Bang (19 page)

“Shut up.” She pillows herself against his sternum, wiggling around for a minute until she's satisfied. “I have some clothes I want to take in to donate later, but other than that my afternoon is free.”

“Oh yeah?” He rubs her bare back. The dip of her spine is smooth and velvet, like a sun-warmed stone. Out the window the trees are bare, Thanksgiving coming and then Christmas, the long cold winter after that. For the first time in his whole life, Jack finds he's not dreading it much at all. “Fancy that,” he tells her, quietly, drawing patterns on her smooth brown skin with one finger. “Mine's free too.”

“Fancy that,” Mari echoes, and closes her eyes.

About the Author

Ruby McNally double-majored in psychology and cognitive linguistics before ultimately deciding her talents lay elsewhere. She grew up hiding her diary from her five brothers, who will never know she wrote this book. She lives in Boston and has no cats.
Crash
is her first novel. You can visit her online at
rubymcnally.tumblr.com
or follow her on Twitter
@Ruby_McNally
.

Look for these titles by Ruby McNally

Now Available:

Lights & Sirens

Crash

Singe

Coming Soon:

Turning Tides

Their slow burn could build to a five-alarm…or go up in smoke.

Singe

© 2014 Ruby McNally

Lights and Sirens, Book 2

Addie Manzella does her best to keep her complicated personal life separate from work. But after the funeral of a colleague who died in an arson fire, things come to a head. She goes tequila shot for tequila shot with fellow firefighter Eli Grant—a contest that ends in the bedroom.

Sure, the sex is great—okay, it's the best of her
life
—but Eli clearly isn't a long-term kind of guy. Though his post-divorce antics read more goofball than player, he's a complication she doesn't need.

Bold, brassy Addie is a serious threat to Eli's determination to hide a dark history. Not even his ex-wife knows the whole story behind the burn scars on his body. Yet he can't resist the challenge of pursuing Addie—especially since she clearly likes being chased.

The fire that took their friend, though, isn't the last. As more buildings—and more lives—go up in flames, Eli's past comes roiling to the present. Threatening to send their fledgling romance up in smoke.

Warning: This book contains two wicked-hot firefighters, a dark secret, sex in semi-public places, and a smidge of Catholic guilt.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Singe:

“Want to get out of here?”

Eli's drunk enough that when Addie Manzella says
Amen,
for a whole two seconds he thinks it's in response to his question. He catches up quick.

“Seriously?” she demands, swiveling to face him on her bar stool. She overshoots and her heels knock up against his pant leg, smearing dust from the gravesite. “Are you for real?”

Eli has had enough women ask him that in the past few months to know it isn't necessarily a bad sign. “I'm for real,” he confirms. And he is. It's the damp curls at the back of her neck, the faded black dress that's a touch too tight around the hips for a funeral, like she bought it five years ago and keeps forgetting to replace it between deaths. Eli knows, because he's been doing the same with his suit—he picked it up for a funeral in '08, Dave Vidal's off-duty heart attack, and hasn't set foot in a store that sells dress pants since. There's a safety pin holding the third button on.

Addie raises her eyebrows. She's got a lot of eyebrow, dark and straight and boyish. They're a surprise in an otherwise feminine face. “You're drunk,” she accuses.

“Only a little,” Eli tells her, opting for the truth or a version of it. He's done this enough to know that that's not always a bad thing either. She's pretty. Christ, all that hair and her olive skin, the freckles on her shoulders. He doesn't think he's ever been this close to her shoulders before. “Come on, let's make like a tree, et cetera.”

“Make like a tree and—no,” she says immediately, laughing. “You're ridiculous.” Then, though, “
Why
?”

Eli shrugs. “S'hot in here.”

Addie rolls her eyes. “S'hotter out there, don't you think?” When he only grins at her, “So what, then, we work together for three years but today you had a hundred beers and I've got a strapless bra on and you suddenly just noticed I'm a girl?”

