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Wild And Wicked
Joanne Rock
Kyra Stafford is tired of being overlooked by her best friend - and local bad boy - Jesse Chandler.She needs to get him out of her system so that she can move on. And burning up the sheets for a night…or two…should do the trick. Since he's not noticing her subtle seduction, she's getting obvious. Capturing him at a local festival and making him trade sensual favors for his freedom should convince him to get a little wild with her. Jesse may have earned his bad-boy reputation but he's proud of one thing - he's never seduced Kyra. Then again, she's never abducted him before.When she states the terms for his release, he can't see past her sexy self to resist. By the time their steamy night is over, Jesse just can't let her go. Too bad she's not listening to any talk about commitment. Looks like he's going to have to use a little wicked persuasion….
She wanted the complete Jesse Chandler experience
Breathless, Kyra stared up at Jesse with his broad, square shoulders and wondered what he had in mind.
He grazed his hand slightly over her thigh. “You sure you don’t want to run?”
“And lose my chance to experience Jesse Chandler’s legendary prowess firsthand?” She settled more deeply into the pillows. “I don’t think so.”
He trailed his fingers over her hip, then up to her bare waist. The insubstantial little touches heightened her senses, made her crave more of him. When he walked those clever fingers under the edge of her skirt, desire trembled through her with a force she hadn’t fully expected.
She’d wanted Jesse forever—had fantasized about sexy interludes with him since she was barely sixteen—but in all that time, her imagination had never hinted it could be this hot between them. This wild.
She couldn’t stifle the sighs of pleasure his hands wrought. She ached for him in the most elemental way, and none of his skilled, seductive torments would satisfy it.
She needed him.
All of him.
Now.
Dear Reader,
I had so much fun penning last fall’s Wild and Willing, Blaze #54, that I couldn’t resist retracing my steps to Tampa’s annual pirate festival and finding out what else was happening on that day. The uniquely Floridian Gasparilla Festival was just too fun not to revisit!
Lucky for me I stumbled across bad boy Jesse Chandler, Seth Chandler’s younger brother. But instead of playing pirate at Gasparilla, Jesse was too busy picking up women to don an eye patch. Enter his best friend, Kyra Stafford, who’s had just about enough of Jesse’s antics. I hope you enjoy her adventures as a lusty lady pirate determined to show her friend how much steamy potential lurks between them.
Stay tuned in 2003 for my all-new series, Single in South Beach. If you think Gasparilla is fun, just wait until you hit South Beach in Miami. Four unlikely friends are cooking up revenge for the men who left them high and dry. You won’t want to miss their sensual adventures on the way to happily-ever-after. Visit me at www.JoanneRock.com to learn more about my future releases or let me know what you think of my books. I’d love to hear from you!
Happy reading,
Joanne Rock
Wild and Wicked
Joanne Rock
In loving memory of my friend and long-ago roommate,
Rebecca Schaffer, who had only just begun
to show the world how brightly she could shine.
Her talent and energy inspire me still.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
1
“KYRA!” JESSE CHANDLER shouted to his business partner as he strode into the barn housing the offices of Crooked Branch Horse Farms. He juggled purchases from the tack shop until he reached a sawhorse table where he could set them down. “I’ve got all the leather you wanted. Saddles and bridles, riding gloves and a dominatrix outfit—oh, wait. That last one wasn’t a business purchase.”
He sorted through the new supplies in the converted old building Kyra used strictly for storage and office space. The horses Kyra bred and trained lived in much more modern quarters behind this barn.
Removing price tags and testing the leather of the new stock, Jesse waited for his best friend and colleague to appear. He’d never made her blush in over ten years of trying, but hope sprang eternal. No matter that Kyra Stafford was the one woman in Citrus County he’d never hit on, he still loved to make her laugh.
“Perfect,” came a feminine purr from over his left shoulder—far closer than he’d anticipated. “I think you need an assertive woman to keep you in line, Jesse Chandler.”
For about two seconds, he reacted to the sultry promise he must have imagined behind the words.
Awareness fired through him, heated his insides despite the breeze drifting in the wide-open barn doors. The Gulf of Mexico rested a mere thousand acres away to border the northwest corner of the state-of-the-art Florida horse farm and training facility. Surely the gentle wind off the water should have helped him keep cool in February.
