Bad Boys Southern Style. JoAnn Ross

so beautiful.

      He drank in the sight of her, his gaze moving over her face, taking in her eyes with their sexy, feline slant, her nose, which tipped up ever so slightly. Having always found perfection boring, Sloan approved of the faint flaw.

      Her slightly parted lips were a soft and dusky pink against her milkmaid’s complexion, reminding him of late summer roses on a field of snow.

      She swallowed ever so slightly as he continued his slow, judicious study. When he bent his head and touched his mouth to that soft, fragrant hollow in her throat, he felt her pulse hitch. Imagined he could taste her low, deep hum of pleasure.

      Her long hair draped her breasts in a jet black curtain. He smoothed it back over her shoulders. As her nipples tightened beneath his hot and hungry gaze, it took every vestige of self-control Sloan possessed to keep from taking those pert berry tips between his teeth.

      He managed, just barely, to keep a tight rein on his rampant need to ravish as his roving eyes moved lower, down her torso, over her taut stomach to the nest of curls between her smooth, firm thighs. Beads of moisture glistened in the silvery moonlight like morning dew.

      No longer able to resist touching, he trailed a sensual path through those thistledown silk ringlets with a fingertip and slid a finger into her moist, hidden sheath.

      The body clenching around the gently invading touch was hot and tight. And, he thought, with a burst of primal male satisfaction as he flicked a thumb over her clitoris and brought her that first, sharp release, mine.

      She was clearly staggered. Her gleaming gold eyes were blurred. Color rode high on her cheekbones and her lush lips trembled on an unsteady breath.

      Just as he was worrying that he might have rushed things—rushed her—she smiled.

      A slow, sexy, siren’s smile.

      And the spell was upon him.

      Sloan had planned, while following her to this secret witch’s place, to have her. To ease the woman hunger that had been bedeviling both his mind and body for too long. But, as he’d also always prided himself on being a tender, thorough lover, he’d also intended to take his time.

      As lightning-hot need jolted straight to his loins, a ravaging madness flashed through Sloan. Patience broke, intentions scattered. With a violent heat raging in his blood, he muttered a half oath, half prayer, and crushed his mouth to hers.

      No less hungry, she kissed him back, her avid mouth moving beneath his, murmuring words in some mysterious, magical language Sloan couldn’t understand.

      His clothes disappeared, thrown to the four winds swirling wildly around them. Her nails dug into the bared flesh of his shoulders as she arched her fluid body against him. Her heart was pounding a fast, primitive beat through her blood, against her ribs, so hard he could feel it against his own chest.

      Primal need clawed. At her. At him.

      As the animal inside Sloan snarled and snapped its steel link chain, he dragged her to the ground, shoved her knees up, and mounted her.

      “Mine.” He needed to say the word out loud. Needed to hear her response.

      She didn’t hesitate. “Yours,” she agreed on a harsh, ragged breath.

      For all time.

      He pistoned his hips forward, surging into her, claiming her innocence in one deep thrust.

      Her cry, born not of pain, but pleasure, tangled with feminine triumph, echoed over the winter bare treetops.

      Clinging to him, her body bowed, her slender hands racing up and down his back while she chanted those musical words from an ancient time, the witch opened completely. Utterly.

      It began to snow, soft white flakes drifting down like feathers shaken from some pagan god’s goose-down pillow. Moving together in an age-old rhythm, steeped in the magic of the night and of each other, neither Sloan nor his witch felt the cold as the snow covered them like a pristine white blanket.

      “Okay. That’s it.”

      Damn. He’d done it again. Fallen asleep at his computer. Sloan lifted his head, relieved he hadn’t drooled and shorted out the keyboard.

      His head pounded, his mouth was as dry as when he’d filmed that adventure flick last year in the Sahara, his body ached like the devil, and he didn’t need to look down to know that it was still reacting to his hot and horny dream. He had, after all, been suffering from a damn near perpetual hard-on since he’d begun this frigging Morganna project. He was also getting sick and tired of icy morning showers.

      It was time for action.

      Time to take charge.

      “Time to get laid.”

      He reached out and snagged the phone from beneath a pile of comic books. Make that graphic novels, he reminded himself.

      Though, personally, having grown up devouring superhero comic books, Sloan couldn’t understand why there’d be a stigma to the term, but after all the years and trouble he’d gone to convincing Morganna’s creator Gavin Thomas to sell him the film rights to the sexy, crime-fighting witch, the last thing he needed to do was accidentally slip up one of these days and insult the writer’s work in public.

      Especially given that, having already managed to incite the ultraconservative right with that pirate movie he’d made with Gabriel Broussard, he suspected the zealots would be heating up the tar and dragging out the feathers when Morganna hit the silver screen.

      He was idly flipping through the pages while the phone rang and he paused on a scene where Brianna, Morganna’s virginal good witch twin—who represented the white magic side of the duo—made love to a mortal male in a sacred circle of stones.

      The black and white frame depicting the snow falling on the naked lovers caused the dream to come crashing back in vivid detail, which in turn had the muscles in his belly knotting painfully.

      “Hello,” the familiar voice on the other end of the line answered. At least that’s what he thought she’d said. It was difficult to tell with all that hot blood roaring in his ears.

      “Hey, Emma, darlin’.” His southern drawl, a legacy from those halcyon days growing up in Savannah, rasped with unsatisfied lust as he struggled to drag his testosterone-crazed mind back to reality. “I’ve got a favor to ask.”

      Five minutes later, Sloan was online, booking a flight to Savannah.

      Then went into the bathroom for yet another cold shower. One he damn well hoped would be his last.

      Four

      Seven months after her grand opening, thanks, in part, to Savannah’s tourism trade, business was booming. Enough so that Roxi had even been able to hire a part-time employee, a descendent of a long line of voodoo practitioners who moonlighted as the lead singer in the Papa Legba Voodoo Priestesses.

      Named for the most powerful of all the voodoo spirits, who, along with all his other responsibilities was in charge of all things erotic and sexual, the pop group was starting to generate crossover appeal, which Roxi attributed in large part to Jaira Guidnard’s mile-long legs, poreless dark chocolate skin, and a body that caused males from eight to eighty to trip over their tongues.

      “Do you believe this?” Jaira asked ten minutes after a busload of Swedish tourists had descended on the shop, located on the city’s colorful Riverwalk. “It’s like a damn Viking invasion.”

      “They’re also paying our rent for the next three months,” Roxi said. “Not to mention your salary.”

      “Well, there is that,” Jaira agreed. “And some of them are actually kind of cute if you go for the hunky blond Scandinavian type.”

      She flashed a blindingly bright smile at one of the Vikings, who immediately walked into a display of pewter wind chimes hanging from the ceiling.

      The