She's wrong about that part actually. 'Course he's noticed her, her rowdy laugh and her curvy little body, how she's a good fireman who keeps her head down even though her pops is who he is. But regardless of what Eli's been getting up to the last six months or so in regards to the fairer sex, he isn't stupid, and until now he's been real careful not to shit where he eats.

David Manzella's twenty-four-year-old daughter? She's pretty much the Thanksgiving dinner table. Eli's an idiot even for bringing it up.

Still, though. Still.

“I mean, I didn't know about the bra,” he tells her, downing the last of his beer and setting it down on the bar. He hasn't quite had a hundred, but he lost track a while ago. It's the arson is what it is—he fucking hates arsons. There hasn't been one for years in the County, and the last sent him on an all-night bender. This time around, he'd prefer to work through his shit in a different way.

When he glances over, Addie's watching him with that same incredulous expression. She doesn't seem particularly put out.

“Strapless, huh?” he asks, pulling on a grin. “I'm thinking about it now, I can tell you that much.”

Addie laughs again, loud and honest. “Shut up.” She kicks him under the bar like they're teenagers in a lunchroom, her knee brushing his for a moment before she pulls it away. Now that Eli's got it in his head, he can't un-want it, can't help imagining what it would be like to lay her out on his mattress and peel that sober dress off. She looks like she'd be soft underneath.

He's also fundamentally not a predatory piece of shit though, so he grins at her one more time and pulls out some cash to pay their tab.

“Okay,” he says, settling up with the bartender. No matter what happens or doesn't, Eli never minds paying for women's drinks. “I hear you. I'm sorry. I'm being an asshole. I'm gonna go home and sleep it off. I'll see you at the station tomorrow, yeah? You'll know me because I'll be the one with the raging hangover.”

“Hey, we'll be twins.” Addie smiles, kicking at him one more time, but friendly. “You gonna cab it?”

Eli nods. “Sure thing,” he promises, ducking his head to kiss her on the cheek before he makes his way through the crowd to say his goodbyes. The heat outside hits him like a wall of sand. It's still completely light out, that weird underwater feeling of having spent all day in the dark, disconcerting. He thinks of Drew, the suffocating heat and the chemical smell of the accelerant. There's a dive down the block that serves until three a.m.

He's just starting to move when the door to the Pint opens and there's Addie on the sidewalk, her hair slipping out of its knot.

“So here's the thing,” she says, squinting in the harsh, sudden sunlight. “My place is walkable.”

Eli stops. His hands are balled up into fists, the resolve of what he was going to do. He makes himself unclench them. “That a fact?”

Addie brings one arm up to shade her eyes like a girl on a beach. “That is a fact,” she enunciates, careful to fit her tongue around the words. It makes Eli want to kiss her. She's got a wide, pale mouth that he's always liked, hanging there like a promise at the bottom of her heart-shaped face.

“Show me,” he commands.

Which is how he ends up hoofing it two blocks down and three blocks over to Addie Manzella's shitty second-story instead of drinking his brains out, the humidity so thick he sweats through his starchy dress shirt in about ten steps. It's better. It's a relief. Eli pushes the thought of Drew aside, concentrates on Addie's swaying hips instead. She can't really walk in her heels, unpracticed or drunk or both. Eli wants to put his hands around her waist and feel the bones shift.

“It's a walkup,” Addie announces finally, stopping in front of a dingy club to pull off her pumps. It takes Eli a second to realize they've arrived, his focus still one-hundred-percent on her ass. He looks between her dangling cross and the unlit neon sign reading
LOOKOUT
, a collection of sad flyers advertising a Saturday night drag show.
Come out of the closet and cum in LOOKOUT
, the chalkboard sidewalk sign reads.

Addie catches him staring. “That one's new,” she says. “Last week was
Come analyze our anal
, although I think it's mostly a lesbian bar.”

Eli blinks. “You live above
this
?”

“Uh-huh.” Addie grins at him, wide and delighted. Her temples are soaked from the walk, the dip of her collarbone bathed in sweat. “Look, you coming or what?”

Which—yeah. Eli is.

