Hot and Haunted Read online

  Brody caught both his hands in my hair, in the length that was streaked with mud and damp with rain and shining in the moonlight. With the dissolution of my last shred of control, he kissed me, a long, hot, erotic meeting of the mouths, tongues tangling wildly as our bodies bucked.

  Then he entered me, smoothly, in one steady push, for I was ready, more than ready, and I welcomed him with an answering arch of my hips.

  Stilling inside me, he looked into my eyes as I writhed beneath him. His eyes questioned, asking if I was sure, and I bucked, screaming his name in desperation.

  He began to thrust, long, deliberate strokes that had the wet walls of my cunt shuddering as they were battered over and over. Knowingly, he held still for a moment, a very brief moment, every time that he was in me up to the hilt. That was what I liked best, and I let him know with my strangled little cries.

  I felt my body go liquid, a hurricane of sensation, as that long cock of his ground into me, grinding and pushing and thrusting, and I screamed, loud and clear with wanton abandonment as I came around him in a gush.

  He stilled as I panted, and I knew that he had yet to come; I was still impaled on the unrelenting length of him, the length that was pinning me into the ground.

  When I again stilled, he lowered a hand to my clit and rubbed, stroking a hard, fast melody even as his hips began to fuck me harder and faster, and his long, warm weight pressed me into the ground. Over and over he moved, our flesh slapping, and I could tell from his clenched teeth and the sweat beading off his brow that he was almost there.

  To help, and also because it felt so damned good, I arched my hips, taking him extra deep, as his thumb pressed hard against my clit. I came again, a long, bright wave of pleasure that reminded me of the bolts of lightning flashing above our heads.

  Once I was caught in the midst of my frenzied release, he ground his hips into me with a ferocity that I didn’t imagine he was capable of and shouted, over and over, as he spilled his slick, steaming pleasure between my legs.

  It seemed like forever before either of us could move. I wasn’t sure how long it was in actuality as we both lay sated, sinking into the warm, squishy mud, heartbeats gradually slowing and nerves beginning to settle.

  I felt drunk, or maybe sedated. Breathing heavily, I opened my mouth and allowed the wonderfully wet drops of rain to moisten my tongue and dampen my throat.

  Groaning, Brody rolled, keeping his limp, satisfied weight from crushing me, and we lay quietly on our backs, watching the streams of water continue to fall from the sky.

  When I was certain that my muscles would again support me, I let him pull me to my feet. We rinsed off in the steaming rain, giggling like children, and when most of the mud was gone, he lifted me in his arms and carried me back to the car, where he offered me his shirt to towel myself off. Brazenly naked, I refused, instead curling my body into Brody’s on the seat.

  I felt as content as a cat who’d had a saucer of cream, a sensation as far removed from my inner turmoil of earlier in the day as Calgary was from China.

  He kept his eyes fastened on me though his mind had to have been as dazed as my own from the incredibly bright sparks that still, even after a long, draining bout of amazing sex, snapped between us. As the steam began again to fog the windows, I lazily reached over him to touch a fingertip to the condensation. I wrote my name on the glass, glad that I had told him the real one, knowing that it would linger there even after I was gone.

  I didn’t want to go. And I still wasn’t thrilled that I didn’t want to, that I again seemed to be attached.

  The warm body snuggled against my own suddenly stiffened; Brody lifted his head and cocked it like an animal.

  “Did you hear that?” He strained against my arms to sit upright.

  I traced a lazy finger over the golden whorls of hair that clung damply to the lean muscles of his chest. “Nope. I’m otherwise occupied.”

  He chuckled and batted away my hand, playfully. “Seriously, it sounded like a car.”

  “Really?” Curious, I lifted myself onto my elbows, and caught the shine of two headlights slicing through the pouring rain.

  “We’d better get some clothes on,” Brody said.

  I continued to lie still, knowing that the night was ending though not as I had planned it would—and it seemed that I was fine with that.

  “Someone’s found us, come on!”

  I stretched, a slow catlike stretch, reluctantly pulling my wet dress against the still-fevered skin of my chest. I didn’t want to get out of the car—didn’t want to face the real world again.

  It might have been selfish, but the little bubble that the two of us had created inside the small car had made me happier than I’d ever been.

  I watched, almost lazily, as Brody tried to slink back into his shirt. The cloth caught on the dampness of his skin, and he shrugged impatiently.

  I didn’t think I liked how eager he was to get out of this car.

  “I hope it’s Triple A.” Brody pushed his glasses up his nose, his face alight with relief. I narrowed my eyes in anger—I had nearly perfect vision and didn’t need to squint to see the vehicle that had pulled to the side of the road in front of us. It was a big, shiny truck, the kind that men in their late twenties bought to show that they were big and tough. It shone black in the beam of our headlights, black and big and somewhat overbearing.

  “I know that truck.” The words fell out of my mouth before I could stop them. Brody paused, and I could see the wheels in his busy brain turning as he tilted his head toward me, uncertainty playing over his features.

  Seeing that uncertainty on the face of someone who I’d learned in the past few hours was, by nature, controlled and analytical, had the corners of my lips turning up in amusement.

  “There’s no need to get all excited. I’m certainly not. It’s only my boyfriend.”

  LITTLE RED’S BIG BAD

  Saranna DeWylde

  Chapter One

  “HERE’S LITTLE RED straying from the path, just like the Big Bad Wolf said she would,” convicted serial rapist Jimmy Bancroft, said with a smirk as three officers led him into the interview room. His chains rattled with every shuffling movement, and U.S. Marshal Miranda Garrick waited patiently for the officers to secure his leg shackles to the heavy bolts in the floor. They removed one wrist from behind his back and secured it to the left side of the table, then his other to the right. Only then was he permitted to sit. “I’m flattered you think all this necessary.”

  Already he was trying to control the power structure, attempting to keep her off-balance, first by saying he had information about her, then by trying to make her comfortable with him so she’d drop her guard. She knew the routine; it was standard predator behavior.

  “Mr. Bancroft,” she began.

  “Call me Jimmy, darlin’.” His mouth snapped into a grin.

  Miranda was surprised by how straight, white, and sharp his teeth were. They were an incongruity flashing out from his pockmarked face. He didn’t look like the kind of man to care for his dental health. It wasn’t both arms, sleeved with tattoos, that marked him as part of the Aryan Nation, his cratered face, the slicked-back fifties greaser hair, or even the strange scar on his neck that looked like an animal bite. It was the black rings of filth under his jagged yellow fingernails, the swollen, red bulbous tip of his nose that betrayed him as a lifetime drunk, and the stench coming off his body that was more than unwashed flesh.

  He reeked of death—rot.

  “Mr. Bancroft,” she started again, keeping it professional and maintaining distance. “That wouldn’t be quite fair since I only answer to Marshal Garrick.”

  Another grin spread across his face like an infection. “No, you’re Little Red to his Big Bad Wolf. He said you’d be comin’, and you’d have fire hair. That’s why you here, ain’t it? Huntin’ Dean Harvey Webster?” He licked his too-full lips languorously, as if savoring the taste of something, his eyes roving over her body.

&nb