Lights, Camera, Cupid!

By Amy Lane, Anne Tenino, SE Jakes and Z.A. Maxfield

Cupid is visiting Bluewater Bay, and he’s leaving chaos in his wake.

Nothing’s been the same in this sleepy little logging town since Hollywood came to shoot the hit TV show Wolf’s Landing—especially Valentine’s Day.

Of course, it’s not just TV stars celebrating the day. In Anne Tenino’s Helping Hand, an aspiring artist eager to escape Bluewater Bay decides he just might have a reason to stay: lust-inspiring logger Gabriel Savage. In SE Jakes’s No Easy Way, a local teacher reconnects with an old lover working security on the film set. And in Amy Lane’s Nascha, a Bluewater Bay elder recalls how his own unconventional family used to celebrate the holiday, while in Z.A. Maxfield’s I’ll Be There, actor Spencer Kepler and his boyfriend Nash Holly brave a blizzard and a fan convention to spend their first February the 14th together.

Real life may be nothing like TV, but when Cupid comes to town, there’s plenty of romance and drama to go around.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Riptide Publishing
• Release date: Feb 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781626492615

Amy Lane

Award winning author Amy Lane lives in a crumbling crapmansion with a couple of teenagers, a passel of furbabies, and a bemused spouse. She has too damned much yarn, a penchant for action-adventure movies, and a need to know that somewhere in all the pain is a story of Wuv, Twu Wuv, which she continues to believe in to this day! She writes contemporary romance, paranormal romance, urban fantasy, and romantic suspense, teaches the occasional writing class, and likes to pretend her very simple life is as exciting as the lives of the people who live in her head. She’ll also tell you that sacrifices, large and small, are worth the urge to write. Website: www.greenshill.com Blog: www.writerslane.blogspot.com Email: [e-mail] Facebook: www.facebook.com/amy.lane.167 Twitter: @amymaclane

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Riptide Publishing

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Burnsville, NC 28714

www.riptidepublishing.com

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All person(s) depicted on the cover are model(s) used for illustrative purposes only.

Lights, Camera, Cupid!

Copyright © 2015 by SE Jakes, Amy Lane, Z.A. Maxfield, and Anne Tenino

Smashwords edition

Cover art: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com/design.htm

Editors: Sarah Frantz Lyons, Carole-Ann Galloway

Layout: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com/design.htm

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ISBN: 978-1-62649-261-5

First edition

February, 2015

Also available in paperback:

ISBN: 978-1-62649-262-2

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Cupid is visiting Bluewater Bay, and he’s leaving chaos in his wake.

Nothing’s been the same in this sleepy little logging town since Hollywood came to shoot the hit TV show Wolf’s Landing—especially Valentine’s Day.

Of course, it’s not just TV stars celebrating the day. In Anne Tenino’s Helping Hand, an aspiring artist eager to escape Bluewater Bay decides he just might have a reason to stay: lust-inspiring logger Gabriel Savage. In SE Jakes’s No Easy Way, a local teacher reconnects with an old lover working security on the film set. And in Amy Lane’s Nascha, a Bluewater Bay elder recalls how his own unconventional family used to celebrate the holiday, while in Z.A. Maxfield’s I’ll Be There, actor Spencer Kepler and his boyfriend Nash Holly brave a blizzard and a fan convention to spend their first February the 14th together.

Real life may be nothing like TV, but when Cupid comes to town, there’s plenty of romance and drama to go around.

About Lights, Camera, Cupid!

Nascha, by Amy Lane

No Easy Way, by SE Jakes

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Helping Hand, by Anne Tenino

I’ll Be There, by Z.A. Maxfield

Dear Reader

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Nascha was seventy-one the night he threw water in his grandnephew’s face, reducing Cal to a crying heap on the ground, shaking with fever, being slowly crushed to death with the caring of two people who would never get better.

He wasn’t sure why his age occurred to him just then—or the fact that it was Valentine’s Day and he’d hoped that Cal would be doing something joyful instead of being sick and exhausted. It wasn’t like Nascha could remember any other goddamned thing ever. And Jesus, wasn’t that a kick in the ’nads. He’d been a man who prided himself on his memory, who’d made a living gambling, for the sake of earth and sky! Oh, Bluejay, the fucking trickster, was having himself a big old fucking party at Nascha’s expense, that was for damned sure.

Nascha pulled himself out of his bitterness and helped Cal onto the couch, toweled his face off, and covered him with a blanket. Cal cried himself weakly into a restless sleep as dawn peered through the window, and Nascha brushed his hair back from his forehead. He was getting lines there, and crow’s-feet from scowling. He was barely twenty-four.

Beth! Beth, do something about your son. He’s working too hard!

But Beth had been dead for six years, and she’d left Cal and Keir to him, and damn him, his mind was failing him, and it wasn’t fucking fair. He’d given up everything for his sister’s daughter, and she’d taken him into her home so he’d never have to sacrifice for her again.

And now, when he wanted to give her son his life, he could barely remember his own name, and Cal was . . .

Cal whimpered, and his forehead was hot. Right now, Cal was sick, and tomorrow he’d be tired and forced to care for his brother who wasn’t pleasant.

