Last Breath by Jessica Clare and Jen Frederick
Regan
Daniel
For the last eighteen months, I’ve had one goal that has dictated every action I’ve taken. I’ve left the Army, turned paid hit man, and have befriended criminals all across the globe to find my kidnapped sister. In every brothel I raid or every human trafficking truck I stop, I hope the next face I find is my sister’s. In a hidden brothel in Rio, I find Regan Porter, bruised by not broken and still sane despite her weeks in captivity. I should leave her behind or send her home because the last thing either of us needs right now is to get involved. But with every passing minute, I find I can’t let her go.
9780991426720 - ebook ISBN
9780991426737 - print ISBN
For the first month of release, Last Breath will be sale-priced at $3.99 to reward early purchasers. The price will revert back to its original retail listing of $4.99.
Please note: this contains some scenes that sensitive readers may find upsetting or triggering.
She’s a biter.
That’s the warning given when I point to the blonde with the glazed
green eyes in Senhor Gomes’ book of whores. He shakes his head and
says that he has access to dozens of others that are better and all
willing to engage in whatever perverse activity I want. He brags that
there isn’t a sick sex act I can think of that Gomes can’t
fulfill. I like home cooking, I tell him. A Texan in Rio sees a lot
of beautiful Brazilian women, but sometimes you want a little
star-spangled banner in the rotation.
He nods as if this
makes sense to him, but I think it’s the money that I’m flashing
that he understands. We walk up to the second floor and down a narrow
hall toward the back, a windowless part of this brick and metal
building. I can’t call it a home or even a brothel. It’s a dingy
place where men with deep perversions but shallow wallets can get
their rocks off.
I don’t want to
have sex here, I’ve explained to Gomes. I have a thing against
hellholes and having sex in them. I wave around a lot of cash, and
Gomes nodded and asks no more questions.
We’re a strange
parade—Gomes, me, and some house mom trailing behind. He stops at
the second to last door and removes a key.
I’ve seen pictures
of Regan Porter before, and not in Gomes’ look book, but nothing
prepares me for her full-fledged, magazine-quality beauty. She hasn’t
been eating well; her delicate bones are beginning to look sharp in
places—at her shoulders, ribs, and hips. But there’s no denying
her breathtaking looks. Her blonde hair is damp and small strands
stick to her perfect skull. Her oval face, with its pink cheekbones
and lush lips and eyebrows that look like wings, stands out like a
piece of fine china at a flea market. Though she’s thin, there’s
a delicious curviness in the slope of her side as it dips into the
waist and flares back out to form a cuppable roundness at the hip.
And those endlessly long legs.
Shit. I close my
eyes and swallow. No decent man would be standing here thinking about
those legs wrapped around his waist. But then again, I’m not
decent. I’m no longer army sniper, Special Forces Daniel Hays who
may have once been lauded as a hero for killing insurgents in
Afghanistan. Now I’m Daniel Hays, mercenary who kills people for
money and spends all his spare time in brothels and flesh dens like
this one. Decency is a word I don’t even know the meaning to
anymore.
It’s been too long
since I’ve had a woman. That’s my only excuse. That and I’m
becoming the monster that I’m hunting. I focus on the bruises on
her knees that are scraped red and raw from time on the floor and the
manacle around her ankle. Any feelings of arousal are jettisoned by
the obvious signs of abuse.
Glancing sharply at
Gomes, I wonder how he’s come to possess a beauty like Regan
Porter. Gomes is a small-time flesh peddler, stuck up here in the
slums, with a house full of females—half of which are missing their
teeth or are too old or too broken.
He usually gets what
the market calls second-hand goods, the girls that no other house
wants. But Regan Porter is gorgeous, and while she looks a little
rundown, she’s still model beautiful with big pink lips and wide
green eyes.
“Nice tits,” I
smirk for Gomes’ sake and her shudder of disgust only feeds into my
growing belief that I’m as dirty as the flesh trader beside me. The
dark edges of the world that I now inhabit are seeping into my skin
like an oil slick covering an ocean. I shouldn’t want to touch her.
And if I have to fuck her in front of Gomes to get her out of here—I
don’t even let myself finish that thought.
There’s still life
in her eyes. If she’s biting and spitting out acerbic insults,
there’s spirit left in her, and I don’t want to be the one to
snuff out that last flame. Her eyes convey her hate, and if she had a
knife, I’d be sliced from my throat to my belly. I stare back, not
because she’s fucking beautiful, but because she’s still
standing. I’m not sure I would’ve been as strong. I don’t know
if she sees my admiration or whether she can only interpret varying
degrees of lust and degradation, but she sees something. An invisible
string spools out between us and her eyes widen when it hits her like
an electrical shock.
For months I’ve
swum in a pool of blood and death and ugly deeds, and to hold onto my
sanity and maybe my soul, I’ve told myself that saving these doves
balances the scale. For every life I take, if I save one then it’s
all a wash in the end. Don’t think it’s tallied that way at St.
Peter’s Gate, but that’s the lie I tell myself so I can sleep at
night and look at myself in the mirror the next day. Regan Porter
will either be part of my attempt at salvation or the bloody stone
that etches out the words He
Failed
on my headstone.
Jen
Frederick lives with her husband, child, and one rambunctious dog.
She's been reading stories all her life but never imagined writing
one of her own. Jen loves to hear from readers so drop her a line at
jensfrederick@gmail.com.
Author
Jessica Claire
This
is a pen name for Jill
Myles.
Jill
Myles has been an incurable romantic since childhood. She reads all
the 'naughty parts' of books first, looks for a dirty joke in just
about everything, and thinks to this day that the Little House on the
Prairie books should have been steamier.
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