Authors: Anne Calhoun
Tags: #Romance, #Erotica, #Contemporary, #Fiction
Breath on Embers
Breath on Embers
By Anne Calhoun
Christmas is the perfect time for firefighter Ronan O’Rourke to take things to the next level with his sexually adventurous girlfriend. He knows she has feelings for him��and he’s sure of his feelings for her—but when Thea refuses his invitation to sample Christmas in New York City because what they share is nothing more than sheet-burning sex, Ronan sets out to change her mind.
Deep down Thea Moretti knows she cares for Ronan, but she can’t move past her grief over her late husband. Loud music and sex with Ronan are the only things she’s got that make her feel alive, so she takes as much of both as she can get. She knows Ronan wants more, but during the darkest time of the year finding her way won’t be easy.
Ronan gambles everything and challenges Thea: one night of passion with him and another man. Can he prove to her that what they share isn’t just great sex but an emotional connection strong enough to last forever?
38,000 words
Dear Reader,
I love the month of December when it comes to releases at Carina Press. This is our third year of publishing our special holiday collections, and I’m fortunate to be the one to edit the collections. It’s become our tradition to do three separate anthologies and this year we chose to do contemporary romance, science-fiction romance and erotic contemporary romance collections.
Each of these three collections is amazing in its own right (not that I’m biased or anything), showcasing the talent of the contributing authors. In our contemporary romance collection,
Romancing the Holiday,
Jaci Burton wraps up her Kent Brothers trilogy with the story fans have been waiting for: it’s finally time to see Brody and Tori’s combustible attraction on page and cheer them to their happily-ever-after in
The Best Thing.
We’ll Be Home for Christmas
by HelenKay Dimon returns readers to Holloway, West Virginia, as she gives us Spence’s story. Lila is more than a match for the delicious Spence and sparks fly when they go toe-to-toe. Last, but certainly not least, is newcomer to the collection, Christi Barth, with her delightful friends-to-lovers novella
Ask Her at Christmas.
And if you haven’t already checked out Christi’s full-length novel,
Planning for Love,
now’s a great time to treat yourself to this funny, emotional, captivating book.
Heating up the pages, and I do mean heating up, are the three novellas in
Red Hot Holiday,
the erotic contemporary romance collection. If you’re looking for stories that are going to make what goes on under the mistletoe even more interesting, you’ll want to read this collection.
I Need You for Christmas
by Leah Braemel features a strong-willed, career-driven Mountie—and the sculptor who molds her to his will in the bedroom. In
Wish List
by K.A. Mitchell, Jonah discovers his lover, Evan, may be the one who can deliver the BDSM wishes on Jonah’s naughty list. And Anne Calhoun brings to the collection a stunningly powerful erotic romance that’s both deeply erotic and deeply emotional, with
Breath on Embers.
A Galactic Holiday
is the third of our holiday collections, showcasing three science-fiction romance novellas with incredible world building and incredible characters. In
How the Glitch Saved Christmas,
author Stacy Gail takes us to our future, with bod-mods, enhancements, tech, artificial intelligence…and a growing love between two rival detectives investigating the case of the...
appearing
gifts. Traveling off world, Anna Hackett’s
Winter Fusion
delivers a story that’s also of two rivals. Rival negotiators Brinn and Savan must come to an agreement on behalf of their respective planets during the cold of Yule, and amidst the danger of a force that wants to stop their negotiations.
Galileo’s Holiday
by Sasha Summers takes us into deep space. Riley’s tugger has just been destroyed, but will she still have reason to be thankful as her relationship with Leo gives her a future to look forward to?
In addition to these nine incredible holiday novellas, four fantastic novels release in December, each one the first book in a new seriesfrom the respective authors. For fans of Regency romance, Wendy Soliman kicks off her Forster series with
Compromising the Marquess,
in which the enterprising heroine supports her family by writing for a scandal sheet, placing her on a collision course with a marquess. In her steampunk romance
The League of Illusion: Legacy
, Vivi Anna begins a dangerous journey for three brothers. Each will find love while two brothers battle deception, jealousy and ruthless rivals to find and rescue the third.
Fan favorite Dana Marie Bell’s new series, The Nephilim, begins with
All for You.
He’s not just the guy next door, he’s the angel next door. And it’s just become his job to protect her—while trying not to fall in love, or into bed.
And this month we’re thrilled to introduce debut author Alison Packard with her debut contemporary romance title,
Love in the Afternoon.