She unlocks a side door and leads him up a narrow staircase, stepping aside to let a mangy-looking cat scurry out the door onto the sidewalk. “That's Chicken Cat,” Addie tells him as the thing darts by. “He's part mine, I guess? He lived here before I did.”

Eli edges out of her way on the tiny landing so she can open the door to her apartment, close enough that he can smell the faint floral scent of her perfume. It's very, very hot. “How long's that?” he asks.

“Not long,” Addie says, though her voice is nearly drowned out by the wheezy hum of the ancient-looking window unit in her living room. Eli peers over her shoulder at a good-sized space jammed full with a crazy hodgepodge of furniture, a futon and a beat-up IKEA coffee table alongside an antique wingback chair. There's a huge photo collage of Addie with a bunch of other girls hanging on one wall, from back in high school maybe, plus one of those ornate carved medallions on the ceiling, like possibly a chandelier used to hang there in the days before the building was carved up into starter apartments and a sad-looking nightclub. There's clothes and magazines and assorted detritus heaped on pretty much every available surface. Eli's skin prickles in the suddenly chilly air.

“Ignore the mess,” Addie tells him, dropping her heels on a denim-covered beanbag chair and padding over to the kitchen in her stocking feet, opening the Reagan-era freezer and cracking some ice out of a tray. “Here.” She fills two glasses from the tap and hands him one of them, hopping up on the Formica countertop. Eli watches her throat work as he gulps, not entirely able to help it.

“Hi,” Addie says when she's finished, looking at him expectantly. Her mouth is very wet.

“Hi,” Eli echoes. Slowly, he puts both hands on her thighs. The fabric of her dress is like an oven, all this heat radiating off her like she's a human hot water bottle. Her hair would be warm to the touch too, he bets, inky-brown and sun baked.

“Hi,” Addie repeats, quieter now that he's close. She's looking for a kiss, Eli can tell. It's a way girls have of holding their faces.

Shit where you eat
, he thinks.
David Manzella's daughter.

“We all good here?” he asks, leaning forward into her neck so he won't be tempted by that wide mouth. He has to clear his throat twice to speak.

Addie laughs, loud and jangly in his ear. “
I'm
good,” she declares, legs opening. She's fidgety, wiggling on the Formica. “I should probably go re-apply deodorant before I let you any closer though.”

Eli shakes his head, feeling the beer swim along with him. “No fair.” She smells good actually, that rosy perfume sweating off her and getting mixed up in the salt. He wants to strip her down and investigate all the damp places. “If I can't, you can't.”

“Mmm.” Addie turns, nose smushing up against his cheekbone. Her breath is just slightly stuttery. “Okay then,” she says, soft. Eli is rubbing higher and higher up her thighs with each pass. “S'a deal.”

Oh, fuck it. Fuck the arson, fuck the bad memories. Eli has both hands underneath her dress. “Deal,” he agrees and turns his head to kiss her.

Sometimes A + B = O. Yes. Oh, yes. Just like that.

The Duality Principle

© 2014 Rebecca Grace Allen

Gabriella Evans's life exists in terms of logic and definitions. She's holed up in Portland, Maine, for the summer to work on her PhD thesis, but something is screwing up her concentration: the rumble of a motorcycle every time the embodiment of her rough-and-tumble fantasies rides down her street.

When her best friend talks her into a blind date, she finds herself out with the opposite of her fantasy. He's polite and well-mannered, yet something behind his crisply tailored shirt doesn't add up—a rebellious gleam in his eye that piques her curiosity.

Orphaned at fifteen, Connor Starks has finally put the years of failing grades, breaking laws and breaking hearts behind him. The only holdover? His penchant for getting down and dirty in public places. But Gabriella makes him want to prove he's become a better man.

Nothing intrigues Gabriella more than a problem she can't solve. But the more Connor tries to bury his past, the more determined she is to uncover it. And what she finds makes all her trusty logic begin to fail her…

Warning: This book contains a summer romance, dirty talk, dockside kissing, motorcycles and tattoos. Features a rebellious nerdy girl with an appetite for outdoor sex and light spanking, and a bad boy who's turned good…or at least he's trying.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
The Duality Principle:

“Your folks were pretty hard on you?” Connor scooped up another big mouthful of ice cream, and Gabriella tried not to focus on the way his tongue lagged over the edge of the plastic spoon.

