A Naughty New Year...Brazen Style with Brooklyn Skye and Giveaway

Brooklyn Skye grew up in a small town where she quickly realized writing was an escape from small town life. Really, she’s just your average awkward girl who’s obsessed with words. She writes young adult, new adult, and romance fiction. 

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This is a scene featuring the two characters from A Moment of Weakness, Micah and Laurel. Earlier that evening, before the New Year’s Eve countdown, Laurel had bet Micah he couldn’t teach her how to play the piano. So now they are in Micah’s apartment after leaving the party they’d spent the evening at.

***

God, he was everywhere.

Two days ago this man with the crystal-green eyes and crooked smile was nowhere—completely nonexistent in her plain-and-simple life—and now Micah was everywhere. In her thoughts. Her memories. Even the bubble of space she’d secured around her.

Maybe that was what it was like when a person developed a fascination with someone. One minute you’re floating in a universe, no gravitational hold whatsoever. Then the next you’re sucked into something with such intense force not even a meteor the size of the sun could knock you out of it. No matter how hard you fought.

The longer Laurel sat beside him, listened to his instructions about where to place her hands on the keys, smelled the heady cologne that hit her each time he shifted, the hotter the burn inside her became. Fifteen minutes and she was about to combust.

“It’s not about how hard you hit the keys,” he interrupted her absentminded practice of chord progression, leaning in closer but careful to not make contact with her in any way. “The keys are like women. They need to be touched gently, caressed until they purr with the perfect…melody.”

Yeah, the seductive way he was speaking to her hadn’t helped either. It was like he was doing it on purpose, saying these things that threw sexual images at her brain. Everything inside her singed with a tingling heat, like she was drifting in a haze of hunger and wishes and wanting. She sucked in a slow breath through her nose. “Maybe you need to show me.”

“Which will do no good. Let’s do this…I’ll point to a key, you touch it. Don’t play it right away, though. I want you to stroke it—tease it—first.” He cocked his head to the side and grinned.

Stroke? Tease? She grinned back. “Do you talk to all your students this way?”

“You’re my one and only student, so apparently I do.” He winked at her, then pointed to the first key. Middle C. “No rush. Nice and slow.”

She moved her hand up and down the key with barely any touch at all then played it. He pointed to another. C sharp—one of the black keys that stood above the whites. With her thumb and forefinger, she ran her fingertips down its sides, noticing Micah stiffen with the movement.

Huh, was he feeling all ruffled inside, too? She eyed him curiously. Without a change in his tight expression, he gestured to the next key.

Her fingers slid with gentle pressure over the glossy ivory before she played, and, beside her Micah let out a heavy breath and ran his hand through his hair, gripping the back of his neck.

“Everything okay over there?” she teased. “You seem a little…tense.” Something about the way her movements were putting this man on edge shot a spark of uninhibited pleasure through her.

“Just peachy,” he answered, staring down at her fingers.

Three more keys pointed to, caressed, and played, then she placed her hands in her lap and turned to him, wondering for the briefest of moments if her cheeks were as red as they felt. What she was doing, would she call it flirting? Though she’d had her fair share of boyfriends, she’d never done something so blatantly sexual in front of one before. Or any man.

“I think we should switch roles,” she said, her voice trembling in the back of her throat. “I point, you touch.”

His eyes burned into hers, blazing hot and so intense she felt seared from the inside out. “No.”

She frowned. “Why not?”

“Because what good would it do? You watching me?”

Spinning on the bench to face him, she shrugged. “Plenty of people learn from watching. Think about how many instructional videos there are. Aerobics, home improvement, cooking—”

“You’re kind of weird,” he said, amused. He sat up and rested the inside of his elbow along the top of the piano. “And I’m kinda curious what type of instructional videos you’ve watched.”

Laurel giggled. “Yoga, computers, golf.”

“Golf?” She was still amusing him; he was still smiling. “Oddly, I’m sorry I missed that.”

She crinkled her nose. “I wasn’t very good.”

For a moment, his gaze searched her face, skipping back and forth between her eyes, doing that profound stare he did so well. With eyes like his, a look like that should be deadly. “All right,” he said, placing his fingers deftly along the keys, “I’ll give you three keys. And”—he grinned—“if I’m not pleasuring them to your taste, I sure hope you’ll speak up.”

Did he talk this way in bed? Or was it dirtier, like when he was onstage? Her heart crammed into the back of her throat, and she swallowed, smiling with the confidence that came with it.

One key, two keys, three. She pointed just as he had, and he took his time fingering the smooth ivory before playing it. C, D, E, and then with that confidence, she pointed to her arm. The bare skin just above her elbow that faced him.

It wasn’t a scowl, but by the way his eyes narrowed she might as well have called it that. “You already had three.” His whispered words did nothing to stop the quiet room from pressing in on her.

Rounding her shoulders back, she retorted, “And maybe I’m no better than the typical woman…always wanting more.” She let those words linger for a long second, then slid her pointer finger higher, to her shoulder. “Maybe you’d rather try here first?”

His lips pinched into a line, and his body went rigid, as if he was fighting some internal battle. But his eyes…they contradicted the rest of his face. On fire and scalding her all over. He inhaled a breath and, ever so sluggishly, lifted his arm and traced a barely there path down the inside of her arm. “What are you doing to me?” he asked, not sounding like a question at all.

A hot prickle followed in the wake of his finger, and her lips drew up. I think the question is, Micah, what are you doing to me? It took a minute to find the rest of her mind, and once she did she pointed to the other arm. He did the same, moving slower and dawdling in the sensitive crook of her elbow before continuing on to her wrist.

She bit her cheek against a wider smile. This feeling inside her—so uninhibited…so wild—was unlike anything she’d ever felt. Like she was falling and flying at the same time. It made her light-headed. It made the room spin. And it made her crave more. She gestured to her neck next, anticipation bringing every cell in her body to attention.

Put your hands on me, Micah. All. Over. Me.

He can fight anything…except his need for her.

Until her new job starts in September, buttoned-up elementary school teacher Laurel Harris is at loose ends and in need of cash. Fortunately her best friend’s older brother is a single dad and desperately needs a nanny. Or so she’s told. She doesn’t anticipate him being such a menacing, muscled, and undeniably gorgeous man…or that he has zero interest in hiring a nanny.

Micah Crane will do right by his young daughter, no matter the cost. And right now, that cost is juggling parenthood with long hours at his bar and working as an enforcer for a notorious crime boss. He doesn’t need another complication in his life, but the sweet, frustratingly opinionated little blonde hell-bent on caring for his daughter stirs his blood like no woman ever has.

All it takes is a moment of weakness to ignite the lust blazing between them. A moment that will unravel their self-control and unleash all of Micah’s darkest secrets…

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• 1 eBook copy of A Moment of Weakness

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