But then Kyra stepped around him to stand by his side and look over the new tack, her long blond hair grazing his arm. Smart, sensible Kyra Stafford who had never flirted with him for so much as five seconds.
What the hell was the matter with him?
Shaking off an absurd sense of attraction he’d never felt for his best friend before, Jesse attributed the Twilight Zone moment to too many nights alone. He definitely needed to remedy that situation this weekend.
“Funny, I don’t see any dominatrix garb here.” Kyra glanced up at him with her bright blue eyes. Innocent blue eyes, damn it. And smiled. “Be careful what you wish for, Jesse.”
From any other woman, Jesse would have pegged that remark for blatant enticement. But he was obviously going through major sensual deprivation if he was hearing come-ons in Kyra’s speech.
Hell yeah, he’d be more careful.
Clearing his throat, he decided maybe they were just both getting too old for the game of trying to make Kyra blush. “Guess I left the spiked collar at the store.” He started hanging bridles on the wall, determined to make tracks between him and this ill-advised conversation. “That’s okay. I don’t go for the hardcore type anyway.”
“Seems like you’re not going for any type lately,” Kyra observed, tossing her hair over her shoulder as she leaned a blue jean-clad hip into the sawhorse table. At twenty-four, she looked sort of like Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Bonanza—a petite blonde in dusty cowboy boots with enough determination and drive to move mountains, or, more often, stubborn horses. “Is southern Florida’s most notorious bad boy finally mellowing?”
Allowing a saddle created for one of their new ponies to slide back to the plywood with a thunk, Jesse turned to face the woman who knew him best. The woman whose question mirrored his own recent fear.
“You know I couldn’t mellow if I tried.” Not that he would try. He was too content with bachelorhood, even though his last girlfriend was sticking to him like glue despite his best efforts to move on. He needed to show Greta he wasn’t the forever-after—or even a three-date—kind of guy.
“Why? Because there’d be ten women lined up in Victoria’s Secret lingerie and armed with apple pies if they knew you were thinking about settling down?”
She tried on a pair of fawn-colored riding gloves and stared at her hand encased in suede.
Jesse grinned. “As if that would be such a hardship.”
She cocked an eyebrow at him in one of Kyra’s classic don’t-bullshit-me looks.
He shrugged. “I don’t know what’s up. I’ve been putting in a lot of hours making final preparations around the Crooked Branch before I turn my attention to my custom homes business. Maybe I’ve just been working too hard lately.”
He hated leaving Kyra to run the business all by herself, but that had been her stipulation from the moment they’d went in on the operation together. She’d vowed to buy back his substantial share of the farm once she’d made it a success.
And damned if she wasn’t whooping butt on that promise already. As soon as she clinched one more horse sale, she’d own the controlling share of the business.
The farm had been great part-time work for Jesse in the years he’d played minor league baseball for kicks. But now that he was closing in on thirty, he was mentally ready to hang his own shingle for a custom home-building business and let Kyra go her own way with the Crooked Branch. His older brother had told Jesse last spring that he would never be able to still his wandering feet, but Jesse disagreed.
He might not be able to commit to any one woman, but he could commit to a place, damn it. Not only was he putting down roots in Citrus County, he was cementing his ties to the area by starting his own business here.
Still, he worried a little about leaving Kyra to her own devices at the training facility. Running a horse-boarding-and-breeding business wasn’t exactly a cushy way of life and as the date for him to bow out approached, Jesse couldn’t help thinking about all the tough jobs that Kyra would be left with to handle solo.
The physically demanding aspects of handling stubborn horses. The chauvinistic attitudes of some of the owners.
He hated the thought of anyone ever giving her a hard time.
She eyed him with quiet patience, reminding him why she was so damn good at working with antsy horses. “Are you sure you’re working, Jesse, or are you maybe overcompensating for leaving in two weeks? No offense, but this is more tack than we’ll need in two lifetimes.” She studied him in that open, no-holds-barred manner that had made him trust her from the moment they met. “Are you just using the excuse of work to hide out from some overeager female of the week?”