When I grabbed Alison’s book from the slush pile to put on my eReader for the weekend, I had no idea I was in for such an amazing story. Though I’m not one to watch soap operas, Alison sucked me into the world of soaps and made me fall in love with Kayla and Sean. Soap opera stars, maybe, but characters you root for, relate to and want to turn the pages faster for so you can see them fall in love, definitely. If you’re a fan of Shannon Stacey, Victoria Dahl and Jill Shalvis, be sure to give this new author a try.
I hope you find time to pamper yourself during the crazy holiday season. And if that pampering takes the form of a great Carina Press December release, even better!
We love to hear from readers, and you can email us your thoughts, comments and questions to
[email protected]
. You can also interact with Carina Press staff and authors on our blog, Twitter stream and Facebook fan page.
Happy reading!
~Angela James
Executive Editor, Carina Press
www.carinapress.com
www.twitter.com/carinapress
www.facebook.com/carinapress
Dedication
Dedicated to Christine, Kristi, and Amanda,
founding members of the Totally Crap Book Club, whose black humor
brought light to a very dark time in my life.
For Mark.
Reflash:
A situation in which a fire, thought to be extinguished, resumes burning.
Chapter
One
December 3rd
Christmas lights glinted on Thea Moretti’s black patent leather boots as she hurried along East Eighty-Sixth Street, across Park Avenue, heading for Madison. The night air held a damp chill that boded snow, and a few drops of borderline-freezing rain spattered her hair. She tightened the belt of her matching thigh-length trench coat and turned up her collar against the cold. If she stood perfectly still the coat and boots covered her from ears to toes, but based on the looks she’d gotten on the bus, any movement flashed a couple of inches of bare skin between the coat’s hem and the tops of her thigh-high boots.
Korn pounded her eardrums as she passed Demarchelier, crowded even on a Tuesday evening, and crossed Madison against the light when the uptown traffic broke. She ducked through The Croydon’s glass door as a man in a business suit exited and headed for Fifth Avenue. The doorman gave her a quick onceover.
“He expecting you?” She couldn’t hear him over the sounds of “Falling Away From Me” but she’d gotten really good at reading lips since she’d moved to New York nearly a year before.
He
was Ronan O’Rourke, resident of apartment 9B, and the answer to that question was
no
.
“Don’t buzz him,” Thea said, keeping her own volume natural. “You’ve got your hands full.”
Rick, occupied with handing out packages to impatient residents while accepting a rack of dry-cleaning from a laundry and buzzing an apartment expecting a delivery of what smelled like Chinese food, took her at her word and gave her a grateful nod as he hit the security buzzer to open the second set of doors. Thea slipped through with the delivery man. The fury-filled music thundering against her eardrums contrasted starkly with the cream marble floor and potted ferns as she headed for the bank of elevators at the back of the lobby. She and the delivery man waited for a couple to exit the elevator, then rode as far as the fourth floor together. Thea trusted the aroma of Kung Pao chicken wouldn’t permeate her outerwear.
There wasn’t enough material under the trench coat to absorb the scent of Chinese food.
Apartment 9B was right off the elevator bank. Thea paused just outside the door and adjusted everything she wore, tugging down the coat’s hem, straightening the boot tops. She shook the few droplets of chilled rain from her hair and left the coat collar up, as a glance in the mirror opposite the elevator told her it added a sexy-spy overtone to the look.
Reluctantly she turned off her iPod, tugged the earbuds from her ears, and wrapped the cord around the device. Silence rang loud in her head until the canned laughter of a sitcom rerun rose and fell behind Ronan’s door. She slipped the iPod into her coat pocket with her MetroCard, then depressed the buzzer.
The deadbolt clicked, then the door opened. Ronan stood on the other side in his stocking feet, his blue eyes widening with surprise and a pleasure that made her heart jitter. He wore a dark blue uniform with the single silver bar of the FDNY’s Lieutenant insignia on the collar. The sleeves of a white thermal undershirt were pushed to his elbows.
“Hey, Thea,” he said. “Did Rick buzz? I didn’t hear it.”
His voice trailed off as his eyes narrowed with interest. In some distant part of her mind she noted the fine lines radiating from the corners of his eyes, a sign that his last stretch of duty at FDNY’s Battalion 10, Engine Company 22, hadn’t been uneventful.
So much the better. He needed this. She needed it, too. More than he knew.
The patent leather squeaked when she cocked her head and her hip; his gaze roamed from the top of her tousled hair to the tips of her shiny black boots, lingering on the way back up at the exposed skin peeking through the coat. The tops of her thighs. The hollow of her throat.
