Page 49 of On A Manhunt: Complete Series

Two weeks earlier

LINDY

His hand cupped the nape of her neck. He wrapped his fingers around the long length of her ponytail and gave a gentle tug.

“Knees, sugar.”

Celine’s lips parted. She wanted to obey, the need to do as told had her legs bending.

He guided her down until she was before him.

He was so tall her head tipped back to hold his blue-eyed gaze.

“Good girl. Now pull my dick out and show me how much you love to please me.”

Her fingers flew to open his jeans and he quickly sprang free. Thick, with a flared crown, she could only lick her lips at the need to taste as she wondered how she might take it all.

As if he could read her mind, he murmured, “It won’t fit. But you’ll try to get those lips around it, to take as much of it as you can. Because you know your pussy will have the same struggle.”

“How’s it coming?”

I startled at the voice that came through my laptop. I was on a video call with Lucy, an author friend in Arizona, although the little window showing her face was hidden behind the one with the book I was writing.

Glancing at the clock in the corner of the screen, I realized the last thirty minutes had flown by.

I didn’t even notice the rev and noise of my neighbor’s chainsaw until now and God, it was loud.

We were doing writing sprints, putting as many words down as we could in half hour increments and I really sank into that scene, even blocking out that awful noise.

Using the mouse, I switched tabs so Lucy appeared in the small video chat window.

I never met her in person, but she was a close friend.

Besides my editor, one of the only people who knew I wrote romance.

On the side. The far, far side of my regular job.

Meaning while the two books I’d published to date were starting to bring in a little money for me to buy a fancy coffee at Steaming Hotties.

It was my nine-to-five weekday job at a small accounting firm that still paid the bills.

I tackled other people’s taxes and general bookkeeping.

Lots of numbers. Very dry, boring numbers.

Unlike my sister, Bridget, who was a human calculator, I found the profession boring as hell. It wasn’t my dream career, that was for sure. The saying, everyone could rely on death and taxes meant job security. I could agree. I was very familiar with both.

These days, I spent my nights and weekends working on my stories in secret because I was confident not everyone in Hunter Valley would be okay with me writing smut.

It was romance, but people would call it that and I didn’t think I could live it down.

This was a small town. I couldn’t leave the house without my hair done and my face made up because I always ran into someone I knew out and about.

I wasn’t sure I could deal with my neighbors if they read the sex scenes in my books, especially ones where I imagined myself as the heroine.

God, like the one I was working on now.

Knees, sugar?

I scanned what I just finished typing. Yeah, that would go over well at yoga. And my chances in the dating pool, which was shallow enough already.

Still, I was determined to make my writing a new career.

It had been my plan when I got out of college, but then my parents died not long after graduation and it got put to the side.

I’d needed a job that was reliable, that paid the bills.

Health insurance. All that grown up stuff I’d had to take on at twenty-three because raising a ten-year old sister became my priority.

Being a bookkeeper had been the first available opportunity at the time and I took it. All these years later, I was still there, but my role had advanced.

Unlike my life. Bridget was grown and had Maverick James in her life. A real man who was blatantly committed after a ridiculously short time. No, I wasn’t jealous she had a gorgeous, successful, wealthy, kind boyfriend. Literally the only eligible guy in town my age.

Yeah, my age.

Although not eligible any longer.

So no jealousy. Not at all. Because I just loved going on dates through the online singles sites and having every one of them be a dud. Which made me one, too.

Me. Lindy Beckett. Single. A dull accountant. A secret fledgling romance writer. Thirty-five with a biological clock that wasn’t just ticking, the alarm was going off.

I rubbed my eyes and gave Lucy a smile. “Sorry.”

“Must’ve been a pretty good scene. Or are you thinking about the date you have tomorrow?”

“Date? Hell, no.” I was to have dinner with another guy I met through a dating app.

He looked attractive in his profile photo and seemed nice in our messaging, but like every man before him, he probably didn’t check all the boxes on my man list. Meaning, he definitely wasn’t the reason I’d totally gotten into the latest chapter.

I didn’t write just romance. I wrote steamy romance.

In fact, I squirmed in my desk chair because I was aroused from what I’d written.

Lately, the words came easier. It wasn’t like I had a boyfriend that I could practice these sexy scenes with or planned to enact with Mr. Dinner tomorrow night.

No, I pulled out my extensive collection of battery powered boyfriends to get off.

The difference now was that one specific man kept popping into my head.

One dark haired, dark eyed, gorgeous man.

I pulled my thoughts of him out late at night when I grabbed a toy from my bedside drawer.

The past few times it had been the big vibrating dildo between my parted thighs.

God forbid he–Dex James–heard me cry out his name as I came.

I couldn’t remember coming harder, and that was from only thinking about him.

Or when I was writing the sexy scenes for my latest book.

Because I definitely pictured him telling me his cock was going to be too big for me to handle.

Big guy, big dick, right?

That was what I envisioned. Except what if I was wrong? What if he had a tiny one? A little miniature hotdog?

I shook my head and frowned at the ridiculousness of it.

Dex James was one of Maverick’s brothers. He–Dex, although probably Mav, too–definitely did not have a cocktail weenie between his muscular thighs.

The man exuded big dick energy.

He also had an easygoing, quick-to-smile, quick-for-fun kind of way about him. Which was completely the opposite of me. I’d been called uptight. Rigid. High maintenance. No doubt last weekend in Denver when I was super stressed, super annoyed and super behind on my book.

