All He Feels - Dax & Ginny (Crossroads Book 11) Read online

  All He Feels

  by

  Melanie Shawn

  Copyright © 2016 Melanie Shawn

  Kindle Edition

  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 Wildcat Dezigns

  Copyedit by Deanna McDonald

  Proofreading Services by Raiza McDuffie

  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

  All He Desires – Nate & Eliza

  Other Titles by Melanie Shawn

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  “We didn’t even have sex.” Dax Archer blew out a frustrated breath as he curled and uncurled his fingers around the cold metal of the barbell hanging above him. “Which means it wasn’t even a one-night stand. I wish it was, but it wasn’t.”

  After yet another sleepless night spent tossing and turning, unable to shut his brain off, he found himself laying on his weight bench, staring at the ceiling of his basement, trying—again—to make sense of the night that haunted him, the night that played on repeat in his mind, the night that action-wise, basically equated to a middle school sleepover. Actually that wasn’t true. He’d gotten more action when he and his friends had crashed Summer Nixon’s sleepover in seventh grade. That time he at least made it to first base.

  “It was nothing. Nothing happened.” Dax lifted the bar and grunted out another set of ten reps. A loud clang rang out as he set the barbell back in its cradle. Lowering his arm he wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist and inhaled with determination. “I just need to forget about it.”

  This was not a new conversation. He was sure that Cap was tired of hearing Dax talk about, pick apart, and rehash the tragically un-sordid night. If something, anything had actually happened on the non-one-night-stand-night, then that would be a different story. He wouldn’t be obsessing over it or the fact that he was unable to get over it and Cap wouldn’t have to suffer through another early morning bitch session.

  But instead, nothing had happened and so Dax was a broken record and his morning workout partner was just going to have to deal. The cold, hard truth was that night and the woman he’d spent it with had plagued him since the morning he’d woken up alone on the couch with a bar napkin lying on his chest with words that were as simple as they were final:

  “Thank you for last night. It was amazing.

  I’ll never forget it or you.”

  One thing was for damn sure, he hadn’t been able to forget it or her.

  It wasn’t that he hadn’t tried to move on and put her out of his mind. He had. Over the past few months he’d hung out with a dozen women—hot, sexy, willing women—but he hadn’t sealed the deal with any of them.

  Dax couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone this long without sex. He’d had a healthy appetite for it since he was fifteen and lost his virginity to his older, more experienced seventeen-year-old neighbor Ashley Noble. Since then there hadn’t been a shortage of women who wanted the same thing from him that he wanted from them, bumping and grinding fun. That was it.

  Wanting to burn off the excess tension he’d been plagued with thanks to his dry spell, he came here to push his body to its limit. Straightening his arms he lifted the bar above him. His biceps burned and shook as he bent his elbows lowering the barbell down to his chest and then pushed it back up. He repeated the motion nine more times to complete his eighth rep of ten. The energy he expended did nothing to distract him from the ache that he feared was now a permanent resident in his chest, constantly reminding him just how empty and hollow he felt.

  Since he was in his late teens he’d been accused of being unable to commit. He’d even been labeled a womanizer and a man-whore. It had never bothered him, in fact he embraced it. It became part of his identity. He enjoyed sex and believed variety was the spice of life. He never wanted to commit to one meal when he could take his plate and sample an endless selection from the buffet table. He wasn’t breaking hearts. He wasn’t a player. He wasn’t lying to anyone. He never led anyone on.

  Dax lived by a firm Triple-No policy: No strings. No attachments. No feelings. He made sure every woman he was with was clear on the rules he happily lived his life by before any boots got knocked.

  The women who saved a horse and rode this cowboy were hopping on for one thing and one thing only, mutual satisfaction. He was upfront about his expectations and they were too. It was a beautiful thing. Until the night that changed everything. The night he never saw coming with a woman that broke the mold and in the process, broke and changed Dax too.

  He still had a firm ‘Triple No’ policy. But thanks to her it had turned into: No interest. No spark. No desire.

  Since the morning after, he hadn’t wanted to be with anyone except the woman who had disappeared from his life leaving only a napkin as a souvenir. Not the hot blonde he met outside the Yoga studio who wanted to demonstrate her flexibility in the bedroom. Not the voluptuous brunette who rear-ended his SUV and made it clear that she had no problem with him rear-ending her. Not the sexy redhead he met at the gym who offered to prove that she was all natural by letting him confirm that the carpet matched the drapes.

  All of these girls had wanted him and he should have wanted them. But all he’d felt was nothing. No interest. No spark. No desire. The only person that he had any interest in, the only person he felt any spark with, the only person that inspired any desire in him was the girl he couldn’t stop thinking about…and it was starting to seriously fuck with his head.