Her mouth, adorned in a matte red several shades darker than her natural lip color.
Jackpot.
Silence stretched for a moment as heat bloomed on his cheekbones and in his bright blue eyes. One dark brow lifted. He cleared his throat, then braced one broad shoulder against the doorframe and let his gaze roam her body once more.
“Can I help you with something?”
Excellent. Ronan had a quick eye and a sharp mind, two qualities that nicely iced the cake of his muscular firefighter’s body.
“Santa sent me to help you, sir,” she said, her voice provocative but low in deference to the building’s other residents. The words felt a little ridiculous. She was a systems architect, not a...
Not a what? Not a flirt? Not a sexpot? Not alive?
His gaze flicked to her mouth again. “With what?”
Holding his gaze with her own, she reached for the trench coat’s belt and unbuckled it, then slipped the shiny black buttons free. The coat gaped open to reveal a red velvet Santa’s helper outfit. White fur trimmed the edge of the strapless bodice and the short skirt’s hem, dancing several inches above the tops of hooker boots straight out of
Pretty Woman
.
Subtlety wouldn’t hold back the emptiness. Filling the void required loud music and meaningless sex. “Anything you like,” she said.
He stepped to the side to let her in. As she swayed down the short hallway leading to the living area she let the trench coat drop from her shoulders to the floor, revealing the length of her spine in the backless dress. The heels, three inches higher than she normally wore, put a swing in her hips that set the red skirt in a perpetual motion guaranteed to draw a man’s eye.
One look over her shoulder and she knew she’d caught Ronan’s.
Based on the rustle of patent leather she knew he’d picked up her casually discarded coat and hung it on the rack beside his door. Ronan was terribly neat, a personal habit that came from living in close quarters with the other officers in his company during his duty shifts. Probie slobs quickly morphed into neat freaks, or risked the wrath of older, more senior members.
She stopped in the middle of his living room. When he joined her, she struck her best model pose, hands on hips. He crossed the parquet flooring to stand in front of her.
“I thought Santa only brought toys to good girls and boys.”
She put her fingertip to his lower lip, then trailed it over his chin to his pulse, thumping steadily at the base of his throat, then continued down his breastbone, across abdominal muscles as hard as his sternum to his belt buckle. “I told Santa you’ve been
very, very good
,” she said, toying with the buckle. Her fingertip almost grazed the bulge straining against his zipper, and his breathing halted for a second.
That slight break in his calm demeanor sent heat sparking along her nerves to settle low in her belly. Ronan was
very, very good
in bed, as self-possessed and controlled as he was out of it. That bottomless well of calm, both intense and remote, reassured her that despite nine months of hooking up, he was no more emotionally involved in this than she was.
She’d met him on St. Patrick’s Day, on her way back from yet another appointment with the therapist her family made her promise to see if she moved away from Columbus, Ohio, the only city she’d ever called home. The weather was warm for March, sunny and promising an early spring as she walked home up Second Avenue. The bars had thrown open their big windows and uniformed firefighters, EMTs and police officers spilled out onto the patios lining the streets. She would have ignored them all if a big blond, several Guinnesses to the wind at one in the afternoon, hadn’t treated her to a terrible come-on line as she crossed the avenue, but when she scanned the group it was black-haired, blue-eyed Ronan who sparked something deep inside. Standing in a cluster of rowdy uniforms, he was serene as opaque glass, but heat and promise rose from his body like mist from the lake on a cool morning.
Much as it did right now, standing in the middle of his living room.
“I’m not a boy,” Ronan said.
He didn’t argue whether he’d been good or bad. Ronan didn’t focus on good or bad. He focused on live or die, and she didn’t want to think about that. “Santa’s branching out,” she said somewhat desperately, then put weight behind the come-on by unbuckling his belt.
The backs of her fingers brushed his erection as she unfastened his uniform cargo pants, then tugged his uniform shirt and long underwear T-shirt free and drew them over his head. This was supposed to be a grown-up gift to him, but she treated herself to the sensation of his skin, taut and smooth over heavy muscle. She trailed the backs of her fingers over his pectorals, then down his abdominals.
Bone, muscle, skin. So alive, blood pumping through his veins as he watched her. Even without meeting his gaze, she felt the heat of his look on her exposed shoulders, the tops of her breasts. The connection thumped between them, would double in intensity if she made eye contact. Instead she dropped to her knees and slid her palms into the open waistband, tugging it down just enough to release his thick, heavy shaft. Without saying a word he eased onto the broad, round arm of his leather sofa, then found the remote and clicked the television off.