“Were?” she asked with a snort. “They still are.” She almost added that their constant distance and propensity to judge were slowly killing her, but she forced the thought away, not wanting her baggage to become a third wheel on the date. “But I guess all parents hard on their kids, right?”

“I wouldn't know. Mine took off years ago.”

Gabriella stopped walking. “They took off?”

Connor paused as well and frowned at the ground.

“My dad left when I was thirteen. Apparently, his next fix was more important than we were. I found out he died a few years later.”

He looked up, squinted and pinched his lips together, as if the words had a bad taste to them. “Mom tried to manage for a while, but she was using too. She couldn't make ends meet, so she left me with my grandparents when I was fifteen to go into rehab.”

“Wow. How did that go over?”

“Weird at first, since I'd never met them before, but they took me in right away, no questions asked. Of course that was because Mom said it would only be until she got out of rehab.”

“She didn't go?”

“She did. She just never came back.”

Gabriella's mouth fell open. For all her parents made her crazy, she couldn't imagine being abandoned like that. “I'm so sorry.”

Connor shook his head and let out an abrupt laugh. “Don't be. She made the right choice. She couldn't have handled me anymore. I was a real rebel back then. I needed some serious discipline.”

Something inside her flared at the word rebel, but she squashed it down.

“So your grandparents raised you?”

“Yup. They made me clean up my act. Taught me to respect others and to play by the rules.”

Gabriella's stomach bobbed like a buoy on the tide. She wondered exactly how dirty his act had been and what rules he'd forgotten to play by, but she concentrated on her ice cream instead as they resumed their stroll down the street.

“My grandmother always taught me to just be myself,” she said. “Even when my parents seemed to want the exact opposite.”

“They don't want you to be a mathematical genius?” He smiled at her, and that damn dip under his nose taunted her again.

“They do, but my mother wants me to find a safe, rich husband and settle down too.”

“And that's not what you want?”

She halted on the corner and looked up at him. There were so many things she wanted, the least of which was the comfortable parameters of the kinds of relationships she'd known. No, she wanted Connor, wanted those brawny hands of his pushing her up against a wall and showing her all about the rebel he once was.

She flattened her tongue against the shaft of her ice cream and licked. Slowly.

“No. That's not what I want.”

Connor's breath rushed out on a tight exhale. He stared hard at her, his towering body looming, leaning in close. Gabriella's belly tightened in anticipation of his lips finally brushing against hers, but then someone on the street called out his name. They jumped apart as two male voices hollered loudly from the cab of a pickup as it sped by.

“Friends of yours?” she asked.

Connor watched the truck, his body tense and guarded until it was out of sight. Then he let out a slow, deep breath.

“Yeah. Sorry about that. Some people never change, you know?”

She didn't know. She'd never had anyone yell out of a truck at her, never stared at one as it disappeared from sight the way Connor had, either. He cleared his throat and nodded in the opposite direction from where the pickup had gone.

“So how's your research going?” he asked, making it clear that talking about whoever had just passed by was off the table. She wished he'd let her in, because having another piece of the mystery that was Connor unsolved was almost as frustrating as how damn good he looked in his jeans from behind.

Gabriella followed him away from the lights of the streets and toward the dimly lit wharf. “Pretty badly, actually. I'm having trouble gathering evidence, which will make it interesting when I meet my thesis advisor in the fall and I have absolutely nothing to show him.”

“Well, disproving duality can't be easy. I mean, everything is dual to some extent, right? Everything's opposite is also its equal. North and South. Good and evil.” He grinned at her, lips quirking up again, eyes crinkling. “Autobots and Decepticons.”

Gabriella laughed loudly. It felt good to abandon their former heaviness.

“That's the proof I need. I can base my entire thesis statement off
The Transformers
.” She waved her hand dramatically in front of her. “I can see the title now: ‘Eighties Cartoons Invalidate Central Theory in Projective Geometry and Boolean Algebra'.”

