Lucky Kiss Read online

  Lucky Kiss

  by

  Melanie Shawn

  Copyright 2015 Melanie Shawn

  All rights reserved. This copy is intended for the original purchaser of this book. No part of this may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission in writing from Melanie Shawn. Exceptions are limited to reviewers who may use brief quotations in connection with reviews. No part of this book can be transmitted, scanned, reproduced, or distributed in any written or electronic form without written permission from Melanie Shawn.

  This book is a work of fiction. Places, names, characters and events are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Disclaimer: The material in this book is for mature audiences only and contains graphic content. It is intended only for those aged 18 and older.

  Cover Design by Violet Duke

  Copyedits by Mickey Reed Editing

  Proofreading Services by Tiesha Brunson, Raiza McDuffie, Jill Grabert Estes

  Book Design by BB eBooks

  Published by Red Hot Reads Publishing

  Rev. 1.0

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Coming Spring 2017: Wild Heart

  Other Titles by Melanie Shawn

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  ‡

  It was official. The devil must’ve been wearing a turtleneck and UGGs, because hell had definitely frozen over.

  Lucas “Lucky” Dorsey was staring at the most perfect pair of large, rounded, au naturel tits he had ever seen in his life. They belonged to a knock-out blonde who’d been on Maxim’s Hot 100 not once, not twice, but three times. A woman he’d never sealed the deal with. A woman who was currently sex Skyping—Skyxting, if you will—in the nude with him. A woman who was asking what he wanted her to do to herself, and the only answer he was coming up with was…

  I don’t care.

  Which was disconcerting, to say the least.

  In Lucky’s entire thirty years on this earth, three things—and three things only—had mattered to him: Women. Mixed Martial Arts. Family. In that order.

  Lately though, his number one was no longer holding its lifelong appeal. As he looked at his computer screen, he waited for his Dr. Feelgood to feel something. Anything. But unfortunately, his officer was not standing at attention. His love pump was deflated. His one-eyed trouser snake was so far from being charmed, it was sound asleep.

  He was bored. Disinterested. Could. Not. Care. Less.

  “Hey, listen, Gigi. I gotta go,” Lucky informed the pair of tatas bouncing on the screen as a yawn claimed him.

  “What!?” A loud shriek sounded as the angle of the camera shot back up to a face—an extremely pissed-off, but beautiful face. Blue eyes bulged out at him. “Why!?”

  He shrugged his right shoulder as he answered with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. “I’m just not feeling it.”

  Could he have made some lame excuse as to why he couldn’t continue Skyxting with this woman who’d been kind enough to bare her beautiful breasts to him? Yes, he could have.

  Would it have spared this woman’s feelings? Most likely.

  Did brutal honesty have its drawbacks? Absolutely.

  But in his experience, anything less only prolonged the inevitable. Lucky wasn’t interested in Barbie Big Boobs no matter how bangin’ her body was, and pretending he was would’ve strung along a girl who he was sure had better offers on the table.

  He was doing them both a favor.

  “I can’t believe you! You asked me to do this! I canceled a meeting for this!” Gigi screeched in outrage.

  “Sorry about that,” he apologized sincerely.

  If Lucky would’ve had any idea that his vagina miner wouldn’t be interested in drilling Gigi’s cave, he never would’ve suggested this Skyxting session. He was honest, not cruel. And he never wanted to waste anyone’s time.

  He and Gigi had been texting and talking on the phone since they’d met last month at a fundraiser for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. A mutual friend had introduced them, and their chemistry had been off the charts. He hadn’t been able to do anything about it then because they were both there with other dates. But Lucky never let a little thing like that keep him from what he wanted. So they’d kept in touch, and within a week, she’d broken things off with her boyfriend of two years and he’d moved on from his hookup of two weeks.

  Since then, every time they’d talked, Facetimed, texted, or skyped things had gotten increasingly hotter.

  That is, until today, when hell had unexpectedly frozen over.

  “You’re sorry!?” she asked—a rhetorical question, he was sure. “Oh, you’ll be sorry! Just wait! You will be sorry!”

  Sadly, that wasn’t the first time he’d heard that particular promise-slash-threat. Verbatim, even. He was running about a one-to-three ratio of those words leaving the mouth of a chick he’d been seeing, as their time together came to an end.

  Usually, he just sat quietly to let them get out everything they needed to say. If he tried to respond or defend his actions…it made things worse. Any words from him seemed to fan the flames of the firestorm of emotions situations like this ignited in people.

  So he’d learned to simply remain silent and take his punches like a man. Closure was the least he could do. Out of all the times he’d been on the receiving end of their veiled—and not so veiled—threats, he’d yet to suffer any of the promised fallout.

  He guessed he was just lucky like that.

  “Do you know how many guys would kill—kill—to be with me?”

  Again, he assumed she was asking rhetorically. Again, he remained as silent as a mime in church.

  “Do you really have nothing to say?”

