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Get Laid by Annabeth Leong

Get LaidBlurb:

Renovators have invaded the home of Jason and Eliza Wu. The two haven’t seen a clean surface in months and, even worse, haven’t had a moment to themselves. With stress in their work lives added to stress at home, the couple desperately needs to have some fun. Jason and Eliza embark on a bold plan to make love and get out of the house—at the same time. Through a series of hot adventures and wild mishaps in the car, at Eliza’s mother’s house, on the top floor of the library and everywhere in between, Jason and Eliza find that not only can they survive renovations, they might even be sorry when they’re over.

A Romantica® contemporary erotic romance from Ellora’s Cave

Excerpt:

By scooting the heaviest things out of the way with the side of her thigh, Eliza could open the refrigerator door just enough to slide her arm in and identify a wine cooler by shape. She snaked it out of the refrigerator, but her hand slipped on the sweating glass bottle just before she got it clear. It crashed to the floor and shattered, soaking the lower half of her stockings and the big bags of flour and rice from the pantry with pink, sugary alcohol. Shards of glass surrounded her and Eliza swallowed, thinking of her bare feet.

Her husband responded before she could. “Don’t move,” Jason said. He was barefoot himself, but that didn’t stop him from getting in close enough to sweep her up into his arms. The man might sit behind a desk all day at work, but he put in his time at the gym. His taut muscles flexed around Eliza as he lifted her out of the mess and glass and tucked her against his chest.

Jason carried Eliza to the other side of the room and set her on the table. “Are you all right? Did you cut yourself?” He lifted one sticky, stocking-covered foot in his hand and inspected it for injuries.

“I didn’t get hurt.” Eliza caught his other hand and brought it to her lips. “Thanks, Jason. Really.”

He kissed the side of her face in response, and she wished he’d gone for her mouth instead. She reached to pull him in for a better kiss, but before she could he crossed back to the refrigerator and folded his arms across his chest. Eliza and Jason both sighed.

“I think we’re going to have to throw all this food away because of the glass,” Jason said.

“I’m sorry.” She got off the table and tapped one foot, trying to remember where they’d moved the broom.

“You stay there. I’ll take care of this.”

“If you say so.”

“I do.”

Eliza smiled, a little of the tension easing. “I want to do something really fun at home for our anniversary. It’s five years, and maybe our last chance before we have to grow up for real and behave. We should jump on the beds and have sex on the kitchen table.”

“About that…”

“What?”

“If you haven’t opened the document I shared with you, then you didn’t see the note I made about the latest delay.”

Eliza’s voice darkened. “What?”

“When they checked out the master bathroom, they found a rotten beam. It needs to be fixed, but Bob said it means the job won’t be done until mid-August.”

“But that’s only two weeks before our anniversary! That’s more than a month behind schedule.”

Jason shrugged. He wrapped his hand in a dishtowel and began throwing items from the pantry into a big black trash bag. “I don’t like it any more than you. They have to finish the job eventually, one way or another.”

“He always finds something else! Did you ask him if he’s sure about the schedule this time?”

Jason stood abruptly and stepped away from the mess in front of the refrigerator. “I don’t want you criticizing me for how I talked to Bob. Why did we think renovations were a good idea?”

“Oh, Jason.” Eliza rushed to his side and tried to put her arms around him, but he shook her off.

Her husband rubbed one hand over his face. “I don’t want us to fight again. I want to have a nice time with you tonight. Do you know why I was upset when you got home? I left the office a little early and I was going to straighten up around here and make you dinner. If we could open the damn refrigerator, you’d see I picked up avocados and a bunch of other stuff you like. I got home and found the kitchen like this, and I knew I couldn’t get it sorted out in time to surprise you.”

Jason grunted and tossed a few more things into the trash bag. Eliza hovered nearby, wishing she could wave their problems away and start the fun they both wanted. She found herself staring at his firm ass, trying to remember the last time she’d really grabbed it. They’d always had a good relationship, a hot relationship. She’d been shocked to see how the stress of renovations had reduced them to sniping at each other.

“I miss you, Jason.”

He stopped moving. “What do you mean?”

“I miss your body. When was the last time we really had some time to ourselves?”

“You mean other than time we spend complaining to each other about the renovations from hell?”

