Cover Reveal + Teaser — THE WILD SIDE by R.K. Lilley

❤ THE WILD SIDE  ❤

standalone erotic romance — coming 2014

ARE YOU READY TO TAKE A WALK?

Alasdair Masters is in a rut.  He just hit forty, has been nearly celibate for the past year, and his life has turned into a daily sequence of lonely patterns that revolve around avoiding human contact.

His tidy life is turned on its head when a hot young blonde at the gym that’s been pseudo-stalking him decides to rock his world.  A very young blonde.  Way, way too young for him.  The problem is, he can’t seem to tell her no, and she just keeps coming back for more.

It doesn’t help that he’s ninety percent sure she’s a criminal, and still, he can’t seem to turn her down.  What is a dull introvert to do when a chaotic cyclone that oozes sexuality comes twisting into his life?

At first, he thinks she’ll give him a heart attack, but after his twenty-year marriage ended a year ago, he’s been a little lost, and when she comes crashing into his life, he realizes that he’s never felt more alive.

Is a walk on the wild side just what he needs to get his life on track or a disaster in the making?  Is it possible for someone that much younger to be just what he needs, or is she a fortune hunter, as everyone keeps telling him?  Is it his hormones telling him that the mysterious younger woman is the one, or could it be more?

 

❤ TEASER  ❤

I set my two perfectly folded gym towels down on a chair by the treadmill and got on the machine.

I always brought two.  I wasn’t even sure why.  I was a creature of habit.  Once I started a pattern, I tended to stick to it, rain or shine.

Kind of like my marriage.  Of course, that hadn’t lasted forever, but that hadn’t exactly been my choice.

I punched in my settings and began my warm-up.  I had already done twenty minutes of stretching at home.  My three-hour daily workout was very precise.  I had a family history chock-full of heart disease, and so I aggressively fought to stay healthy.  I was intelligent enough to know that I’d brought the whole thing to an extreme, but honestly, what else was I supposed to do with my free time?  I was busy enough with work, but my work involved a lot of sitting down and tapping away at a computer, and I felt I had to counter all of that physical inactivity, somehow.

I’d just had my dreaded fortieth birthday, and I felt like I was in as good of shape as I’d ever been.  My waistline wasn’t growing, thanks to my three hours a day in the gym and an impeccable diet, and my muscles were well toned and good sized.  I had no idea what age I actually looked, but I figured the liberal salt and pepper at my temples brought it at least close to forty.  I didn’t really give it much thought, as I stayed largely to myself, and any time I was on camera, I went out of my way to avoid seeing it.

The gym was busy, as it usually was, so my time there was literally the most social I was in an average day, and I usually got away with a nod and a good morning to the receptionist on the way in.

That was it.  The only verbal interaction in my day.

Sometimes I had to talk on the phone for work, and once, maybe twice a year, I did a few television or radio interviews.

And that was it.

The scary part was it was effortless for me.  It had started with an ugly divorce just over one year ago, and slowly shaped its way into this.  A sad, old man that could have easily embraced a life as a complete recluse.

I did still go out of my way to work out at an upscale gym, instead of just building one in my house.  I had the room.  I certainly had the money.  I figured it was only a matter of time before I resorted to that, too.

The strange part of it was, I wasn’t worried about it because I was lonely.  I was worried because I wasn’t.  I did miss being with a woman in the literal sexual sense, but that was about it.  I’d considered the idea of hiring a prostitute briefly, but even that seemed like an ordeal.  I detested breaking the law.  It was so very chaotic.

A familiar figure moved onto the machine next to me, and I met smiling light green eyes in the mirror, nodded once briefly, then looked back down.

She was a shapely little blonde woman that had started sharing my gym hours nine days ago.

Girl, I corrected myself.  She was a girl, way too young for me to even sneak a long glance at, though I was only human, and she was wearing next to nothing, so I’d caught many, many glances.

She probably thought I was dad material, I told myself, as she started to jog on the machine, her full, perky breasts bouncing with every smooth step.

She really needed to go shopping for a more supportive sports bra, I thought to myself, my eyes catching on her, then darting away, then glancing again within a few bounces.