Jesse shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
Caught.
Why in the hell had he thought he might be able to hide anything from this woman? Kyra’s eyes might be innocent, but they were wise.
Jesse shoved the stack of too many gloves to the back of the sawhorse table. “Honestly, I’m having a little trouble with Greta lately. She looks at me and sees picket fences no matter how much I avoid her.” He’d met the German model in Miami Beach last fall and they’d spent a crazy few days locked in her condo overlooking the water.
Between Greta’s flashy lifestyle and jet-set friends, Jesse had assumed she wanted the same things from their time together as he did—simple, basic things like mind-blowing sex and a few hours to forget life wasn’t as perfect as they pretended.
But ever since then, Greta had called him on and off, even going so far as to show up on his doorstep over the holidays to see if he wanted company.
“She thinks you’re marriage material?” Kyra’s skeptical tone suggested a woman could be committed for harboring those kinds of thoughts.
“Go figure. But she’s damned persistent. And you know how I hate to hurt people.” One of the foremost reasons he avoided relationships like the plague was to ensure he never hurt anybody. He’d learned that lesson early in life when his father had torn Jesse’s whole family apart with infidelities until he walked out on his wife and kids for good.
Too bad Jesse’s tact of keeping things light with Greta had bitten him in the ass this time.
“You need a different kind of woman.” Kyra sidled closer.
Or was that his imagination?
“Damn straight I do.” He folded his arms across his chest, unwilling to take any chances with his over-active libido today. The last thing he needed was any freaky twinge of attraction to Kyra again.
“A woman who wants the same things from a relationship you do.” Her voice took on a husky quality, reminding him of what it was like to trade pillow confidences with floral-scented females in the dark.
Not females like Kyra, of course.
He cleared his throat.
“That’s how I’m going to approach things from now on.” Jesse turned back to the mountain of leather goods on the plywood table and mentally started dialing numbers from his address book. A night with Lolita Banker would satisfy every stray sexual urge he’d had today, and then some.
“Then why don’t you let me help?” Kyra’s hand snaked over to his, gently restraining him from shuffling around the new bridles. “I know exactly what you want.”
Damnation. Her touch sizzled through him even as her words called to mind sensual visions. The arch of a woman’s back, the pink flush of feminine skin, the sweet sighs of fulfillment as…
Jesse’s gaze slid from Kyra to the mound of fresh hay that waited not ten yards away.
Holy freaking hell.
He withdrew his hand from her light touch as if burned. Then again, maybe he had been. At the very least, his brain circuits had obviously fried because there was no way in hell she’d meant anything remotely sexual.
Determined to escape that provocative vision forever, Jesse closed his eyes and clutched the new saddle in front of him like a shield. Maybe his mind was playing tricks on him because he wouldn’t be seeing Kyra much once he started his new business.
“Great idea.” He forced the words past dry lips, trying like hell to remember the color of Lolita’s hair, the shape of her mouth, anything. “Let’s grab a beer after work and you can help me figure out how to let Greta down easy. You know somebody to hook her up with?”
He backed toward the barn doors, clutching the saddle in a death grip. Perhaps it was a good thing he’d be leaving the Crooked Branch in two weeks after all. “Besides, Lolita Banker’s waitressing at the bar on Indian Rocks Beach. Maybe I just need to meet someone else to help me—” Forget all about seducing my best friend? “Get my head on straight again.”
Turning away from those vivid blue eyes and poured-into-denim body, Jesse shouted over his shoulder. “Happy hour starts at six.”
HAPPY HOUR?
Why didn’t they call it something more apt like frustrated-as-hell hour?
Kyra fumed as she watched Jesse’s motorcycle kick up gravel on his way out of the driveway—as if he couldn’t put enough distance between him and her lame attempt at seduction.
She’d had a thing for Jesse from the first time they’d met. His perpetually too-long hair, dark eyes and prominent cheekbones gave him a dangerous look that hinted of long-forgotten Seminole heritage. He wore one gold stud in his ear, which, according to high school legend, he’d had ever since his tenth-grade girlfriend convinced him they should pierce a body part together. Jesse had kept the stud long after the girl.