“It could work.”

Connor wolfed down the last spoonful of his dessert and tossed the bowl in the trash before they drifted in the direction of the docks. When they came to a point where a gate locked the pier, a
No Trespassing
sign guarding it, Gabriella stopped.

“Dead end,” she noted, but Connor typed a code into a keypad by the knob, and the catch in the metal door released. He opened it for her, and Gabriella eyed the pier down at the end of the ramp. Sailboats and yachts floated and rocked in every slip. “Do you have a boat down there?”

“No, but like I said—I know my way around codes.”

“And I'm guessing
No Trespassing
signs don't apply to rebels like you, either.”

He laughed and held her gaze. “Something like that.”

His voice was soft and low, his eyes hooded and dangerous again. The Connor she'd seen for a few moments at the café was back, and she wanted more of him. She stepped through the open gate and waited as he closed it behind them. The ramp was steep, and they walked down the length of ropes and wood to the flat of the dock. It was steady, secured in place by tall poles made of timber, moss growing where the water broke around them. The noise from town quieted and was replaced by the softly lapping shore, the creak and groan of idling boats, and the sound of their footsteps. As they neared the edge of the pier, Gabriella was intensely aware of Connor's presence and the fact that in between the moored boats and sleeping seagulls, they were completely alone.

“I still don't see how you can disprove duality,” he continued. “Every extreme is a variation of its dual, right? Hot and cold are opposites, but really, they're just degrees of the same thing.”

Gabriella enjoyed his logic, even if he wasn't understanding the whole picture. “So you're saying that light and dark aren't opposites. They're just two poles of the same phenomena.”

“Exactly.”

“Good theorizing. I'm impressed.” She leaned back against one of the poles and slicked her tongue over the pool of melted ice cream in her cone. “Do you have any other examples to share with me?”

“Tons.” Connor braced an arm above her head, his body so muscled and sure and towering over hers. “Love and hate. Repulsion and attraction.”

She felt the pull between them like magnets. Like gravity. She had to know if he felt it too.

“Pleasure and pain.”

“Exactly,” he repeated softly. “I mean, how can you try to disprove something when it's standing right there in front of you?”

She licked her ice cream again. Connor's eyes darkened as his gaze dipped down to her mouth, his heavy stare fixed on her tongue. Gabriella broke off a piece of the sugary cone and bit down on it sharply. She heard his breath catch.

“Going for the cone already when you haven't finished your ice cream?” he asked.

“I guess I've had enough.” The truth was that she was nowhere close to full, her body empty and throbbing with the need to be taken and claimed.

“Well, I finished mine, and I'm still hungry.” His mouth was inches away from hers. “Sharing is caring.”

She tilted her half-eaten cone toward his mouth. Connor leaned in, his eyes locked with hers as he slipped his tongue inside it. He probed and licked, achingly slow, his tongue sliding into the wafer funnel the way she imagined it pushing into her body. She shivered and reached back to clutch at the wood behind her with one hand, her knees starting to buckle.

“You sure you don't want any more?” he asked.

“I might want more.” But she didn't mean the ice cream.

“You should. It tastes really good.”

He took the cone from her hand and slowly, purposefully gathered some ice cream onto the tip of his tongue. Closing the distance between them, he bent down to brush his lips against hers. For a moment, all she felt was hot breath and cold lips, and then his kiss washed over her. Gabriella melted into the feeling, drinking the ice cream that spilled from his mouth into hers.

Connor pulled back to take a breath and threw the cone to the ground.

“You taste better.” He roughly clasped her neck, cleaving her to him for another dizzying kiss.

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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

Samhain Publishing, Ltd.

11821 Mason Montgomery Road Suite 4B

Cincinnati OH 45249

Bang

Copyright © 2015 by Ruby McNally

ISBN: 978-1-61922-570-1

Edited by Christa Soule

Cover by Kanaxa

All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
electronic publication: March 2015

www.samhainpublishing.com