“I love that you were going to make me dinner. Really, I do. It’s just there’s something I might need more than dinner. I think we both need it.”

A slow grin spread over Jason’s face. “I may have had an ulterior motive when I decided to make you dinner.”

“I hope you did.” Eliza reached out to him with one hand. “Can’t we clean it up in the morning? We have to stop letting these renovations ruin our lives.”

Jason took her in his arms before she finished her sentence.

Buy Links:
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Amazon UK
Barnes and Noble
Ellora’s Cave

 

Bio:

Annabeth Leong has written erotica of many flavors. She loves shoes, stockings, cooking and excellent bass lines. She always keeps a new e-book loaded on her phone and a paperback stashed in her purse, but her eyes are still bigger than her stomach whenever she visits a bookseller. She blogs at annabethleong.blogspot.com, and tweets @AnnabethLeong . Watch for her next contemporary erotic romance from Ellora’s Cave, Design and Scandal.

Icarus Bleeds by Annabeth Leong

Icarus BleedsBlurb:

Icarus, a man on the run, dreams of wings, and of taking flight like the surgically modified rich and famous of Central City. The hacker who harbors him will do anything to keep him, including paying for the dangerous operation in a back alley chop shop. Neither can imagine how much the wings will truly cost.  (M/M)

Buy Links:

Forbidden Fiction’s Story Page (includes links to all sites where the title is available): http://forbidden-fiction.com/library/story/AL1-1.000140

 

Excerpt:

I will call him Icarus, because he worked so hard to erase his birth name that I will not commit the sin of returning it to him now. The things I said and did when I knew him will only make sense if you understand how beautiful he was, so I will try to force the words of mortals to describe a man who never seemed to belong to earth at all.

Icarus first came to me in the dark, in the rain, passing out of the shadows falling over the street, slipping smoothly into the shadows I made for myself. His eyes glowed from the corner where he took a seat, huddled under shelves loaded with discarded computer equipment. Even then I wondered how a shadow could be so luminous within a shadow, how black could shimmer from within black.

I wasn’t in the habit of looking at my clients. They came because they wanted to be forgotten, and they generally did not want to be seen either. I could not help myself with Icarus. He reminded me of flesh I liked to pretend I didn’t have. Eyes, lips, fingertips, inner thighs, the sides of my stomach, the soles of my feet. And, yes. Tongue. Cock. Thoughts both crude and poetic competed to distract me from the mechanical process of obscuring someone from all the files and IP addresses that affirmed that person’s existence.

I avoided looking at his skin, a lighter shade of what is called black than my own purple-tinged pigment. Icarus’s brand of black flowed with honey, shone with sunlight, glittered with the gold that may once have belonged to Pharaoh. Long, thin fingers, delicate as a girl’s. Red-gold palms, and the beginnings of a scar, a telltale revelation of a story that started in the hands and parted the flesh of the forearm nearly to the elbow.

He saw me looking, and pulled the sleeves of his sweater down low, clutching bunches of the material in clenched fists. “Can you really make me disappear?”

I snorted. “Of course not. Not these days, not with the backups they keep and the triple cross checks they have to avoid failure conditions. Best I can do is make them forget to look for you.”

He nodded, the gesture emphasizing the length of his neck, the quality of his silence. “How much?”

“How much you got?”

He shrank back from me, receding into the forest of parts and cords. “I’m not looking for favors.”

“I don’t do favors. I do a sliding scale. You pay what you can afford to pay. What you think is fair. I trust you.”

“Why?”

I sighed. No one ever understood this when I bothered to explain. “Because I’m not one of them. I don’t want to act like one.”

He swallowed, his Adam’s apple moving gracefully up and down in that impossibly lean neck. “I was going to see what you would take.” He bit his lip and didn’t explicate, but I got an idea of what he’d had in mind by the way his hands crept toward his fly, the gesture so subtle that I wasn’t sure it had been a conscious invitation.

On any other night, with any other man, I wouldn’t have. I would have kissed that smooth, wide forehead, done my work for free, and sent him back into the street uttering the vague promise that someday, when he could, he would take care of me. With Icarus, I could not resist the offer. I had to keep him a little longer. Though I hated myself for it, the sentence passed my lips as if it made up part of my daily stock in trade. “After I finish, you’ll come upstairs with me.”

