Surrender to a Sex Therapist (7 page)

Although, by the spreading grin on Mike’s face as he returned, and the way the poor jilted guy slinked away from the bar, my employee may have elaborated on my polite refusal.

I shook my head and smiled. That man was incorrigible.

“
So, how you been sleeping?” Mike opened up the small dishwasher we kept to wash glasses just under the counter.

I sighed and avoided his penetrating, compassionate gaze. “Not well.”

He shook a finger at me. “I could tell the insomnia’s back. You always get extra quiet when you aren’t sleeping well. And you forgot to do the books. You never forget to do the books on Friday.”

I bristled a bit at this, but swallowed down my defensive trigger and joked, “Well, maybe I’ve suddenly got a life, and now I’m doing the books on Monday.”

He gave that deep, throaty laugh I tried to deny had an effect on me. “Sweetie, I know everything about you, and I know you haven’t gotten a life yet.” His warm, strong finger swept under my chin and tilted my head up.

Uttered by different lips, those words would’ve come off as creepy. But, from Mike, they came off as caring, concerned, sad about my lack of social outings. I knew he worried about me. Worried that I worked too much.

He didn’t know the truth, though. That was one thing Mike Stansfield did not know about Ms. Katherine J. Leonard. (Call me Kat for short.) He didn’t know the effect I had on people.

It started, or at least I became first aware of it, in elementary school. I was about nine. I liked to watch the other kids playing on the tire swing, and I’d always been an observer. But, this day, my friend Robbie Golding asked me to play tag with him and some other kids, and I gleefully joined the small group.

I caught Robbie. Tag, you’re it! But, as kids will do, we got to wrestling on the school grounds. It was harmless fun, until Robbie started to gasp for air. The official diagnosis was asthma, but I knew. I don’t know how, but somehow I knew. I stole his breath away, and it most certainly was not a good thing.

After that, more strange things happened. Kids would complain they felt drained after a sleepover at my house. Like they had no energy and they could sleep for a week. Me, on the other hand? I’d feel energized. As if I could run circles around the high school track field from dusk till dawn.

And when I had sex, it only got worse. Lucky me. My first time, I thankfully only gave the boy a panic attack. But I stopped a man’s heart once. I bought my first vibrator after that experience.

But here’s the sadistic irony of my situation. I’m an insomniac, and the only thing that truly cures my insomnia is sex.

Universe has a really crappy sense of humor.

Mom took me to multiple specialists, doctors of all sorts, but no one has a clue what’s really wrong with me. Supposedly it’s all psychosomatic. It’s not psychosomatic when you’re in the ER, praying your boyfriend doesn’t die from having sex with you, let me tell you.

But what do I know? I’m a simple bar owner with a weak spot for cheesy 70s films and Channing Tatum. You can also see why Rogue from X-Men is my favorite superhero, I’m sure.

“
Yeah, I can’t sleep.” I asked him to make me a lime margarita. “So what?”

He shrugged, but a smirk lingered at the corners of his mouth. “The offer still stands.”

I shook my head, smiling at him as I did so. “Nope. I never mix business with pleasure.”

His eyebrow raised and he shook a finger at me while he dried a glass. “That might be part of your problem, Ms. Kat.”

“
Whatever, peanut gallery.” I waved him off, downed my sour-sweet drink, and slid off my stool. I went to gather empty glasses off tables while he gave last call.

After I locked the door behind the last straggler, I said goodbye to Mike as he went out the back exit. Then I headed up the spiral staircase that led to my apartment above the bar.

I froze when I noticed the bright red door leading into my home was already open an inch. A breath died in my throat and my heart thumped like a frightened rabbit’s foot.

Who the hell is in my place?

Mike was gone, and I thought I was completely alone. I searched the narrow hallway, looking for something I could use as a weapon, should the intruder attack me. Finding nothing, I ran back downstairs to the bar, moving as quietly as I could, and snatched up a pool cue. I wasn’t going down without a fight.

Back at my apartment, I pushed the door open the rest of the way and slowly crept inside. My hand slid up the wall and I flipped the light switch up.

No one. A cheery amber glow filled the spacious living / kitchen area, revealing it was unoccupied. I breathed a sigh of relief, lowered the hand that gripped the pool cue, and went back to lock my door tight.

