Seducing Austin

By J.F. Lowe

Does what she hides make her innocent? What she reveals makes her guilty? When the truth lies somewhere in between, it can get us both killed.

As a Texas ranger, it is my obligation to uphold the law, but the day I laid eyes on her, I knew that she'd be trouble. Savin' her awakened somethin' inside that I haven't felt since the

• Language: English
• Publisher: Seduction and Sin Publishing
• Release date: Jun 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9780648753735

J.F. Lowe

USA Today bestselling author, J.F. Lowe is renowned for writing spine-tingling thrillers, heart-Wickedly Innocent military romances with laugh-out-loud dialogue, alpha males, and absolutely sizzling sex scenes.

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Seducing Austin

J.F. Lowe

Published by Seduction and Sin Publishing 

Copyright © 2021 Seduction and Sin Publishing

Edited by Alison Jacobs

EBook ISBN: 978-0-6487537-3-5

ISBN: 978-0-6451020-0-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or establishments is solely coincidental.

Acknowledgements

I want to say a special thanks to the people who make this series work. As my husband and I traveled around the United States of America in 2019, we were lucky enough to go to some amazing places and meet some fabulous people. These places and people were my inspiration. Seducing Austin, while it’s the first book in the Seduction In The City series, it was one of the last locations we stayed on the trip. We lived in Austin for approximately three months deciding if we would make it our home. Unfortunately, a family emergency happed at home in Australia, and we had no choice but to leave. Sadly within a month of leaving, the world had been hit with covid-19 preventing our return for almost two years.

Seducing Austin was picked to start this series because it was of a couple we met on the first weekend we arrived in Austin at a local saloon called the Little Longhorn Saloon. As we watched in amazement of game called chicken shit bingo, the couple offered to show us the real Austin, and we spent the better part of the three months discovering all things Austin old and new, including a little visit with an Austin icon Willie Nelson. As you will see, this is what inspired this book and the coming together of the entire series of Seduction In The City.

A little about Austin. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, Austin is the capital of the state of Texas, the Lone Star State. The city dates back to the 1830s, when the first Anglo-American settlers arrived in the area, then part of Mexico. In 1837, settlers founded the village of Waterloo on the banks of the Colorado River, the first permanent settlement in the area. By 1839, Waterloo would adopt the name Austin and the frontier town would become the capital of the Republic of Texas. The city is named for Stephen F. Austin, the Father of Texas.

It is home to numerous lakes, rivers, and waterways, including Lady Bird Lake and Lake Travis on the Colorado River, Barton Springs, McKinney Falls, and Lake Walter E. Long.

Residents of Austin are known as Austinites. They include a diverse mix of government employees, college students, musicians, high-tech workers, digital marketers, and blue-collar workers. The city’s official slogan promotes Austin as The Live Music Capital of the World, a reference to the city’s many musicians and live music venues, as well as the long-running PBS TV concert series Austin City Limits. The city also adopted Silicon Hills as a nickname in the 1990s due to a rapid influx of technology and development companies. In recent years, some Austinites have adopted the unofficial slogan Keep Austin Weird, which refers to the desire to protect small, unique, and local businesses from being overrun by large corporations.

However, over recent years several Fortune 500 companies have headquarters or regional offices in Austin, including 3M, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Amazon, Apple, Facebook (Meta), Google, IBM, Intel, NXP semiconductors, Oracle, Tesla, Texas Instruments, and Whole Foods Market. Dell’s worldwide headquarters is located in the nearby suburb of Round Rock.

About this Book

Does what she hides make her innocent? What she reveals makes her guilty? When the truth lies somewhere in between, it can get us both killed.

As a Texas ranger, it is my obligation to uphold the law, but the day I laid eyes on her, I knew that she’d be trouble. Savin’ her awakened somethin’ inside that I haven’t felt since the day my wife died. I want to love again, but this frustrating, gorgeous woman is hidin’ something.

\This novel contains situations that some readers may find objectionable. Not intended for those under the age of 18.*

Prologue

Most people don’t appreciate freedom, not really. Many have never known what it’s like to have your freedom taken away from you, and many others have long since forgotten what it’s like to be completely beholden to another. Not Gabrielle though. There was no possible way that Gabrielle could forget what it was like to be free, not when she spent every waking moment in servitude to a cold bastard of a man.

It was one of the rare occasions when he let her out of the cell he normally kept her in. There were various reasons that he let her out from time to time, and none were good. This time, it was to keep up appearances and reassure people that he most definitely wasn’t keeping her chained to a bed so that he could abuse her at will.

