For Love of Passion (Stone Brothers Book 4) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Front title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Want to start at the beginning?

  Inner title

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Epilogue

  The End!

  Want more of Tanner and Helen?

  Mailing list - don't miss out!

  Other Works by Samantha Westlake

  Check out my website!

  About the Author

  Contents

  Front title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Want to start at the beginning?

  Inner title

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Epilogue

  The End!

  Want more of Tanner and Helen?

  Mailing list - don't miss out!

  Other Works by Samantha Westlake

  Check out my website!

  About the Author

  For Love of Passion

  Samantha Westlake

  Copyright 2017 Samantha Westlake

  All rights reserved.

  For Love of Passion

  Book design by Samantha Westlake

  Cover Image Copyright 2017

  Used under a Creative Commons Attribution License:

  http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0

  Adult content warning: All characters are legal and fully consenting adults and are not blood relations.

  Dedication

  For my fuzzy goofball, whose caterwauling interrupts many a typical writing session.

  Did you read the first three books of the Stone series?

  While this book is a standalone romance, several of the supporting characters already met their loves in previous novels! They went through quite the trials to earn that love, and you can read all about it.

  If you'd like to read their stories, be sure to check out the earlier books of the Stone romance series by clicking the links below:

  For Love of Valor

  For Love of Honor

  For Love of Freedom

  For Love of Passion

  Chapter One

  TANNER

  *

  From the moment that I opened my eyes to soft whiteness, I knew that I was in deep trouble.

  I was in a bed. That by itself wasn't unusual – I generally wake up in a bed, most mornings, unless drinking the night before got especially crazy – but this wasn't my bed. I knew that immediately from the softness of the mattress underneath me, from the feel of the sheets. This bed felt like pure luxury distilled. These sheets, easily well over a thousand-thread count, probably cost more by themselves than my entire net worth.

  Literally. That's how broke I am.

  Now that's a depressing thought to have before even opening my eyes.

  After taking a few more seconds to collect myself, fighting the urge to just drift back off to sleep in this wonderfully soft bed, I opened my eyes and sat up. Yes, this was definitely a problem. The bed stood in a huge, opulent bedroom that I didn't recognize. Everything in the bedroom looked custom-made, expensive, and way beyond anything I'd ever be able to afford to own in my life.

  And not a single thing looked familiar.

  I shifted uncomfortably in the bed, and then, delayed by a second, had another horrifying realization. I grabbed the softer-than-silk covers and lifted them up to confirm this next appalling fact.

  Yup. Beneath the covers, I didn't have a single stitch of clothing on my body.

  Shit. I reached back behind me, just in case I was missing a kidney as well. I didn't feel a scar, but this didn't much assuage my rising panic.

  I leaned forward to look around – and immediately dropped back down into the bed, wincing as a hand shot up to press against one throbbing temple. Oh, my head! Even the muted light, cutting in through tilted blinds on a huge bay window, seemed to stab directly through my eyes into my skull. Either last night had been a hell of a great party, or someone decided to drug me.

  Last night... there had been an event, hadn't there? Richard's Poverty Ball, the well-intentioned fundraiser with the stupid name. I closed my eyes, both to block out the painful light and to prod my reticent memory. I'd been forced into helping with that big party, serving as one of the organizers, but then I'd stepped outside for some fresh air, and...

  ...and that was it. My memory turned into a hole-filled sponge from that moment onward. I remembered flashes of homeless people moving on a dance floor in the Stone mansion's massive ballroom, remembered a fuzzily beautiful woman's face smiling at me, remembered tiny little broken, nonsensical fragments of conversation. But there had been something else, something big, that I could only sense by feeling around the edges of my half-destroyed, hazy memories...

  Finally, like a patient locksmith, I managed to prod my brain in the right area, and another part clicked into place. I shot bolt upright in bed for the second time, despite the corresponding lance of hangover pain piercing through my brain.

  The idea. I'd had an idea, a flash of pure inspiration for my novel! There had been a woman, beautiful like a Greek muse, who had sorrow in her eyes and would be a perfect main character! She'd accomplished it all, but her success at the proto-classical American life wasn't enough to fill her inner melancholy, to conquer her deepest ennui...

  Like a drowning man holding on to a thrown life preserver, I clung to that thought. It was golden, ideal. I couldn't forget it for a second. I needed to capture it – this was the flash of insight that I'd needed for months, whose lack had left my great American novel floundering! I spun around in bed, searching for my phone, for a piece of paper and a pen, even a permanent marker – anything so that I could capture this ephemeral idea before it escaped my cranium!