“
Drop the weapon, Kat,” a soft, sexy voice said from behind me. “You don’t have to be afraid.”

I whirled around to find Mike standing by my lumpy beige couch. I gasped, and fear crawled up the back of my neck. What the hell was he doing in here?

“
What the--” The pool cue clattered to the floor.

***

Read an excerpt from a sizzling Wild & Lawless release
Hans & Greg: 50 Shades of Fairy Tales
by Leigh Foxlee

Hans & Greg

By Leigh Foxlee

“
I love getting head from a man with a goatee.” My boss Derek sighed out the words and sat back in his chair while I slurped my way down his erection. Through grunts of satisfaction, he continued, “I need you to do the Darmoor murder legend story this year.”

I stopped sucking, wiped a bit of pre-cum from the hair beneath my lip. “No goddamn way.”

He pressed a finger to my lip, then pressed my head full of dark curls back into his crotch. “But I need you to go out there and interview Hans. We need something more this time. More meat on the bones, ya know what I mean?”

I stroked his thick, pinkish brown cock, pulling my mouth away to mock him. “Did you intend to make that terrible pun, or …”

Once more he shoved me down on his spit-shiny glans. “Shut up and suck. People don’t want sleepy little town fluff these days. They want tawdry suburban scandal. Or, in this case, tawdry backwoods scandal. You leave after you make me cum.”

“
Yes sir,” I grumbled around his penis.

Derek Tremblay was the editor-in-chief of the Sudbury Review, a medium-sized newspaper publisher in Sudbury, Ontario where I’d worked for the last three years. I was an acquisitions editor who doubled as a reporter when I first got the job, but after expertly sucking Mr. Tremblay’s cock I quickly moved up the Review’s ladder. He made me his executive editor after we started fucking. I take that as a compliment.

My name is Greg Butler, and I’m a journalist, which you probably already guessed. Well, truth is, these days I don’t go out and get the stories much anymore. I stay in my nice, cushy exec office and edit them. Believe me, it’s still hard work red penning those puppies, particularly when we get a new crop of journalists fresh in from college, but sometimes I miss going out there and getting into my work, too.

However, not a journalist at the Review wanted to cover the yearly Darmoor murder legend story. Though not an old legend, only ten years have passed since the event, it’s well known and just scandalous enough to make the little town it happened in … well … legendary.

So why doesn’t anyone want to cover it? Well, in the past we’d do a boring blanket story. Someone would go down to the archives and pull up all the old files on the murder that happened in the sleepy little suburb of Chestnut Lane, only a fifteen minute drive from my office in Sudbury. Not exactly thrilling reporting, combing through archives and sneezing your way through a decade of dust.

But to get to Hans, the center of this local melodrama, I’d have to go all the way out past Chestnut Lane, into a rural district that was bordered by an old growth forest. No one had gone to interview Hans in years, and he rarely allowed strangers in his home, or so I’d heard.

Hans Muller was a witch who had been accused of murdering his lover. He was cleared of the charges due to lack of evidence, but most of the Darmoor people still think he did it. Hans keeps to himself on a little piece of land at the Darmoor limits. And it looks like I’m going to be his houseguest this weekend.

“
I can’t believe he agreed to it,” I said to myself as I drove through thick Ontario woods, down a rutted dirt road that led to Hans’ Victorian gingerbread home.

I parked outside a place done up in faded mint green with a porch out front that was framed in dingy white latticework. The turned porch posts were chipped and broken in places, and some of the spindles hanging from the rounded windows were missing, but the home still held its strange storybook charm. I couldn’t help but grin as I got out of the car and grabbed my canvas bag from the back of my Honda. Looking at it reminded me of fairy tales my gran would read to us as kids.

I knocked on the dark mahogany door and peered through one of the two windows in the top half of the entrance. Inside was gloomy and lacked light, but I could see someone drawing close through gray afternoon sunlight spilling in via what I assumed was the kitchen.

But no one opened up. I waited. Knocked again. Then I heard a soft yet deep voice say, “Enter.”

So I did.

