Heart of Darkness - A Standalone Bad Boy Romance Novel Read online

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  HEART OF DARKNESS

  - Within Every Man, Beats a Bleeding Heart

  A Bad Boy Romance Novel

  By: Gabi Moore

  Table of Contents

  Prologue – Zack

  Chapter 1 – Madeleine

  Chapter 2 – Zack

  Chapter 3 – Madeleine

  Chapter 4 – Zack

  Chapter 5 – Madeleine

  Chapter 6 – Zack

  Chapter 7 – Madeleine

  Chapter 8 – Zack

  Chapter 9 – Madeleine

  Chapter 10 – Zack

  Chapter 11 – Madeleine

  Chapter 12 – Zack

  Chapter 13 – Madeleine

  Chapter 14 – Zack

  Chapter 15 – Madeleine

  Chapter 16 – Zack

  Chapter 17 – Madeleine

  Chapter 18 – Zack

  Chapter 19 – Madeleine

  Chapter 20 – Zack

  Chapter 21 – Madeleine

  Chapter 22 – Zack

  ADDITIONAL BOOKS IN THIS ANTHOLOGY:

  FANTASY/SCI-FI:

  Manipulator Of Elements – A Young Adult Urban Fantasy

  Wicked Legacy – An Urban Fantasy

  Chosen – A Sci-Fi

  STEAMY CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE:

  DAMAGED

  LUST

  DOING IT FASTER

  Other STEAMY books by Gabi Moore:

  BREAK

  TEMPTATION

  ROUGH

  BARE HANDS

  ABSOLUTION

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  HEART OF DARKNESS

  A Bad Boy Romance Novel

  By Gabi Moore

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  Prologue - Zack

  It had all started out as a joke.

  The base commanders were still stalling on setting up proper bank accounts for the guys, still struggling to keep morale up when the soldiers were flat broke, still trying to pass off those piece of shit ready meals as all part of the master plan.

  We had been fired on twice already, and sustained losses from carelessness alone. The casual killing and destruction had already gone sour inside me, the images curdling into a strange cartoon in my mind, replaying again and again in lurid, mocking detail, and I had already gone numb, so numb that when she raised an eyebrow at me and suggested we do it, it was all just a joke at first.

  A dare.

  I knew what people said about her. I knew what soldiers like her did on down time to keep those last shreds of morale going. But you have to understand – with that much darkness every single day, even the most twisted things can start to look like light.

  Like relief.

  Even though it was all highly illegal, she said, “I can show you a place in town where we can get some real goddamn food,” and when she said it, she got this hollow look in her eyes and her lower lip opened just a little. Just the tiniest bit.

  Fuck, I didn’t need to be asked twice. So we snuck off base that night into that piece of shit town and giggled like kids playing hooky. She handed a few crumpled notes to a withered looking street food vendor, and he looked at our uniforms as though it cost him every last stitch of willpower not to spit in the little parcel of chicken and fries he handed over to us.

  We mock-saluted, she muttered the little Arabic she knew and we ran off giggling.

  In the alley it was dark enough that I couldn’t make out much of her face except the shine in her eyes as she blinked. But I could tell the exact moment it all stopped being a joke.

  She cleared her throat, then crumpled the oily wrapper and tossed it aside. When I kissed her, her lips tasted like fear and loneliness and chicken grease. A BBC guy had come a month ago to do a documentary on the secret sex lives of Iraqi soldiers, but his piece of shit project never took off. He had probably fucked her too. Probably right here.

  “Wow, you must have been hungry,” she said, voice silky in the darkness.

  “It’s been a while,” I said and pulled her in close. She laughed a little. They’re all still women, under the fatigues and blunt manners and rough talk. And under mine, I was still a man.

  “I can see that,” she said and ground her hips against my cock.

  I buried my fist in the hair at the nape of her neck and yanked her head up towards me, kissing her hard. I was protein deprived, horny as hell, and feeling a little… nihilistic. Home was a universe away. Honor an abstract concept. Death was closer to me now, always skulking on the edges.

  I undid her belt buckle and roughly pulled her trousers down, revealing two hot, tight thighs underneath and a neatly trimmed triangle of fur.

  “You don’t have to be gentle, Zack… I’m a big girl, I can take it. Just go for it.”

  Still standing, she spread her legs a little and kissed me again.

  Somewhere at the edge of my consciousness, a dark, heavy haze began to descend on me. It filled me up like a dust storm fills ups the sky and blurs the horizon. The haze blanked out my mind. Tightened my fists. Throbbed into my dick.

  I grasped her waist and spun her around, flinging her against the rough brick wall so her pert ass was facing me. She arched her back as I groped urgent handfuls of her ass, her thighs, her hips, kissing savagely along her back, then unzipping myself.

  “You’re going to regret saying that,” I breathed, and pulled out an angry cock. All at once I rammed into her little slit, and she bit down on her own hand to muffle her cry.

