A Leap in the Dark
Assassins of Youth MC #2
By Layla
Wolfe
Genre: MC Romance
Release Date: March 7, 2016
Praise for Leap in the Dark
"I look
forward to the next in the series. Congratulations to Layla. In my opinion,
this was her best book." ~ Kaz, Triple Bs Book Blog
"Absolutely
brilliant read and i can't wait to see what comes next and whether the
Assassins will manage to take down the fundies!!" ~ Booklover, One Click Aholics
"I LOVED A
Leap in the Dark. And, now I can’t wait for the next book in this series." ~ Tanya, Tasty Wordgasms
Synopsis
Kiss slowly. Play
hard.
Oaklyn: That arrogant, loathsome bastard had the nerve to move to Avalanche. Levon left behind his empire of sleaze to invade the tiny, sleepy town I’d decided to call home. I wanted to get away from smut and abuse and into a fresh, innocent place where nobody knew my name, only to be followed right into my very house by the King of Corruption himself.
I could handle it if he was physically gruesome. But he struts around with his muscles bulging and his cornflower blue eyes sparkling. I’m a nurse, a practical, sensible gal. But when Levon needs my help, I put away my pride and come running. And he’s going to need a lot of help to go up against the dirtbag Avalanche mayor, blackmailing him with his shameful past.
Levon: She’s proud, conceited, and holier-than-thou, everything I hate in a woman. But maybe it’s been too long since I had one, because when she steps up to the plate to help me, I’m doomed. I had to knock her down a few pegs once she knew I wanted her. Joining the Assassins of Youth motorcycle club and giving Oaklyn a few sessions over my knee just seemed to increase her yearning, though.
She’s a sizzling hot tornado of a woman. I need her to fight back against the fucking corrupt politicians in this town we’re trying to transform. I might have come from a sordid, disgraceful background. But I’m determined to move into the light and the purity that will make this town great.
Publisher’s Note: This
is a full-length, standalone novel with a HEA and no cliffhanger. Possible
triggers include male prostitution, sexual abuse, gun running, and crooked
municipal blackmail.
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Excerpt
“My parents, along with almost every other Lost
Boys’ parents. Every parent who threw their son to the wolves. This is why a
lot of us learn to feel no emotion. I’m usually pretty emotionless, which is
why I’m thinking maybe I can deal with Gideon’s work inside the compound.
Yesterday I had to face this Parley Pipkin assbite who was one of the men in on
the ass-kicking I received from Zelpha Pratt’s dad. Like it takes ten men to
kick the ass of one teenager. I did all right, staring him in the fucking
face.”
“You refrained from shooting him, anyway. That’s
admirable.”
I hadn’t told anyone other than Gideon about
Ladell Pratt yet. Deloy probably suspected that he was one of my tormentors,
but was polite enough not to bring it up. “Fifteen years of controlling my
emotions has taught me well. That’s why I like your scientific way of looking
at things. We have more in common than you might suspect. Emotion is a defect
in a perfectly logical machine.”
“No, no, not at all,” she cried, loud enough for
Nana to hear. I moved closer to her, taking her by the upper arms to guide her
into the shadows of the kitchen wall, farther from Nana’s bedroom. “Reason
alone, without human emotion, has created more wretchedness than a zealot’s
crusade.”
“You haven’t lived in Cornucopia.”
“Watching a Shakespeare performance informs us
more about the nature of jealousy, how it can infiltrate a man’s life and ruin
his marriage, than any textbook ever could. Harriet Beecher Stowe helped rouse
society against slavery more powerfully than any spreadsheet. Dickens did more
to prevent child abuse and institutional atrocity than any welfare society
report.”
I had to agree with her, because literature had
replaced emotion in my life. I could feel through works of art, music, and
writing. I allowed myself to feel outrage and indignation on their behalf—maybe
because they were “made up” works of art, and somewhat remotely removed from my
own carefully guarded cage of feelings. “Well, yes. Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ is still
played in about five hundred languages in ten billion elevators throughout the
world. I’m sure it’s managed to soothe many a savage beast. The photo of the
napalmed Vietnamese girl or Dorothea Lange’s Dust Bowl photos still resonate in
people’s hearts. Oaklyn, you don’t need to convince me. I feel deeply through
others’ creations. It’s just my real life where I have trouble knowing how to
feel.”
“And that’s where you’ll miss out. You have to
feel direct confrontations with people. There’s no sense in having pity for
people if you’re being ruled by performance and profit. There’s no point in
being charitable if you’re really not experiencing the compassion directly like
a stab to your heart. I have a shitty boyfriend, I’ll be the first to admit
that. But at least we have passion. We fight with passionate anger in our
hearts.”
“That’s useless to me,” I said. It sounded
heartless even as I said it. When had I become such a callous, insensitive
jerk? “I’ve had no close relationships with anyone in my life—ever. Not since
Zelpha Pratt.”
“You mean romantic. But you love your men.”
I stood tall and proud. “I love my men like a
protective mother hen. But passion with a woman? Nothing. At least you have
that with your idiotic boyfriend.” It irritated me that she had even an idiotic
boyfriend. I’d grown close to her the past week, strange to say. We sort of fit
together like hand in glove, though I knew she loathed me for my business
practices. I was used to that. I’d been denounced for my field of work for a
long time now. It was only because we serviced such a large denomination of
pious men and women in the community that no one had harassed us to move.