His bowed head telegraphed his acquiescence well before his soft words. “Thank you.”

When I got him to my bed, I knew I should be the one thanking him. He stripped with a benevolent dignity that shamed me. I felt as if I’d brought the Virgin Mary to my room to make a whore of her. Again, I considered releasing him, leaving my work to be my offering to his present and future beauty.

Then his undershirt peeled away from smooth, hard abs, and his boxers fell away from his hips and the thick, dark cock that hung soft between his legs. The shy and lovely young man before me, with his incandescent eyes and visible ribs, brought my own cock surging to life. I could not let him go. My desire made me cruel.

“Get on your knees and crawl to me,” I whispered, loosening my own clothing, casting it aside. Hurt flashed through his eyes, and I loved it for the confirmation that it offered. He was open to me. I could touch him. I could make him remember me forever.

 

Bio:

Annabeth Leong has written erotica of many flavors. She loves shoes, stockings, cooking and excellent bass lines. Icarus Bleeds joins many other dark erotica titles published by Forbidden Fiction, including The Snake and the Lyre, a story of Orpheus and the erotic underworld, and In the Death of Winter, about a dead god and the sacrifices his followers still make. She blogs at annabethleong.blogspot.com, and tweets @AnnabethLeong

Finding Mr. Wrong by Annabeth Leong

WMS_blogtourWhat fun is Mr. Right without Mr. Wrong? Like Mr. Right, he comes in many flavors—in Mr. Wrong’s case, the arrogant jerk, the sniveling coward, the cheater, and more—but unlike the hero of a book, he doesn’t always get the appreciation he deserves. And he should get love because, even when he’s bad for the heroine, he can be a lot of fun for the reader.

In my latest release, The Fugitive’s Sexy Brother, Mr. Wrong stole my heart while I was writing. Matthew Lodi was once a star bounty hunter, but now he’s down on his luck and in over his head, mooching off everyone he knows to make the crushing payments he owes for the thing he loves more than anything else in the world, an orange Lotus Elise 2008, California Edition. At the start of the book, he’s stolen from the main character and mistreated her, but that’s only the beginning of what he gets up to in pursuit of his beloved car.

I couldn’t get enough of him.

He made me mad in such a satisfying way, and I could just see the cocky smile that convinced women to go to bed with him even when they knew better. I loved describing his wrong-headed thought processes, and loved watching the way his supremely callous behavior slowly forced the heroine to stand up for herself.

Much as I’d never want to be the girlfriend of such a jerk, the writer in me was head over heels. Whenever it felt hard to make progress on the book, I’d think about the next scene I wanted to do with him.

I’d like to raise a glass to the Mr. Wrongs who show up in books, providing a person we can love to hate, a target for satisfying comebacks, and a guy the heroine can feel great about walking past when she’s holding hands with Mr. Right.

 

Excerpt:

A rattle marred the powerful purr of the car’s engine slowing and stopping. Matthew Lodi swallowed hard, trying to control his anger and anxiety, but his fists clenched on the steering wheel, whitening his knuckles. Lotus Elise 2008, California Edition. Those words alone could make him happy on the worst of days. Too bad the car had turned on him in the last eight months.

He ran a finger over her sleek dash. A crack tugged at his skin and he sucked air in through his teeth. First the rattle, now this. One part after another had developed problems since he’d crashed her late last year. But no matter what went wrong, he couldn’t let her go. He’d never been this wound up even over a flesh and blood woman. He hemorrhaged money to keep her running and he didn’t like to think about the repo man he’d seen poking around his yard the other night.

He hoped Guy’s little secretary, Neva, had her story straight. He could use a big payday.

A stream of curse words pouring through the window jerked his attention away from the flaw in the dash. Matthew popped up out of the car. A month before someone had keyed the Lotus while it was parked outside Guy’s Bail Bonds. Since then, every hostile word or movement near his employer’s building seemed directed at Matthew’s car.

The guy with the foul mouth appeared around the corner of the building, but Matthew forgot him the moment he focused on the woman pushing him forward. Emily. Protective emotions surged in Matthew’s chest at the sight of his ex-girlfriend’s slight body and big, innocent blue eyes. He locked the car and stepped forward.

