Firefighter Taz watches over wounded innocent Jenny Green, but as he helps her to heal, she comes to need her guardian angel’s touch.
Night after night, wounded innocent Jenny Ann Green sleepwalks, reliving a nightmare. Her nearest neighbour, firefighter Taz—short for Tasmanian Devil—is a legendary sexy bastard of a dominant, but he’s breaking his heart over this girl. He needs to find a way to heal her. Her silent pain awakens his own past.
Soon Taz forces Jenny to leave the safety of her house, taking her shoe shopping at the mall—even though he hates women’s shoes—to a barn raising for the local coffee house and to the SPCA to adopt a forlorn golden retriever. It’s not the way he’d ever thought he’d use his natural gift for dominance, protective and gentle, but the fear in Jenny’s eyes is melting. Now she needs him to do more than watch over her—she needs him to touch her. But small town girls like Jenny always fall for bad boys like Taz…
Reader Advisory: This book contains light BDSM and a brief scene of M/M/F contact.
General Release Date: 11th April 2014
Jenny Ann Green was digging in her garden again.
Taz watched her from the open door of his kitchen, rubbing his bloodshot eyes.
Dirt shot like it was geysered out of the ground, hitting her face, hitting the ratty-looking things in her gardening basket. She dropped her trowel and began tunnelling into the earth with her bare hands, more dirt whipping out, shooting onto the neatly kept grass.
“Fuck this,” Taz growled.
He reached her in seconds. Stood there, trembling. Closed his eyes. Don’t touch her, asshole. You can’t touch her.
But it was hard, so freaking hard not to yank her off the ground and into his arms.
“Jenny?” His voice was rough. He cleared his throat, balling his fists. Don’t scare her.
She kept on digging. She probably hadn’t heard him.
“Jenny, look at me, sweetheart.” A memory of a female voice mocking him for using the word ‘sweetheart’ came to him. Dharma, his friend Fred’s smoking new girlfriend. Yeah, she’d pointed out that using that word hadn’t suited him at all since he was such a bastard with women.
She’d been right.
He was.
He didn’t like women. He didn’t trust them.
They had their use and he kept what he wanted from them tightly compartmentalised.
With his head thrown back, he dragged in deep breaths, trying to centre himself. As an experienced dominant, he knew the first rule was to master yourself before you tried it with anyone else.
But it was so hard because Jenny got past all that. She was the crack in his armour that kept getting wider and wider, and it scared him because what the fuck would spill out if he kept letting her in? Nothing good. Absolutely nothing good, he knew.
When he had control, he knelt beside her, ignoring the dirt that she shovelled in his direction. Hell, the girl couldn’t even see him out of those spacey eyes so the dirt coming towards him was nothing personal.
Jenny was too polite, too sweet to ever throw dirt his way, much as he deserved it for the way he’d treated her.
He remembered the evening he’d come home and found that she’d planted flowers along his drive. “If I want fuckin’ flowers, I’ll plant them myself. Now get your ass off my property.”
Yeah, he’d been a real prince.
“Jenny Ann.” His voice was calm. “Jenny, wake up, sweetheart.”
No response. She was putting the weedy-looking things into the hole she’d dug. Damn, it was as deep as one Bo, his friend Mike’s golden retriever, routinely dug in Mike’s backyard.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m…” She frowned and looked down at the bulb in her fist. “Saffron bulbs. Come up in the fall,” she said in her honeyed Southern lady drawl.
“That’s good, Jenny,” Taz said. “But do you have to do this now?”
“Now…” She blinked. He could see her mind slowly coming back online. Suddenly she shuddered violently, looking around her.
It was killing him. He had to put his arms around her. “Jenny.”
She was ice cold. Ice cold. Shivering in her little threadbare nightie. No slinky red gown and red shoes for Jenny Ann. No, she went to bed alone in soft cotton, worn from too many washings.
He tried not to look at her nipples through the gown. She had larger breasts than he’d thought. She had a way of hunching her back or wearing too-large clothing so he hadn’t been able to see them clearly. He wanted to take them in his hands. Bastard, to be thinking that now.
Jan Irving has worked in all kinds of creative fields, from painting silk to making porcelain ceramics, to interior design, but writing was always her passion.
She feels you can't fully understand characters until you follow their journey through a story world. Many kinds of worlds interest her, fantasy, historical, science fiction and suspense—but all have one thing in common, people finding a way to live together—in the most emotional and erotic fashion possible, of course!
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