Muscle for Hire (28 page)

The cop chuckled. “Not for a while, at least.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?” his partner asked, frowning at the blood still seeping through Aslin’s shirt. “You’re a big bugger, but a bullet wound isn’t something to brush off.”

Aslin lowered his attention to his side, raising his stained shirt with steady hands. “I’ll…” He stumbled back a step, his legs buckling beneath him.

Rowan was at his side before he could fall, sliding her arm around his waist. Supporting him. Holding him even as pain tore at her ribs. “I’ve got you.”

He looked down at her, his lips curling into a slow smile. “Hope so.”

She smiled back. “Know so.”

Somewhere in the distance—or maybe it was right beside her, she’d lost track of anyone else—someone cleared their throat.

“Get a room you two,” Chris said.

“You were right.” Rowan gazed up at Aslin’s face, unable to look away. “Someone
was
trying to hurt me.”

He brushed his thumb over her split lip, a deep rage simmering in the back of his eyes. “She
did
hurt you. She’s lucky I didn’t kill her.”

“
You
got shot,” Rowan murmured, touching her fingers to the sticky red stain on Aslin’s side. It was a ridiculous thing to say, but she couldn’t think of anything else.

Aslin’s answering grin was crooked. “I’ve had worse.”

Rowan’s eyebrows shot up. “Worse?”

He nodded. “This is just a flesh wound. A bloody stubborn American put me on my arse a week ago and I still haven’t recovered.”

Warm joy flooded through Rowan. “A bloody stubborn American, eh?”

His dark eyes twinkled, his hands smoothing over her backside to hold her closer to his hips. “Thank God I love her, or I’d be forced to point out the fact she didn’t listen to me when I was trying to—”

“Yeah, yeah, soldier boy,” Rowan muttered, rising up onto tiptoe as she tangled one hand in his hair and tugged his head down to hers. “We’ve got a whole life ahead of us for you to tell me you were right and I was wrong. Now just shut up and kiss me, will ya.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he whispered with a smile.

And he did.

Carefully.

Epilogue

“How many years were you Nick Blackthorne’s bodyguard? I would have thought you’d be used to a red-carpet event by now.”

Aslin shifted on his seat in the stretch limo, fighting the urge to pull at his black bowtie. “Sixteen years counting this one.” He slid Rowan a sideward glance, unable to hide his wry grin. “But when I walked a red carpet as Nick’s bodyguard, no one was remotely interested in looking at me.”

Rowan leant across the seat a little and placed a soft kiss on his jaw. “I don’t know how anyone could
not
be interested in looking at you. Especially when you’re wearing a tux.” She smoothed her palm up his thigh, the tips of her fingers brushing the bulge of his groin in a caress Aslin had no doubt was planned. When it came to turning him on, his wife knew
every
possible tactic, no matter how seemingly innocent. It was, he’d conceded, a gift. One she utilized often. Very often in the most inconvenient of places.

God, he loved her.

“But as sexy as you
do
look in it,” she went on, her voice a husky whisper in his ear as she danced her fingers up the line of his rapidly responding dick through his trousers, “I can’t wait to go home and strip it off—”

He turned and captured her lips with his in a ferocious kiss before she could finish the wholly arousing promise.

She burst out laughing against his kiss, the throaty sound almost undoing Aslin’s control. The far-from-gentle scrape of her nails against his scalp as she tangled her fingers in his hair in response didn’t help.

He had half a mind to tap on the screen dividing them from the driver and tell the lad to take them home. Pronto.

Any decision so self-serving was taken away from him however, when the limo came to a halt and the screen was lowered. “We’re here, Mr. Rhodes.”

Rowan groaned into Aslin’s mouth. “Dammit.”

Aslin chuckled, pulling away from her soft lips. “Thanks, Jeff,” he said with a smile at Jeff Coulten.

“Your timing is impeccable as always, Jeff,” Rowan grumbled, giving Jeff a disgruntled glare as she straightened the cherry-red slip she wore.

