The Other Man (West Coast Hotwifing) (25 page)

The Principal’s Office

Yours for the Night

Hers for the Evening

Mine Until Morning

The Fortune Hunter

Show and Tell

Fair Game

More Than a Night

Dead to the Max Excerpt

Try a sample of Jasmine Haynes’s
Max Starr
Series, an erotic paranormal mystery/romance.

Thirty-something, down-on-her-luck accountant Max Starr has the unfortunate gift of being psychic, a newly-discovered wrinkle in her already messed-up life. Her husband, Cameron, is dead, killed in a botched 7-11 robbery two years ago. She’s cut herself off from friends, moved out of her San Francisco home in favor of a studio apartment, and dumped her flourishing career as a CPA to do temp work.

And now Max has developed an annoying penchant for attracting the spirits of murdered women. Okay, they possess her. And to exorcize them, Max must unmask their killers. But how?! By stepping into the void their deaths created, taking their jobs, befriending the loved ones they left behind. Max goes wherever she has to go and does whatever she has to do, with a lot of help from the ghost of her late husband Cameron and hunky and very enticing Detective Witt Long.

Excerpt from
Dead to the Max
, Book 1

Copyright 2010 Jasmine Haynes

Cover design by Rae Monet Inc

She’d dressed in a long, black skirt and white blouse, flawlessly pressed. She was perfect. The perfect daughter, perfect wife, and perfect employee.

Tonight she longed to be the perfect lover. They’d stolen quick, furtive moments together, but this was the first time she would have all night with her lover. Her body hummed, with anticipation, with guilt, with fear.

She’d parked her silver Maxima in the farthest corner of the San Francisco International Airport long-term lot, then caught the shuttle bus to the terminal building. She’d done everything he asked. Except wait outside the terminal. She wasn’t supposed to pace in front of the arrivals monitor, trying to decide if she liked the anxiety, the foreboding.

She slipped her wedding band and sapphire engagement ring into the inside pocket of her leather purse. His plane was five minutes late. Checking the arrival time for his flight one last time, she crumpled the bit of green paper with the flight information he’d given her, threw it on top of an already full trash can, then walked to the lounge area to take a seat.

His gaze swept her as he stepped off the escalator outside security, and her heart sank to the toes of her sensible pumps. The glare he shot made her tremble. Was he pissed? Had she ruined everything?

Two confused, blank-eyed children clung to his big hands.

His estranged wife met them, ready to take his kids from him.

He neither kissed nor touched the pretty, plump blonde. Her sole purpose was to pick up the children after they’d returned from a visit with his parents.

His hands now empty and his bag slung over his shoulder, he walked several steps behind them. His wife chattered at the children and ignored him. Clusters of travelers engulfed them until they disappeared in the throng surrounding the baggage carousel.

She lingered in the waiting area another ten minutes, then rose, dragging her leather purse up her arm to her shoulder, and headed for the front doors, a lump in her throat. Once outside, she stood at the curb for the next long-term bus. He was at the other end of the island, the way they’d arranged. His wife had unknowingly played into the scheme, telling him she’d pick up the kids but
he’d
have to take a taxi.

She wondered why he and his wife still played this silly game.

The night had cooled. Her silk blouse was thin, but the heat from rumbling buses swept beneath her skirt and set her on fire. She could feel the hot lick of his gaze as if twenty feet didn’t separate them, his anger and desire a potent combination.

Need, hunger, dread, and excitement formed a squirming package in her stomach. Butterflies. Spontaneous combustion.

He sat in the back of the bus, she in the front. They neither spoke nor looked at each other. The ride to long-term was the longest ten minutes she’d ever known. Finally they turned down her aisle. She couldn’t believe she was doing this, couldn’t imagine stopping it now. Wouldn’t stop it even if her life depended on it.

She exited from the front of the shuttle, he from the rear, the overnight bag now in his hand. Pulling out her keys, she pressed the remote alarm.

The bus pulled away. Her heart hammered.

His bag was on the ground beside them and his hands were up her skirt before she had the car door open.

He dragged her into the back seat. She spread her legs over him, straddling his thighs. The roof of the car scuffed her hair. Tugging on his zipper, she took him in her hand. He sucked in a breath; in the past, he’d always initiated. There wasn’t time to fish the condoms out of her purse. When she slid down onto him, he groaned, but he didn’t take his eyes off her face.

She’d never been so wet, so vocal, or come so willingly in her life.

Three power-thrusts later, he came.

She screamed.

* * * * *

She screamed out her orgasm. Tears gummed her lashes and rolled down her cheeks. Hands circled her throat. From the floor of the car, the rumpled bit of green notepaper, the one she’d thrown away, taunted her, and the empty condom wrapper shouted her shame. How had it come to this?

In that moment, before fear gripped her, before instinct took over, when her guilt was strongest, she welcomed Death. Welcomed it as the life was choked from her, welcomed it until her eyeballs ached and colors exploded behind her lids. Until blood from her bitten tongue leaked down her raw, bruised throat. And then her body fought for survival.

