Excerpt: Pros & Cons of Vengeance by A. E. Wasp & May Archer

Today I am so pleased to welcome A.E. Wasp & May Archer to Joyfully Jay. The authors have come to share an exclusive excerpt from their upcoming release, Pros & Cons of Vengeance (Pros & Cons Book 1). Please join me in giving them a big welcome!

Join us for an exclusive, never before seen excerpt from a brand new series from the author of the Hot Off the Ice series of hockey romances and the author of The Way Home romantic suspense series! Join them and their ragtag group of professional criminals turned into unwilling Robin Hoods as they complete the tasks set for them by a dead man and get a chance to erase the mistakes of their pasts.

Pros & Cons of Vengeance releases on September 10th, 2018. Book #2: Pros & Cons of Deception launches October 15th.

We join our story already in progress:

Excerpt

Breck

I finished making the cup of lemon tea in Chad’s otherwise-barren kitchen and immediately regretted it. My stomach was too knotted up to handle even that. Chad’s apartment no longer felt safe. I imagined Cisco’s eyes tracking my every movement as I gathered my clothes and put them in a bag.

I’d head to Rock Creek Park, I decided. Danny had once mentioned that he liked to walk there. And since I’d exhausted all the likely places to find him, it was time to start searching the unlikely ones.

I grabbed my tea off the counter and headed to the living room to dump the cooled mixture on Chad’s ficus.

The knock on the door startled me so badly, I spilled tea-water all over the floor.

“Maintenance, Mr. McMickles!”

Poor Chad. If I’d grown up with a name like McMickles, I’d probably be an asshole, too.

“Uh. Busy now! Come back later,” I called. Much later, like after I’d left.

“Emergency,” the maintenance man insisted.

Damn it. “No hablo ingles!”

“Open la puerta, Señor…McMickles?”

Shit. Figured they spoke rudimentary Spanish.

I crept through the kitchen toward the door and peeked through the peephole, but all I could see was the base of the man’s neck and the blue, button-down uniform that maintenance guys wore.

How fucking tall was this guy? Or was I just particularly short?

I took a step back.

“I’m having sex!” I cried. “Oh, God! Oh, fuck. I’m sooooo clooooose!” My fake pleasure-moans were on point, if I did say so myself.

There was a momentary pause, but then, “Sir, water is pouring into the apartment downstairs and we think it’s coming from your air conditioner!”

Fuck. That could be true. That thing had to be gushing out water, cold as it was in here.

I hesitated. It would have been nearly impossible for Cisco to have traced my phone here this fast. And no one else knew I was here.

When in doubt, do the thing least likely to arouse suspicion.

I undid the deadbolt and opened the door… and all I could think was whoa.

Like, whoa, this guy was tall. As in Jason-Momoa-tall. And the peephole had not done justice to the breadth of his chest, which almost filled the fucking door frame. They built the maintenance guys like Aquaman around here.

Then whoa again, because when I stopped staring at his chest and finally lifted my eyes to his face, he was grinning at me like I was the coolest thing he’d ever seen, teeth bright white against his tan skin. And while I was used to guys finding me sexy — that was literally my job — the looks they gave me were usually possessive and covetous and hard, nothing like this warm amusement that suggested Aquaman and I were sharing a joke.

And then whoa one more time, because the dude licked his lips and said, “So… was it good?” in this deep, raspy voice that reminded me of the radio announcer on the easy listening station back in Alamosa, and damn if I hadn’t laid in my bed at night back in high school, listening to fucking clarinet solos and power ballads, just so I could jerk off to David Tremaine telling me tomorrow’s weather forecast between songs. This man was a walking orgasm, and I felt a stab in my gut I barely recognized as lust since it had been so long since I’d felt it.

“W-what?” I stuttered.

“The sex,” he said, leaning against the doorframe and leering at me like no maintenance man outside porn ever would. “Was it good?” How did he manage to make a good ole boy accent sexy?

Somewhere beneath the lust-filled part of my brain, distant alarm bells began to ring.

“Get out of the way, Alvarez,” a distinctly familiar, distinctly un-sexy voice carped, before another body pushed forward, elbowing Aquaman in the gut. “And for God’s sake, turn the pheromones off. Some of us are trying to breathe.”

It was like looking at my own damning gaze in the mirror as Ridge shook his head at me. “What the fuck have you done, little brother?”