Seduction of Saber (Saving the Sinners of Preacher's Bend #3) (18 page)

Saber Patterson, MD , who’d specialized in heart
medicine and gave it all up to ride bulls, somehow ignored the fact that at any
given moment this woman’s angry, uncontrollable, overprotective parent could
come barging in here and punch out his lights. Or worse, haul out a shotgun on
his sorry ass.

Then again, did he really care? Julia was more than
worth the risk of getting embedded buckshot in the butt cheeks.

He settled his mouth against her lips, drew her
closer, and slipped inside her warmth.

Two full hours later, flushed and satisfied, her body
lying limp on top of his, Julia in deep slumber, Saber wondered if life could
really be this good to a man. He pushed aside a tendril of her red hair, and
smiled.

There’d been a time when everything had gone so
horribly wrong. When Trevor, only six years old, died on his operating table and
Saber had felt as though his entire world had ended right then and there. He’d
wanted to die right along with his young son; severed himself from medicine,
from his friends, from the rest of his family so the deep wounds could heal.
But they healed over slower than expected.

Then to have his ex, Carol, take off into the dead of
night as she had, leaving with her lover, and never once looking back at the
damage she’d caused?

Saber had thought for many years he was simply a
cursed man. He rode bulls to compensate for his inability to cope with the
truth. He feared good wasn’t in any deck of cards ever dealt him, only bad and
evil to hound his days.

As he moved his sight to a now slumbering Julia, so
incredibly sexy that it pulled at every cell in his entire body, he wondered
how he could have been so wrong. Life was good. A man need simply to take the
bull by the horns every once in a while and hang on for that full eight seconds
ride.

If getting Gill to like him was that raging bull, then
he would do it. He would do anything for a redheaded, fire-breathing vixen of a
woman with a permanent grin on her face.

Saber grinned. His dimples set at full depth. His
heart filled with joy. His body might hurt, but his conscience was filled with indescribable
warmth he didn’t want to lose.

Julia stirred on his chest. “What time is it?” she
whispered, rubbing at her eyes as she drifted her sight up to his.

Saber’s hands surrounded her bared back as he
answered. “Near six o’clock. Why?”

Startled by this answer, Julia pushed from his naked
form and jumped right out of his arms, leaving him cold.

“Six o’clock?” she yelped.

He watched every move she made with a shameless grin
that couldn’t be helped. “Yes. Why?” They’d been in and on her bed for a near
eternity.

“Oh, shit! Oh, damn! Oh, God, Patterson!” She groaned
loudly, searching for the remainder of her clothing.

Saber barely moved from his spot. “What’s wrong?” He
propped his aching frame against the headboard. A headboard that had gotten a
good workout, he would say, and proved without doubt he’d not been quite up to
snuff—health-wise.

“My father is supposed to be here at six o’clock. He
will be here any minute. Get up. Get dressed. And for God’s sake, would you
please wipe that silly grin off your face?”

She tossed his pants directly at his head, followed by
his crumpled T-shirt.

“I am not getting out of this bed and I am not getting
dressed.” Saber tossed his clothes right back, missing her head by inches. “If
you want me to like your father, then you had better calm yourself down and
come back to me this very instant.”

“I will do no such thing!”

Julia shoved her arms through her paint-splattered
T-shirt, then her legs into a pair of jeans. She couldn’t find the ones she’d
been wearing. He’d strewn about her clothing in his haste to remove them from
her person hours earlier.

She couldn’t locate her underwear, either; opted
commando over being caught in the nude by an overprotective father.

“Come on, Patterson. This is not funny. Get dressed.
If he sees you like this…”

“Sees me, how?” he asked recklessly, flipping off the
covers from his lower half to lie as God had intended him to be. Self-satisfied
and dare he say it, terribly smug.

“Naked!” Julia smarted.

“How’s he ever goin’ to see me this way, unless you
run right out there and let him know that I’m in here?” he asked, pointing
toward her closed bedroom door. “He ain’t, so calm down, Sweetheart. Take a chill
pill. I will leave this bed when I am good and ready to leave this bed. That
might not be until tomorrow.” To prove this he plumped the pillow behind his
head and settled in more comfortably.

Julia yanked the quilt from his body. “You don’t know
my father as I do,” she reckoned. “He is totally overprotective, to a fault. If
I am not where I should be, he will just come waltzing right in looking for me.
He’ll think that I’m having an insulin attack … or something. And that he needs
to do …well,
something
.”

Saber somehow did not want that
something
to be
a man’s fist in his face. It just healed. “Fine, I’ll get dressed. But you are
going to have to tell him the truth soon enough, Little Darlin’.”

Julia stopped at her bedroom door; her hand hovered
over the knob. “And what is that, precisely?”

“That you love me, that you agreed to marry me, and
that under no condition is he to punch out my lights again.” He rubbed his hand
over his lower jaw. “It’ll just mess up my good looks, and no one wants that.”

