Go Deep

  Juniper Bell

  A standalone sequel to Go Wild.

  Beth is the shy, dreamy type. No one guesses at the wild sexual thoughts she hides behind that quiet façade. She doesn’t even share her secret longings with her husband.

  Gavin loves his wife, but he’s tired of living in a marriage in which neither he nor Beth reveal their true desires. When Gavin sees Beth’s response to an erotic bondage photo in her framing shop, he jumps at the opportunity to break through her barriers.

  He accepts an invitation to a showcase match for the amateur hockey team he coaches during Wild Nights, an infamous winter festival during which “anything goes, nothing counts”. But he’s opened a sensual Pandora’s box—Beth has some surprises of her own. When she meets Eagle, a free-spirited Wild resident, she knows he’s the perfect man to help enact her erotic fantasies. And once they go deep, there’s no going back.

  Ellora’s Cave Publishing

  www.ellorascave.com

  Go Deep

  ISBN 9781419935039

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Go Deep Copyright © 2011 Juniper Bell

  Edited by Jillian Bell

  Cover art by Dar Albert

  Electronic book publication September 2011

  The terms Romantica® and Quickies® are registered trademarks of Ellora’s Cave Publishing.

  With the exception of quotes used in reviews, this book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from the publisher, Ellora’s Cave Publishing, Inc.® 1056 Home Avenue, Akron OH 44310-3502.

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  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

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  Go Deep

  Juniper Bell

  Chapter One

  The shocking photograph had appeared at Artfully Yours during Beth’s lunch hour. A stranger had left it, along with a scrawled note that he’d pick it up in a month. After a brief glimpse, she’d thrust it into the stack of works to be framed. For days it sat, untouched, while she thought about it constantly. It surfaced in her mind at the most awkward moments. At breakfast with Gavin. In the shower. In the car, driving to work. In bed.

  Especially in bed.

  Gavin would die if he knew the dirty visions inspired by that photograph. She had to shove the images aside during their usual gentle, careful lovemaking. The world of that photograph didn’t belong in their tidy home with the antique four-poster bed and rose-printed rugs inherited from her mother. What would her mother say if she knew how that depraved photo had invaded Beth’s imagination?

  Beth shuddered with shame as she opened the door to the storage room where the photograph lurked. Her mother would never know, she reminded herself. Three years she’d been gone. Gavin kept telling her to stop worrying about what a dead woman might think of her. One of these days it might happen.

  In the meantime, she was a professional with a job to do. The photograph had to be framed. Some twisted soul considered it art. She’d put it off long enough, and unless she wanted to decline the work on moral grounds, it was time to face it.

  The photograph, eighteen inches wide and twenty-four inches high, waited innocently in the corner. Black and white didn’t quite describe it. It glowed with a seductive, silvery sheen. Especially the woman’s naked flesh. A man and a woman inhabited the photo as if nothing else existed in the world. They saw nothing but each other, two parts of a whole caught in an eternal sexual charge. This photo was about sex, but not the kind of sex Beth was used to. Wrong sex, riveting sex, uninhibited, hellacious sex.

  The woman’s hands were fastened behind her back with a pair of handcuffs. Thick bands circled her wrists, which rested right above her buttocks. One of the man’s hands rested there, poised to explore further, deeper into the vulnerable opening beneath his palm. His other hand held a leash attached to a collar around the woman’s neck. Her head arched back toward him so her throat and torso traced a beautiful silver line against the dark shadows of the photo’s background. Her eyes were half closed in an expression of luxurious surrender.

  Beth closed her own eyes to block out the sight, but the image was scorched onto her eyelids. Except that in the darkness of her imagination, the woman was moving. She was thrusting her breasts forward. As if she were the woman in the photo, Beth felt the urgent swelling of her nipples, the unyielding hardness of the collar around her neck, the heat of the man’s hand on her ass. She wanted that hand inside her, ravaging her without mercy. She wanted to be ordered to her knees, commanded to do unspeakable things.

  Beth shook herself violently. What was going on? Usually she could bury her unruly, churning imagination. She had a lifetime of experience bashing such thoughts. Get to work, lazy, she scolded herself, hearing her mother in those words.

  She snatched up the photo and took it to the framing workstation, where she laid it on the counter as if it were a lab specimen. Perhaps it was just a particularly powerful piece of art. She’d managed nearly a year at art school before her mother had gotten sick. The composition, the lines, the contrasting textures of skin and leather all pointed to an artist’s eye. She should find out who took the photograph. Maybe it was someone famous.

  Something caught her eye in the shadows behind the couple. A point of light she hadn’t noticed before. Just enough light to delineate a figure lounging in the background.

  Someone was watching this intimate scene.

  Her whole body tightened. A watcher was enjoying this spectacle, witnessing the woman’s arousal, the man’s mastery. Heat shot through her lower body. She peered closer. She was wrong. The second man wasn’t only watching. His hand stretched toward the hidden triangle between the woman’s legs.

