Page 7 of Guilty as Sin
The fight would have to be in the bathroom, which would take some ingenuity. Why was Sawyer in metro-baddie’s bathroom?
The next section of wood split.Crack.Sawyer’s love interest, of course. This time, Jace would have to make her likable. A heroine, fighting the good fight along with Sawyer. Otherwise, readers would complain he was misogynistic. He wasn’t misogynistic. He just didn’t necessarily trust women.
He didn’t necessarily trust men, either. But nobody complained about a treacherous man in a book. That, they expected.
Erica.He rolled the name over in his mind. Yeah, it sounded sexy. Dark hair, blue eyes. Tall, willowy, cultured, and mysteriously feminine. Perfect.
Sounded good to him, too. Maybe heshouldclean up his act. That kind of woman probably didn’t want a mountain man. Of course, she probably wasn’t hanging about in the produce aisle in the Sinful, Montana, Safeway, either.
Right, so Erica’s taking out a bodyguard, and Mr. X thinks he has Sawyer backed up into the bathroom, and…
Tobias barked, and Jace looked down the drive. Mail truck. He finished stacking the wood and took off for the mailbox with Tobias trotting behind.
He pulled out the white envelope, and Tobias whined.
“Yeah,” Jace told the dog, ignoring the fact that his heart was pounding in that way your heart did when you got the danger signals, a way Sawyer’s wouldn’t have. Readers didn’t want to know how it really felt, about the coppery taste of your own fear.
This time, he looked at the postmark. Missoula. A couple hours away. He thought about fingerprints and took the envelope up to the house, where he put on gloves, feeling a bit silly, opened the envelope with his tactical knife, and drew out the two sheets of stapled paper.
Blackstone didn’t let anyone catch him off guard. So how had it happened? He would have given the question more attention, except that he was otherwise engaged. By the caressing touch of the sting-inducer on the sensitive insides of his upper thighs, then over his groin, around and down. And by the purr of that voice. The one that, he was nearly sure, belonged to the woman in red.
“I’m going to make you want it whether you want to or not,” she told him. “I’m going to make you do it. Then you’ll know how helpless you can truly be. And after that… have you ever heard of choking at orgasm, I wonder? Of course you have. I’m sure you’ve done it. But you’ve never felt it yourself, have you? Always in control. Always in command. But surrender can feel so good. Trust me. You’ll think you’ve died and gone to heaven. You could be wrong about one part.”
It had gone on, but Jace hadn’t read it. “That’s the worst of it, mate,” he’d told Tobias. “That I’m getting my knickers in a twist over somebody who actually wrote, ‘the woman in red.’” Tobias had cocked his head, his ears at full alert, his brown eyes locked on Jace’s, and Jace had said, ‘Too right. Bloody soft. You’d think I’d be too old and too hard for mind games.’”
It hadn’t been so much about what she’d written—at least, he was fairly sure now that it was a “she.” It was more what had come next, at the bottom of Page Two.
Three spaces, then,You tried to call me. That makes me happy. I knew you’d be curious, and I was right, wasn’t I? It’ll be better than you’ve ever had before, because you’ll wonder how much of it I mean. You’ll wonder if it’s even me, because I won’t tell you. I can give you something nobody ever has. I can make you give it all up, and make you want to go there. Watch for me. And wonder.
I love your muscle definition. I love your strength. I want to take it from you. How will I hold you still while I do that? Don’t you wish you knew?
Love,
Natalia
(That’s not my name. But you can call me that. I’ll call soon. Love you.)
Which was all creepy, but stupid, except that it had been effective enough to spark the old nightmare. She knew, somehow, what he feared most. Being afraid. Being powerless.
But he wasn’t powerless. Twelve hours later, still crouching before the wood stove, watching the yellow light dance behind the glass window, he rewrote “Natalia’s” scene in his mind. In his version, he didn’t lie there with his mind paralyzed by fear. Whoever had written that didn’t know him very well.
If you responded to danger with paralysis, bad things tended to happen to you.
You tended to die.
In Jace’s rewritten version, he listened to that purring voice, focused all his attention on it, let his body respond, and then said, “All I hear is promises. I don’t see you climbing on top of me and giving me a go. I reckon you’re all talk.” And then, when she’d taken the challenge, because she’d need to—when she’d thought she’d won, when she was well and truly after it, when his body had got itself with the program and given her something to work with—he said, “Kiss me. Please.” Like he wanted it. Like he was hers.
And when she did? He bit her lips off. He grabbed the hand clutching at his wrist, broke a finger, and held on. He made her let him go. People who delighted in giving pain never wanted to feel it for themselves. No guts. No ticker.
You only lost if you gave up, and he didn’t give up.
He stood up, pulled the shirt over his head without bothering with the buttons, and told Tobias, “Back to bed. Nightmare’s over.”
He couldn’t save Andy O’Connor. He could dream it, could rewrite it as many times as he wanted, and O’Connor would still bleed out in the dust of the Mirabad Valley. And then his body would be blown apart.
That story was written. It was done.
He woke at six the next morning with a PTSD hangover, but he knew about that, too. He called it what it was, he stared it down, and he put it away. He drove into Sinful, told Tobias to stay in the ute, headed for the gym—The Sinful Body, which he supposed he’d name a gym himself if he were trying to bring the customers in—and said hello to Charlotte, the redheaded girl at the front desk, who always smiled and blushed when he arrived. Of course, she probably blushed for everybody, so he wasn’t too excited. He smiled back, because shy redheads reminded him of his cousin Willow, accepted his towel, and put himself through the first phase of the workout he and Rafe had done together last time he’d visited his brother.