  I thrashed my way across the massive sea of the bed. It seemed to extend on forever, as if someone had put a block of mattresses together to create a super-bed. I finally reached a shore and wrapped the sheet around my waist. My eyes scurried across the floor, searching for an article of clothing that might conceivably belong t
o me.

  There! I spotted a pair of pants that looked familiarly worn down and tattered. I took a step away from the bed, moving towards the pants, and then froze.

  Just beyond the pants was a foot.

  The foot was pale-skinned, almost white. It was naked, and attached to a leg. My eyes slowly rose, following that slender leg up.

  The leg connected to a similarly pale torso. A skimpy little lace bit of naughtiness formed a brief bridge across the pale skin, separating thigh from stomach. I felt vaguely like there should be another little bit of laciness up higher, but my eyes found nothing. They focused briefly on a pair of small, high breasts, pale pink nipples still contrasting against the underlying whiteness, before scrambling up the slope of shoulders to find a face.

  There was a woman standing in the entrance to the bedroom, next to my abandoned pants on the floor. She wore nothing but a pair of black lace panties, held a cup of steaming coffee in her hands (I could smell it from across the huge bedroom), and gazed steadily back at me through a pair of eyes so dark that they were nearly black. Midnight hair cascaded down from her head, forming an inky waterfall over her back.

  "Hello," she said softly to me, and another part of my memories of last night clicked into place.

  I looked at her face, frantically punching at my brain. "Helen," I said through lips that felt thick, a tongue that seemed two sizes too big for my mouth.

  She nodded. "Good morning, Tanner."

  She knew my name. I didn't remember anything else about her except her name, Helen-

  -our bodies moving together in the darkness beneath the covers of the bed, her hands sliding over me, her mouth warm and pliant as I took it with my own, our bodies coming together to generate our own warmth against the coolness of the covers, losing myself in her as pleasure rushed towards the breaking point-

  Oh shit.

  "You look like last night caught up with you," Helen said, advancing across the expanse of her bedroom with small, mincing steps. She glanced down at her nearly entirely naked body, and the faintest bit of pink crept up into her pale cheeks. She set the cup of coffee down on an end table (I tried to resist the urge to check out her ass and completely failed – wow, that was nice), then lifted a bathrobe up from where it lay on the ground. She wrapped it around her, and I swallowed a brief bloom of disappointment at losing sight of those small but perfectly round little breasts. She bent down and picked up my pants, handing them over to me.

  "Yeah," I said, still trying to piece together the bits of memory. I'd been at the Poverty Ball, and now I was waking up in the bedroom of a strange woman, one that I'd apparently slept with last night. The dots didn't seem too hard to connect, although I didn't know how I might have managed to move from A to B.

  Trying to buy time, I pulled on the pants that she handed me. My phone, thankfully, was in my pocket. I greedily pulled it out so that I could type out my story idea – and then paused as I realized that I was completely ignoring Helen. "Sorry, I just need to get my idea down," I said.

  She sat down lightly on the bed beside me. I didn't even feel her weight disturb the mattress. "Didn't you write it down last night?"

  I was discovering the same thing. There in my notes, with quite a few misspellings but still comprehensible, was my idea in all its glory! I must have written it last night at some point, when it first occurred to me.

  "Thanks," I said, turning and looking over at her. Another spike of pain went through my head, and I fought down a sudden twist in my stomach. "Sorry, but I had a lot to drink last night. If I was a boor to you, at all rude, let me apologize."

  She smiled. The smile transformed her face, I thought distantly in the back of my head. Without the smile, she looked serious and gloomy, but the flash of teeth brightened up her entire face, made her look ten years younger. I guessed that she might be in her late twenties or early thirties, although only the faintest little crinkles around her eyes gave away any indication of age.

  "You don't need to apologize," she said softly, the wattage of that smile warming me. "You weren't rude at all. Quite the opposite, in fact."

  Well, that made sense. Usually, if I was rude to a woman, I didn't end up waking up in her bedroom the next morning. And if I'd offended her, she wouldn't have come prancing in, all half-naked and sensual. Although generally, I wasn't doing much waking up in strange bedrooms at all, or even seeing the insides of them. This was breaking a pretty significant dry spell.

  "Well, I'm sorry nonetheless," I still said, acting on the general basis that I'd never made a situation worse by apologizing too much. "Listen, do you think that you could refresh my memory a little bit? I've still got some blank spots." Aside from the book idea, which burned like a beacon inside my head, I couldn't remember much at all. "I hate to say it, but I don't even remember your last name."

