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  Strong Arms of the Law

  Cerise DeLand

  Rex Martinez is one tough Texas Ranger who’s always gotten his man. No woman has ever resisted him either. But the saucy little number currently under his protection makes him nuts. Makes him hard. And makes him eager to put her in her place…which is, of course, in his arms. And his bed.

  Crime writer Skye Chamberlain chafes under Rex’s rigid rules. He’s too macho, too yummy to stay cooped up with while she’s trying to remain celibate.

  When Skye calls his bluff and demands they embrace their relationship now instead of later, Rex can’t resist. But his need to keep her hot and happy makes him drop his guard—which is exactly when trouble comes calling.

  Ellora’s Cave Publishing

  www.ellorascave.com

  Strong Arms of the Law

  ISBN 9781419934735

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Strong Arms of the Law Copyright © 2011 Cerise DeLand

  Edited by Helen Woodall

  Cover art by Syneca

  Electronic book publication June 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.

  Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the Internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the publisher’s permission. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000. (http://www.fbi.gov/ipr/). Please purchase only authorized electronic or print editions and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted material. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  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.

  Strong Arms of the Law

  Cerise DeLand

  Dedication

  To my editor, Helen, who catches all those pesky things I seem to breeze over—and puts me to rights every time. My great gratitude for her incomparable efficiency, talents at “reading” me and her insights. Thank you!

  And to my gal pals, the Gang of 7: Nicole Austin, Regina Carlysle, Samantha Cayto, Desiree Holt, Allie Standifer and Brenna Zinn! Buddies and inspirations, every one! Thanks, my darlings, for the laughter and the insights.

  Trademarks Acknowledgement

  The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

  Camaro: General Motors LLC

  Dairy Queen: American Dairy Queen Corporation

  Godzilla: Toho Co., Ltd.

  Indiana Jones: Lucasfilm Ltd.

  Sig Sauer: S.A.T. Swiss Arms Technology AG

  Texas Lottery: Texas Lottery Commission The State Agency Texas

  Chapter One

  Skye Chamberlain crawled out her bedroom window of the tiny house outside Alpine, Texas before sunrise on a sweltering August morning, biting back a shout that she was finally escaping the strong arms of the law.

  Who knew she had it in her?

  Crime writer. Bookworm. Former ER nurse. Turned fugitive.

  She grinned. Even—she thought as she stretched her dangling toes to reach for the ground—if it meant she’d be in hot water with her captor. I’m going swimming, Ranger Martinez, before you’re up and learn I’m gone.

  She felt the cool earth beneath the soles of her feet and stifled a sigh of relief. There was only so long she could stand this blazing August heat. “And the scalding gaze of Rex Martinez,” she murmured to herself as she tucked her boobs back inside her cotton bra, hiked up her flimsy panties and flung her towel over her shoulder.

  She headed for the pool behind the barn, picking her way along the pebbles and brush barefoot. She needed to do five laps, maybe more to get relief from the tension of wanting to jump the bones of the tall, dark Texas Ranger who had been her bodyguard for more than two months.

  He was an ogre, a tyrant, refusing to let her go anywhere except prowl that teensy-weensy house like a caged animal. But she had to get away, do something physical, if only for a few minutes. She would melt like ice cream if she spent one more day enthralled by his gruff cowboy charm. Denying we’re headed for bed.

  Hell. She hurried along. Any exercise would be better than another twenty-four hours cooped up with the Texas lawman who played cards like Godzilla, talked like smart-ass Indiana Jones and took charge like Pancho Villa.

  “Your birdie, buddy, has flown the nest.”

  * * * * *

  “Coffee’s ready,” Rex Martinez spoke to the closed bedroom door of the cabin. “Come on out. I made it like you want it. Weak.”

  He smirked. Skye Chamberlain didn’t act like she wanted anything watered down. Not her prospects for survival once she testified against the Gonzaga Familia. Not her hope for a life free of reporters harassing her for interviews about the Texas drug gangs in cahoots with a local mayor. So why she liked her coffee less than rocket-ready stumped him.

  “Rise and shine, Chamberlain,” he called when he heard no sounds. Usually she would throw a shoe at the door or grumble at him to leave her be. Early riser, the buxom blonde booty-licious novelist from Chicago, Skye Chamberlain, was not. “We didn’t stay up that late watching that movie.”

  Nada.

  All right, then. You asked for it.

  Rex Martinez thrust open the bedroom door, zeroed in on the rumpled sheets, the empty bed, the curtains fluttering at the wide open window and heard footsteps crunching on gravel.

  He cursed.

  She was gone? Again?

  Shit! He had never met such an infuriating woman!

  “You will not do this!” he vowed and spun for the back door, the barn and the sure knowledge that she’d tippy-toed out to the pool. That Olympic-sized extravaganza was the only outdoorsy distraction to his confinement with this tempting piece of gorgeous Anglo ass. Best-selling crime writer Chamberlain and he had been holed up in this hideaway near Big Bend for long enough to make his cock a permanently stiff medical marvel. So now, horny and hot and irritated with the fact that she denied their mutual attraction with her every look and breath, he would eat his Ranger badge if Skye Chamberlain was going to defy his orders to never leave the house!