Specifically, he was sending her into the grocery store with a shopping list. She was to diligently purchase every item listed, naturally under threat of punishment if she failed, even if the fault wasn’t her own at all. Once done, she was to head outside and wait in a very specific corner of the parking lot for him to pick her up.

Logically, one might assume that this posed an opportunity for Gabrielle to cry out for help, to slip away while in the store, to inform a cashier or good samaritan of her plight.

But logic had no place in the tangled schemes of Sean. As Gabrielle went down aisle after aisle, mechanically adding the nonperishables that her paranoid captor lived off of, she was being watched every step of the way. The hairs on the back of her neck rose every time she rounded a corner and found the horrifying sight of Sean staring back at her, always lurking, always watching.

Every time, she held her breath and prayed that he would vanish, but every time she turned a corner, she was greeted by his hateful eyes, shaggy mess of hair, and faded truck’s hat. Over six feet tall and just as fit as he’d been the day that he’d left the army, Sean was wearing his typical wife beater and flannel, the sleeves rolled up to show tattoos that haunted Gabrielle’s dreams.

What had happened to the caring, loving fiancé that had gone to Afghanistan? Who was this shell of a man who had come back, full of nothing but urges to destroy and dominate?

Gabrielle slowly let out a rattling breath, careful not to let him hear, for he would surely beat her a little extra tonight if he did. It was twisted and perverse, but in a way, she almost preferred the times when he woke up screaming and beat her because he thought she was an insurgent coming to murder him. At least on those evenings, she could lie to herself and say that he just needed help to get better. But on all the other nights, when he was calm and controlled and sober and beat her anyway…

But today, for some reason, Gabrielle found that she could look him in the eye. She had no idea what was different, but as she stood in that grocery store aisle, she watched her abuser, her tormentor, her captor, and felt nothing at all.

"Is there anything else, sir?" she asked, her voice deliberately low.

As expected, Sean’s face twisted into a spiteful expression of pure malice. You don’t get to talk to me, he hissed. "Not here, not anywhere! You don’t know me, you don’t get to know me. Out here, we’re strangers, and back home, you’re the worthless whore that I screw whenever I feel like it. Is that getting through your thick fucking skull, slut?"

Gabrielle nodded, more out of reflex than anything conscious. He had well and truly trained her to be obedient.

No, I don’t think you are getting it. He stepped closer, towering over her, forcing her to look up into his eyes. It was a game he liked to play at every opportunity, another chance to bend her to his will. "If you ever approach me in public again, if you ever say a single word to me, I will end you. They will never find your body, but if they do, rest assured that not a single person will give a shit or miss you. Nobody cares about sluts that open their legs just to get a hit. Do you understand me?"

There were a thousand things that Gabrielle could have said to that, a million things she wanted to scream in his face, but she ultimately settled on the most miserable and unpleasant of them all.

Yes, sir.

The following minutes passed in a fog. Gabrielle checked out, and after the fact, she couldn’t even remember if the cashier had said a single thing to her. All her attention had been on Sean as he stood by the entrance, watching and waiting.

A part of her mind was contemplating the ways that he’d punish her tonight. Perhaps he would tighten the restraints to the point where they bit into her skin. It wouldn’t be the first time, and any marks could easily be covered with long sleeves.

But the rest of her thoughts were consumed by an unfamiliar haze. There was a sense of finality to it, a feeling that she knew something was going to happen, and that she had already come to terms with it without even knowing what it was.

Was this what it was like to be at peace with your own death? That was what she pondered as they rode in his rusty pickup back to the house. Had she subconsciously seen her own death coming, and then had her entire self already decided that it might as well go with the flow?

Well fuck that.

The moment they reached the house, Sean wrenched her out of her seat, pulling her by the hair across the console and throwing her down onto the ground. Though her body was stunned, breathless, and too shocked by the sudden violence to react, her mind was another matter entirely. No matter how many times it happened, her body never got used to the random punishments and abuse, but after the first few dozen times, her psyche had figured out that the best course of action was to focus on something else, anything else. As long as she just didn’t think about what was happening, then it wouldn’t hurt. Or at least it wouldn’t hurt as much.

Through the front door, as always. He dragged her limp, unresisting body to the top of the stairs that led down to the basement, then gave her a good, hard shove. She tumbled down like a bag of meat, her mind dully wondering if anything had broken this time. It felt like it, but then again, it always felt like that, regardless of whether he’d shattered her arm again or just left her covered in horrific bruises.