  Gigi’s eyes were enlarged and wild. Her face was red. If she were a cartoon character, steam would’ve been escaping from her ears. In mere seconds, she’d transformed into a completely different person than the sexy vixen who’d been on the screen moments before.

  It shocked him how a girl could flip a switch and—presto chango—they were unrecognizable. Not just physically either, but emotionally as well, and that was actually a much scarier situation. It was mind blowing to him how quickly their emotions could exit Sane Street and take a sharp turn down Psycho Alley.

  “Lucky!?” Gigi prompted.

  He figured the rhetorical portion of today’s presentation had come to a close. “I would say I’ll talk to you later, but I think we both know that’s not going to happen.” He wasn’t trying to be a dick, but when he saw her face, he realized his parting remarks had been received that way.

  “You are such an asshole!” she screamed before the screen went black.

  Okay.

  Well, that had actually been much smoother and much shorter than the last three women he’d moved on from. Of course, this was over a computer, and consider
ing they’d never done the dirty, it was probably weighted in his favor. In person, post-coital dismissals usually ended with things being thrown, names—a lot worse than asshole—being called, and death threats being issued, on a two-to-one ratio.

  Upon closing his computer, Lucky stood and stretched his hands over his head as he blew out a breath. Restless. That’s what he was feeling.

  For the last six months, he hadn’t been able to shake this feeling. Initially, he’d attributed his dissatisfaction with being professionally plateaued. As of nine months ago, everything he’d set out to accomplish in his MMA career, he’d accomplished. Maybe that wasn’t how his management or even the UFC world viewed it, but what other people thought—good or bad—had never really mattered to him.

  Over the past four years, he’d been working towards one goal: to fight and beat Ryder “The Hammer” Dawson. Since they had drastically different fighting styles and were in different weight classes, it had been almost impossible. In fact, every manager and every promoter he’d had told him it would never happen. But Lucky didn’t take no for an answer. Not when it came to getting what he wanted.

  So he’d worked his ass off. He’d trained in Muay Thai and several other disciplines that had facilitated his mat work improvement. He’d even bulked up by twenty pounds. Naturally, he had a lean frame, but he hadn’t let that stop him, either. For a fighter, going up two weight classes was basically the definition of insanity, since fighters who competed in those weight classes would “cut” weight before weigh-in so they qualified to fight. On average, a fighter cut ten pounds, but he’d heard of fighters cutting up to twenty.

  After having trained his ass off, his goal had come to fruition.

  He’d faced Dawson in the ring and come out the champion. For the first few months, he’d ridden the high of everything that came along with fulfilling an ambition of that magnitude. Then, as was inevitable with any high, he’d come down. Gravity was a bitch that way.

  He’d honestly kept expecting to snap out of the hangover-like funk he’d been in. But every morning, he’d woken up and not felt any better than the day before.

  So he’d decided he needed a change. First, it had been little things, like his diet and his training regimen. No improvement. Then he’d stepped it up. He’d remodeled his home gym. His thought was that a new environment might inspire him. Push him.

  It hadn’t.

  Which had led him to where he was today. His most drastic move to shake things up: moving across the country from South Carolina to California.

  Tying his shoes, he was hoping that a run might be just what he needed to combat the unwanted arrival of claustrophobia. She’d (yes, claustrophobia was a woman—what else could make a man feel like he was going to die if he stayed with it?) come to visit and brought her best friends, anxiety and edginess. The trio was currently having one hell of a threesome in his chest, stomach, and head, and he wanted no part of it.

  The screen door crashed behind him as he stepped outside and inhaled deeply, letting the fresh, crisp smell of pine trees fill his lungs. For as far as the eye could see, the luscious pines filled the mountainside. This place was majestic on steroids.

  He’d been in Hope Falls, a small community hidden in the Sierra Nevadas about thirty miles from Lake Tahoe, for two days. He planned on making this his home for the next three months, until his next bout. It had been a no-brainer, really. His twin brother, Logan; his older brother, Levi; his cousin, Adam; and Charlie, his pops, who he’d been estranged from all of his life, had all ended up here.

  Family. That’s what he was hoping would snap him out of his funk. While he’d been growing up, Charlie had not only been an absentee father, he’d been a nosentee father. He’d met the man, who’d provided his mother the baby batter to make him and his twin, once and only once—when he was twelve and his mother had died. His old man had come to the will reading, and when he’d found out that the mother of his children had only left him their twelve-year-old twin boys and no cash, he’d bounced. Thankfully, his older brother Levi, who had been eighteen at the time, had stepped up to take full custody of the twins.

  The next time he had seen his dad was a few months ago, at Levi’s wedding. He’d shown up out of blue, trying to make amends. Well, it had been out of the blue to him and his brothers. For his dad, it had been a long road of being a con man, battling addiction, and finally ending up in prison. Now he was sober, and he’d actually become a substance abuse counselor.

