Julie Leto - Something Wicked

Praise for Julie Leto’s STRIPPED, winner of the Romantic Times BOOKreviews Best Blaze of 2007 Award

“Fresh characters, perfect details, passionate relationships, humor and sizzling sex all make this novel a winner.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews

“I really loved the chemistry between the leads. I loved the magic, the secondary characters and the action, and I cannot wait for the next one!”

—New York Times bestselling author Gena Showalter

“This was my first read by Julie Leto, and it won’t be my last. It satisfied on every level: good romance, good sex, good action.”

— The Good, The Bad and The Unread

“Sexy, sassy, and fun, Stripped by Julie Leto is one book designed to make your summer exciting and a whole lot hotter.”

— Cataromance

Dear Reader,

Anyone who’s been reading Harlequin Blaze for a while has probably noticed that the heroines in our line are…um, different from ordinary women. Okay, they’re different from me. But I believe a Blaze heroine is the woman I want to be, even when my career, my family, or my day-to-day responsibilities keep me from grabbing life by the lapels and saying, “I’ve done it your way long enough…it’s my turn now.”

I’ve built a career writing heroines who are one step to the left (or right!) of center and the delicious, confident, sexy men who love them. But once in a while a woman drifts into my imagination who is kind of ordinary…in an off-beat way. Such a woman is Josie Vargas, who first appeared as a secondary character in my August 2007 Blaze novel, Stripped. Josie proved to be a free-spirited anchor for Rick Fernandez, a once steady, by-the-book cop whose life has turned upside down. Now he’s hunting down the evilest of the evil, and without Josie’s intervention (and more important, her love) he might just go down a path from which there is no return.

Something Wicked is the final story in my St. Lyon witches series, which started with the novella “Under His Spell” in the Witchy Business anthology, then continued with Stripped. There are also appearances by characters featured in my novella “Driven to Distraction” from the A Fare To Remember collection. I love revisiting characters, and I hope you enjoy it, as well!

Happy reading,

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author Julie Leto has a reputation for writing ultrasexy, edgy stories, despite (or maybe because of) her previous profession as a Catholic high school teacher. Born and raised in sunny Florida, Julie lives in Tampa with her husband, daughter, a very spoiled dachshund and the world’s largest guinea pig. For more information on Julie’s books, check out www.julieleto.com or visit and chat with her at the popular blog site www.plotmonkeys.com.

This one is for my sister-in-law, Jeannette Leto, because even though she’s never really gotten a character named after her, my heroines keep staying in “her” apartment. One of these days, this jet-setter is going to show up in a book and I promise, “you” will be just as fictionally fabulous as you are for real.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

RICK PUNCHED Josie Vargas’s number into his cell phone. He’d only dialed the seven digits twice since he’d met her, but the sequence flowed from his memory, with a bit of a melody behind it, as if he’d memorized it with the music like the alphabet song. Their first real date, just last night, had been incredibly ordinary and ultimately fantastic. Dinner. A movie. Talking. Lots and lots of talking.

And then, the kissing.

Lots and lots of kissing.

He’d had to harness every ounce of his self-control not to try and seduce her out of her clothes the moment they’d stepped into her apartment. Not an easy task for either of them, but they’d managed to remain upright and fully dressed.

Damn it.

They weren’t teenagers. And clearly, both of them knew a good thing when they saw it. So they’d disentangled from each other with a promise to take things slowly.

Get to know each other.

Become friends first.

Good thing they lived in Chicago, where cold showers were cheap and easy to come by.

Rick hit the Talk button on his phone, then adjusted the crotch of his slacks as he walked away from the office building where he’d just engaged in an unauthorized and unwise operation with his former boss. He’d much rather think about Josie. Her silky hair. Her soulful eyes. Her curvy, sensitive breasts. Thinking about her got him hard as a rock, which made it so much easier to forget just how many rules he’d broken in the past twenty-four hours and how, in all likelihood, his career was about to nose-dive into a backed-up toilet.

Might not be so bad with Josie around. She certainly made all the other parts of his life a lot more interesting.

Rick hadn’t been the same since the moment she’d literally run into him at the precinct. She’d been searching for her best friend, Lilith St. Lyon, the department’s on-call psychic. Since Rick had been trained from birth by his Cuban-American mother and his equally old-school sisters to socialize only with women who would someday make a good wife, he might not have noticed her otherwise. Her blond, sun-streaked hair, hippy-dippy tunic, long skirt and lace-up sandals put her in the “do not touch” category. And yet, he’d been intrigued.

She broke every rule his familia had laid out.

Good, preferably Latino family?

Her last name was Vargas, so she had a Latin connection, but every member of her family came with a rap sheet.

Catholic?

Ha! Wiccan.

Loves children?

He hadn’t yet garnered her opinion on niños or niñas, but she’d hinted that her crazy childhood hadn’t left her unscarred.

Adores cooking and cleaning and tending to her man’s every need?

Again, Rick chuckled. He could certainly imagine Josie preferring to live her life barefoot, but pregnant and in the kitchen? Never in a million years.

Of course, his family wasn’t stuck entirely in the previous century. They also wanted Rick’s future wife (as any and all girlfriends were considered to be) to have an advanced degree from college so that she could, if necessary, support the family should Rick’s career in law enforcement come to a violent end. But as far as he knew, Josie had graduated exclusively from the school of hard knocks. And while her career as a shopkeeper seemed successful enough, her business selling custom aromatherapy candles and pagan paraphernalia was firmly entrenched in a coveted location on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. There would be no moving to Miami once the kidlets arrived, as was expected.