Y’all remember Vinter, right? Simple Need? Elise needs a bad boy and finds the ultimate one in the bar? Tattooed and pierced Vinter? You do? Great!

It just so happens that my new book from Ellora’s Cave which is coming out this Friday, July 2nd, is about Vinter’s business partner, or one of them, Dallon. He tends the bar where Elise walked in and tried not to cry in her drink.

When I started on Vinter’s story, I knew there were going to be two others. I knew there was going to be a hot, yummy, to freakin’ die for bartender, and I knew there was going to be a hot, yummy, to freakin’ die for artist.

Dallon is our bartender. Jaspar is our artist. I am still working on Jaz’s book and he’s being given a run for his money because the lovely woman that wants him…REALLY WANTS him. And she’s come to get him. But, y’all will just have to wait for that one!

In the meantime, Dallon has agreed to let me post an excerpt for you to keep you…on the brink, as it were, until Friday. He might let me post snippets here and there throughout the week, but I don’t think I’ve begged enough yet.

When good girls go bad, very, very bad…

The minute Carrie meets tattooed, bad-boy bartender Dallon, her decision is made. He’s the one, her ticket to freedom and a new, independent life. She’s tired of dictates and zero dates and following the path laid out before her by her well-meaning-but-completely-out-of touch-with-her-reality religious parents.

Dallon sees the buttoned-up, full-of-curves woman outside the grocery store and feels the flames of hell licking at his heels. When she asks him for directions to the large, nearby university where she’s starting work, his gut-twisting lust for her doesn’t diminish, but those flames start to singe his tough-as-nails hide.

With the promise he made to himself about not fornicating with anyone associated with the university his father is the dean of about to go up in smoke, Carrie takes the first exit off the Heavenly Highway straight onto Sin Street. She wants Dallon to teach her all the things a good girl should never know and she won’t take Hell no for an answer.

Reader Advisory: What Dallon does with a beer bottle may be illegal in forty-eight out of fifty states…and at least two territories.

Damn, but she had a pretty mouth.

“I don’t want to leave.”

Shit. Don’t say anything. Not a word. Not a single solitary word. “You should.”

She raised her eyes to look him square in his, a silent challenge reflected there. “Why?”

Dammit. He planted his hands on the edge of the bar and leaned toward her until he could smell the beer on her breath. “Because you don’t know who I am and you don’t know what fire you’re playing with.”

She licked at her lips. He wasn’t even sure she knew she did it. “W-who are you?”

No sense lying about it or anything else now. “The devil himself.” Even if he could protect her by doing so, she didn’t want protection from him. He knew that as well as he knew his own name. “You were headed out to the college earlier.”

“Yes. I was hired a few weeks ago. Why? What does that have to do with anything?”

“The dean is my father. He is also the pastor of the big downtown Baptist church here.”

“Oh. I didn’t know.”

“Right. Very few do. You don’t need to be messing with me, Carrie. You really don’t. If ever there was a black sheep, I’m it. My reputation is bad, very, very bad. It’s best that you go. Now.”

She lowered her gaze and he thought he’d gotten through to her, even though he hadn’t said much. He’d hoped it was enough and it appeared that it was. When she looked back up at him, he knew he was in deep trouble by the sheen of tears and the clenching of her jaw. She took a deep breath before she spoke again.

“I quit my job.”

It was said so softly he wasn’t sure he’d heard right, but the determined set of her jaw told him he had. “You quit?”

She blinked rapidly to keep the tears from falling. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“I want something in my life that is all mine, that no one else has a say in. I’ve never had that kind of freedom and now that I’m out on my own, out from under my parents’ thumbs, I want it.”

Don’t ask, man. Please for the love of all that is twisted and dirty, don’t fucking ask. “That’s all you want? Freedom?”

“No.”

FedEx was going to bust through the doors, package him up, and send him straight to hell by ten the next morning for asking his next question and already knowing the answer. “What else do you want?”

“You.”

His dick throbbed at the one clearly spoken word. “You shouldn’t, Carrie. I’m not the kind of guy you need. I don’t do good girls,” which was a huge lie, “and you are one. I don’t do tears either unless they’re the kind that come from me spanking the shit out of you or the kind that come from you begging me to stop fucking your ass so hard.”

As he spoke, shock widened her eyes, her mouth formed a little “O”, and her cheeks turned a delectable shade of dark pink, much like the shade he imagined her pale butt would turn. She balled her hands into fists against the bar then flattened them out, pressing down until the tips were white. Had that finally gotten through to her? Had he finally said the right thing to get her to leave?

“Well, okay.”

Her body relaxed and she dropped her hands and her gaze to her lap. Yes, she got it. Dallon breathed a sigh of frustrated relief and ignored the pinch of disappointment. He wasn’t right for her. She was too clean for him and his rough, kinky ways.

Then she spoke, and at first it was hard to hear her, but as she went on, her voice grew louder with anger and her eyes shot daggers at him when she looked back up.

“It’s not up to you to decide what kind of guy I need. If you don’t want me, if I’m not the kind of woman that you…that you ‘do’, that’s one thing, but don’t tell me what I do and don’t need. I’ve had enough of that in my life. I can make my own choices, my own decisions.”

Dallon smiled. His little innocent had spunk. He’d never expected it, but he damn sure liked it. If she wasn’t going to take his hints or his outright telling her to go, he wouldn’t fight it anymore. “Okay. I won’t tell you what you need. At least not when it comes to this. And I do want you, I just don’t want you to have any regrets after. I might be a bastard, but I don’t want you hurt when I don’t turn out all sweet and tender with you. That’s not me.”

“Oh. Good. That you want me too, I mean.”

Now she was looking everywhere but at him and he had to bite back a laugh. She was going to be more fun than he’d first imagined, what with the sparks she’d already fired at him. Oh, he knew sure enough that he should still walk away, that he should try harder to convince her he was bad news, but he wasn’t going to. The woman said she wanted him and he was just bad enough he was going to let her have him.

So, what do y’all think? Interested?

~lissa