“Fine, I’ll tell him all that, as soon as you start on
getting dressed, and I leave this room. But if you do not hurry, I might not
agree to any of it.”

She pulled open the knob to find a very determined
Gill Hillard on the opposite side of it. He was holding a man’s cane in his
right hand. In the interim, Saber had gotten out of the bed and was now
standing on the other side of the room, completely in the buff.

Gill’s eyes moved first from one, then to the other, then
hurriedly away.

“I don’t even want to know!” he blurted out, handing
Julia the cane.

His daughter took it; but looked as though barely knowing
what to do with it. “You are late for dinner. And unfortunately, Jesus Christ,
Julia! I now know why.”

Gill then openly glared at Saber, who had at least been
smart enough to grab the sheet off her bed and cover the lower half of his body—and
to do what he could at hiding what another man could easily see. That man,
Julia’s giant of a father.

“Unless Rodeo Man here has asked you to marry him, I
may not be able to hold it in much longer.”

“He has. And I have agreed. And…”

Gill held up his left hand, flaring his nostrils. “Then
it’s a damn good thing that I have already set a place at the dinner table for him,
else he’ll be eating his next meal through a plastic straw.” He kept his gaze
steady on his daughter’s face. “Now that my wife is home, I’m sure none of us want
to explain to her why your future husband would be drinking his meals through a
straw, now do we?”

Gill winked down at what turned into a very startled
twenty-eight-year old woman. The elder Hillard then nodded at Saber, a
man-to-man gesture, before walking away.

**

Julia closed her bedroom door. She leaned her forehead
against the hard wood, letting it sink in—that not only did her father approve
of Saber; the rest of her family would, as well. She was finally getting what
she wanted out of life, finally getting what she truly deserved, complete and
carefree happiness.

“See. I told you he’d not mind too terribly,” he said.
The words arrogant and presumptuous from behind her back, they drew out her
smile.

She pulled from the door, turned, and stared. “Mind?
Damnit, Patterson, you have got to be the luckiest Bull Man alive.”

He dropped the bed sheet, giving her a street level
view of his sudden and demanding desire for her. His grin much larger than even
hers was.

“Do you have any idea what it feels like to know my
father likes you?” As she stared at him his smile turned sinful.

“Why, yes I do, Ms. Hillard. So come on over here and
fix this for me before your father changes his mind about liking me. I had to
wait a long time for you. I have needs.”

Julia rushed over to him, did as she was told, and
gave him exactly what he needed when he needed it the most. She was simply
returning any favors already granted her, in spades, when a harsh knock sounded
at her bedroom door before they were completely done with administering to his
many
needs
.

“I’m leaving. Your lady boarders have come home. Your
food is getting cold. And my wife, I would suspect.” Gill’s retreating
footsteps could be heard moving down the long hallway toward the front door.

“Do you think he’s bluffing?” Saber asked, pinning her
under his hard body on her double bed.

“About what?” She kissed the side of his neck to move
downward from there, ever so slowly.

“About leaving the house?”

Once she’d reached a more sensitive spot on his torso,
the tail of his snake tattoo, she had the man groaning like a baby.

His newest tattoo was the number eight, with a slight
dent in its side and capped with a tilted cowboy hat, but sadly located on his
left shoulder blade where first impact by White Hot Lightning had been made.

She kissed that spot too.

“No. He’s not bluffing. My father tells it exactly
like it is—every time.”

Another kiss followed by another across his entire bare
chest.

“Then we have all night?” he rasped out.

“No, Dr. Patterson,” Julia grinned. “We have the rest
of our lives.”

He flipped her easily so that she landed right on top
of him, and answered this with a chain of kisses over her heated skin. “I do
like the sound of that, Little Darlin’.”

“So do I, Dr. Patterson.”

Texan drawl, blond hair, silver-blue eyes, slight limp
to his left leg, and charming snake tattoo surrounding his scarred middle, his
newest tattoo stating the obvious, she wouldn’t have wanted the man of her
dreams to come into her life in any other way.

Had he, she would’ve never considered him a man of
consequence. And even she knew men of consequence were worth the trouble they
put a woman through…with a capital ‘T’.

Julia kissed Saber tenderly, loved him passionately,
and enjoyed every single second of what was going to be the rest of her life
with this man; a life, beginning to end, with an
Eight Second Wonder
she’d
never thought to have.

The End

Author’s note

I welcome you to the end of the Preacher’s Bend
series. I hope you enjoyed it, as much as I did writing about all of these bad
boys and girls.

Please check out Book 1 of the series,
120 mph
,
and Book 2,
Roundabout Road.
As always, comments and praise are welcome.

You can visit my website,
http://jevennawillow.com
to find more of
my titles. Or find my Amazon author page
http://www.amazon.com/JevennaWillow/e/B00IGHSXJ4
and please don’t forget to hit that like button in the upper corner.

You can also find and like me
on Facebook at
http://www.facebook.com/jevennawillow

as well as Twitter

@JevennaWillow

Happy Reading.

