We’re ONE WEEK away from the release of PLAYING DIRTY by Lauren Hawkeye – read an excerpt below and preorder your copy now!
About PLAYING DIRTY:
His guiltiest pleasure
She’s wild, wicked…and pure, sexy trouble
It takes a nanosecond for Beth Marchande to see that Ford Lassiter worships rules and order. Yet behind his leonine eyes this gorgeous but tightly wound man is hiding something much deeper than lust. He’s hiding a deliciously raw, hungry need to take control while Beth relinquishes hers. But for this wild, fierce woman there’ll be no holding back his heart…no matter the cost.
“Dare is Harlequin’s hottest line yet. Every book should come with a free fan. I dare you to try them!”
—Tiffany Reisz, international bestselling author
PLAYING DIRTY releases June 1st – Preorder Now!
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Excerpt:
Damn.
As if he’d spoken out loud, Beth’s eyes fluttered open. Lifting her head, she looked across the bar, over to where he sat, aching…and right into his eyes.
Earlier today her eyes had been the color of the afternoon sky, but now they were sapphire fire, the flames licking along his skin. His gut tightened as she smiled lazily, then slowly, sensually disengaged herself from the tangle of limbs. Behind her, the couple continued their dance, but Ford didn’t care—his eyes were on the woman who was crossing the room toward him with slow, deliberate undulations of her hips.
“Fancy meeting you here, Sir Lassiter.” She stopped well into his personal space, and that vanilla perfume made his mouth water and his jaw clench.
“Sir?” He arched an eyebrow and tried really hard not to do what he wanted, which was to reach out and place his hands at her waist, to slide her shirt up and feel the warmth of her skin beneath.
“Mmm, you seem like a sir.” Beth smiled and inched closer, stepping right between his spread thighs. He felt his expression darken—she knew exactly what she was doing, what she was asking for.
“What makes you say that?” His instincts told him to tug her flush against his body, to press her to him so she could feel exactly what she was doing to him.
He did not.
“You seem all proper and noble…like an aristocrat. A knight. Sir Lassiter.” Beth nudged forward just a whisper, and he felt the curve of her hip press into his inner thigh.
His mouth went dry.
“Like you’re trying so hard to do what you think is right. But tell me something.” Tilting her head back, she looked up into his eyes, searching. “Why is denying yourself something that you want, that we both want, the right thing? I know you feel it, too.”
Her open question gutted him. He’d been in the boardroom with billionaires, with sheikhs, with sharks, and he’d bested them all.
The little woman who smelled like cupcakes? She was bringing him to his knees.
“I—” He started to explain, but she cut him off, stepping back, her sudden frown breaking the spell.
“I see.” Her lips pinched together in a mockery of a smile. “I’m not the kind of woman you want to get involved with, right? Not even for a night. Let me assure you, that’s your loss.”
Wait…what? “Wait just a damn minute.” When Beth would have turned, Ford did as he’d imagined, catching her by the waist and hauling her back into the vee of his legs. This time her pelvis connected with the steel length of his erection, and he savored her sharp little intake of breath. “What do you mean?”
“I think it’s pretty self-explanatory.” Beth regarded him coldly, though she didn’t back down. “My hair, my tattoos… I’m far too wild for you.”
“Oh, do you think so?” The way she was looking up at him, so certain she was right, was a challenge, and he felt something inside him roaring to life to meet it.
She thought he was turned off because she wasn’t his usual type? Well, he couldn’t deny that she was not at all the kind of woman he was usually drawn to, and his instant attraction to her puzzled him more than a bit.
But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was what she made him feel.
“I don’t give a damn about the color of your hair or the ink on your skin. Got it?” The need to prove that she wasn’t the problem was quickly overriding his sense of restraint, the only other thing that had held him back from accepting her sweet offer that afternoon.
“I don’t know you, yet you make me want things I’m not comfortable wanting. Make me feel things I shouldn’t.” His hands at her waist squeezed, hard, to emphasize his point, and he savored her resultant shudder, which ratcheted up his own excitement.
“Why would you be uncomfortable wanting something if it doesn’t hurt anyone else?” She was watching him again, lids heavy over those big eyes. “Or maybe you think that it is hurting someone?”
He kept his stare on her face, absorbing every nuance of her expression, which was open, honest.
Something told him that Beth Marchande wasn’t going to be disgusted with the demands he might make of her.
“Sometimes a little bit of hurt is good, Sir Lassiter…especially when I’m begging you for it.”
“Fuck.” Dragging his hands up her sides, over her rib cage and the swell of her breasts, Ford clasped Beth by the shoulders and tugged her forward, crushing her smirking lips to his own.
Rather than offering him a kiss as sweet as the vanilla she smelled of, she moaned beneath the pressure and opened, her tongue surging out to tangle with his.
One hand slid behind her head and fisted in the long mane of raven and amethyst hair, just as his fingers had itched to. He tugged her head to the side roughly and then dragged his lips down the column of her throat, settling over her pulse and sinking his teeth in to claim.
“Well, what’s it going to be, Sir Lassiter?” Beth’s breathy question rasped in his ear, and she shuddered when his teeth marked her skin. “Are you going to be good? Or are you going to be bad? What do you think?”
Shoving his glass aside—he felt intoxicated just from being near her—Ford stood, making sure that every plane of his body glided against hers as he did.
Her eyes glittered with the same need that he felt as he quickly pulled a fifty from his wallet and tossed it onto the surface of the bar.
“I think…” Ford deliberately wrapped his fingers around her own, drawing them up to his lips to nip. “I think that we’re going to go back to my room right now. And I’m going to find something better for that smart mouth to do.”
About Lauren Hawkeye:
Lauren Hawkeye/ Lauren Jameson never imagined that she’d wind up telling stories for a living… though when she looks back, it’s easy to see that she’s the only one who is surprised. Always “the kid who read all the time”, Lauren made up stories about her favorite characters once she’d finished a book… and once spent an entire year narrating her own life internally. No, really. But where she was just plain odd before publication, now she can at least claim to have an artistic temperament.
Lauren lives in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta, Canada with her husband, toddler, pit bull and idiot cat, though they do not live in an igloo, nor do they drive a dogsled. In her nonexistent spare time Lauren can be found knitting (her husband claims that her snobby yarn collection is exorbitant), reading anything she can get her hands on, or sweating her way through spin class. She loves to hear from her readers!
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