  Charlie had relocated to be close to Levi. Around the same time, Logan, who was a cop in New York, had been forced to take leave after an undercover job had ended with three people dead, one of whom was his partner. Logan had done everything by the book, but he’d still had a hard time coming back from it. So he’d come out to Hope Falls for R&R. It was supposed to be temporary, but Lucky had a feeling that it was permanent.

  Lucky hadn’t lived in the same city as his family since he’d left for the Army when he was eighteen. But here they all were. The Dorsey men had invaded Hope Falls.

  As he began his run, he tried to lose himself in the rhythmic pace of his feet pounding beneath him. The zone—that’s where he wanted to be. He needed to get some of his drive back. He’d been doing everything on autopilot ever since his last win. On paper, he’d been training just like he always had, but the difference was there’d been no fire behind it. No passion. No drive.

  Cutting down the trail that led through the mountains and to the street his dad and his brother were both renting houses on, Lucky hoped that this run would clear his mind. That it would serve as a mental antenna adjustment so the picture on his life screen would be focused again.

  “Lucky!” a female voice echoed through the serene wooded area.

  What the hell?

  Granted, he did have his fair share of female groupies who’d gone to extraordinary lengths to get his attention, but he’d barely been in town for forty-eight hours. Not only that, it was like six a.m. Ummm, apparently, this chick was subscribing to the theory that the early stalker-bird got the worm.

  Part of his brain was telling him to run faster than before. Don’t look back. Keep on keepin’ on. Instead, he slowed his pace as curiosity got the better of him. Glancing over his shoulder, he didn’t see anyone. All he saw were tree trunks and foliage. For a brief moment, he thought he’d imagined the whole thing.

  “Lucky!” the echo came again. This time, it sounded closer and tinged with desperation.

  The smartest thing to do was drop it, continue on his familial quest. No harm, no foul. Unfortunately, no one had ever accused Lucky of being the sharpest tool in the shed.

  His eyes shot to the area where the sound originated. Still nothing. With the natural agility that had been honed to an expert level, first in Ranger training and then in the various disciplines that he’d studied in Mixed Martial Arts, he scaled an enormous rock using the leverage of a pine tree trunk.

  As he climbed, another thought hit him. What if this wasn’t some random groupie? What if this was a scorned woman from his past? Either way, the chances that it was simply a nice girl out for a run, who had happened to see and recognize him were, hmm, slim to none.

  His fingertips gripped a divot in the rock and he used it to hoist himself to the top. From that vantage point, he was able to see around the bend of the path he’d just traveled. A woman wearing navy blue sweats, a white T-shirt, and a blue hat came into view. He couldn’t see the face that was hidden under the bill. And her baggy clothes made it nearly impossible to decipher what was beneath them other than a small frame.

  But he could see light-brown hair that fell over slim shoulders and smooth, olive-toned skin that stood out in contrast to the white cotton sleeve it peeked out of.

  And then the showstopper.

  Her lips.

  That rosy shade of pink wasn’t store-bought. And the fullness of the bottom one almost exactly matched its upper counterpart.

  Those lips looked familiar, and his body respo
nded to them like he knew them.

  A low hum of awareness spread though Lucky’s body, hot and smooth like a shot of whiskey. His body felt alive for the first time in months. And something he wasn’t sure he’d ever feel again after he’d won his title coursed through him: it was desire.

  Chapter 2

  ‡

  This can’t be happening!

  “Lucky!” Deanna Bishop’s eyes frantically searched the densely-wooded area as fear raced through her veins.

  Bending down low, she puckered her lips and made kissing sounds. Nothing. Since yelling didn’t seem to be working, she decided to go with the whole attract-more-bees-with-honey route.

  In a soothing tone, she singsonged, “Come here, baby. Come here, boy.”

  A quick scan of the area showed no sign of the four-legged animal that was the reason that this, her first day on the job, was also going to be her last. She’d just been hired as the newest firefighter at Station 8 in Hope Falls. Yes, her cousin, Eli, might’ve facilitated her interview, but she’d earned the job all on her own. She held a degree in fire science. She’d also been an EMT and a volunteer firefighter in her hometown of Santa Barbara with Engine 23 for the past three years.

  When she’d been notified that she was finally going to become a full-time firefighter and called her mother to tell her the good news, all that her retired international-fashion-model mother had said—after a dramatic sigh—was, “Well, I guess if running into burning buildings is really what you want to do with your life, then you should count your lucky stars that Eli stuck his neck out for you.”

  Her mother’s dismissal of her accomplishment was no surprise. From the time Deanna had turned eight and her mother had given her a box of Slim Fast drinks as a present, she hadn’t taken anything the woman said to heart. Not even when she had encouraged her thirteen-year-old daughter to follow in her footsteps by doing an ad campaign together. Her mother had convinced Deanna that it would be a great bonding experience, that it would be something they could always look back on and cherish. Later, she’d overheard her mother’s stylist and her agent discussing the fact that the client had only wanted Victoria if she had her daughter in the campaign, since they were targeting a younger, “hipper” demographic.