Drop Dead Gorgeous

A heartbeat later, the door opened and he pried the woman loose long enough to step aside and motion her into the room. She slid by him, her hands brushing his crotch before she disappeared inside.

He quickly followed and Meg was left to wonder if Corny had been right and she’d just witnessed the transformation of a lifetime. That couldn’t have been Dillon Cash.

Yes. No. Hell, no.

The next few minutes were spent debating between the three as she gathered up her purse and Pleasure Manual, climbed from the front seat and headed for the hotel lobby.

She didn’t mean to slow down, but she couldn’t help herself. She paused briefly at the door to room four, but the only sound she heard was the frantic beating of her own heart.

2

“LET’S DO IT RIGHT NOW,” the soft, breathless voice slid into his ears and sent a burst of yeah, right straight to his brain. “Please.”

Dillon Cash stared at the woman who’d preceded him into the motel room, her eyes gleaming with a mix of passion and desperation. He barely resisted the urge to pinch himself.

No way was this happening.

This was Susie Wilcox, a former Homecoming Queen and now the hottest divorcée in Skull Creek, according to the local paper and Tilly Townsend who’d given the sexy blonde the number one spot on last year’s Hot Chicks list.

Rumor had it Susie was a shoe-in for this year’s list, as well.

She had long, silky hair. Legs up to here. Breasts out to there. Her tiny waist begged for his hands and her heart-shaped ass made his mouth go dry. She’d been the star of his wettest dreams back in high school, and a few dozen erotic fantasies in the twelve-plus years since.

She was everything he’d ever wanted in a woman and she was here.

Now.

With him.

And she was getting naked.

She kicked off her high heels, grabbed the edge of her tank top and pulled the cotton up and over her head. Popping the buttons on her jeans, she shimmied the ultra-tight denim down her long legs and stepped free. Her fingers went to her bra clasp and just like that, her impressive DD’s popped free. She stood before him then wearing a pink mesh thong that left little to the imagination and a rosy red flush that said she was as hot and bothered as a woman could get.

Surprise snaked through him, but he tamped it back down and focused on the hunger stirring deep inside of him.

“I can’t stop thinking about you,” she said. Her gaze, intense and unwavering, glittered with passion. “About us.” She shook her head. “I don’t know why, but the first moment I saw you tonight, I knewwewould end up here.” She smiled. “I feel like I can’t keep my hands off of you.” The smile faded into a look of raw, inexplicable need. “I feel like I’m going to explode right nowif I don’t get close to you.” She moved toward him, eating up the distance between them with determined steps. “Very close.”

Maybe she wasn’t privy as to why she wanted him so badly. And Dillon wasn’t about to tell her.

It had started two months ago when a stranger had ridden into town. Jake McCann had turned out to be more than the average drifter. He’d been a vampire determined to lay his past to rest, to slay his demons. Literally. And Dillon had gotten caught in the middle of the struggle.

One minute Dillon had been trying to protect an old friend and the next, he’d had a pair of bloodthirsty fangs—courtesy of Jake’s nemesis—gnawing at his neck. He’d come this close to dying, his life spilling away on the pavement of the town’s main square, but then Jake had stepped forward, shared his own blood, and changed Dillon forever.

Thankfully.

Sure, it wasn’t the most practical lifestyle—no more lounging on the beach or scarfing chicken fried steak. But being bitten and turned into a vampire who thrived on blood and sex—especially sex—wasn’t such a bad thing.

Not to a man whose parents had been a pair of obsessive-compulsives who’d worried about everything, particularly the health and well-being of their only two children. Dillon and his younger sister, Cheryl Anne, had been smothered and coddled to the point that they’d been isolated from their peers. Harold and Dora Cash had never taken their children on a trip to the beach—and risk the possibility of sun damage? Nor had they allowed them to eat chicken fried steak or anything with an overabundance of trans fat.

Dillon had grown up playing solitaire and chess while other kids went camping and joined Boy Scouts. He’d also been a computer whiz who’d spent his summers reading and taking online courses instead of catching fireflies and going on picnics or swimming down at Skull Creek river.