  The haze thickened over me. I slammed my eyes shut and saw only death. Torn bodies. Twisted faces. Dribbles of blood in sand. I groaned and opened my eyes again, hoping the nightmare outside was better than the one inside.

  Her body writhed and curled around mine like a snake. I whimpered and let go, the haze blurring over her now, erasing the soft features of her face, of her shape. In the haze, she became a piece of meat. And so did I. And if our bodies were just going to be blasted to chunks in this godforsaken place then we might as well fuck for all we’re worth while we could, right?

  “Zack, hey, easy tiger.”

  Even though she was a tough woman who had made a career of pretending never to be scared, I heard the flit of fear in her voice all the same.

  My hips were now unleashed, something wild and unnatural uncoiling inside me, curling pump after pump of rage into her, so hard that her own hips were knocking into the wall in front of us, her belt buckle clinking and scratching against the rough brickwork.

  “Zack, you’re hurting me,” she mumbled.

  I could scarcely hear her.

  My world was sinking underneath a pall of black smoke. It sunk like fog into my tired, fearful body. Seeped into my hands as they held her down, pinning her there for the brutality I poured into her, stroke after stroke after stroke. I didn’t stop. I could smell her fear. Her dark excitement. And I kept going.

  She thrust her hips back against mine and groaned in the same pleasure-pain that had taken me over. I felt her greedy little body
pucker and convulse around me as she tried to steady herself. Even in a woman like this, an animal like me could find deep pockets of depravity. I fucked her harder, lifting her up onto her toes. Just raw meat. Just bodies. Fucking. The haze curled round us both, and closed over like an envelope.

  When I came to, we were still in that grimy alleyway. She was hastily buckling herself back up again and re-braiding her hair, a strange look on her pretty face. I tried to give her the shameful roll of notes I had prepared in my pocket, but she waved them away and frowned.

  “Save it for therapy, buddy,” she said, tucking her shirt back in. “You need it.”

  Chapter One - Madeleine

  It had all started out as a joke.

  I never really meant for it to actually go anywhere, but what can I say… I have a habit of getting myself into trouble and not having the balls to get myself out again.

  “So what do you think?” I said. “It’s not just me, right? He is cute isn’t he?”

  My long-time friend and occasional co-conspirator gave me an amused look and then examined the photo on my laptop screen one more time.

  “Well?” I pushed. “For a prisoner, I mean. He looks sweet, right?”

  She laughed and shook her head.

  “I don’t know, Maddy. He looks a little… prisoner-ish.” She scrolled down to read the rest of the bio.

  “You think so?”

  “Well, he’s wearing a jail uniform and everything.”

  “It’s not a jail, it’s a correctional facility,” I said and grabbed the laptop from her again.

  She crunched her eyebrows at me and took a sip of her tea.

  I loved Annie because she was everything I wasn’t: tough, perfectly put-together and the kind of woman that grown men fawn over because she ‘gives as good as she gets’. She called a spade a spade and even though I’d done my best to convince her that this was an ‘inmate social network’, she could see right through it for what it was.

  A dating site for prisoners.

  “Anyway, stop being so judgy, it’s mostly just a joke anyway. I was just curious,” I said and pulled up the modest photo album belonging to inmate 487 290, Zack J. Hunter.

  Annie took another sip of her tea as she had a good look at the handful of photos he had uploaded. Most of them were on the small side, and it was hard to see him clearly. But my fingers stopped swiping when we landed on a bigger, clearer picture.

  Zack J. Hunter, standing outdoors somewhere in a bright, overexposed afternoon, his khaki prison uniform unbuttoned and rolled down to his hips to reveal a seriously built chest and abs that looked chiseled from bronze.

  “Ah… now I see what’s going on here,” she laughed, and zoomed in on the photo. “That man is just a little more than ‘cute’, Maddy.”

  He had wild coils of wheat colored hair that were frozen mid-flutter around his smiling face, and though he was shielding his eyes from the sun, they still peered out from the laptop screen at us, sparkling with a kind of mischief that almost made me feel that he magically knew Annie and I were ogling him just at that moment.

  “I know, right? What was his crime, being too hot?”

  It was a joke I had already decided to make, well before Annie came over for her weekly tea and to visit Jasper. But I was glad to see that I was right. The guy was gorgeous, and it wasn’t just me making poor life decisions again.

  “Well, what is he actually in prison for?” she asked.

  Jasper’s pink triangle nose was always the first part of him that you saw, and when I saw it poking out from under the table, I was grateful for the distraction and reached down to pick him up.

  “Hey, little one, do you want to see the hot guy as well? What do you think?” I held him up in front of the screen, his little kitten legs dangling limply. Jasper was unamused and wriggled out of my hands, then saw his chance to explore the table top and hobbled over it, poking his nose here and there.

  “Well?”

  “Well what?” I said.

  “Is he like… a murderer or something?”

  I sighed and flopped back in my seat.