  At that, Helen's eyes rose a bit. "Really? You really must have had more to drink than I did," she said.

  I winced inside my head. If she was surprised that I didn't remember her last name, it probably meant that she was someone important. Of course, my friend slash employer, the billionaire Richard Stone, had invited just about every important, famous, wealthy person in the city to this Poverty Ball. Everyone who had more money than they knew what to do with could be a potential donor, but the long guest list didn't stop each guest from convincing himself or herself that he or she was the most important person in attendance.

  Helen glanced away from me. "O'Callahan," she said, almost too softly for me to catch the words.

  "Sorry?" There I went, apologizing again.

  "Helen O'Callahan," she repeated, and a lightbulb clicked on in my head as I recognized the name.

  An instant later, the full impact of that name hit me, and I was suddenly grateful that I was still sitting down on the side of the bed. Otherwise, I probably would have staggered, maybe dropped heavily into the nearest chair as my face went white with shock.

  I'd heard that name, from Richard, from his younger brother Sebastian, from others that I couldn't name now. Helen O'Callahan was, without a doubt, the most infamous woman in the region.

  Of course, she was better known by the nickname she'd acquired: the Black Widow.

  Now, looking at Helen as the realization of her true identity dawned over me like gathering clouds just before a lightning strike, the nickname seemed fitting. Her inky black hair and dark eyes contrasted sharply against the paleness of her skin, making her look almost like Morticia from the Addams Family, or a soothsayer from some horror film. I didn't know all the rumors about her, but I'd heard enough.

  Holy shit. I'd just woken up in the bed of the Black Widow, after taking her home from a high society charity party. And although I was still a bit hazy on some of the details, it was abundantly clear that we'd known each other in a carnal fashion.

  I'd slept with the Black Widow. And given what happened to the male spider of the variety that gave the woman her nickname, I didn't have much hope for my own future right now.

  Somehow, Helen hadn't noticed my momentary freezing, my face going slack with shock as I realized who she was. She had instead reached for her cup of coffee, lifting it carefully to her lips.

  "Well, I should probably get going," I stammered out. I stood up and looked around the room for my shirt, although I wouldn't be ashamed of going out topless if necessary. I did sit-ups when my well of creative writing energy ran dry, which had been happening more and more often as of late. I had a six-pack that would make Superman feel jealous. "Gotta get back to writing, now that I've had this great idea."

  The excuse seemed to work. "Julius has your shirt," Helen said, smiling at me. "I had him re-sew the buttons that we tore last night. I'm sorry for being so... forward."

  "No, it was great," I said automatically as my brain buzzed. Wow. Sex so good that it led to ripping clothes off each other? Maybe there was a reason why those male spiders kept walking into the female's grasp, even knowing what fate they'd face. "Thanks."

 
Helen stood up, taking a step towards me. I tried not to flinch away. She wasn't going to lash out and kill me right here! At least, I was pretty sure of that fact. Sixty percent sure.

  "No," she said softly, and those dark eyes of hers locked onto mine, held them with the pure magnetic strength of her personality. "Thank you. Last night was..." she paused, her lips quirking ever so slightly up in the faintest of smiles. "...was a good thing for me."

  I made my escape, my heart thumping in my chest. I didn't see this Julius character outside the bedroom, but I did find my shirt hanging on a banister at the top of a massive wooden staircase leading down to the main level. Helen O'Callahan lived in a mansion, it seemed – but I noticed little else as I fled.

  Once I made it outside and headed back to Richard Stone's mansion, the place that I called home for the moment, I finally managed to start breathing again.

  In bed with the Black Widow! What the hell happened to me last night?

  Chapter Two

  TANNER

  *

  One month earlier...

  "Sit-ups? Again? Don't your abs hurt?"

  I paused in my exertions, looking up at the tall, powerfully distinguished man who'd just entered the sitting room. From where I lay on my back, my knees folded and my arms tucked behind my head, he looked even taller than normal. He crossed his arms and looked down at me, his expression somewhere between annoyance and amusement.

  "Yeah, they do," I admitted, freeing one hand from behind my head so that I could poke at the overworked muscles in question. "But this is what I do when I can't come up with any ideas for writing!"

  "Just sit-ups, over and over?"

  "Sometimes I throw in some push-ups, mix things up," I sighed. My biceps bulged almost as much as my six-pack.

  "And that works out for you?"

  Still frowning down at me, Richard walked over to take a seat on one of the leather couches. When I'd first moved into the Stone family mansion, most of the furniture had been older, more elegant but much less comfortable pieces that were clearly chosen more for their appearance than for their comfort.