I’d taken it out on Dex. And Mallory, too, although she was used to me, as Bridget’s best friend, of being a little crazy after all these years.

“I was working on the second sex scene,” I told Lucy.

“I want to read it,” she said, her voice eager, eyes lighting up with anticipation. “God, what is that noise?”

“Chainsaw. The guy next door is trimming trees, I think.”

Mr. VanMeyer had been running that machine for the past hour.

“Jump to page thirty-two,” I told her. We wrote in a word processing program that was shareable online so she could toggle to my document and read what I wrote with ease. Like right now where she opened it and went to that page.

I grabbed the glass of iced tea from beside my laptop and took a big gulp while she read. It was a warm day, and I had all the windows open.

“Wow, Lind, that’s super-hot.” In the little display on my screen, she fanned herself.

“I know. It’s–”

“That guy, isn’t it?” she prodded with a sly smile. “The one you and your sister went to Denver with last week. Whatever his name is. You’ve made him be the hero of your book.”

“What are you saying, that he’s my muse?” I shook my head with a little more vigor than the question deserved. If Lucy could pick up on it, I was worried. “Nope. Definitely not him. He’s not a cowboy like in my stories.”

I couldn’t imagine Dex James wearing a Stetson like the heroes I wrote. Sure, he’d look good in one. Or a potato sack, but a cowboy wasn’t his personality.

“So? I’m sure he’d love to put you on your knees.” Her dark eyebrows went up and down, then she grinned. “When’s the last time you had a guy do that? Boss you around.”

Never. Still, my panties were wet from the possibility.

And the top unchecked box on the man list. There were many things on that list I’d started with my mother when I was fourteen and AJ Alvarez asked me to go bowling.

Back then, it had honest on it. Friendly.

Courteous. As I got older, I added more things, like loyal and good with kids.

The one I was thinking about now was sexually attentive.

Guys in the past who I’d let into my bed hadn’t been selfish, but they hadn’t been attentive either. Or bossy.

An alarm came through the video call. “Shit, I have to go,” she said with a sigh as she swiped at her cell. “Ariel will be off the bus in ten minutes. Bye!”

The video call ended. I pushed back my chair from the kitchen table and grabbed my glass to refill it.

The whirring of the chainsaw was incessant.

I might have pushed through before, but I needed a break from the noise.

Shutting the windows was only going to make the house stuffy and wouldn’t block out Mr. VanMeyer’s yard work completely.

It was time to leave the house. I needed to get groceries anyway. I always went on Saturday afternoons, only today I’d stalled for a few hours as the words flowed from my fingertips.

Thinking about sexy times with Dex. Bossy, me on my knees, sexy times.

“Gah!” I said to the empty kitchen.

Dex was all kinds of wrong. He lived in Denver, not Hunter Valley. He was young. Two things that said not permanent and that was what I was looking for. A permanent, as in forever, man. Mr. Right.

I set my glass in the sink, then tore the list of what I needed at the store off the notepad next to the fridge.

Going upstairs, I checked my face in the bathroom mirror, swiped on some colored lip gloss and ran a brush through my hair.

Outside, I stopped in my front lawn to see what Mr. VanMeyer was up to.

We were in an older neighborhood in Hunter Valley and the trees were large, the landscaping well established.

There were shrubs separating our two yards, but he had a massive cottonwood that gave his backyard lovely shade all day and mine later in the afternoon when it blocked the Western late day sun.

It wasn’t that one he was working on though, which was good because I liked that shade, but a second tree that had been dead for a year or two.

He was finally trimming some of the lower branches he could reach from the ground.

He wore his usual outfit of jeans and white t-shirt with suspenders.

No matter the season, this was his outfit every day that I’d known him, which was my entire life since he lived in his house when my parents bought ours after they were married.

I came along two years later and had been here ever since.

He saw me, shut the chainsaw off and waved.

“Hiya, Lindy!” he called. He was a kind man, always happy, but a little crazy.

“Hey, Mr. VanMeyer. Trimming the tree?” I asked.

He rubbed his mostly bald head and grinned. “Chopping this sucker down.”

I looked up at the big, bare tree and wasn’t sure how he was going to do that.

He liked to take on adventurous do-it-yourself projects and then ended up calling in the professionals to finish up.

Like replacing the back steps off his deck.

Or when he decided to repave his driveway. Or put in the new mailbox post.

“Careful on a ladder getting those low limbs.” The tree was at least thirty feet tall with lots of long, sweeping branches. There were a few small ones he’d already been able to cut off that were scattered around him in the grass.

Shaking his head, he patted the handle of the chainsaw. “Oh, I’m not getting on a ladder.”

“Good.” I didn’t want him to fall because it would definitely lead to him breaking something. And with a working chainsaw, maybe cut something off. At least he called in the pros first thing this time. “Then there will be more for the tree trimming service. I’m off to Van’s. Need anything?”

“I’m not hiring a– Wait. You’re going to Van’s?” His eyes lit up like a kid on Christmas morning at the mention of the grocery store. “I like those brownies they have.”

I laughed. “I know you do. I’ll get you some.”

He offered a thanks only after reminding me he liked the ones with nuts sprinkled on top, then pulled the cord to start the chainsaw again.

Hopefully the brownies would be enough to lure him away from the chainsaw and I could get a thousand more words in before it got too late. I’d finish the sex scene with Dex… with the hero, before bed.

And my date with my vibrator.