She tore at the fingers, shrieked, twisted, kicked, scratched, and punched. And still she couldn’t drag in a breath. Terror fisted around her heart and squeezed. Fear of death. Fear of life. Fear like she’d never known. Not even the night someone put a bullet in Cameron’s head.

Max Starr woke clawing at her throat, Cameron’s name breaking the thrall of the dream. Blood drummed in her ears. Her heart pounded against the wall of her chest.

But she could breathe. Oh God, she could breathe, sweet, clean air smelling of early morning, green leaves, and hope. She was here, in her bedroom, where she belonged. Safe.

“Are you all right?” Cameron’s voice, not spoken but inside her head, comforting, familiar, the way a dead husband’s voice should be, the only way a crazy, grieving widow should hear her husband’s ghost. But she’d have given anything to feel his arms around her right now. For real, not just in the erotic dreams he brought her.

Sometimes fantasies weren’t enough.

Like now, when her throat still ached. She lightly caressed the flesh, her fingers cool, her skin tender with residual effects of the nightmare.

“It was a dream,” she murmured for both their benefits. Maybe her worst nightmare--except for that night two years ago when Cameron was killed--but still just a dream. After a deep inhale, then a long sigh, the tension dribbled out her fingertips and the soles of her feet.

Physical, reality-based sensation returned--sheets tangled around her legs, her back stuck to the cotton. She pushed the bedclothes aside to let cool air from the open window blow across her naked body. In the elm outside her window, the stray black cat gave a pathetic mewl. She shouldn’t have fed it yesterday, but knew she’d do the same thing today. Her racing heart eased into a steady, normal beat.

“That was a vision, Max, not a dream.” Cameron’s voice again, always with her, inside her.

It had been his name that woke her. It wasn’t part of the dream, vision, whatever it was; his name was something she’d interjected into a reality that didn’t belong to her. Even now she sensed remnants of another’s strong emotions inextricably linked with her own.

In the dark corner across the room, dear departed Cameron’s eyes flashed. Despite the two years since his death, those glittering points of light, all she ever really saw of him, still gave her a little jolt, part excitement, part fright. The red tip of his spectral cigarette glowed. He’d loved them when he was alive. They’d been the death of him in the end, not by cancer, but by gunshot at the corner 7-Eleven where he’d gone to buy his last pack.

If you enjoyed this excerpt, look for all the Max Starr mysteries:

Dead to the Max
, Book 1

Evil to the Max
, Book 2

Desperate to the Max
, Book 3

Power to the Max
, Book 4

Vengeance to the Max
, Book 5

The Max Starr series is also available in print.

She’s Gotta Be Mine Excerpt

Jasmine Haynes also writes as Jennifer Skully, funny, sexy, poignant contemporary romances. Here’s an introduction to Jennifer Skully’s Cottonmouth series!

She’s Gotta Be Mine

Cottonmouth Book 1

Copyright 2011 Jennifer Skully

Cover design by Rae Monet Inc

Dumped? For her husband’s high school sweetheart he hasn’t seen in twenty years? Roberta Jones Spivey isn’t going to lay down for that, no way. Instead, she decides to reinvent herself. The new Bobbie Jones—new haircut, new name, new attitude—will follow her soon-to-be ex to the small Northern California town of Cottonmouth. And there she’ll show him—and his sweetheart—what a big mistake he made.

What better way to show him what he’s missing in the brand new Bobbie Jones than taking up with the town’s local bad boy—who’s also reputed to be a serial killer. Nick Angel is devilishly handsome and sexy as all get-out. In a word, perfect.

It’s all going exactly according to plan...until a real murder rocks the little town of Cottonmouth. Of course, Nick didn’t do it...did he?

~Previously published in 2005 as
Sex and the Serial Killer
~

Excerpt

A mixture of red dye and sweat trickled down her forehead, hovered on her eyebrows, poised to drizzle into her eyes. Soon to be blinded by runaway hair products, Roberta Jones Spivey could force nothing more than a mousy squeak from her throat. She was about to go deaf, too, from the hairdryer blasting her eardrums, and still, she couldn’t open her mouth wide enough to shriek. Any moment now, her hair would spontaneously combust. They’d smell the smoke first, then the aroma of singed hair, but by the time any of the umpteen stylists scurrying about The Head Hunter’s main salon came to her rescue, she’d be bald. If not charred to a briquette.

Help me before my demise becomes a fifteen-second slot on a tabloid show
. Now was not the time for a panic attack.

Drip, drip, drip, from her eyebrows to her eyelashes. In a last ditch effort to save herself, she squeezed her eyes shut. Burning tears leaked out to mingle with the caustic fluids. She clamped onto the chair’s arms, a death grip, terrified that if she touched the stuff, she’d end up rubbing her flesh off, too.

Someone. Please. Notice me
.

The bowl of the dryer was suddenly jerked up, cool air from the overhead fans wafting across her scalp.

“Bobbie, honey, why didn’t you tell me the color was running?” Mimi was the only person who’d ever called her Bobbie.

Roberta dragged in a breath of air to explain, then collapsed in a spasm of coughing as the stench of chemicals, dyes, perm solution, and her own terrified sweat swooped down her throat.