Fearless and Lawless in one volume at the kindle store!

Now available in ebook format! Fearless and Lawless by Sarah Black in one volume at the Kindle store.

http://tinyurl.com/44nkbq6


Colton passed his service revolver to the security officer behind the front desk at the hospital. The guard was tall and very dark, with a full black beard and faint traces of Ethiopia in his voice. He put the revolver in the lockbox and handed Colton the receipt.

“You got some pretty nurse upstairs, right, Lieutenant? Every day at lunchtime, you get you something good to eat, my friend?”

Colton smiled at him, his jaw stiff. Every day, this same backslapping, big stud routine. “Not me, man. I’m just getting my blood pressure checked.” He slapped his hard belly. “You know you can’t be too careful with your health.”

He cut through the cafeteria, picked up a couple of salads, then walked through the indoor healing garden to the professional building. The University of Arizona hospital was a gorgeous, glass-walled sanctuary of air-conditioned quiet in the middle of Tucson’s gritty downtown. The professional building was still, the staff at lunch or behind closed office doors, with their shoes off and their ties loose.

The surgical residents had a suite of small offices behind the radiology wing. Diego’s door was closed, but the surgical nurse was behind the desk. “Hi, Lieutenant Wheeler.”

“Ma’am. Does he have a patient?”

She shook her head. “Those salads look good. He’s gonna have to eat fast, though. He’s got to be in surgery in an hour.”

Colton knocked quietly on the door, then pushed it open. Diego was sitting at his desk in a pair of green surgical scrubs, initialing a stack of lab reports. His hair was pulled back in a slick black ponytail, and there was a faint line of annoyance between strong dark eyebrows. He smiled when he saw Colton standing there, stood up and came around the desk. “Hey. I thought you couldn’t get away for lunch!”

“I just arrested the dumb fucker. He was taking up too much time. You hungry?”

“Yeah, I am.” Diego turned back to the desk, shoved the stack of papers and medical journals to the side.

Colton set the salads down on the desk and pulled another chair up. “You want blue cheese or Italian?”

“I think Italian,” Diego said, opening the plastic containers. The little chef’s salads were pretty, dark green lettuce and cherry tomatoes, ham and cheese and half a boiled egg each. Diego slipped his egg onto Colton’s salad, then poured dressing from the little plastic pouch. “What are you doing? You’re just standing there.”

Colton smiled and picked up the blue cheese. “I was just looking at you, baby. You all right? You looked like you had a headache when I came in.”

Diego shook his head. “Bad mood. I’m getting spoiled, having you around so much. I think I like your undivided attention. I’ve been acting like an asshole since you told me you couldn’t come for lunch.” He shoved a forkful of salad into his mouth. Noon, and Diego’s jaw was already dark with whiskers. Colton could see a little patch of black chest hair in the V of the scrub top. It looked like the V of dark hair below his belly.

Diego stared at Colton’s hand, suspended halfway to his mouth. Laughter lit his eyes, and his voice turned honey-sweet, melting a bit into the rhythm of Spanish, his native tongue. He leaned forward, and Colton could see himself, double reflections in Diego’s dark eyes. “You bring the handcuffs?”

Colton laughed out loud and swiped at his head. “You’re like a boner on two legs, man. I ought to tie you up and leave you for one of the nurses to find. But I don’t know if they’d let you up. One of those girls might just climb on board, take a ride on the love train, you know what I’m saying?”

Diego was shoveling salad in like he might not get another chance to eat this week. Or like he wanted to finish quick, have time for some... Colton put the plastic lid back down on his salad. He could eat later. Diego probably wouldn’t have another free minute until tonight. “You got duty tonight, baby?” Colton stood up and started unbuckling the black leather belt from around his waist.

Diego stared up at him. “Nope. You?”

“Nope.”

Diego was eating faster. “Hold on, Colton. I’m coming, just wait for me. Wait...”

Colton shook his head, reached behind him, and locked the office door. “You just finish your lunch without choking, and I’ll take care of you.” He unbuttoned his uniform shirt, draped it over the back of the chair, unsnapped the waistband of his uniform trousers. He reached for Diego’s hair, pulled the ponytail loose and slid his fingers through it until the tumbled, silky black mass of hair fell forward to his shoulders, across his face.