“Need some help bringing this joker in?”

Emily’s pretty, freckled face wasn’t made for the sour expression she gave him in response. “I can’t afford to ‘share’ any more commission with you, Matthew. Go get your own.”

Thirty seconds and she’d already brought up this old fight? He wished Emily would stop denying the strength of her feelings for him. “Emily,” Matthew protested. “I’m not trying to take anything that belongs to you. But we both know it’s no good for you to try to do all this alone. You should let me help you with the physical part so you can concentrate on the stuff you can do well.”

The fugitive in her grasp gave a sudden grunt. “Sorry,” Emily told him. “That one really wasn’t for you, even if you did spend the drive over calling me every name in the book.” Matthew rolled his eyes. Emily insisted on treating her quarry like people responding to a dinner invitation. She lacked the stomach to handle them the way they deserved. Matthew reached for the man, mentally planning a hold that would inflict the right amount of pain without leaving bruises that would concern prison officials.

Emily blocked his approach, interposing her body between Matthew and the fugitive. He didn’t think she should leave her back open like that. His forehead wrinkled in concern. “Get your hands off my quarry,” she growled. Thin cheeks showed Matthew that she hadn’t been eating well. Her desperation made him worry about her even more.

“Emily.” He couldn’t resist touching the side of her neck. A few freckles dotted the skin there, but he knew they were just a tease compared to the dots splashed over her shoulders and breasts.

Her shove shocked him, knocking him back onto the sidewalk. Matthew blinked. She shouldn’t have done that when his guard was down. He scrambled to his feet and followed her in.

 

The Fugitive's Sexy BrotherBlurb:

Emily Boysen is sick of low-level bounty hunting jobs that don’t pay her rent, and sick to death of her ex-boyfriend taking credit for her work. Ready to claim her due, she takes on the quarry of a lifetime, the notorious Fernando Bonavita. But instead of the fugitive, she captures his sexy younger brother, Javier.

Javier Bonavita never wanted to know the truth about his older brother’s activities, instead protecting him out of loyalty. When he uses his hacking skills to pose as Fernando, he never expects to uncover crimes he can’t stomach. Beautiful Emily has no idea how glad he is to be in her custody—as long as he’s her prisoner, he doesn’t have to face his brother.

Passion flares between Emily and Javier, and soon he’s putting the handcuffs on her. Suspicion grows along with their feelings, though. A sinister plot centers around Fernando, and untangling it will test their loyalties to the limit.

 

Buy Links:
All Romance eBooks
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Ellora’s Cave

 

Bio:

Annabeth Leong has written erotica of many flavors. She loves shoes, stockings, cooking and excellent bass lines. She always keeps a new e-book loaded on her phone and a paperback stashed in her purse, but her eyes are still bigger than her stomach whenever she visits a bookseller. She blogs at annabethleong.blogspot.com, and tweets @AnnabethLeong . Watch for her next contemporary erotic romance from Ellora’s Cave, Get Laid.

 

Giveaway:

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The Fugitive’s Sexy Brother by Annabeth Leong

The Fugitive’s Sexy BrotherBlurb:

Emily Boysen is sick of low-level bounty hunting jobs that don’t pay her rent, and sick to death of her ex-boyfriend taking credit for her work. Ready to claim her due, she takes on the quarry of a lifetime, the notorious Fernando Bonavita. But instead of the fugitive, she captures his sexy younger brother, Javier.

Javier Bonavita never wanted to know the truth about his older brother’s activities, instead protecting him out of loyalty. When he uses his hacking skills to pose as Fernando, he never expects to uncover crimes he can’t stomach. Beautiful Emily has no idea how glad he is to be in her custody—as long as he’s her prisoner, he doesn’t have to face his brother.

Passion flares between Emily and Javier, and soon he’s putting the handcuffs on her. Suspicion grows along with their feelings, though. A sinister plot centers around Fernando, and untangling it will test their loyalties to the limit.

Buy Links:
All Romance
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Ellora’s Cave

Excerpt:

Javier’s smart phone buzzed in his pocket. He paused his video game and glanced at the screen. The vibration originated from the custom application he’d written to monitor the motion sensors he’d set up around the perimeter of his brother Fernando’s house. Returning his attention to his computer, Javier quit the game and pulled up a view of the exterior cameras.