Cal had been such a laughing child. A laughing teenager too. But the man who snapped orders to Nascha and Keir like they were wayward children didn’t look like he could laugh anymore.

I wish you could laugh, Nascha said out loud, his own voice startling him in the decaying house. He glanced around self-consciously at the warping floors, the unpainted walls, the dusty, bent blinds—all that was left of his niece’s dream. God, he’d spent a lot of time in places like this. Had worked his ass off for Beth to have an education so she wouldn’t have to live like this if she didn’t want to.

And now her son’s soul was dying in a rotting house, and he had no hope in his heart.

The bitchy thing about old age was that it didn’t know when to give irony a fucking rest.

After four years of Alzheimer’s, Nascha was used to drifting back and forth through time. He was lucky he could remember his own name, much less Cal’s, and he was well aware he had the bone-stripping magic of Exelon to thank for what he could remember. But this trip to the past wasn’t a wander. This time, his mind made a difficult and deliberate shift to a room like this, with threadbare carpet and dirty walls.

And a big bed with used sheets that were about to get used again . . .

Nascha? Kitten purred, pulling the sheet up past her brown nipples out of provocation, not modesty. Honey, aren’t you coming to bed?

Nascha looked up at her and smiled rakishly. God, she was sexy. An avalanche of black hair barely covered the clay-colored skin of her breasts. Add to that full lips and wide brown eyes and a hot-blooded desire . . .

Oh, she was absolutely shameless.

Both of them, Kitten and her husband, Rawlins Wolf Eyes, were everything a man like Nascha could want in the sexually liberated seventies.

Especially in a place like Pecker Tree, a small town just outside of the Salish reservation near Seattle. Because honestly? There wasn’t a goddamned thing to do there except take white people’s money and get laid.

Counting my winnings, Nascha said easily. He and Rawlins had been inside her that morning, and she hadn’t bathed. The rankness of musk in a lover—male or female—smelling like Nascha’s cum just turned his key like nothing else.

"Don’t you mean our winnings?" Kitten said archly, and Nascha grinned.

Yeah, honey—you did real good tonight.

Rawlins played the patsy, Kitten played distraction, and Nascha, who was handsome but not too handsome and smart but not obviously smart, quietly and without fuss stripped and gutted anyone foolish enough to challenge them to a game of poker.

They weren’t stupid about it—they didn’t win too big the first time they played someone. Nascha would let a few games go, do the foolish thing, or send a hand to Rawlins. But that was just to get the mark back on the second night. And, if they were good, on the third.

This had been the third night, and Nascha, watching the three tourists who thought they were finally going to come back and win big from the dumb injuns at Patsy’s Roadhouse, had reached his limit. Two of them kept fondling Kitten’s ass, and she’d wiggled it and played along, but the long-suffering looks she’d sent Nascha and Raw had told them both she was about done with rich guys from LA who thought they knew everything.

Nascha had winked at Raw then—their signal—and the two of them had proceeded to bleed the three tourists dry.

They’d gotten mad—of course they had—but Raw was built like a dump truck. He’d thrown two of them out and wrestled the third to the hood of his fancy Camaro, and Nascha had brought Kitten back to the apartment the three of them kept above Patsy’s.

That was the first order of business—not bleed the mark, not make sure they didn’t know they’d been fleeced. Protect Kitten.

The second order of business was not to call Raw fat. For one thing, he wasn’t. He was just solid as a boulder. For another, it hurt his feelings and had done so since he and Nascha were kids. People underestimated Rawlins a lot—but Nascha never had. Rawlins had a sharp, methodical brain, and he knew that if he made his jaw slack and his eyes dull, marks wouldn’t see him at all.

The third order of business was not to let on how smart Nascha was, ever.

Nascha was genius smart—his first school test scores had said so. And then the white people had come to the reservation and tried to take him away to special schools. Nascha had needed to run away from those schools a lot, because his mother drank too much, and his little sister, Rabbit, wouldn’t have had anything to eat if he hadn’t been there.

Of course, right when Nascha had felt like Rabbit could maybe get by without him—and Jesus, she’d been loud enough about telling him that—she’d gotten pregnant at sixteen so she could get welfare and live in her own tiny RV on the res, buy her own alcohol, and neglect her own daughter.

And Nascha was once again tied to the res to look after a little girl he’d had nothing to do with fathering.

After six years of watching Rabbit fall apart and Beth hold it together even in diapers, if it hadn’t been for Rawlins and Kitten, he might have grabbed Beth and taken off anyway. Crushing poverty and shitty health care did not inspire a man to hope, no matter how good he was at poker.

But Rawlins and Kitten were there, and right now, Kitten was looking at him hungrily, moving her hand under the blanket between her spread thighs.

Don’t be too long, she urged, and Nascha placed the three even piles on the kitchen table that took up a quarter of the one-room apartment, then stood up, stripping his baseball shirt, Levis, and boots just as quickly as he possibly could.

Oh, she tasted good.

Apple whiskey flavored her tongue, and her skin was salty with the sweat of the night. She laughed as he licked her neck, then kissed down her body, pulling the sheet away.