Diego’s eyes were as black as his hair, dark like the night sky, huge now as he stared up at Colton. He stood up, tossed the plastic container of salad toward the trash.


Excerpt from Lawless:

It was the time of the siesta, and the air was so still and quiet that Colton turned off the little fan that sat next to the bed and listened. “Did you hear that?”

Diego was splayed out across their bed, his head pressed into the white pillowcase. Colton saw a long, curved line of sweat down his backbone, so he turned the fan on again and angled it to blow over his skin.

“Thanks, that feels good. Did I hear what?”

“Nothing. That’s the thing. No chickens, no babies, no horses, no little boys sneaking around.”

“It’s nothing sinister, Colton. It’s too hot. Everybody’s asleep.”

Colton nudged him with his toes. “You’ve been sleeping for an hour. Maybe longer.”

“That last duty kicked my butt. Thirty-six hours, Jesus. They had the patients backed up in the ER, just waiting for an OR to get free. I was second to one of the ortho guys. That ortho surgery is hard, jerking bones around. I don’t think I’m cut out for it.”

Diego had wanted to be a heart surgeon, but a vicious hate crime the year before had left him with only one eye. Now he believed his depth perception wasn’t good enough, and he was working as a general surgeon. Colton had felt a quiet undercurrent of sadness in him this last year, like he’d lost some of the joy in his work, in being a doctor. But Diego said he was fine and would change the subject when Colton brought it up.

“It’s too quiet around here,” Colton said again. Since the three Juans, little boys who lived on the ranch and were all named Juan, had peeked into the window when he was giving Diego a blow job, Colton had been a little skittish about fooling around during siesta.

The thick adobe walls of the small casitas kept the temperature down some, but it was still almost ninety degrees in their bedroom. “It’s too hot to fool around.” He didn’t sound very sure.

Colton’s ranch was on the border with Mexico, in the badlands between Nogales and Sasabe. They had four generations living there, most of them washed up in that dry land by strange tides of fate, and with nowhere else to go. Maria Goretti took care of the ranch. She was the niece of the original Maria who had taken care of the ranch; had a reputation for plucking girls in trouble out of the reach of the men who were abusing them, letting them stay at Colton’s ranch to have their babies in peace. Some of them never left again.

Nobody in the borderlands would mess with Lt. Colton Wheeler or his ranch or the people who lived under his protection. He was a lawman, the old-fashioned kind who knew which rules could bend and which rules could break and which butts needed to be kicked. He was a legend, and so was the old man who lived out there with them, Lt. Manuel Del Rio, a tough retired Mexican cop and Diego’s great-uncle. Between Manuel and Colton, one in Mexico and one in America, they had protected this rough scrubby desert land for nearly seventy years. They loved it with a passion that was hard to understand, and they loved Diego, too.

Colton wondered sometimes if Diego wouldn’t rather be living some cool urban dream in Paris or Amsterdam instead of kicking around the Sonoran desert. Well, he’d had the choice, and he chose Colton and the borderlands, his family and his people and a medical practice that would never make him rich.

“I don’t hear any little boys,” Diego said, rolling over and letting the fan blow on his chest.

Colton reached for the sweaty black hair that covered Diego’s chest in wiry curls, traced it down to his belly, then down into the thick, curly nest between his legs. His dark cock was stirring, and he stretched his arms over his head, stretched and yawned and reached for the cup of green tea he’d left on the bedside table. “So, Colton. Let’s fool around.”

Colton sat up and looked at the little windows. They were covered with white linen curtains that fluttered a bit when the fan blew in their direction.

Diego leaned up on an elbow and looked at him. “So what if the three Juans look in the window?”

“It was my ass they were staring at,” Colton reminded him. “And laughing at, the little jerks.”

“You’re just so pretty. They wanted to see what a natural blond looks like.”

Diego put the cup of tea back on the table. He was propped up on his side, and Colton looked at the long curvy length of him, ivory skin and curly black hair, long, slender legs with runner’s thighs. He was wiggling his toes, a sure sign he was getting turned on, and another sure sign was rising, heavy and dark between his legs.