  “This is getting out of hand.” Shaking his head he forced himself to face reality. “I’ve gotta move on. Put her and that night in the rearview, right?”

  When Dax’s question was met with silence he turned his head to the side and saw two very unimpressed brown eyes staring back at him.

  “Don’t look at me like that.” Dax defended, “You don’t understand because you got more action than I did that night. She couldn’t keep her hands of off you.”

  “Arf!” Al Capone, Dax’s white English bulldog, responded with a deep, proud bark.

  “Oh, now you have something to
say.” Dax wanted to believe that his loyal companion wasn’t rubbing his face in the fact that he’d spent the night snuggled up with Ginny, getting petted, getting kissed, getting to be in her lap, while Dax had sat on the other end of the couch wishing he was the one snuggled up against her getting showered with attention.

  Dax went back to his lifting, hoping he could, at the very least, lose himself in the repetitive task. It didn’t work but he knocked out two more sets before sitting up and taking a swig from his water bottle. His muscles screamed from the punishment they’d taken as a result of him trying to exorcise his demons with exercise. He stood and crossed the cement floor of his basement gym that boasted a weight bench, punching bag, treadmill and a couch that he’d had since college. It wasn’t fancy, but it worked for him.

  Before heading upstairs he caught his reflection in the full-length mirror that had already been on the wall when he purchased the house six months ago.

  When he’d hit puberty, in what seemed like an overnight transition, he’d gone from a tall and lanky kid to having a lean, athletic frame. Playing football in high school, doing two-a-days and hitting the weights had built mass on his naturally athletic frame. Joining the Marines and undergoing their Special Forces training had taken his fitness to the next level; he’d bulked up and put on a good forty pounds of muscle.

  But the man whose reflection he saw now was a chiseled, cut version of the man he was in the Corps. He was in the best shape of his life now that he was spending every free minute he had in his home gym in an effort to free himself of the memory of Ginny’s angel face and sin-worthy body.

  It didn’t help that Ginny, or Virginia Valentine as she was known to millions, was a country singer whose face was plastered on the front of every gossip magazine alongside her boyfriend, Hollywood bad boy Derek St. Vincent. Every time he saw another shot of the two of them, he wanted to punch something. Hard.

  The night that Ginny had come home with Dax after she’d performed for a private birthday party at the restaurant/bar he co-owned with Riley Sloan and Ace Elliot, she’d explained that her relationship with Derek was for publicity only. The two celebrities never confirmed nor denied their status on record, which only fueled the press. It was a mutually agreed upon, mutually beneficial arrangement. They appeared at events and in public together in order to raise both of their profiles. She’d said it was standard practice in the business, but the look in her eye had told him that she wasn’t happy about it.

  At the time, he wanted to ask her more about it, but he hadn’t. He wanted her to open up to him when she was ready. He’d honestly believed that the night they were sharing was the first of many. He’d been wrong.

  The alarm sounded on his phone and he motioned for Cap to go in front of him. The dog lumbered up, slobbering and panting the whole way. When they reached the top, Dax was hit with a stink bomb. The air was thick and smelled of rotten eggs. If this were a cartoon, there would be green wavy lines of fumes surrounding him.

  He gagged as he covered his mouth with his towel. “Damn, Cap. Did you get into the trash?”

  His bulldog had a habit of eating “people food” and then having gas so bad they could seriously have used it as a lethal weapon when he was in the Corps. Cap could clear a village with his toxic ass.

  “Come on. Let’s go,” he instructed firmly as he detoured to the back door.

  Thankfully Cap did his business quickly and they both headed back inside.

  Dax was due at The Plate, the restaurant and bar he co-owned, for their quarterly meeting in twenty minutes and then he had to head to Elite Security, where he worked as a private security specialist. He was due there for debriefing on his assignment that ended last week and also to do a risk assessment on his new assignment. He was going to be on a three-man team with Nate, a tech specialist, and Riley, who would be splitting executive protection duties with him for a politician that was going to be campaigning in the area.

  His work at Elite wasn’t a full-time job. He was a contract employee. Dax liked as much variety in his work as he liked in his women. In addition to The Plate he co-owned a bar in New Orleans called Freedom, and he had successfully flipped several residential properties while he’d lived down there. Since moving to Harper’s Crossing, he’d bought the house he was currently renovating and living in. He’d finished the bottom floor, which included an eat-in kitchen, front living space and two bedrooms that were separated by a Jack and Jill bathroom. He was using the larger of those two as the master bedroom. He still had a lot to do on the second story, which held two bedrooms and the upstairs bathroom. Once he finished he’d put it up for sale and move on to his next project.