Lush, with a belly and hips that spilled over his hands and breasts that filled his mouth—oh, how he loved that in a woman. The roughness of her nipple and areole filled his mouth and he suckled gently, then with more vigor as she knotted her fingers in his hair and held him tight, gasping under his onslaught.

He released her nipple and kissed down her body, pulling in mouthfuls of tummy and releasing them just to hear her giggle. She spread her thighs wider for him, and he could smell the tang of her, of him and Rawlins coating her, and he hungered for it.

He teased the seam of her labia delicately until she squirmed, enjoying his teasing as she enjoyed everything else.

C’mon, Nascha, she begged. Don’t leave a girl hanging.

He looked up her body, at her own hands kneading her breasts and tweaking her nipples, and grinned as he parted her with his thumbs. Deliberately, maintaining eye contact, he dug his tongue in and lapped slowly up, using the flat of his tongue on her clitoris because he knew she liked it hard.

The low moan started deep inside her curvy body, and it was all the reward he needed. He went back to work, losing himself in her center because sex really was that sweet.

Neither of them looked up when the door opened and closed, and Nascha was three-fingers deep inside her, enjoying her cries of pleasure, when he felt big hands part his ass cheeks unceremoniously.

Rawlins dragged his tongue between Nascha’s crease with the same vigor Nascha was using on Kitten, and Nascha moaned in spite of himself.

Oh, that felt so good.

Rawlins was a direct lover, and he spat twice before replacing his tongue with his thumb. Nascha squirmed and tried to keep his attention on Kitten, but the burn in his asshole was hard to ignore.

Aw, honey, you’re distracting him, Kitten laughed.

Raw’s response was to dig his thumb in deeper and watch Nascha writhe, impaled, as he tried to lick Kitten into screaming orgasm. Kitten’s burbles of laughter turned back into gasps of pleasure as Nascha concentrated, and Raw’s comforting heat draped over Nascha’s back.

You’re so serious, Raw chided, long black hair falling forward, cascading over Nascha’s bare shoulder like silk. Like we’d kick you out of bed if she didn’t come. For emphasis, Raw shoved his thumb in to the hilt, and Nascha let his head loll on Kitten’s thigh.

Oh God . . .

Not God, little man, Raw laughed throatily. Kitten, pass me the lube.

She reached without looking to the drawer next to the bed, and they fumbled over Nascha’s head for a minute. Nascha’s body was on fire, in agony, that thumb crammed inside him taking his attention as his balls swelled, his cock bobbed and ached, his skin tingled all over . . .

"Oh holy fuck!"

That quickly, Raw had pulled his thumb out and replaced it with his cock. Nascha buried his face against Kitten’s thigh, suckling a mouthful of flesh in reaction. She gasped and laughed and wiggled away.

Pull him up, Raw, she ordered, delighted. I’ll get the other end.

Raw’s meaty arm forced Nascha up against the big guy’s chest, and he let his head roll back against Raw’s shoulder.

Raw kissed his ear, his neck, nuzzled his temple. That’s right, Nascha, he crooned. You take care of us at the table; we’ll take care of you on the bed. Isn’t that right, Kitten?

Oh yeah, she murmured, and her mouth, her blazing, rough-tongued mouth, began working his cock.

Nascha disappeared, his consciousness blending, becoming a part of his lovers, becoming light and sound, the smell of the trees outside, the feel of rain, the brightness behind his eyes. His body was doing the things a body did during sex—clenching, trembling, heaving, sweating—but when orgasm charged through him in a wash of electricity and pain-edged pleasure, it wasn’t just his body that was warm, safe, and locked in harbor.

It was his heart, his soul, bonded with the two people who loved him as he loved them.

He came to himself with Kitten licking the last of the cum from his cock, and Raw pulling out of his ass, leaving a trail of his own cum in his wake. Raw turned his head then and took Nascha’s mouth in a kiss—warm, possessive, kind.

Nascha was settled in between them as Raw switched off the light. Kitten curled into him, and Raw threw an arm over the both of them, and all was right with the world.

Nascha shivered with the memory as morning threatened the darkness in the little house he’d shared with Beth and her husband and sons. It was so easy to leave this house by the ocean and go back to those times in crappy roadhouse apartments. He had so many good memories of the three of them: him, Kitten, and Raw. He couldn’t remember which specific night preceded the heavy knock on the apartment door—the knock that changed his life. It could have been that one, or it could have been another night when the three of them had twined and pleasured and come. Raw and Kitten had been his

Reviews for Lights, Camera, Cupid!

[tldegray-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Let's discuss how I adore the Bluewater Bay series. It's m/m romance set in a small Pacific Northwest town where a genre TV show based on a book series films. The characters are a great mix of cast, crew, and townie (including a few loggers). This is a town I'd like to visit, and it's definitely a TV show I'd watch and series I would read. The books are on the whole funny and sweet, with realistic problems and solutions.

Lights, Camera, Cupid (Bluewater Bay #6) is a St. Valentine's Day anthology of stories about characters both old and new. We revisit Carter & Levi and Spencer & Nash, plus meet some of Bluewater Bay's current residents. Very sweet and funny, as always.


[I received this book free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.]