A girl was crawling beneath Fernando’s hedge. Even with the cameras, Javier would never have seen her if the motion sensor hadn’t pinpointed her exact position. She held her body low, wore clothes that blended in perfectly with the hues of the yard’s greenery, and moved slowly enough that she wouldn’t attract the casual eye.

Game time.

Plans and strategies tumbled through Javier’s head, but he remained still for a moment, frozen by discomfort. No jilted lover Javier could imagine would act this way, approaching the house like a single-member SWAT team. He squinted at the grainy image of her. He supposed she was a woman, not a girl, but she was a slip of a thing. Her body seemed slight in comparison to the thick, tawny hair bound at the back of her head. Skin only a shade lighter than the hair peeked out of the camouflage clothes in a few places—Javier caught a glimpse of a light brown shoulder blade and the back of a thigh. He remained glued to the screen, fascinated by her strange grace. She didn’t seem like his brother’s type at all.

Javier cleared his throat, struggling again with suspicions he didn’t want to acknowledge. But what harm could it do to play along? That girl couldn’t hurt him, and more than anything he wanted to repay Fernando for all the years he’d looked out for his kid brother. It wouldn’t hurt to earn recognition as an adult in the process. Maybe if he could gain Fernando’s trust he’d be rewarded with true explanations instead of obvious fabrications like this one.

Javier glanced down at his clothes. He should really be dressed as Fernando, but hadn’t had the patience to wear suits when he didn’t have to. He frowned at the image on the screen. He’d locked all the doors and the ground-floor windows were sealed and made of shatter-resistant materials. He had a minute before he had to decide his next step with the girl.

He went to the closet, stripping off his T-shirt on the way and stepping out of his jeans. Fernando’s clothes hung a little loose on him—their bodies were close, but the tailored touches Fernando had added emphasized his thicker physique. Javier was slightly taller and slightly leaner. He found a pair of dark-gray pants that fell far enough down on the leg and looked okay in the mirror. Javier turned to the dress shirts and found himself confronted with a dizzying array of fits and colors. How did his brother deal with all this complication every morning? And why did he care so much?

Javier shook his head at himself and reached for the nearest one, only to freeze at the sound of Fernando’s upstairs bedroom window sliding open. Had the woman really climbed up here in a matter of minutes? She hadn’t been carrying any gear.

He shrugged on the shirt and stepped out of the closet, still buttoning it. She stood just inside the window, her stance wary and her eyes on the computer screen. Handcuffs and restraints swung from the belt loops of army-green short-shorts. Her gaze flicked toward him, her blue eyes large and bright against the sandy backdrop of her face. She wore no makeup, but a generous scattering of freckles added plenty of interesting color and shape to her features. A smile spread over Javier’s face before he could think the situation through.

The interloper scowled in response, producing a can of mace. “You think this is funny, Bonavita?”

Javier held up his hands quickly. He didn’t want to get sprayed. But he couldn’t back down completely or the game would be up before it had even begun. He imitated the cool confidence his brother always possessed. “You wanted to see me so badly you couldn’t knock?”

Her frown deepened. “You watched me approach the house on video monitors, and decided to…change your clothes?”

“Couldn’t let you think I didn’t care about our date.”

She glanced at the monitors and shook her head, her lips forming the word “stupid.” Javier cocked his head, but before he could ask she brandished the mace more fiercely. “Take whatever weapons you’ve got and put them on the floor.”

“What you see is what I’ve got.”

“Yeah, I’m going to believe that.”

Javier shrugged. “If you want to strip-search me, I won’t stop you.”

She rolled her eyes. “Pig.”

“Then I guess we’re going to stand here all day.”

The woman sighed and set down the can of mace. Javier’s body relaxed, but before he had a chance to enjoy it he was on the floor, the woman on top of him. She couldn’t have weighed much, but she knew how to make her body heavy. Her legs wrapped his thighs in an intimate hold that kept him immobilized, and the blade of her forearm wedged under his chin threatened his windpipe.