  That was his life. Moving on from one thing to the next. He finished a project and found another one to put his time and energy into. He didn’t get sentimental or stuck. Not in places and sure as hell not to people.

  “So why the hell do I feel superglued to her?” he asked as they made their way into the bedroom after Cap had done his business. Cap flopped onto his body pillow in the corner of the bedroom as Dax tossed a pair of jeans, boxer briefs, and a button-up shirt on the bed.

  A yawn was the only response he got before his four-legged sidekick closed his eyes and started snoring. Loudly.

  “Good talk.” Dax shook his head as he walked past the dog to the bathroom.

  He pushed out of his sweats and turned on the shower.

  As he waited the few moments it took for the water to heat up, flashes of Ginny kept popping up in his mind like targets in the virtual reality training course that had simulated combat when he was in Special Forces training. It was like that all the time. He’d be planning out the plumbing he needed to do upstairs and out of nowhere her full, red lips would pop up. He would be going over the new menu items they were thinking about adding to the lunch specials and suddenly all he could see were her eyes. He would be making dinner and bam, her long legs would materialize with such detail in his mind’s eye that he wanted to reach out and touch them.

  When he stepped into the shower he leaned his hands flat on the tiled wall and dropped his head in order to let the hot stream run over it and down the back of his neck. As the pulsing spray beat down on him, he tried to ignore the fact that he was rock hard thanks to his mental Ginny pop-up book. Getting off when he had places to be wasn’t really his MO, but since he had no desire to walk around with a massive erection for the rest of the day, he figured the best thing to do was to take matters into his own hands.

  As he wrapped his fingers around his straining shaft, he stopped trying to forget about Ginny and started concentrating on her instead. His body was already primed as he gripped himself tighter and began stroking up and down. He intentionally relaxed his mind and allowed his imagination to run free and it ran straight to the woman that had inspired his deepest, most intense desires.

  Over his thirty years on this earth he’d acquired quite an extensive collection of images and go-to fantasies in his spank bank. They ranged from women and experiences he’d personally had to ones he’d yet to check off his erotic bucket list. In the past, it wasn’t unusual for him to go months, even years without using the same scenario or visuals to get himself off.

  But that was before his not-one-night-stand with Ginny. Since then, all of his fantasies had starred one person and one person only. The only variety was what activity they were engaged in and what location they were at.

  This morning his one-track mind headed straight to a destination he was all-too familiar with…his couch. In his mind’s eye he saw Ginny sitting in the same place, wearing the same white cotton dress and cowboy boots she had worn in real life. But that is where his memory took a fork in the road onto Fantasy Lane.

  Unlike real life, in his fantasy he was boldly able to ask her what she was wearing under her dress.

  There was a catch in her breath as she answered, “Nothing.”

  With an authoritative tone he instructed roughly, “Show me.”

  At his provo
cative request she licked her lips nervously and her eyes dropped down to her lap as a faint blush rose on her cheeks. His heart hammered beneath his chest as he watched her fingers brush the hem of her dress and begin slowly pulling the fabric up revealing first her creamy thighs, then the sexy flare of her hips and finally the sweet curve of her waist.

  Every cell in his body throbbed with pleasure as she paused, bunching the material below her breasts. Her clear blue eyes met his as she crossed her arms and lifted them, tugging the dress up and over her head, releasing the most incredible, full pair of breasts he’d ever seen.

  Fantasy Ginny wasn’t lying, she didn’t have anything on beneath her dress. No panties. No bra. She sat before him completely bare, with her arms at her sides and her knees pressed together wearing only her cowboy boots. Her chest rising and falling in a shorter pattern as her breathing grew shallow.

  Dax let his gaze roam her naked body. His hungry eyes tracing the swell of her breasts tipped with hard, pink nipples that had his mouth watering with the need to cover them with his lips and suck. To pull them between his teeth and nip with enough pressure to have her body begging for more.

  With renewed arousal surging through him he continued his visual journey down past her mounds along her taut stomach and stopped just below her belly button.

  “Spread your legs,” he roughly commanded.

  She sucked in a startled breath, but did as he asked.

  Like a beacon calling him home, her sex glistened between her legs. He let his eyes travel up her seam to the patch of brown curls that sat above her dewy flesh and back down to the base of her entrance.

  “Touch yourself,” he gritted out, his voice husky with passion.

  A soft, needy sigh escaped her as her hand moved to her slippery softness. Her fingers slid along her petal-soft folds and traveled up to her clit. When she began brushing her forefinger back and forth over the distended nub, Dax felt himself return to reality as lightning bolts of pleasure shot through him. His orgasm slammed into him and he stiffened in release.