At thirty-one, he’d become his own boss—he owned the only computer store within a fifty mile radius that handled both new sales and repairs. He was independent, financially solvent, and still a major geek.

Up until two months ago, that is.

“Once a geek, always a geek.”

Susie’s words echoed in his head. That’s what she’d told him back in high school when he’d worked up the nerve to ask her out. He’d gotten a new haircut and ordered a cool pair of jeans and an AC/DC T-shirt online. He’d even invested the money he’d made typing English papers on a pair of contact lenses. But it hadn’t been enough. By then, the damage had already been done, his reputation established. His new look had failed. Even more, one of his contacts had popped out and Susie had ground it into the concrete as she’d spun on her heel, told him to get lost and walked away.

Her rejection had set the stage for many more to come. He’d gone on to have a measly three sexual encounters in his lifetime (not counting the experimental petting he’d done with his buddy Meg back in the ninth grade), and not one woman had ever come back for seconds.

In fact, he’d had a pretty hard time talking them into firsts.

All that had changed the night he’d been turned.

He’d changed.

A gleam of yellow pushed through the part in the drapes and sliced across the carpet at his feet, but it did little to illuminate the rest of the room. He blinked, his gaze piercing the darkness, drinking in every detail of the small hotel room—from the faint scars on the worn dresser to the tiny thread that unraveled at the corner of the bedspread, to the shimmering spiderweb that dangled in the far corner. His vision had improved and sharpened to the point that he had no need of the black coke-bottle glasses he’d worn since the age of five.

His dark blond hair was shinier and thicker, too, his body more muscular and defined. His acne had completely cleared up and his tongue no longer tied itself into knots when a pretty female looked his way.

Now he knew exactly how to talk to a woman.

How to look at her. To touch. To seduce.

He was now a vampire who craved sexual energy as much as he craved the sustenance of blood. More, in fact. And after thirtyone years of near celibacy, Dillon Cash had no qualms feeding the hunger that now lived and breathed inside of him.

His nostrils flared and the scent of warm, ripe woman filled his head. His body responded instantly. His hands itched to reach out. His muscles tightened in anticipation. The blood pounded through his veins. His dick stirred, growing hard, hot, ready.

Still. As great as he knew the sex would be, this encounter would just make him that much more anxious for the next.

Another woman.

Another rush of succulent, sweet, drenching energy.

He needed it. He thrived on it. He fed off of it.

Gladly.

Unlike the vampire who’d turned him, Dillon wasn’t the least bit anxious to escape the hunger. Not when it came with so many perks. He knew he would inevitably miss his humanity. He would then get as serious as Jake about finding and destroying theAncient One, and putting an end to the vampire curse once and for all.

After he’d broken Bobby McGuire’s record for having slept with the most women in town.

Bobby was a legend in Skull Creek. He’d held the number one spot on the town’s Randiest Rooster list for a record twenty-eight years, right up until he’d turned forty-eight and had had his first heart attack. The doc had put him on a strict No Excitement diet, and he’d been booted off the list. Before however, he’d been a major gigolo rumored to have done the deed with over three hundred women, a count he’d recorded by carving notches into his pine headboard. That proof had sold for over two thousand dollars last year at a local charity auction when Bobby, now an old man, had donated a houseful of furniture and moved to a retirement community in Port Aransas.

Over the years, some had called Bobby a sex maniac. Others had called him a liar. A few had even said he was delusional.

But no one—not a single soul—had ever called him a geek.

Not that Dillon cared what other people thought. Nor did he have any desire to land himself on the notorious list.

This wasn’t about proving something to the folks of Skull Creek. It was about proving something to himself. After so many years of having zero luck with the opposite sex, he’d started to think that maybe, just maybe, Susie had been right about him.

He’d never really thought so. He’d always walked the straight and narrow because of his parents. He didn’t want to cause them any more grief. He’d caused enough as a child when he’d nearly gotten himself killed.

It had been his seventh birthday and he’d been determined to camp out down by the creek. His parents had said no, but he’d snuck out anyway. He’d been walking around without shoes near the water and had stepped on something sharp. In a matter of days, a small puncture wound had morphed into a full-blown staph infection.