Jeff grinned at them both in the rearview mirror. “Of course it is. Now hurry up and get out. Chris is just about to arrive on his Ducati behind us, and I can see Nick Blackthorne waiting at the end of the carpet.”

Rowan turned to Aslin. “Ready?”

He brushed a quick kiss on her lips before letting his fingers trail a tender path over the growing swell of her stomach. “Always. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”

She snorted and gave him a shove. “Get out of the limo, soldier boy. The
Dead Even
premier is about to begin and your ex-boss is waiting for you.”

He flipped her a salute. “Yes, ma’am.”

Rowan’s eyes narrowed. “Watch it. I may be six months pregnant, but I can still put you on your ass.”

Aslin laughed and then turned to the door. With a deep breath, he counted to ten and stemmed the smile threatening to spread across his face. He had a reputation to uphold after all. Rowan Hemsworth-Rhodes’ husband was—at all times—a menacing, serious man. It wouldn’t do the world’s press to know otherwise.

The door opened to reveal Jeff standing on the sidewalk, grinning at him as he stepped out of the limo’s backseat. “Enjoy the movie, Aslin.”

Camera flashes ignited in Aslin’s face, but he ignored them.

Nick grinned at him. “Looking good, Uncle As,” he called, sliding his arm around Lauren’s waist.

Dropping them both a quick nod of greeting, Aslin turned back to the limo and held out his hand to help his wife alight from the transport. “In case I didn’t mention it,” he murmured in her ear, smoothing his hand over the lush curve of her hip before settling it on the small of her back, “you look stunning tonight.”

She smiled up at him. “You did. But feel free to say it again many times tonight if you like.”

Aslin couldn’t help himself. He laughed. And the camera flashes fired around them.

About the Author

Lexxie Couper started writing when she was six and hasn’t stopped since. She’s not a deviant, but she does have a deviant’s imagination and a desire to entertain readers with her words. Add the two together and you get romances that can make you laugh, cry, shake with fear or tremble with desire. Sometimes all at once. When she’s not submerged in the worlds she creates, Lexxie’s life revolves around her family, a husband who thinks she’s insane, an indoor cat who likes to stalk shadows, and her daughters, who both utterly captured her heart and changed her life forever.

Contact Lexxie at
[email protected]
, follow her on Twitter
www.twitter.com/lexxie_couper
or visit her at
www.lexxiecouper.com
where she occasionally makes a fool of herself on her blog.

Look for these titles by Lexxie Couper

Now Available:

Death, the Vamp and his Brother

The Sun Sword

Tropical Sin

Suck and Blow

Triple Dare

Dare Me

Love’s Rhythm

Suspicious Ways

Savage Australia

Savage Retribution

Savage Transformation

Coming Soon:

Dark Embrace

His music moves the world. Can his love move her heart?

Love’s Rhythm

© 2012 Lexxie Couper

Nick Blackthorne knows all about words of love. They’re the reason he’s the world’s biggest rock star. The irony? He turned his back on love a long time ago, lured away by the trappings of fame.

An invitation to a friend’s wedding is a stark reminder of how meaningless his life has become. When he enters that church, there’s only one woman he wants on his arm—the one he walked out on a lifetime ago. But first he has to find her, even if all she accepts from him is an apology.

Kindergarten teacher Lauren Robbins once had what every woman on the planet desires. Nick. Their passion was explosive, their romance the stuff of songs…and it took fifteen years to get over him. Then out of the blue Nick turns up at her door, and all those years denying her ache for him are shattered with a single, smoldering kiss.

But molten passion can’t hide the secret she’s kept for all these years. Because it’s not just her heart on the line anymore…and not just her life that’ll be rocked by the revelation.

Warning: Remember your first crush on a rock star? Now add smoldering sex, a raw and undeniable passion, soul-shattering orgasms. And secrets…

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Love’s Rhythm:

“Hello, Lauren,” a deep male voice said behind her.