Teaser Excerpt from ©
120
mph by Jevenna Willow

Saving the Sinners of Preacher’s
Bend Book 1

Rain could wash away what one wanted to stay hidden;
easily uncovered the truth by truly violent nature or even deadlier calm.

Rain, in fact, could kill.

Sara stared at the window for a few seconds more then
pulled her sight from it. Her attention slipped over to the bowl. Seven dollars
and fifty cents of pure hell stared back at her from across the room. Seven
dollars and fifty cents of a past she would have to let go and forget—soon.

Yet, how was this even possible? She certainly
couldn’t go out searching through pouring rain, in hopes to locate a certain
Mr. Mohr, when she had a convertible the top no longer worked. Her car parked
in the underground garage and only drivable on sunny days until fixed.

And the phone company accidentally disconnected her
line late yesterday afternoon. This disconnection could have had something to
do with the man who ran the local branch …and who’d been a regular at the club.
After a few minutes arguing the inexcusable fact out with the man’s secretary,
by way of pay phone in the back of the grocery store, and a few choice
adjectives to get her point across, Sara had gotten his secretary to admit her
boss might have made a mistake, and first thing Monday morning she would
certainly look into it.

Mistake, her ass! He’d done it on purpose. They were
all doing odd little things to Sara …on purpose. Undelivered mail, removed
antennae from the roof of her car, cut cable lines from her apartment, a flat
tire, a huge ten mile detour on a road she’d driven to work every day for the
past eight years—and no construction equipment on sight.

However, none had ever made her second guess her every
move as a mere stranger had; namely, the words and deeds of one well-connected
Reverend Mohr.

Excerpt from Book 2 ©
Roundabout
Road by Jevenna Willow

Saving the Sinners of Preacher’s
Bend Book 2

To those who no longer lived in Preacher’s Bend,
Sundays sucked around here, especially if you were now considered an outsider;
as well, a backstabbing, life-altering treacherous snake to every one of its
Christian-minded elders.

Well, that would be her, precisely.

She hadn’t done any real harm to those still in Preacher’s
Bend—past or present. Liddy never took anything they weren’t willing to give
away. What she’d done was leave without saying Good-bye. And that, without
question, was the deadliest of all sins to commit in a town so small-minded
that it couldn’t see its ass even if bent over.

No one was to leave Preacher’s Bend without any one of
its residents acknowledgeable of where it was that person was to end up. Disappearance
severed gossip lines, and those around here lived for the connection. Christ!
Even she hadn’t known where it was she would end up.

Liddy just knew she had to go; if not for herself,
then for the well-being and personal safety of one incredibly gorgeous Jake
Giotti. You know? The guy dressed in form fitting leather jacket, big snake
tattoo, and his sweet ass seated comfortably on a custom-built, low-riding
Harley.

God, she hated him!

Liddy hated Jake so much her teeth were starting to
ache.
She’d been hurt so deeply by
the man, and so angry with him ever since, and filled with such a violent
temper toward him …well, she could have shot him right between the eyes that
fateful night—without flinching, chipping a nail, or breaking into a sweat.

But the past was the past, as it should be. She’d let
it go.

While she sorted her thoughts together as best she
could, she turned her head to glance out the large window of Rachel’s Café …and
that was precisely when a world she thought she knew so well came to an abrupt
end.

She hadn’t touched the plate of food in front of her,
simply because she wasn’t as hungry as she’d been when first coming through the
doors. But when one’s world ends so abruptly, food should not matter a hill of
beans to the scheme of things. She could not pull her gaze from that window
even if her life depended on it. Time had seemed to speed up momentarily—fast
forward. It slammed directly into her heart and considerably staggered her.

Coming up …No. Christ, it was more like waltzing up,
with a most definite and very familiar swagger…

Was it? Good God! Could it be? Jake Giotti? The same
Jake Giotti who was technically her husband? The same Jake, but a slightly new
and improved version of the man?

He was dressed in a very expensive silk suit and minus
one perfectly God-forgiving, forty-five-thousand dollars, custom built Harley
Davidson motorcycle generally stuck between his legs. As well, minus at least
twelve inches of gorgeous brown hair that he’d always tied in a ponytail with
thick leather strap. Unless a certain someone untied it for him. But no one was
mentioning any names now, were they? And, they were most definitely not stating
that very same someone had been in the throes of blessedly hot and sweaty sex
with the man, either!

Thee Jake Giotti?

Jesus! He was walking right toward the window, coming
straight for Rachel’s Cafe with a sly grin on his face.

In the blink of an eye, her life flashed before her
eyes. It came into view in full Technicolor, and all she could do was staring
at the change ten years in him had done. From head to toe, he was no longer the
Jake she remembered. Good God! He’d physically grown into something far better,
something far more dangerous, and something far more devastating to the naked
eye. To peace of mind and state of well-being, he was …well, he was wearing a
suit for Pete’s sake…

And
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