She wore only a hot pink sports bra and the tiniest skintight white lycra shorts I’d ever seen in my life.  Her abs were toned, waist tiny, her skin smooth in a way that happened only in the very young.

Way, way too young for you, I reminded myself, my furtive gaze catching on her lithe hips as she jogged her sexy little heart out.

My eyes moved up to her face, and I flushed to find her watching me watching her.  I looked down and kept on jogging.

There’d been no censure in her eyes, and so I found mine wandering back to her face.

She was beautiful.  Not a scrap of makeup on, her white-blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, and still she could’ve stopped traffic.  A real bombshell.  None of it was artificial either, just plain old good genetics at work.

She was friendly, too.  I wasn’t sure why, but she usually took the machine next to mine, if it was empty, though there were lots to choose from.  She always had a smile for me, too.

Maybe I reminded her of her dad.  Or fuck, her grandpa.

It didn’t bear thinking about it.

I’d never been with a younger woman, let alone one that much younger.  Hell, she’d probably give me a heart attack.  I shook off the thought.  A flawless little thing like that wouldn’t give me a second glance, and I told myself that was a good thing.

For all I knew, she could have been jailbait.  Needless to say, for a man that’d never even had a speeding ticket, just the idea of that was too scandalous to linger on.

Still, my eyes were drawn, time and again, to her perfect figure jogging hard on that treadmill.  Her legs were incredible, long and slender, bare from the top of her thigh to her ankles, and so toned and tan.

I made myself look away and not look back.

I hit the one-hour mark on the machine when I saw her slow and stop out of the corner of my eye.  This had become a pattern, too.  I did exactly one hour of cardio, before I hit the free weights.  She seemed to be working a similar routine, and every day I saw her, it became even more in sync with mine.

I almost jumped in surprise when she approached me directly, standing on the very front of my machine, to get my attention.

My eyes traveled slowly up, trying not to linger on the way her breasts rose out of her sports bra’s neckline as she leaned into my machine.  She was spilling out of the thing.

She beamed at me.

I swallowed hard, catching the side bar and swinging first one leg, and then the other, onto the footrests on the sides, coming to a stop.

I popped out an ear bud, raising my brows in what I hoped was a look of polite interest.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hey,” I panted back, shutting the treadmill down.  May as well quit, since I’d reached my goal.

She handed me my towel, and I took it, immediately wiping my brow.  This was a new development and a strange one, to be sure.

She held up the second towel, my OCD towel, if you will.  “I saw that you have two.  I forgot mine.  You mind if I borrow it?”

I shook my head.  “Go for it.  Glad I could help.”

She smiled again.  Her teeth were gorgeous, straight and white against her tan skin.  “What’s your name?” she asked me.

I was caught off guard, and so it took me a few extra beats to answer awkwardly.  “Alasdair.”

She raised her brows, looking intrigued.  “Nice name.  It has a lot of character.  Do you shorten it at all, or should I call you that, Alasdair?”

Hearing her say my name made me feel indecent.  Just beastly.  I briefly considered cutting my workout short.  “Sometimes my friends call me Dair.”

“Dair.  I like that too.  And are you daring, Dair?”

“Not particularly,” I said quickly, my heart pounding.  I couldn’t quite believe that she was hitting on me, but if she was, I needed to put a quick stop to it.

Way too young, I told myself firmly.

I moved to the weights, and she followed like we were old friends.  I started doing curls, eyes glued to her as she grabbed some smaller weights and started doing dead lifts with a hammer curl.

The sight of that had me slack-jawed.  The move consisted of her bending down at the waist, her legs straight, and touching the ground, then lifting back, her ponytail bouncing, back arched, her incredible ass sticking out, and bringing her arms into a curl.

She faced away from me when she did it, giving me a perfect view.  Her shorts were so thin, her skin so supple, that it was more perfectly designed to turn me on than a porno.  And I’d watched plenty of porn.  The girl was set on giving me a heart attack today.

She kept doing it for the longest time, sending me a look over her shoulder as she straightened on the last rep.  She smiled that sweet little smile at me.  “Well, aren’t you gonna ask me?”