  “Beth.”

  She jumped about two feet backward into a stack of white mat boards. Gavin caught them before they tumbled to the ground.

  “Gavin! You scared the bejeepers out of me.”

  The corner of his mouth lifted, the way it always did when she used one of her mother’s phrases. “Judy-isms”, he called them. “Sorry, I swear I wasn’t sneaking up on you. I said your name a couple times, but you didn’t answer.”

  She saw his black eyes flicker to the photo and took a surreptitious step sideways to block his view of it. For some reason, she didn’t want him to see the photo. Especially after he’d caught her so wrapped up in it.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Saying hi to my wife. Scaring the crap out of her. I’m a romantic, you know.”

  She relaxed into a smile. Gavin Thomason, her lawfully wedded husband. Sometimes she still couldn’t believe it. A spattering of snowflakes decorated his dark hair. His hockey skates dangled from one hand. He must have just come from practice. He was a former high school hockey star and current coach of the infamous Fairbanks Renegades. Everyone in town knew Gavin. And everyone had been shocked when he’d married quiet, dreamy Beth Vale.

  “How were the hooligans today?”

  “My players behaved with complete propriety today, I’ll have you know. Only two incidents of on-ice mooning.”

  She shivered. Gavin’s players were young, hard-bodied rowdies, so hot they inspired all sorts of guilty fantasies. Not that she’d ever told Gavin that.

  “Those etiquette lessons are paying off.” She edged closer to the counter, hoping to slide the photograph under a piece of whiteboard.

  “What are you working on?”

  Darn those perceptive dark eyes of his. Gavin rarely missed anything, as his players well knew.

  “Nothing in particular. A photograph.”

  He took a step closer. His muscular presence filled the small room, giving her the sense of having nowhere to hide. He was well aware of the power of his body, having used it to mow down opposing players at the rink for so long. With her, he was always meticulously restrained, although sometimes she caught a flash in his dark eyes or a ruthless curve of his mouth that reminded her what a physical creature lurked inside.

  Not like her. She was locked away in her own head. At some point she’d thrown away the key.

  He took another step forward. “Can I see it? I like photos.”

  “It’s, um, kind of private. The client might not like other people looking at it.”

  He raised an eyebrow but stopped. “Framer-client confidentiality? Never heard of it.”

  “It’s an unspoken rule, kind of a Hippocratic oath of framers.” With that, she turned and dragged a piece of cardstock over the photograph. As soon as it was covered up, she felt safe. “Now whe
re’s my midafternoon kiss?”

  He dropped his skates, reached for her and pulled her close. The heat of his groin burned against her lower belly. Using both hands, he angled her face toward his and cradled her cheeks in his palms. “My beautiful wife.”

  Under his intent gaze, warmth filled her. Gavin was so handsome, all dark hair and eyes, strong, slashing eyebrows and rugged jawline. He looked like a Spanish pirate, even though his family was Irish. Girls had always gone nuts over him. She’d watched them in middle school, writing his name in their notebooks, then in high school, using inventively skimpy outfits to snare his attention. And now here he was, her husband, claiming a kiss in the middle of the afternoon.

  She sagged against him, letting his strength guide her. He brushed his lips softly against hers. A shiver passed through her, like a ripple on the surface of a deep lake. Go deeper, she wanted to tell him. Deeper, harder. But she could never say such a thing. He’d be too shocked. She’d be too shocked.

  Her body strained against his. How could such a strong man be so gentle? Where was the ferocity he used to show on the ice? But that was why she loved him, wasn’t it? The fact that he could restrain his own powerful nature in deference to her fragility? She touched her tongue to his. She felt his body tighten and his erection rise against her stomach.

  She broke away, gasping. “You’d better go. Meredith’s right outside.”

  “Right.” Something flared in his eyes. “Wouldn’t want to embarrass you on the job.”

  “I’ll see you tonight.”

  He nodded, turning away. She watched him take a deep breath. He was probably trying to get his erection to subside. His control over his body always amazed her.

  “I took some pork chops out of the freezer,” she told him. “I hope you’re in the mood for meat.”

  He shot her an ironic look as he picked up his skates from the floor. “I’m a man. I’m always in the mood for meat.”

  “Right.” She flushed. Was that some kind of dirty double entendre? The Renegades were constantly making naughty jokes and she rarely got them the first time. They always gleefully explained them to her as she turned redder and redder.

  “Love you,” Gavin said, already out the door.

  “Love you too.”

  When he was safely gone, she turned back to the photograph.

  Funny—it wasn’t hidden under cardstock the way she had thought. It was right out in the open. The erotic scene assaulted her senses, sent shock waves through her system. She felt stripped naked. Mercilessly exposed. And wickedly aroused.