Lauren squealed. An honest to goodness squeal. At the same exact second she spun on her heel and swung her satchel, weighed down with two textbooks, her uneaten lunch, car keys, half-empty water bottle, twenty-two hand-drawn self-portraits tucked in a sturdy cardboard folder, her purse and her iPad.

The satchel smashed into the temple of the man standing behind her.

There was a solid thud, a surprised
oof
, followed by an even more surprised, “shit, that hurt,” before the man went down like a bag of bricks, collapsing to the ground in one fluid, graceful drop. No, not just the man, the rock star. The rock star the whole world idolised, the one who’d grown up in this very parochial town with her.

The rock star who’d stolen her heart in that life she refused to think about.

Lauren’s mouth fell open. Her pulse turned into a sledgehammer. She stared at the motionless man lying at her feet, refusing to believe what her eyes were telling her. Nick Blackthorne was here in Murriundah, and she’d rendered him unconscious with the very satchel he’d given to her fifteen years ago.

“Oh, no.”

The words were a whispered breath. She dropped to her knees, the ground’s winter-damp seeping through the linen of her trousers as she reached out with one hand and gave Nick’s shoulder a gentle push. “Nick?”

He didn’t move.

Oh boy, Lauren, you’ve KOed the world’s biggest rock star.

She shoved him again, a little harder this time. “Nick?”

He didn’t make a sound. Not a bloody one.

“Shit.”

Her heart slammed into her throat, just as hard as the satchel had hit his head. She licked her lips and brushed a strand of his black hair from his forehead. He was just as gorgeous as always. Older, yes. He was almost thirty-seven after all, but the years looked good on him, so good. In fact, they suited him. When he’d been a teenager, he’d been god-like in his beauty. When he was in his twenties, that god-like beauty had verged on painful to look at. She’d spent many nights lying in the bed they’d shared for a year and a half, gazing at him while he slept, wondering at his perfection, her belly knotting with love, her sex constricting with longing. And then it had become just her bed, Nick nothing but a ghost in her heart.

She’d stopped reading articles about him somewhere in his late twenties, knowing each one would only make her stupid heart ache. But it was impossible to avoid seeing images of him. He kept popping up on the national news. Australia loved one of their own, especially when they’d won a Grammy or Billboard Award, or when they were dating Hollywood royalty or British royalty, something Nick Blackthorne seemed to do on a regular basis. Even worse was the local
Murriundah Herald
, the small newspaper constantly keeping the town aware of their famous
son
and his activities. Those images were hard to escape, and when she had let herself stare at them for longer than a heartbeat, she’d noticed his late twenties and early thirties only elevated his looks to a lived-in sexiness. The tiny seams around his eyes, the lines by his nose, they all heightened what she’d never forgotten—Nick Blackthorne was a sexy, sexy man. And now here he was, unconscious on his side in the Murriundah Public School’s muddy playground, looking even sexier than she remembered.

Damn it, what was he doing here? What the hell was he doing back here?

For me?

She frowned, shaking her head at the notion. No. Nick wouldn’t be here for her.

Could be. Isn’t that what you’ve dreamed about for the last fifteen years?

Her frown turned into a scowl. No, it bloody well wasn’t. She had moved on. She wasn’t still the naïve young woman with impossible fantasies and fairy-tale wishes of happy-ever-afters. And if he was here for her—her heart smashed harder into her throat at
that
thought—he could bloody well bugger off. The last thing she wanted was—

He groaned. A barely audible noise deep in his chest.

Lauren started, a tiny yelp slipping from her. “Nick?”

She nudged his shoulder again, but the groan was about it. “Well, at least I know I didn’t kill you,” she muttered, giving him a glare. He lay there on the cold ground, long, lean body decked out in black jeans, a black shirt and a black leather jacket she knew would cost more than she earned in a month.