I had no idea what she was talking about, but my mind went very dirty with it.

Could you do that one more time, but pull your shorts down for this one, so I can fuck your brains out?  I was pretty positive that wasn’t what she meant.

Can I give you a ride home?  Or maybe a hard ride on my cock?  Nope, those two were out, too.

Or how about, Want to grab a coffee after this?  That one was better, but I held my tongue.

“Excuse me?” I asked instead.  The safest bet of all.

“My name.  I know yours now.  Don’t you want to know mine?”

I smiled politely, sincerely hoping that my raging hard-on wasn’t too obvious.  I was wearing athletic pants and a long sweatshirt, so I was probably safe.  “Yes, of course.  Nice to meet you…”

“Iris.”

My brows shot up.  You didn’t see many girls her age named Iris.  “Iris?”

Her eyes twinkled at me.  She gave very good eye contact.  Intense, but good.  “Don’t you like it?”

“Y-yes,” I stammered out.  “It’s a beautiful name.”

“It’s always easy to pick out flowers for me.  My favorite flower is the same as my name.”

“I’ll make a note of it.”  What the fuck did you say that for? I asked myself.  Of course, I wouldn’t be getting her flowers.  Totally inappropriate.

She looked pleased as punch.  “You do that.”

She bent down, her back arched like a pinup girl, and picked up her borrowed towel.  She moved closer, dabbing at her cleavage with it.

I swallowed hard, my cock throbbing in time to my accelerated heart rate.

“Upper body today, huh?” she asked.

I was watching her perky tits as she said it, so I blinked like an idiot.  Her nipples were hard.  I could see them through that flimsy as hell bra.  “Hmm?”

The towel moved down to her stomach.  She didn’t look to be sweating much, but she patted herself down like she was.

I was in a full on sweat.  I designed it that way.  It made for a better workout, but just then I wanted to strip down.

Strip down and pin a naked Iris to the floor.

“You’re working your upper body today.  You alternate, right?”

“Oh yeah.”

“It’s an intense workout you’ve got going.  You training for something in particular?”

I shook my head.  “Just trying to stay fit.  What about you?  You clock in three hours, too, right?”

She shrugged.  “That’s a new thing, though I do enjoy a good workout.  Just trying to keep things nice and tight.”

That made my brain short-circuit.  “Things are looking very tight.”  A perfect fit for my cock, my perverted mind added.

She came a little closer, almost into my personal space.  “Thank you.  That’s a big compliment, coming from a gym regular like you.”

I couldn’t take anymore.  I turned, put the weights back on the bar, and went into a round of grueling pushups.

When I rose again, she was a few feet away doing French press reps, her chest thrust forward.

I turned quickly away, and tried not to so much as glance at her.

She kept her distance until I was on the last quarter hour of my routine, making my rounds on the machines.

“I bet you have some super special after workout drink you down after these sessions,” she told me as she approached my machine, her tone playful.

She got right up in my personal space, her breasts just inches from my face.

I looked up at her eyes, mine almost pleading.  She had to quit teasing me, whether or not she knew that’s what she was doing.

I grunted.

“Admit it.  You do, don’t you?”

My mouth twisted wryly.  She even had a good personality.  She was a sweet little thing.  She didn’t need to be.  She could have gotten by on sheer good looks alone.  “I have a little something I make.”

“It’s a drink, isn’t it?  I’d bet good cash you make it with a Vitamix, and it has kale in it.”

I coughed out a laugh.  “You aren’t wrong.  I’m pretty predictable, huh?”

She winked at me.  Fucking winked.  It was adorable, and I needed to get away from her.  “You’re a mystery to me.  I’m just throwing out guesses, trying to figure you out.”

“Now why would you do that?  I have to tell you, I’m about as boring as they come.”

She shook her head, her eyes soft.  “Not at all.  You seem fascinating to me, Dair.”

I wasn’t sure why, but that seemed to be my breaking point.

I politely excused myself and hit the showers.  I was the only one in there, and I did give half a thought to rubbing a quick one off, but I refrained.  I’d be home soon enough.