Javier gasped from the shock of his back crashing to Fernando’s hardwood floor, but recovered as quickly as he could. “Beds are much more comfortable.”

“In your dreams, Bonavita.”

Moving with practiced confidence, she rolled Javier onto his side without relaxing the strength of her hold. She snapped a set of handcuffs around his wrists.

“Whoa, whoa. Baby, let’s talk about this.”

“Very funny. Like you don’t know why I’m here.” A light layer of sweat had appeared along her neck. She smelled wild and powerful, like leaves, salt and sun. Javier knew he should be more concerned about himself, but he couldn’t get his mind off the idea of her lying on top of him for an entirely different reason.

She returned Javier to his back, the position forcing his cuffed hands to dig in to his spine. He curled up to remove the pressure, but a sharply placed knee to his chest forced him back down and pinned him. “Woman, you are serious.”

“Are you just figuring that out?” Her hands slid inside his shirt. For one delicious moment, Javier’s eyelids fell shut and he shivered at her touch. She stopped moving and he opened his eyes slowly to confront her solemn stare. “You are enjoying this way too much,” she said.

If his hands had been free, Javier would have tried to enjoy it a lot more. He’d forgotten how it felt to roll around with a woman, forgotten the sensation of soft, warm flesh against his own. Sure, the situation clearly meant serious trouble for Fernando, but Fernando wasn’t here, was he? Javier felt wild and invincible. He grinned up at the woman. “How could I not? Look at you.”

She glared, but her cheeks turned rosy, bringing out a clearer view of her abundant freckles. “Wonderful. The first man to be stunned by my good looks happens to be the most dangerous quarry I’ve had in years.”

Bio:

Annabeth Leong has written erotica of many flavors. She loves shoes, stockings, cooking and excellent bass lines. She always keeps a new e-book loaded on her phone and a paperback stashed in her purse, but her eyes are still bigger than her stomach whenever she visits a bookseller. She blogs at annabethleong.blogspot.com, and tweets @AnnabethLeong . Watch for her next contemporary erotic romance from Ellora’s Cave, Get Laid.

Not the Leader of the Pack by Annabeth Leong

Not the Leader of the PackBlurb:

Rival alphas Juli Gunby and Neil Statham want to tear each other apart — but will they do it in battle or as mates?

When Juli Gunby left Missoula, Montana, she didn’t intend to come back. Not to her exacting alpha werewolf father, and certainly not to Neil Statham, the beta who rejected Juli’s girlish advances. Her father, as usual, has other ideas, using his dying breath to pass pack leadership to his daughter. Juli resolves to carry out her duty to her father and her pack, but the one man she wants on her side has made himself her enemy.

After years of loyal service to the pack, Neil expects to take over as alpha when his mentor dies. As good as it is to see Juli again, he knows he can’t trust her. After all, she abandoned both him and the pack years ago and never looked back. Neil determines to fight for his rightful position in the pack, even if that means going up against a woman who fills him with an overwhelming urge to mate every time she walks into the room.

Someone needs to lead, and the more Neil and Juli fight, the more they attract interference from those who would control the pack and destroy the ties between them.

Buy Links:

All Romance
Amazon
Amazon UK
Bookstrand
Breathless Press

Excerpt:

“Juli. We’re the only pack members who saw your father pass that ring of leadership to you.” He paused to allow the significance to sink in, the bar noise around them rising to fill his silence. “You have another life in Lewistown. You have a career. You’ve made it clear you’re not interested in this pack. We can say whatever we want about what took place in that room. He could have passed the ring to me as far as anyone else knows. No one would question that.”

He would have kept talking, except that Juli wrenched herself violently out of his grasp at that point. “Not interested in this pack? We can say whatever we want?” He heard her just fine over the music despite the new distance between them. In fact, he worried who else had heard her mention the pack. And who else had seen that furry paw she’d thrust into his face.

They both froze for a second, staring at her latest lapse of control.

“Damn it.” Juli’s curse came out more as a growl than as words.

“We need to get out of here,” Neil said. “You just focus on staying cool.” She knew better than to argue with him. He grabbed her hand and pulled her out, leaving their beers behind. They could finish this conversation in his truck.

