Sticky

D
ear Readers
,

Thank you so much for reading my book and spreading your love of the written word. Hunter Gage is an over the top Alpha, who is sure to rock your boat ;)

This is pure, unadulterated fun. A sexy as hell love story with sex, danger, and more sex, and its a wild ride filled with multiple orgasms.

Love,

Julia

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oin Julia’s
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A
PEEK
AT WHAT ’S TO COME…

“
I
want to devour you
.”

She shivers, her face torn between nervousness and excitement. Oh, Sloan. I’m going to make you scream.

Fucking perfection. I bury my nose between her tits, tasting her, and she’s every inch as delicious as she looks, her skin silky and hot, and she smells so fucking amazing, without any perfume or any of that shit on, just her scent, like almonds or vanilla, something that makes me want to hold true to that promise and swallow her whole.

“How do you like it, Sloan? Do you like it rough?” I ask as I work her tits with both hands, rolling her nipples between my fingers until they stand at attention, rock-hard with want.

“Fuck yes,” she gasps.

I smile. “Good.” I bend to suck just below her breast, letting my teeth drag over her skin, not biting, not yet. I circle her tit, glorying in every inch of her perfect chest, making sure I leave a mark every inch of the way, until her pale skin is red hot between my lips.

“Right there,” she’s moaning as I finally suck her nipple into my mouth, taking my tongue along the tip, my teeth closing around her, sinking in slowly, deeper and deeper until she gasps again, then squirms, her heart pounding so hard I can feel it against my lips on her flesh.

“Shit,” she hisses when I release her, letting the blood flow back into her sensitive chest, the red marks already darkening to purple. But I’m moving on, my hands pressing into her curves, her waist, and her hips, then back to her waist to grab her and drag her toward the edge of the bed, until I’m kneeling between her spread-eagle thighs, my tongue tracing the curve of her stomach, darting into her navel, following the line of her hips down to her core.

When I finally rip off her panties, I note with a grin that she’s trim, but not completely bare down there. Just the way I like.

God, this woman.

“You are fucking hot as hell, do you know that?” I press my palm flat along her stomach, as my other hand wraps around her thigh, slides beneath her to grip her ass, sandwiching her between my hands.

She wriggles her hips, and the faint flush that touches her cheeks as she gazes down at me sends a pulse of blood straight into my cock. I want to do everything to her at once—fuck her, lick her, watch her suck me off.

I grin and bite her thigh. First things first.

C
URRENT DAY

This is the last one
, I remind myself.
The last job I’ll ever have to pull for this asshole.

I’m lead through the skeleton of the Revel by one of the asshole’s henchman. The Revel used to be one of Atlantic City’s top performing casinos. Now it’s under construction, being prepped for the new management, aka my asshole of a “boss,” if you can call Aaron that. The construction didn’t stop Aaron from moving in a little early, though.

I sidestep what looks like a blackjack table someone took a hammer to. The guy bringing me in, another of these tanned and top-knotted Jersey Shore thugs Aaron dredges up from I-don’t-want-to-know-where, shoots me a dirty look. I reply with an easy grin.

Aaron’s regular guys never trust me. Can’t understand why.

It’s almost like they know I’m forced to be here.

Finally, we reach the back lounge. A neon sign hangs half-disassembled over the door—the only letters remaining spell out
dies Burlesque!
Inside looks like a raver puked on Texas. American flags hang everywhere, with cowboy boot logos in neon on the walls, and splatters of paint that I’m ninety-nine percent sure would glow in the dark decorate the floor and what remains of the bar.

There’s music playing, not the bass-heavy club shit I’d expect in a room like this. Something soft. Classical.

Which is why I have to lift my eyebrows as Topknot leads me around the bar to a raised seating area currently occupied by Aaron’s thugs elite, circled around a poker table, at least three of them with bikini-slut Barbies perched on their knees. Literally, wearing bikinis in a room where the air conditioner’s blasting so high it feels like mid-January.

“Hundred thou,” one of the guys I don’t recognize says as he slides a stack of chips toward the already giant stack in the middle of the table.

“Call,” Aaron answers from the head of the table, his poker face as empty as the one he wears when he tells his people they have three days to get him his fucking money. He never tacks a threat onto the end. He never needs to.

As we take the steps up to the table where they’re playing, the dealer turns another card over. One of the guys curses and folds on the spot, though whether it’s because of his hand or the level stare Aaron’s shooting his way right now is anyone’s guess.

The guy’s Barbie wastes no time trying to take his mind off the game, and as her head disappears under the table, my opinion of Aaron sinks to a new all-time low. And it was already at rock fucking bottom to begin with.

Five empty faces turn to watch me as I approach the table, even the creep getting sucked off right now. Whether they’re all pretending not to hear the slurp of the girl licking his dick, or whether they’re just so used to this shit they don’t even notice, I can’t tell.

“You called?” I face Aaron, ignoring the rest of them.

“I have something for you,” he replies in that steely-even voice of his, and for a split second I’m afraid he’s referring to the hooker in his lap, whose fake tits could pass for flotation devices. “A job,” he adds, and I’m actually relieved for an instant.