I emerged from the showers, clad in a fresh white T-shirt and black athletic shorts, to find Iris still hanging near the weights, still in her workout gear, dabbing at her glistening breasts with my towel.

Well, I guess she’ll be keeping that, I thought, giving it one last longing look before I turned on my heel and headed out.

I nearly let the door swing shut on her before I realized that she’d followed me, still in her workout gear, duffle bag in tow.  I held the door wide for her, a little worried at her beaming smile.

“You shower at home?” I asked, then wanted to take it back.  I did not need a visual of her showering.

“Yeah, usually.  Here.”  She draped the used towel over my shoulder.

My mind went really filthy with the things I’d be doing with it later.

“Thanks for that.  You just headed home now?”

I nodded, looking over at the parking lot, back at the gym, anywhere but at the too young girl that was too much trouble for my peace of mind.

“Have a good one,” I murmured, and walked away.

“Wait,” she called out from behind me when I was halfway through the parking lot.

I stopped.  She was just a few feet behind.  Either she was following me, or she was walking somewhere.  My pearl white model S Tesla was the only car parked this far back.

I turned to her, and she was smiling at me, of course.

“Do you mind giving me a ride?”

I took a few deep, steadying breaths, wondering what to do.

Of course, I needed to give her a ride.  If the poor girl needed to walk somewhere, she could hardly do it dressed like that.  She’d be abducted, for sure.

I wasn’t positive that I wouldn’t abduct her myself.

“Sure, honey.  Where you need to go?”

She pointed at my car, her eyes widening.  “Is that your ride?  It’s brilliant.  Wow.  A Tesla.  Just beautiful.”

I smiled, impressed that she knew what it was and waved her on.

I loved my car, and I got a real kick out of her excited reaction to it.  She was good at making me smile.

“I’ve never been in one of these before.”

“I just got this one about eight months ago.”

“Do you like it?”

“Yes.  I’m happy with it.”

“Whoa.  You got the seven seater?  You have any kids?”

I laughed.  “No.  I have no excuse, other than that the salesman was very good at selling me features.”

We were inside and belted before I looked at her again.  I could smell her in the small space.  She smelled so good that it was playing havoc with my peace of mind.  Like vanilla, maybe a touch of lemon, and some hint of what could only be her hot little body after a good workout.

I was shamefully happy that she hadn’t showered after the workout.  I had a very clear visual of me licking every bit of that salty sweet sweat off her, and since that wouldn’t be happening, I at least had a smell to obsess over in place of that.

She reclined her seat until she was lying down flat.  Her mouthwatering breasts pointed straight up in that position.  “That is so cool.  What is that called?  The glass ceiling?”

“An all glass panoramic roof.  Like I said, the salesman was very good at selling me features, even ones I didn’t need.”

I started the car, waiting for her to tell me where to go.  When we just sat there for a few minutes, I asked, “So, where can I drop you?”

She brought her seat back up.  “Aren’t you going to invite me back to your place?  I want to see your house.  And I’d like to try whatever concoction you make yourself drink after your workout.”

I smiled and shook my head.  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Iris.  You are much too young to be inviting yourself to some man’s house.  Especially an old guy like me.”

“How old are you?” she asked, sounding only vaguely curious about that.

“Forty.  Old.  How old are you?”

“Twenty-four, Alasdair.  Old enough for any damn thing.”

I gave her a gimlet-eyed look, sure she was messing with me.  “I don’t believe you.  Prove it.  Show me your ID.”

She giggled like I’d just said the funniest thing, but she did bend forward to fish around in her bag, retrieving a small pink wallet.  “What?  You think I’m jailbait?”

“Something like that.”

She handed me a Nevada driver’s license.  I studied it, did some quick math, then studied it some more.  It was real, as far as I could tell, and it did place her at twenty-four.  I could hardly believe it.

“I’m still way too old for you.”

“Your cock doesn’t agree.”  Her tone was so innocent that it took me a moment to process what she’d said.

I flushed bright red.  “My cock doesn’t know what’s good for it.”

“But I do.”  Her voice was whisper soft and breathy.

I put the car in reverse.  “You sure about this?”