A near fatal infection that had turned his parents from normal and easygoing people to smothering and obsessive caretakers in less than six months.

Cheryl Anne was too young to remember—she’d been four at the time—and too young to blame him for the stifled life she’d been forced to lead. But he remembered how things had been before the incident. His parents had been fun-loving and adventurous back then. And Dillon? He’d been outgoing. A risk taker with a zest for life.

He’d buckled under the guilt, suppressed that lust and obeyed his folks from then on. To everyone else, he’d seemed like a quiet, shy, timid kid, but deep inside he’d been just the opposite.

An act. That’s all it had been, or so he’d always thought up until he’d graduated high school without even making it to second base with a girl. The doubts had set in then—the notion that maybe he wasn’t really pretending. Maybe he really had morphed into a bona fide geek.

Even now that he was a vampire there were still moments—quick bursts of thought whenever he found himself in the most unreal situations—when he knew, he just knew, he had to be dreaming and it was just a matter of time before reality intruded and he morphed back to his old, boring self.

But he was going to change all of that and silence the doubts for good. He’d fantasized about breaking Bobby’s record—what hormone-driven teenage boy hadn’t?—but he’d never had the opportunity.

Until now.

Two months, an uncontrollable hunger and a nearly impossible number of women—he was now only two shy of his goal.

Training his gaze on the tall, voluptuous blonde, he sent a rush of mental images, leaving no doubt in her mind what he wanted to do to her.

She didn’twalk away this time. She couldn’t. Shewanted him with a greedy desperation that she’d never felt for any other man.

He read that truth in her eyes—another vampire perk—along with the fact that, despite her beauty and the prestige of being number one on Tilly’s Hottest Chicks list, she was the loneliest and most miserable of all her friends. Contrary to rumor, she hadn’t left her second husband because he’d filed bankruptcy after some bad business investments. He’d been cheating on her with a giggling twenty-one-year-old barmaid and had spent their entire savings on hair plugs, liposuction and a penis enlargement.

“Touch me,” she begged. “Please.”

And because Dillon needed her as much as she needed him, he did.

“CAN ANYONE TELL ME THE key ingredient to a successful relationship?”

Meg wiggled in her seat, craned her neck and peered between two gigantic teased and sprayed hairdos. Her gaze went to the woman who stood center stage in the small lobby of the Skull Creek Inn.

Winona Atkins was well into her seventies. She wore a flowerprint smock, white orthopedic shoes and a penis-shaped name tag that read Carnal Coach. Rolls of snow white curls covered her head and a pair of gold-rimmed cat’s eye glasses hung from a chain around her neck.

The old woman arched a white eyebrow as she eyed her roomful of eager students. “Well, come on now.” She waved a bony hand. “I ain’t got all night. Somebody bite the bullet and take a stab at it.”

“Honesty?” someone called out.

“Mutual respect?” asked another.

“Separate bank accounts?”

Winona smiled, her face breaking into a mass of wrinkles. “Those are some fine answers, ladies. Mighty fine.” She shook her head. “But I’m afraid they ain’t even close. See—” she retrieved the hat rack standing in the far corner and hauled it front and center “—every man, no matter how upstanding or uptight he might be, likes a little hooch ever once in a while.”

“Hooch?” one woman asked. “Is that like a floozy?”

“Exactly. It’s a woman who can cut loose and shed her inhibitions.

A woman who’s got confidence and isn’t afraid to show it. A woman who’ll strip buck naked and wrap herself around the nearest pole.” Winona gripped the hat rack and did a little shake and shimmy. “I call this move “Circling the wagons”, ladies.” She went around the cedar rack once, twice. “I know it looks complicated now, but after tonight’s lesson, you’ll all be able to do it with your eyes closed. Which is a plus if you’re like Sally, there, who’s got cataracts.” She indicated a seventy-something woman straining to see with her bifocals. “Not that you’re s’posed to close your eyes. Eye contact is a powerful thing between a woman and a man.”

Winona’s words stirred a sudden vision of Dillon standing in the hotel doorway, his gaze hooked on Susie Wilcox, his eyes bright. Gleaming. Powerful.

