AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Normally she didn’t have a problem with making a decision and sticking to it. But lately ping-pong matches had nothing on the wishy-washy flip-flopping she was doing in her own damn mind.
“Or maybe you want me to think you are so I lose interest.”
“Are you admitting you have interest?” she tossed back, wondering where Kim had disappeared to. Her friend had run to the store around the block. What could possibly be taking so long?
He leaned forward and snagged her free hand, dragging it to…what? He wasn’t really going to put her hand on his—
Yep, he was. Oh my God. She had her hand on her best friend’s brother’s sizable erection, and her fingers were all but twitching with the urge to wrap around him.
No. Absolutely not. Heat radiated through thin cotton, an undeniable temptation. If anything, he grew even harder.
“Take a breath,” he advised, his lopsided grin again overtaking his face. “For such a woman of the world, a man’s hard cock shouldn’t be all that big of a deal.”
One night in Bangkok changes all the rules.
Black Knight, White Queen
© 2013 Jackie Ashenden
Professional chess player Aleksandr Shastin never lets emotions rule his life, or his game. Not even the unexpected death of his mentor shakes his icy control—at least that’s what he thinks. Until he meets a woman in a Bangkok rooftop bar, a woman whose raw sexuality and emotional honesty find every invisible crack…and pries them wide open.
Graphic artist Izzy Cornwall fled to Thailand to escape suffocating grief and guilt after her sister’s suicide. As she locks gazes with Aleks, their instant attraction sets her on fire. And the way he looks at her makes her feel what she hasn’t felt in months: that she actually exists.
In the heat of a Bangkok rainstorm, their chemistry steams up what was supposed to be one night of pain-numbing passion. Neither expected that a single encounter would change all the rules, making Aleks the novice, and Izzy the grandmaster. But if Izzy wants his heart, she’ll have to show him that in order to win, sometimes you have to lose.
Warning: Contains one hot, controlling Russian chess master, a heroine who’s more than capable of taking him on in a game of strip chess, and a checkmate to make Kasparov proud.
Enjoy the following excerpt for Black Knight, White Queen:
The man, an Australian tourist, moved his bishop and looked smug. “Check.”
Aleks wasn’t bothered. He’d set up the trap and the Australian had fallen right into it. Reaching out, he moved his knight. “Checkmate.”
The Australian frowned. “Shit. No way.”
Aleks said nothing. There wasn’t anything to say. The evidence was right there on the chessboard.
The guy cursed a bit in the way Australians often did, then reached over the board to shake hands, gracious in defeat.
A few people had gathered around them while they’d been playing, the magnificent view of Bangkok from the hotel’s famous outdoor rooftop bar apparently far less interesting than a chess game. As the Australian vacated his seat, a couple of them looked as though they wanted to play too, but Aleks shook his head and began packing up his board. Playing tourists wasn’t much of a challenge and it did nothing for his game. He’d be playing real opponents in the tournament in a couple of days anyway.
As the crowd drifted away, he gestured to the barman again, and the man poured him another shot of vodka. Good Russian vodka. Viktor’s favourite.
He downed it, but the alcohol did nothing to ease the tightness in his chest at the thought of the old man.
Grief. It’s called grief.
Was it? It had been so long since he’d felt anything he couldn’t be sure. Then again, perhaps it was. Grief was, after all, the usual emotion after someone had died.
Aleks gripped the shot glass then pushed it over the bar for another hit, puzzled with himself.
In order to feel grief one had to care. And Aleks wasn’t sure that he did. After all, Viktor had been just another old man playing chess in Moscow’s Timiryazevsky Park. A man who’d been kind to him on a few occasions when Aleks had been young, but no one that special.
The barman filled up the glass again, and Aleks drank it down, rubbing his chest. But even the third vodka didn’t make a difference to the odd tight feeling. He may as well have been drinking water.
The wind picked up, replacing the scent of exotic flowers, sewage and the hot oil smell of a big city with the heavy, thick scent of rain. Distant thunder rumbled, a warning that perhaps an open-air rooftop bar in the middle of tropical Bangkok was not the best place to be in the rainy season.
Bar staff began to usher people through the tables of the outdoor restaurant situated near the bar, toward the steep, beautifully lit glass staircase that led up from the terrace to the domed elevator entrance.