  * * * * *

  Gavin stole a look at the mystery known as his wife. He bit into his pork chop while she chewed her salad greens with her usual air of distracted serenity, as if she were a nun contemplating eternity. Beth had an untouched look about her, an innocence that even two and a half years of marriage to a beast like him hadn’t changed. Her light-brown hair framed her delicate face, which had the kind of subtle beauty that took a more mature man to appreciate.

  In high school, she’d peeped up at him one day in line at the cafeteria, her light-filled green eyes dropping shyly back to her tray in the next moment. He’d remembered those eyes, but the constant parade of more confident girls had commanded his attention. He’d vaguely thought of her as the artsy type, and knew she was the daughter of the fearsome Judy Vale, the strictest school principal in North Pole.

  It wasn’t until he was a grown man and Beth had come back to North Pole with a new air of poise that he’d felt unrelentingly, unstoppably drawn to her.

  He still felt that magnetic pull, that fascination bordering on obsession, but he wasn’t sure he knew her any better than in high school. What went on behind those dreamy, light-green eyes? What did she think about all day? What got her excited, riled up, undone? Sometimes, for a flash, he glimpsed a different look—stormy, smoky, hot—but it always disappeared so quickly. The desire to know her, deep inside, ate at him.

  But today he’d gotten a tiny window into her mind. That bondage photo she’d tried to hide from him. He’d seen how she stared at it. He’d seen the dazed look in her eyes when he’d surprised her. He’d seen her efforts to block it from his sight.

  “Sweetie?”

  She startled, as she often did when he spoke, as if he’d interrupted some complicated internal conversation. “Yes, Gavin?”

  “We got a special invitation today. The Renegades did, I mean.”

  “Oh? How exciting.”

  “You haven’t even heard what it is,” he said drily.

  “You said it was special.”

  “Right.” He shouldn’t make fun of her distraction. He kept forgetting she was still mourning her mother, whose illness had shadowed their courtship and…still did, really. “I got a call from the coach of the team down in Wild. The Nasties.”

  “The Wild Nasties?” She made a face. “Where do you guys get these names?”

  “From drunken brainstorming sessions in bars, where do you think? Besides, the NHL took all the normal names.”

  She snorted. “A normal name would never work for you guys.”

  “Yep, the Renegades definitely suits us. Anyway, Wild has a showcase game during their winter festival, and the team they were supposed to play had to cancel. They all have the flu, apparently.”

  Secretly, Gavin wondered if the flu wasn’t code for the coach not trusting his players at Wild Nights, but he wasn’t about to share that suspicion with Beth.

  “They want us to come down to Wild this weekend and play the Nasties.”

  Beth giggled, her lovely eyes lighting with amusement. “Play the Nasties, that sounds just…wrong.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ve done worse. Remember when we played the Damn Fools in Juneau?”

  “I liked their outfits.”

  Gavin winced. “Uniforms.”

  “That’s what I mean.” Beth gazed at him innocently and speared a tomato. “So are you going to play the Nasties?”

  “I think so. They’re supposed to be a good team, from everything I’ve heard. The guys need a challenge.”

  “Great! See, I was right, it’s exciting.”

  “I want you to come with me to Wild.”

  “Me?” Beth laid down her fork, looking troubled. “You know I don’t understand hockey. I never even know when to cheer.”

  “The game is only one afternoon. We’ll make a weekend of it. Drive down in our own car, leave the hooligans to their own devices, and spend some time in a new place. Have you ever been to Wild?”

  He watched her closely. The more important question was, did she know about Wild Nights? Would she make the connection to his casual mention of a winter festival?

  “I’ve never been there. I feel like I’ve heard something about it, but I can’t remember right now. Maybe my mother visited there.”

  Gavin nearly choked on his forkful of pork at the thought of rigid Judy Vale going to Wild Nights. Then again, for some people, Wild meant glaciers and a spectacular bay. Their loss, in his opinion.

  “Well, this is your chance to follow in her footsteps then. We haven’t gone anywhere together in a while.”

  “That’s true. Well, sure, I guess we can go. Drive down after work on Friday, come back on Sunday?”

  Gavin suppressed a sigh. He had to get Beth to lighten up. “Can’t you get a day off work? I’d like to go down earlier than that.”

  “I suppose. Although Meredith is still a bit sloppy.”

  Gavin should have felt guilty about making her leave her work in her assistant’s hands. Normally, he would have. But he remembered the fiery look in her eyes after he’d caught her with that photograph. He wanted to see more of that look.

  If Wild Nights wasn’t the perfect opportunity, he’d eat his hockey puck.

  Chapter Two

  Outside, a world of white whizzed past the window of the Subaru Forester. Beth felt vaguely hypnotized by the steady parade of snowy spruce trees and the occasional bridge over a frozen river. A half-empty bag of potato chips and a heavy silence lay between her and Gavin. God, had they run out of things to talk about after only two and a half years?