Only an instant.

“You realize this makes a dozen,” I reply. That was the deal. One dozen favors. All he gets from me.

“I do.” His lip curls, though I wouldn’t exactly call that a smile. “Don’t worry. I picked a good one for your finale.”

My stomach starts a slow sink through my small intestines, though I don’t let it show on my face. I learned a long time ago never to let anything show around him. “Whatever you need,” I say aloud.

There’s a grunt from the other end of the table as Blowjob there finishes, at the exact same time the classical music swells in a crescendo, thankfully drowning out any other sounds.

“Fredrick Casey owes me $500,000 in back gambling debt. He lives in Ducktown. Billy will give you the full details.” He waves a dismissive hand at Topknot. “Fredrick is insular. Paranoid. His twin sister Sloan is the only person he talks to, the only person he trusts. Thing is, my intel that says he has the money in full; that he’s planning to skip out on the generous loan I gave him and keep the interest for himself. So what I need to know is where he’s keeping it.”

We’ve been down this road before, enough times that I know what’s coming. “You want me to get close to the sister. Figure out what she knows.”

Aaron runs a hand through the girl on his lap’s long, fried blonde tresses. “Women are your specialty, Gage. They like you. They talk to you.”

“Yeah, well, they’re easy to figure out,” I say with a glance at the girl’s face. She’s staring at her lap, eyes downcast. I wonder how much Aaron paid for her. That’s
his
specialty, after all. Knowing everyone’s price to sell out, to compromise their lives and dignity because he has what they need.

Chuckles circle the room as the dealer sweeps up the cards to dole out a new hand with an insanely high buy-in.

One last gig. Lucky number twelve. Then I’m done for good.

“So?” Aaron prompts, impatient, as he clearly wants to pick up his new set of cards and get moving with blowing more of the money he worked so hard to swindle out of people like this Fredrick Casey, addicts and crooks and guys too desperate to see any other way out of whatever situation they got themselves wedged into before Aaron came along. “Are you in or are you out?”

“Are you actually asking?” I lift one eyebrow. He’s never given me
options
before.

“I can be polite, Gage. If you don’t like this job, you can always opt out. Wait for the next favor to arise.” He says that in a tone that makes me absolutely sure that if I don’t accept this job, the next one he’ll fling my way will be ten times worse.

“I’ll do it,” I mutter.

With that, Aaron turns back to the table, satisfied that he got what he wanted yet again. That’s fine by me. It’s the last time I’ll ever have to deal with this fucker.

One last time,
I recite again, as Topknot hands over a stack of files. That’s fast becoming my personal fucking motto these days. But it’s all I’ve got. Hope that eventually, finally, this can end.

T
he files tell
me jack shit about anything important. It’s like surveillance footage put together by a kindergartener. Who the fuck has Aaron been hiring these days?

Sure, it’s got the basics. Addresses for both Fredrick and his sister Sloan. Places of work—him nowhere (which figures, since he’s apparently sitting on a pile of dough big enough to refinance the Revel himself if he wanted), her at a diner downtown, which seems weird. You’d think if brother was sitting on a nest egg the size of a small mansion, he’d at least finance his twin sister, supposedly the only person in the world he gives a shit about, with enough money that she wouldn’t have to wait tables for a living.

But after five years of running jobs like this for Aaron, I’ve learned that’s how people like Fredrick Casey are. The world revolves around money for them, and if they don’t see dollar signs at the end of the tunnel, they don’t make the effort to walk down it. Not even for a family member.

Fucking bastard.

Maybe this job won’t be completely god-awful after all. At least, that’s what I’m thinking when I turn up the sunny, tree-lined avenue surrounded by depressingly beige cinder-block apartment buildings. Every few houses is a “hotel” that looks exactly like its neighboring apartments, the kind of hotels that would be no stranger to providing in-home entertainment, complete with a happy ending.

This is no neighborhood for a lady. Especially not the lady I imagine from the photos Topknot included in the file.

There’s something about Sloan’s face in those pictures. Her body is fucking magazine-perfect, if anyone in the fashion industry had eyeballs and allowed women to look the way they should in magazines—curvy and luscious, with tits I’d need both hands to squeeze, and the kind of ass you want to dive into, like a pinup from back in the day when they knew what real women looked like.

But it’s her face that makes her stick in my mind, even now as I’m creeping down her block keeping my eyes peeled for Morton’s, the diner where she works. Even in the few candid shots that Topknot managed to take of her while she busied herself pouring coffee around the diner, leaning against tables to chat with older couples, a huge smile on her cupid-bow lips, there’s this look in her pale green eyes (eyes I’ve never seen on anyone before, so clear they could pass for a gemstone, eyes that have to be fake, contacts or some shit). One photo in particular, of her facing Topknot’s table, smiling over the lens’s head (probably taking Topknot’s order, unaware of the hidden camera strapped to his body somewhere), captures a longing in her eyes. She’s smiling, but in her head, she’s somewhere else. Somewhere happy. Somewhere her loser gambling addict of a brother won’t make her work her ass off while he hoards his pile of ill-earned gains.