  It was, admittedly, the single question that had been gnawing at me ever since I had sent that first ‘just curious’ email. He had responded immediately, and the opportunity to ask him never seemed to arrive.

  What exactly had he done?

  I had scanned the same set of pictures over and over again, looking for clues. Were those the veined forearms of a burglar? Or the well-formed mouth and chin of a drug dealer? When I looked at his broad hands, his square jaw, his strong thick neck, my irresistible thought was to wonder: which precise part of him was responsible for breaking the law? His hands? His eyes? Something else…? He certainly didn’t look like the tax-evasion type.

  In any case, it wasn’t a thought that I followed too far. I didn’t like where it went. Besides, none of this was very serious. I was newly single, he was stuck in jail, and I needed the company. Well, human company, that is. It was a Sunday morning and my animal-tally was currently sitting at eighteen dogs, five cats (including pink-nosed, black-furred Jasper) thirteen birds, a pair of chickens, a rabbit, a fancy rat and an aging ferret who had terminal stomach cancer.

  “I’m sure it’s none of my business, anyway” I said.

  “What? You’re not curious? What if he’s a rapist or something?”

  I slammed the laptop closed.

  “There’s no way he’s a rapist, for god’s sake.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well, he just, he would never do that…”

  Annie gave me a long, hard look. I guess it did sound lame, especially coming from someone with my track record.

  “Maddy, how long have you been emailing this guy anyway?” she asked slowly.

  I shrugged and nervously tried to find a way to sip my tea when it was quite obviously finished.

  “Maybe a few months? I don’t know, not that long…”

  “A few months? OK whoa.”

  “Oh god, you’re being judgy again, Annie” I said, and looked around for Jasper under my chair.

  “I’m not. I’m just curious, what happens now? When does he get out?”

  Annie had a way of asking, all at once, the very same irritating questions I had taken at least six months patiently avoiding asking myself.

  “I have no idea.”

  “I don’t get it. Would you meet him if he was released?”

  “I don’t know, Annie. Jeez, so many questions. Anyway, maybe I like the idea that he’s stuck in there and that’s the end of it.”

  She nodded and smiled knowingly.

  It was true. When you thought about it, a prisoner was almost the ideal boyfriend. He’d never hit you up for money, and couldn’t really cheat. Plus, you’d never need a restraining order, so there was that.

  “When I said you should start dating again with a new guy, maybe I should have been more specific,” she laughed.

  We sat in silence for a while, wondering if the day needed another cup of tea, or whether it was time to call our visit complete.

  “I did mean to ask you about something, though,” I said changing the topic. “Jasper’s food is nearly done.”

  Just because I was a vet, and just because I had a home full of abandoned animals that would rival Noah’s ark, didn’t mean I had the cash to pay for every little abandoned kitten that blew my way.

  Annie was an old, old friend, and was going through a long-winded divorce. She would be moving out of her temporary flat in a little while, she promised me, and she’d take Jasper back, eventually. But I was beginning to feel taken advantage of.

  “Oh shit, is it really? Are you sure? He eats so little. Anyway, don’t worry about it. I’ll be in the new place next week for sure and then I’ll just take him off your hands, so there’s no point getting new food till then, right?”

  I gave her a thin smile. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that his food had actually been finished for a week already and that I was fe
eding him out of pocket from the other cats’ food. I certainly didn’t have the heart to tell her that she had already promised me she would take him back two weeks ago, and that he wasn’t even meant to be staying with me in the first place. But what was I going to do, let Jasper go to a high-kill shelter just because Annie and her husband couldn’t sort their lives out and rehome him?

  “Hey, do you want some more tea?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  No matter how many hurt animals you save, you’d better believe that there are millions more waiting to take its place. Later, as I saw her out, she hugged me and kissed me and laughed, saying, “try not to take in any more strays while I’m gone, OK Maddy?” and I felt a hot little flush of irritation.

  I smiled and waved her off. One day I would quit being such a pushover and put my foot down.

  Not today, though.

  In any case, maybe I didn’t care if he was a murderer.

  Chapter Two – Zack

  Zack: You should tell her the truth!!!

  I stared at the words for a while, realizing how I could have easily written them for myself.

  Maddy: I know I should :( I’m such a softie though. I guess because Jasper’s such a sweet little guy I could never say no to him, you know?

  Zack: But that doesn’t mean you can’t say no to HER

  I like instant messaging because it really isn’t instant at all. It gave me just that little bit of extra time to think. To write a response, carefully. Hell, if I had that little time lag in real life, with just an extra spilt second for me to think before I spoke… well, let’s just say I probably wouldn’t be here in a steel reinforced computer lab, supervised by four guards and using my day’s internet time to chat to a woman I met on Soulinmates.com.

  I liked the way the logo on their page had two little brackets around the “in” part of inmate, so that only the “mate” was left. That’s why I was here anyway, right? Some parts of humanity need to be sectioned off from the rest, just so everything else can make sense. And that part was me.