A pang of envy shot through her. A crazy reaction because no way—repeat, no way—was she even remotely attracted to Dillon Cash.

Sure, she’d felt a few tummy tingles when they’d tried the kissing thing way back when, but what red-blooded, curious, hormonal teen girl wouldn’t after watching Mickey Rourke seduce Kim Bassinger? It hadn’t been Dillon. It had been the heat of the moment.

Luckily, the temperature had quickly fizzled after the first disappointing attempt at a kiss. She hadn’t felt even an inkling of attraction to him since.

Not then and certainly not now.

Forget jealous. She was envious. He had a hot woman falling all over him, and she wanted the same. Not a hot woman, mind you, but a hot man.

Yep, she was envious. If it was really and truly him, that is.

She latched onto the doubts and turned her attention back to the front of the room.

“…start with Mary.” Winona pointed to a woman seated on the front row. “I want you to get up and try circling the wagons. We’ll keep going seat by seat until everyone gets a turn. While everyone’s trying out the technique, I’ll have a look at the homework assignment from the last class.”

Pages fluttered as everyone pulled out their notebooks.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” Mary said as she pushed to her feet. “I’m not used to working with an audience.”

“That’s what these are for, dear.” Winona retrieved a platter of petit fours from a nearby table. “I call ‘em pleasure bites. These little buggers will have you stripping off your clothes and shedding your inhibitions quicker than Arlen Wilson can chow through an apple with those new titanium dentures of his.”

“Are those made with that wacky tobacky Mildred Pierce always puts in her brownies?” Mary asked.

Winona frowned. “I run a reputable business here, ladies. This here’s made with Everclear,” Winona said. “Colorless, tasteless and completely legal.”

“Well, then.” Mary grabbed one and popped it into her mouth before helping herself to a second and then a third. She drew a deep breath and eyed the hat rack.

Meanwhile, Winona handed the platter to the next woman in line and the goodies started to circulate.

“Billy and I had such a good time last night,” Mabel Avery told Winona as the old woman stepped toward her and confiscated her journal. “He loved watching me with that pink vibrator I ordered off the Internet.”

“My Hank liked watching me, too,” another woman said, waving her spiral notebook. “But mine’s purple instead of pink.”

“My Melvin said it was his fantasy come true,” said another.

As the comments continued, Meg made a show of searching around her seat before throwing up her hands. “What do you know? I think I left my notebook in the car,” she said to the woman next to her. She pushed to her feet. “I’ll just pop out and get it.”

Five seconds later, she closed the lobby door behind her and breathed a sigh of relief.

Coward, a voice whispered. The entire town knows you’re unattached.

But knowing it and hearing it, complete with written documentation to back it up, was a totally different thing. It was bad enough she’d had to try out the vibrator alone. She wasn’t going to admit it to a roomful of nosy women.

No, she’d take her time going to the car, then slip back inside once Winona went back to her pole dancing techniques.

She was halfway down the walkway when her gaze snagged on the door to room four.

It was shut solid. The curtains were drawn on the window just to the left. No light spilled past the two-inch gap in the drapes.

Make that a three inch gap.

Not that she was looking.

She was not going to look.

That’s what she told herself as she started to walk past.

For one thing, it was rude and intrusive. Two, she could care less what was going on inside. Sex or scrabble. Neither were her business.

At the same time, if Dillon really was having sex with Susie Wilcox, it meant that not only had he changed, but the town had let him. Somehow, someway, he’d killed a lifetime of perception in a matter of months.

And she couldn’t help but wonder how he’d done it.

If he’d done it.

Curiosity burned through her and her footsteps slowed. She’d take one quick little peek and no one would be the wiser. Cupping her hands over her brow, she leaned toward the window.

She blinked and the dimly lit room started to focus.A pair of jeans lay in a heap on the hardwood floor. A lacey bra dangled over the back of a nearby leather chair. One red high heel peeked out from under the corner of the bed. The covers bunched at the bottom of the mattress, the bedspread a tangled heap on the floor.

A very naked Susie Wilcox lay on her stomach, her cheek nuzzling a pillow, one arm slung over her head, the other resting on the empty spot next to her—

Wait a second. Empty?