She said, “Decisions such as whom to fall in
love with, how to discipline a teenager, which beloved things to sacrifice,
which dreams to follow or abandon—all of these choices should be made with
emotion ruling, not wiped out and deadened by your logical thinking. If I let
myself be ruled by logic, I’d never have hooked up with my worthless Italian
boyfriend.”
“And that’s a good thing?” I scoffed.
She shrugged. “I’m actually trying to get rid of
him. Emotion keeps drawing me back to him. But you see what I mean? You’re
missing out on such a broad array of human experiences if you don’t go through
any of those things.”
I was getting riled, maybe with the more Jim
Beam I drank. “You don’t understand. I was kicked out of the bosom of my
family. I was told that I was a thing, a bother, an inconvenience. I was a
miniscule number in a perpetual multitude of numbers—an ‘it,’ not even an ‘I.’”
She folded her hands in front of her soberly,
though she had drank as much as I had. “I understand. You won’t let yourself
feel because that would dredge up all those angry, bitter feelings.”
“But I am angry and bitter! ‘Angry and Bitter’
is my middle name! It washes over me time and time again, trapping me in my
bitterness, my rage, my inability to even remotely forgive anyone connected to
that incident.”
“You have to learn to forgive, Levon, or else
you can’t move on. Don’t you want to marry and have a regular wife? One that
wasn’t chosen for you by some moldy old elders? Don’t you want to feel regular,
normal passion and love for a woman—a woman you chose yourself?”
I don’t know what the fuck came over me. All at
once, I knew I had something to prove to Oaklyn. Suddenly her waist under the
furry jacket looked so small, so fragile, like she needed my big hands around
it. When I grabbed her, she jumped, as though I was going to hurt her. She held
onto my forearms as I lifted her onto the deck railing. She was so fucking
light, with bones like a little bird! I parted her thighs with my massive ones,
feeling like an ancient tree next to a swaying birch. I touched the tip of my
nose to hers, and she didn’t try to pull away.
“I might not know romantic feelings,” I
murmured, “but I know that sex can masquerade for emotions of that type.”
And I kissed her.
I gave it my all, letting my usual rage and
indignation stand in for passion. I bit her pouty, full lips over and over
again until I felt the breath of her sighs against my mouth. Her entire body
did a full melt, and she even wrapped her ankles around the back of my knees.
Something happened during that wild kiss. My
asshole self, who had never even really felt a passionate sexual urge—it was
strictly business with all of us—began to cave in. Just like Oaklyn was folding
up, dissolving like a sinkhole beneath my onslaught. Some of the walls I’d
built up carefully over fifteen years began to dissolve. I could almost feel
it, at the edges of my awareness, like a curtain someone was lifting on the two
of us.
Like a spotlight shining on us coupling there on
the deck railing, I began to feel like the star of our show. Only there were
two of us, because it wasn’t just me performing like a trained seal. This was a
woman who wasn’t my client. I was voluntarily licking her lips of my own free
will. My cock was burgeoning, swelling against the wood railing, just an inch
from her pussy. It made a giant tent in the loose lounging pants I wore, but I
wasn’t embarrassed. Real feelings rushed through my lungs. Every breath I
snorted against her cheek, every intake of air was like breathing true, real
emotion.
I didn’t hate Oaklyn. I sort of even liked her.
My hands moved up her ribcage, felt her bony
shoulders, cradled her strong jaw. Of course I never kissed clients, so I
hadn’t kissed a woman in a year, maybe even two. It just wasn’t in my
wheelhouse—I didn’t have the time. So feeling the true, hot, aroused sensuality
of a woman beneath my very palms, well, it was a fucking turn-on.
But I knew I had to break away. I was good at
doing that.
“There,” I panted triumphantly, as if I’d just
solved some equation on a whiteboard. Oaklyn looked at me wide-eyed with
wonder, her lower lip shining as though stung by a bee. She clearly didn’t know
what to say or maybe even how to feel, so I helped her out. “How’s that for
emotional turmoil?”
I was going to stalk off jubilantly, but Oaklyn
beat me to it.
She leaped from the railing, shoving me out of
the way. She stormed off for a few steps, but then thought better of it, and
twirled back to face me. “You! Levon Rockwell. You’re the most infuriating,
contrary man on the face of the planet!”
Then she stormed off. I saw her go into the
kitchen and grab the bottle of Jim Beam off the counter without missing a beat,
then continue to her room.
Infuriating. I liked that. It meant I was
getting to her.
Then I wondered why I wanted to get to her.
Also Available
Meet the Author
Bestselling author
Layla Wolfe likes to bring you alpha males--sometimes two at a time--and the
kick-ass women who love them. Her BARE BONES MC series explores the dark,
disturbing life of the biker club in Arizona. Her spinoff series THE BENT
ZEALOTS MC is a gritty MM saga. She is currently at work on Book One of THE
ASSASSINS OF YOUTH MC, another spinoff set in Utah.
Layla Wolfe is the pen name of multi-published erotic romance author Karen
Mercury.
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