  Like a jackrabbit, he jumped the porch steps and sprang headlong for the barn and beyond it, the pool. In a dozen swift strides, he reached his quarry. He grabbed one slim wrist and hooked an arm around her naked middle. Bikini underwear and all, she fell backward against him. The feel of her bare skin shot electric testosterone through him. It was the same jolt he’d endured ever since the judge had ordered her into his care two long hot months ago.

  “Come on, Miss Congeniality.” She kicked back at him and he barked, “You are not going swimming. I told you before, woman!”

  She tried to buck backward in his arms. “Stop it! Rex! You’re hurting me!”

  “Nothing like I’m going to, if you don’t stop disobeying me!”

  Slowly but surely, he hauled her around to face him. “What the hell is the matter with you? We’re safe here. You go out and you never know if one of those roaches’ll spot you!”

  “We are thirty miles from the nearest town.”

  “Thirty-two point eight miles from the town where you saw them kill
those three women and thirty-one point one miles from the courthouse where you will testify against them. Not so far, lady, that they can’t be all around here.”

  “Oh, you are infuriating. They are not out here.” She pointed to the copse of live oaks and tall cacti that surrounded the house they occupied. “They certainly do not get up at seven in the morning to spy on the puta reporter they hate.” She began to walk back inside. “If they are even aware I’m close.”

  “You can bet that they’re looking everywhere within a hundred mile radius.” He caught her arm. “That’s why you are here with me and under my care.”

  “Don’t you get it? We’ve tried this for two months now, Ranger Martinez, sir. I am not safe here with you!” She struggled with him, her ponytail springing free of its band and that cloud of Marilyn Monroe platinum spilled around her slim shoulders.

  “Don’t trust me?” Hell. What would it take to strip these two scraps of fabric off her? A flick of two fingers? No. A court order.

  She pushed at his chest to no avail. “I cannot stay in that house with you cooped up like a prisoner!”

  “Yeah?” He checked her expression. Pouting. Demanding. “How do you think I feel?”

  She snorted, pushing herself flush to his poor melting body. That surprised him. Paralyzed him. She was usually so ladylike, so dainty in how she spoke and how she moved, that this made him blink. Then she rubbed up against him, her plump breasts a fiery brand to his shirt as she cupped a hand over the bulge in his jeans and purred, “Martinez, I know how you feel.”

  He clamped a hand on her ass, holding her against him. Like he’d get any relief this way! “No, you don’t.”

  “Like now? How could I miss it? With your eyes all over me for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I cannot pee but what you know it!” She wrenched away from him and stalked her way down the garden path back to the house. “Helluva way to hide out.”

  He was hot on her classy little tail, grabbing her arm. “It’s the only way I know to keep track of you.”

  “You could at least let me take a swim!” She threw out a hand toward the pool. “That house was built for midgets. And the air conditioner peters out at eighty.”

  He chuckled. “What can you expect? It was made when Ike was in the White House.”

  She stomped her foot. “Stop being funny!”

  “I’ll try mean.” He bared his teeth.

  “Do that.” She stifled a smile, but whirled away to hide it.

  He was right on her heels. “Where you’re concerned, I’m dedicated.”

  She spun and they collided. “To suffocating me, yeah.”

  “To keeping you breathing! No swimming. No walks. No swinging on the front porch.”

  She huffed, turned and kept on walking. “One Ranger. One tight-ass.”

  “Yeah. You got a problem with that, tough shit, lady.”

  She tramped up the steps of the porch, the cheeks of her ass jiggling beneath the skimpy black panties. He forgot to breathe and halted in his tracks, loving the view.

  She yanked open the screen door, tossing back at him. “I like rules. Law and order. Nothing wrong with them. What I’m tired of is being tied down with you.”

  He blinked. She was bored with him? What a crock. “Thought you liked how I beat you at cards. Chess, too. Every time,” he rubbed it in.

  She spun, hands on her hips. “Why would I?”

  He rocked back on his heels and surveyed every inch of the curvy woman in front of him. “Because you have never had a man beat you at anything.”

  She stiffened.

  “Do I detect a little shiver going up that pretty spine of yours?”

  “You do not.”

  “You bet I do. I see who you are, lady. Had you pegged after about a week together. Can’t hide from me.”

  She began to turn away.

  But she froze when he said, “Never had a man you wanted to dominate you, did you?”

  He watched her profile closely. The up-turned nose lifted a tad higher. Her trim chin rose a bit more firmly. So. Can’t find the gumption to deny it?

  “I didn’t think so, darlin’. It’s okay. You don’t have to admit I’m right. It’s enough that we both know I am.”

  “You can’t say that,” she whispered as she stared at him.

