I promise you that.

  “Fine,” he said to the air, throwing the bag onto the dresser top and pacing the room. God help him from meddlesome sisters. Sylvia insisted he check out the dating site, which he had. She was convinced he’d lost his mind and been quite vocal about it when he mentioned he could just ask the poster woman from the convention out instead of coming on this date.

  So there he stood, in a beautifully decorated room of the world-class family Castillo Resort, waiting to pay to get laid by one woman while lusting for another. Quite a feat for a man who hadn’t been interested in anything sexual in almost five years. When his wife left him for her co-worker three years earlier, their relationship had been dead for years already. The only shock for him that she’d actually been having sex at all, much less
with someone else.

  What sounded like a cement brick crashed outside the door, grabbing his attention and pulling him out of his musings. Without a thought, he threw open the door to find her, the woman from his thoughts, sitting on the floor, throwing an assortment of things into a large, ugly, very utilitarian bag. He blinked twice and shook his head, trying to shake the suspicion he might be hallucinating.

  “Idiot.”

  Nope, no hallucination, definitely her. “I think we've been through this before, unless of course you actually are calling me an idiot this time.”

  “You?” Her head shot up, and her mouth dropped open for a quick second before she composed herself and started shoveling items back into her bag with little success.

  “Me.”

  “What are you doing here?” Her beautiful green eyes locked with his and his cock came to life again.

  “I suspect the same thing you are.”

  “But you have a date.” She appeared so perplexed he wanted to kiss her senseless.

  “Yes, and I believe it’s with you.” I couldn’t be so lucky. “You must be Mia?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Mia, I’m Gavin.” He held out his hand, and when she placed her soft, smaller one in his, he gave a gentle tug to urge her to her feet. Moving her hand to his lips, he turned it over and placed a gentle kiss over the inside of her wrist. Her heat warmed his lips and she inhaled sharply. He smiled. “Come on in.”

  Bending down, he grabbed her bag, threw what remained on the floor unceremoniously back into it, waited just outside the doorway until she walked into the room, then shut it behind them. She touched the wallpaper, her fingers grazing the silk, much like he hoped they’d graze his hard cock. She walked around the room, taking it all in, but it wasn’t lost on him that her eyes avoided the huge bed. With its overstuffed pillows and thick comforter, plus the gigantic headboard, he wondered how she thought he wouldn’t notice her apprehension.