Hans Muller took my breath away. I’d heard stories. That he was nothing like what you expected. I’d expected an unkempt hermit with bleary, wild eyes and a set of mismatched clothes. What stood before me in the poorly lit foyer was a blond man of medium height who looked like a New York model. Normally I liked my lovers a little less pretty, but there was something in Hans stare that drew me in and refused to let go.

His features were fine, soft. His full lips begged to be kissed. Straight, thick hair was slicked away from his face and just brushed the wide, ribbed straps on the white tank he wore. A simple pair of blue jeans hugged his slender hips. He wasn’t muscle bound, but he was fit. His wide eyes were so light blue they looked like circles of ice. 

He looked me up and down, and his face remained unreadable as he did so. “Who are you, and why are you in my house?”

I frowned, scratched my somewhat shaggy eyebrow (damn, they’d need a trim before they poked me in the eye). “Greg Butler. I’m from the Sudbury Review.” I held up my bag. “I’m here to interview you this weekend.”

Now he smiled. The gesture took its time curling his lips, and the look reminded me of a cat carefully stalking a mouse. “Ah, Derek sent you, even though I refused. This shouldn’t surprise me.”

This time I scratched at the stubble peppering my face. “You know Derek?”

He turned away, revealing a firm ass that bunched nicely as he walked. “Yes, we’re … old friends, you could say. He was the first interview I ever allowed.” With one hand, he beckoned for me to follow him into the kitchen.

The room was sparse, but filled with state of the art appliances. I saw a state-of-the-art mixer in one corner that looked like it would’ve cost a tidy sum. I’m not much of a cook, but I could tell Hans was a baker of some sort.

That’s when my eye caught the retro arborite table to my left. It was laid with a blue and white checkerboard cloth, and the top of this was filled with gingerbread men. Or, at first glance, I thought they were gingerbread men. I tore my gaze from them for a moment when Hans spoke again.

“
So what does Derek want for this interview, hmmmm?” He sounded both faintly amused and annoyed. “He’s gotten all he’s going to get. I don’t care how many sexy reporters he sends.”

I blinked at that, then grinned. “Why, thank you. Sure I can’t change your mind?”

He walked to one side of the table filled with gingerbread men, crossed his arms over his chest (I think to show off his pecs). “What did you have in mind? If you’re creative, maybe I’ll spill secrets even Derek doesn’t know.”

***

Read an excerpt from a sizzling Wild & Lawless release
Janet The Giant Lover: 50 Shades of Fairy Tales
by Roxxy Meyer

Janet the Giant Lover

By Roxxy Meyer

I like my men big and brawny. Not all over-bulging muscle and popping veins, but, as my Aunt Macy used to say, “Built like a brick outhouse.” Okay, not the most romantic image, but you get the point.

And in my line of work as a tattooist, I deal with a lot of hot, burly giants, but nothing could have prepared me for what happened after Aunt Macy died and she willed me her little bookstore on Granville Street. 

Aunt Macy told me, “Janet, when I kick the can, you can do whatever you want with this place.” She’d repeat this on most of my visits, while we had coffee and brownies like only Aunt Macy’s could make them, sitting between dusty stacks of everything from 
Moby Dick
 to 
Her Scottish Rogue
. Aunt Macy loved bodice rippers, and she actually wrote historical romance under a few pen names. Along with the bookstore, it covered the bills and left a little over, but she wasn’t rolling in wads of Jackie Collins’ type cash advances. Still, Aunt Macy had been quite content with her life in her small cozy bookstore, with apartment over top. 

Now, as I locked my Jeep and walked to the brick building, with its green and white striped awning, a wave of sadness hit me in the chest. I sighed heavily, blew a strand of platinum blonde hair from my eyes, and hitched my backpack over my tank top clad shoulder.          

I caught my reflection in the glass door as I unlocked it. One pigtail was higher than the other and my hazel eyes looked bloodshot and bleary. My face seemed paler than usual. I was tired from the long drive up, and my faded jeans were sticking to me in the late spring humidity. 

No sooner did I open the door and step into the shadowy store than someone was behind me, grabbing my shoulders with large, slender hands and whirling me around.

“
You must go help them!” a tall, almost Amazonian, woman in a billowy, blue cloak whisper-rasped at me.

“
Go help who?” I scrambled back from her, trying to get in the door and shut it before she could pull a knife or something on me.