Just as the thought struck, she heard the deep, familiar voice. “Nice view.”

The words slid into her ears and her heart stalled. The hair on the back of her neck prickled. Awareness zipped up and down her spine, along with a rush of embarrassment.

She was so busted.

3

SHE KNEW IT WAS DILLON even before she turned around.

Before her gaze swept from the long bare feet peeking from beneath the frayed hem of aworn pair of jeans, up denim-clad legs, past a trimwaist and an enticing funnel of whiskey-colored hair that bisectedwashboard abs, over a muscular chest, thick biceps encircled by slave-band tattoos, a corded neck, to the familiar face—

Wait a minute.

Tattoos?

Her attention swiveled to one sinewy arm. Sure enough, an intricate black design snaked around the bulging muscle, making it seem larger and more powerful. Her gaze swiveled to the other arm. Ditto.

“Nice view,” he repeated.

The deep timbre of his voice drew her full attention and made her tummy quiver. Her thighs trembled and her nipples pebbled and—

Girlfriend, puleeeeease. We’re talking Dillon. The guy who’d given her dry-cleaning coupons for her last birthday. Other than those few ridiculous moments in anticipation (thanks to Kim and Mickey) of their first kiss, she’d never felt anything for him other than friendship.

Certainly not the overwhelming need to get hot and sweaty and naked.

Then again, she’d never seen him wearing nothing but worn, faded jeans, the top button undone, a pair of dark and dangerous tattoos and a relaxed, confident, sexy-as-hell smile.

“Yeah,” she blurted, eager to distract herself from the sudden trembling of her body. “She’s, um, really pretty.” Her throat tightened around the words as if it actually bothered her to admit as much.

As if.

“I wasn’t talking about the view inside.” His gaze slid from her eyes to her mouth and lingered for several seconds.

If she hadn’t known better, she would have sworn she felt a distinct pressure on her bottom lip. Like an invisible finger tracing the plump fullness, testing it…Crazy.

She licked her lips, killing the strange sensation, and his gaze collided with hers.

“I’m talking about the view out here,” he added. Something hot and sensual shimmered in the green depths of his eyes and her pulse jumped.

“I’ve left over a dozen messages,” she blurted, eager to ignore the sudden butterflies that fluttered away in her stomach. She gathered her indignation and nailed him with a stare. “Did you forget how to use a phone, or have you been avoiding me on purpose?”

The corner of his mouth crooked into the faintest hint of a smile. “I’ve been a little busy.”

She glanced at the window. “Too busy to call your folks?” She eyed him. “I saw your mom at the hardware store last week. She’s worried about you.”

He shrugged, his biceps flexing. The tattoos encircling his arms seemed to widen. “I haven’t been able to call.”

“You haven’t been able to, or you haven’t wanted to?”

“Things are different for me now. I’m different. I doubt they’d understand.”

Meg doubted it, too. They’d freaked out when he’d stepped in an ant bed back in the fifth grade and had pulled Doc Wilmer away from a championship golf game just to apply Benadryl. Meg could only imagine what they would do if they knew Dillon was stepping into motel rooms, and every place else it seemed, with every available woman in town.

Correction—almost every available woman. He’d been avoiding her like the plague.

“What’s going on with you? You never miss pepperoni day.” She didn’t mean to sound so accusing. So what if he’d blown off their monthly lunch at Uncle Buck’s Pizza not once, but twice now? She would have skipped their infamous double-decker pepperoni in a heartbeat in favor of a date with a really hot guy. “You could have at least called.”

“I meant to.” The sexy confidence faded for a split second and she glimpsed a twinkle of true regret. “Don’t be mad.”

“Because you’re going through some major life crisis and didn’t have the decency to tell me? You really think I’d be mad at a little thing like that?”

“You’re not mad, then.”

“I meant that sarcastically.” He grinned and she felt her indignation melt. “Okay, spill it. What’s up?”

He gave another shrug. “What can I say? I’m finally coming out of my shell.”

“At thirty-one?”

“Maybe I’m a late bloomer.”