They ran for the truck like the rest of the world was on fire, and slammed the doors behind them once they got there. Juli writhed in her seat, gasping, her wolf form rippling just on the other side of her skin. Neil panted in response. He didn’t normally have trouble controlling his shift, but with her beside him, so close, too much of him wanted to meet her in a place of complete abandon. He wanted to run with her under the moon, fight her for supremacy until neither cared who wound up on top or on the bottom. Then, with one last vicious pounce, he wanted to surrender to the merging of their bodies. He swallowed hard.

Stats. He ran through the winning World Series teams for the last three decades. He tried to calculate his total career RBIs. The stream of data calmed Neil down. He started the car. “I’m going to drive us somewhere a little more private,” he told Juli. “Just in case.”

“Back to the hospital.”

“You’re in no shape—”

“Back to the hospital.” She showed fangs. Neil didn’t need that so soon after he’d regained his own control. He stopped arguing and pressed the gas. They’d go somewhere. He just needed to be driving so he had something to concentrate on besides the idea of Juli giving herself up to the beast. He needed a really good reason to remain in human form.

The truck’s cab filled with her labored breathing. Neil turned on the radio to distract himself from the sexual images the sound called up for him. He’d always avoided being alone with her, afraid to give even the appearance of impropriety. Right then, Neil wasn’t sure if he was grateful for the trouble he’d saved himself or sorry as hell for what he’d missed. The instinctual attraction he felt for her was off the charts.

He got so caught in his reverie that only Juli tugging at his sleeve alerted him that her struggles had become sobs. “Neil, can you pull over?” Her voice sounded deflated. “I’m sorry I insisted about the hospital. I’m not ready to go back there yet.”

Her obvious misery immediately pierced his sexual fog. Neil pulled the truck into a convenience store parking lot and looked at her. “Do you want a minute? I can go get some water.”

“No, it’s okay.” She hesitated, chewing on her top lip. “I’m obviously way out of control.”

He watched her face carefully. “About what I said in the bar… I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“You just think I don’t care about any of this.”

“Well, do you?”

Her head snapped up and a bit of the wolf flickered behind her eyes again. “How can you ask me that?”

Neil blew out a long breath. She wanted him to make his case? He could do that. “You know being pack alpha doesn’t pay. What about your fancy job in Lewistown? The one that was so important you couldn’t come back here to visit your dad?”

She rubbed her eyes. “Can you try to keep the venom out of this, Neil? Jeez, you’re so bitter, you’d think I failed to visit you.” Bingo. But Juli continued speaking, oblivious. “Gabriel’s not going to like it if I resign. He talked a lot about developing new talent when he hired me. But it’s not like the Council can’t run without me. This was my father’s last request. Besides, the pack probably needs me more.”

He swallowed, unable to believe she had the nerve to say these things. “Maybe I’m underestimating how good you are at walking away from things. Foolish of me, since I have personal experience.” Neil shook his head, uncertain if the anger surging through him was directed at himself or at Juli. “The pack needs someone really committed, Juli. Not someone who will leave again the next time it’s convenient.”

She snapped her gaze to his, her eyes widening with understanding. A wave of fear rushed through him. He’d revealed too much of his personal feelings. They needed to decide about the pack first. “You were the one who rejected me, Neil,” Juli said, her voice so soft he almost couldn’t hear her. “All I did was move on.”

Bio:

Annabeth Leong has written romance and erotica of many flavors — dark, kinky, vanilla, straight, lesbian, bi, and menage. Her titles for Breathless Press include Not His Territory, Not the Leader of the Pack, and a contribution to the Ravaged anthology. She enjoys writing about the tension between passion and control that werewolves embody. Unfortunately, when Annabeth loses control of herself, she does not gain the power to change shape. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, blogs at annabethleong.blogspot.com, and tweets @AnnabethLeong. She loves talking books on Goodreads, too: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5295946.Annabeth_Leong

Buy One, Get One Free Offer:

Not the Leader of the Pack stands alone, but Annabeth has written in its world before. She’d love to share the previous title, Not His Territory, with current readers. If you’d like to participate, e-mail proof of purchase of Not the Leader of the Pack, such as an Amazon receipt, to annabeth dot leong at gmail dot com and let her know your e-book format of choice. Annabeth will buy a copy of Not His Territory for the first 25 people who respond.