Just the photos of her, still-life images of her beauty, make me want to know more, to get inside that black-haired head of hers and root out her secrets, learn what makes her tick.

Maybe this last job won’t be so bad after all, I think, and if I’m honest, it’s not just because I enjoy fucking over people like her dickhead twin. It’s also because I want this woman.

Which should make seducing her considerably easier. Even pleasurable, if she’s anywhere near as gorgeous as those photos in real life.

There
. Morton’s Diner. Through the windows, I glimpse a couple older women at the old-fashioned 50s-style bar, and a smattering of burnt-out withered old men and heroin-skinny young women, strung out at the formica tables over cups of coffee, no food, thanks. The other waitresses (all waitresses, no male servers here, which tells me something about the seedy-looking mustached guy behind the till, watching his bartender pour a milkshake with his eyes firmly fixed on her ass) look slightly healthier than their drug-addled customers, and a couple of them even approach cute. But no shock of black hair among them; no sway of hips that make me want to grab both love handles and ram myself home in between them.

No Sloan.

Shit. Must be her day off. The fucking lazy-ass intel Topknot gave me didn’t bother to include any sort of work schedule or hints on when to find her where.

Luckily, her apartment complex is only a couple blocks from the restaurant. I take another mental snapshot of her place of work, memorizing entrances and exits, the crowds inside, the faces of the other employees. I’ll be back soon enough, since obviously this will be the easiest place to introduce myself to her. I want to make sure I know the lay of the land before I walk inside, though. I’ve learned on enough gigs like this one to know my exit strategy at all times.

Satisfied, I peel out of the parking lot and whip around the corner toward the address I committed to memory last night. It doesn’t take me long to find, right on a main drag above one of those seedy day-bars that only locals frequent when the casinos aren’t open and they need to get their really alcoholic fix on. God, the place is fucking depressing. The fire escape is rusted to hell, hanging off the side of the building like a drunk from the downstairs bar. So much for climbing up that to take a peek at the territory.

I count ratty windows up to the third story, where she lives. Even from here, you can tell that apartment has a different feel to it than the one below. The second floor has a few rags passing for curtains in the window, and emits a sickly white glow, like bare bulbs in whitewashed rooms. Her window, on the other hand, is draped in pale blue curtains, open a crack to catch the unseasonably warm early spring breeze. The curtains dance in that breeze, and through a part in them, I catch a glimpse of an old-fashioned hanging chandelier, nothing fancy, but a girly touch you wouldn’t expect to see in a dump like this.

Gotta admire how she makes the best of her situation, I think as I scan the parking lot of the bar. There, wedged in between two SUVs dwarfing the hell out of it, is the car that matches the license plate in Topknot’s notes. To say it’s nothing special would be the understatement of the century: it’s a Dodge Neon with a taillight missing and the bumper rusted through in spots. But just like her apartment, it’s clear Sloan has made an effort to spruce up the car. The interior features fuzzy white shag seat covers and a disco ball air freshener dangling from the rearview. Not to mention it’s completely clean, even with the white seat covers.

I park a few cars down, and saunter up to her car, checking the windows of the bar and any passersby in the street before I drop to one knee and feel beneath the doors. No spare hide-a-keys, unfortunately, though it makes me weirdly happy to be foiled at this. She’s no dumbass.

Next stop I hit up the mailboxes. Again, they’re sadly exposed, rusted just like the fire escape, the locks on the second floor and fourth floor apartment boxes completely broken. Hers, however, has been fixed with a new padlock, something she must have added herself when the original lock wore out. So much for learning more about her there.

I’m loitering by the door, debating if I should try ringing the doorbell of another apartment (two and four seem like if anyone’s home, they’re occupied by people stupid enough to buzz me in without asking who it is) to case the interior of the building, when I hear footsteps descending through the thin front door.

I have just enough time to duck behind one of the enormous SUVs before the front door swings wide open, and I hear heeled footsteps clack across the pavement. From my vantage point behind the car, I can see the reflection in the bar windows.

It’s her.

She’s smiling, humming under her breath, a throaty sound that makes me think her voice will be even sexier. She glances over her shoulder toward the bar, just once, but I catch a look at her face, and she’s everything I pictured. She has her hair pulled into a messy ponytail, so long it falls midway down her back, and I imagine wrapping that ponytail around my fist as I lean over her in bed.

I need her.

Judging by her outfit—a T-shirt, sneakers, and track pants that hug her curves enough that I can picture the exact shape of her luscious ass and her thick, milky thighs—she’s going to work out somewhere.

Even better, she sticks in some earbuds and hits the pavement, running out of the parking lot and jogging down a side street.

Perfect.

I should leave right then, head into the bar to avoid suspicion and any chance of her spotting me. But I can’t bring myself to tear my eyes from her backside, enjoying the way her ass curves so fucking perfectly above her flashing legs.

I’m definitely going to be picturing this moment the next time I’m getting off.

Then, all too suddenly, she rounds a corner ahead, and I’m forced to shove to my feet and walk fast toward my truck.

It’s time to make her mine.