  The warning in her words only made him madder. He took the steps in two lunges, hauled her up against him and gave in to the red-hot torment of her sassy lips. His mouth crashed down on hers. And damn. She was warm, sweet and Christ, was she willing. Her mouth opened, her tongue came out to dance with his, and he got such a juicy piece of her he drew away, stunned.

  She stared at him. Her purple eyes growing wider, her mouth parting, swollen.

  He wrapped her close, the touch of her sleek supple flesh drilling into his fogged mind and shaking loose one promise. “After this trial is done, you can bet your next paycheck I’m coming after you.”

  She pushed away, their rough play dislodging her thin bra, the material hooking on the peaks of her nipples and slipping slowly to the floor. Her heavy breasts bounced as she stepped away.

  He watched them. His cock twitched. Tightened.

  She shivered as his eyes narrowed.

  His tongue slid along his lower lip. “You better go put some clothes on those pretty things fast.”

  She pivoted and made for her bedroom and shut the door with a click.

  He thrust one hand out against the doorjamb, his eyes closing while he massaged his heavy, unhappy cock.

  What was wrong with her?

  Cabin fever was one thing.

  Horny is another, Skye.

  She fell backward against her bedroom door and rubbed her palms over her aching breasts. God, how she wanted his hands on her. His mouth. His cock. His everything.

  Two months in the wilderness with the Lone Ranger has you stupid for him, Skye. So what if he’s built like the Starship Enterprise? All right, all right. So he’s droll as John Wayne. Handsome as the devil. Wise as an owl. And endowed like a rock-hard porn star.

  Ohhh, stop this! He’s only interested in you because you’re his only choice. Bet the girls all drool over him at the local dancehall. Texas Ranger, white hat, big gun, big hands and huge balls.

  Get over it, Chamberlain!

  All you want is a good roll in the hay.

  But that wasn’t all she wanted. Not from Rex Martinez. No sir. From him, she wanted more than one great fuck. She wanted all day, all night. His honed muscles plastered to her body. His thick, rasping bass voice rubbing her senses, letting her feel him deep inside her pussy, all the way up in her cunt, his thighs rocking against hers.

  She pushed away from the door, strode to her closet and stepped out of her panties. She wanted to be surrounded by strength like his.

  Mountainous strength.

  Indomitable.

  Like she’d never known.

  Like she’d only read about in novels.

  A man so centered, so realistic, so sure of himself and what he was meant to do in the world, that she was in awe of him.

  How she even got a few words out to talk with him had begun to astonish her. And she was never enthralled by anyone. Years in the savage realities of the ER. She knew it. So did her editor, and it was how she was able to go into some rough crime areas and do research. How she kept her cool and her stomach from up-chucking. How she made her living. Even this gig that had gotten her in so much trouble with this Gonzaga clan, had not frightened her. At first.

  “Blonde, built and begging for it,” was how her editor billed her desire to come to South Texas and see if she could meet any of the Gonzagas. “You have to be safe out there, Skye. No series is worth getting killed for. And you know this familia is one of the most cruel along the Rio Grande. I do not want you kidnapped or maimed. Get another plot. I can do without this story.”

  “But you can’t, Chuck,” she’d told her boss at her publishing house. “Journalists aren’t going in anymore. Hell, even if a newspape
r has the research staff, they think twice about sending them in to Mexico. But these Gonzaga boys are women’s worst nightmare. Importing sex slaves from Asia into Mexico and across the border into Texas. Kidnapping women from the border towns and forcing them into prostitution in bordellos in Chihuahua and Monterrey. Last year, they kidnapped two female sheriffs. One they killed, but the other one we think they have kept alive in Nuevo Laredo. This makes the basis for a great novel.”

  He had agreed to the angle, but hated the fact she would be such a blonde Anglo target. But she had lucked out. Renting a house across the American-Mexican border in Nuevo Laredo, she had attracted the amorous attentions of the man whom many suspected of being the familia’s second-in-command. He was hot for her and ready to make her his own special puta, too, when she’d heard him admit to killing three women. Then the next night, she’d witnessed his buddy kill three females. Skye had been able to feed information to the Texas Rangers about that and a raid the Gonzagas planned on an all-girl’s high school in Texas. They had caught the murderer and then put the second-in-command behind bars. Skye was their star witness against both men.

  The Gonzagas put a price on her head.

  “And here I am,” she whispered, looked back at the bedroom door and decided what to do with the rest of what the odds said would be a shorter life than she predicted. “Here I am, Rex Martinez, wanting you.”

  She strode, naked as a bird, to the door. She opened it and there he was. Her Ranger, still standing in the same spot she’d left him.

  Surprised, he moved only his brows as his baby-blue eyes flamed at the sight of her nude body.

  “You know what I think, Ranger?”

  “Got me, honey.” Truth was, his gaze said he got her lips, and her nipples and her bellybutton and her blonde-haired pussy.

  “I think the trial might be too long, and your paycheck too small.”