Silence once again rang in her ears and she wished for the distancing effect of the television. Instead, she gripped the base of his shaft and pulled it down to her mouth, then swirled her tongue around the head. At first contact his defined abdominals flinched, and his breathing stuttered accordingly. The nuances of sex filled the void with heat and simple erotic longing. Back on familiar territory, she closed her red lips around the tip and flicked a glance at him through her lashes. Eyelids drooping with lust, his mouth somehow looked both soft and mean as he watched her. Emboldened, she set a torrid pace, wetting the shaft with her saliva as she went down until her lips met her fist, then drew back up. Spit slicked her grip as she continued, the sound flicking against her eardrums with each hot suck.
His hand lifted to her cheek, then the fingers from his other hand tangled in her hair, pulling her back with a none-too-gentle tug. Her mouth was open as he slipped his thumb in to rub the edges of her teeth before his fingers tightened on the back of her head, pulling her forward and guiding his cock back into her mouth.
Heat seeped along her nerves to pool in her cunt. Her knees shifted apart, the patent leather squeaking on the hardwood as she undulated with longing. The scent of skin and musk drifted into her nostrils. A low groan echoed in her ears, the sound of Ronan’s control fraying. His fist tightened in her hair, the fingers on her jaw tightening even as his hips lifted, forcing his cock to the back of her throat. He was one, perhaps two sultry sucks away from coming when the fist in her hair tugged her head back and again made her meet his electric blue eyes. Hot, male desire etched his face, and his cock throbbed in her hand. A pearly drop formed at the tip. His muffled curse when she bent forward to lick it off made the sting in her scalp worthwhile.
“A blow job’s not enough?” she asked.
He crouched just enough to wrap one brawny arm around her waist and hoist her right off the floor, then turned for his bedroom. “I haven’t seen you in a couple of weeks,” he said.
“I wanted to give you something,” she protested.
“And now I want to give you something.” He backed her into the wall and pinned her with hips and shoulders, the arm around her waist slipping under her ass to hold her at the right level. He kissed her, his mouth hot and possessive, demanding her full, undivided attention. She struggled, because this was supposed to be about sex, not about
them
. But she didn’t last long, and when surrender shuddered through her muscles, softening her against him, he added, “Since I’m bigger and stronger, you’re going to take it.”
He kissed her, his tongue delving into her mouth while his hands remained still, until demand knotted tightly in her nipples and pussy and she wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist. The noise in her head cracked under her frantic pulse, the squeak of her boots, and breath warring with kiss.
One arm still under her ass, he stepped away from the wall and found the short zipper at the small of her back. With one jerk the teeth separated enough for her bodice to gap away from her breasts. He turned to the bed and bore her down onto the spread. Braced on one elbow, he tugged the molded cups down, exposing her breasts.
She shimmied in an effort to get the silly dress over her hips and off, but he leaned into her, stilling her movements. “Keep it on,” he said as his gaze roamed from breasts to bared thighs then to her face. “It’s hot. Very hot.”
Masculine appreciation edged out the exhaustion in his eyes. He cupped one breast, plumping it while running his thumb back and forth across her nipple until her eyes closed, then applying his tongue to the tip, then the edge of his teeth as her need for sensation grew. Her breasts grew heavy and tight as he worked them over. When her nails dug demandingly into his shoulders and she arched against the hip and thigh pressing against her mound, he chuckled and shifted down. She went up on her elbows and watched him use his jaw to nudge red velvet and white fur to her hips, a day’s worth of scruff scraping enticingly against sensitive skin. Black hair, wicked blue eyes, full mouth surrounded by sexy stubble...the combination of sight and sensation made her drop back against the bedspread.
When he paused, she gave an internal groan. The plan was to give him a sexy Santa’s helper blow job and then leave, erecting a barrier against the upcoming season. The coat and skirt were short enough that she’d worn rather demure black hipster briefs, not the thong or cheeky panties typically adorning her ass for an evening with Ronan. But then he settled his open mouth over her mound and exhaled gently. Moist heat pressed against her clit, sending sparks flickering along nerves to her fingertips and toes. She braced her feet and undulated under him, but realized she’d planted her sidewalk-dirty boots on his bedspread and shifted to take them off.
“Leave them,” he said again as he slid his palms under her ass to pull her underwear down. “The boots, the dress...leave the whole fucking outfit on.”