When you gamble with desire, be prepared to risk everything…
Unlike the rest of the Hell’s Eight brotherhood, Ace Parker’s home isn’t on the range. This restless cowboy craves the hustle of Simple, Texas, a lawless town where he can sate his darker appetites without guilt. At least he could, until Petunia Wayfield arrived. The prickly new teacher is insisting that Ace help her rid the town of drunkenness and card playing. For that kind of miracle, Ace demands a reward the spinster schoolmarm will surely never give.
But Petunia isn’t backing down. Not when the intense passion Ace offers shatters her to the core. As soon as she can afford a ticket to California, she’ll leave Simple behind for good. Until then, she’ll match his sensual challenge with her own, daring him to give up his fiercely guarded self-control. And then real danger claims Petunia, forcing Ace to reveal the man he really is—even if it drives her away forever….
Praise for Sarah McCarty’s men of Hell’s Eight
“McCarty is a sparse, minimalistic writer, with a great ear for dialogue. She’s a passionate observer of history, and manages to deftly and accurately weave her spicy stories through with important facts and issues of the epoch she invokes. She’s also good at capturing that intangible magnetism surrounding dangerous, rugged men…I’m hooked.”
—USATODAY.com
“If you like your historicals packed with emotion, excitement and heat, you can never go wrong with a book by Sarah McCarty.”
—Romance Junkies
“It’s so great to see that Ms. McCarty is able to truly take these eight men and give them such vastly different stories and vastly different heroines, all of whom allow us to see different aspects of what life was really like for Western Frontier women, be it good, horrific, or simply unfortunate.”
—Romance Books Forum
“Sarah McCarty’s series is an exciting blend of raw masculinity, spunky, feisty heroines and the wild living in the Old West…with spicy, hot love scenes. Ms. McCarty gave us small peeks into each member of the Hell’s Eight and I’m looking forward to reading the other men’s stories.”
—Erotica Romance Writers
“What really sets McCarty’s stories apart from simple erotica is the complexity of her characters and conflicts…definitely spicy, but a great love story, too.”
—RT Book Reviews
“Readers who enjoy erotic romance but haven’t found an author who can combine it with a historical setting may discover a new auto-buy author…I have.”
—All About Romance
Ace’s Wild
Sarah McCarty
For Mark. A man who I trust to lead me in the darkness, to hold me in the light, and who never makes me regret taking that leap of faith into his arms. May you all be blessed to find someone just like him.
Contents
Simple, Texas November 1860
SHE WAS GOING to hell, for sure. Petunia Wayfield stepped off the rough board walkway into the dirt street, barely missing a pile of excrement left by some animal. Dust rose in a puff around her skirts. It’d been a long spell since the last rain. If this drought kept up another month, Christmas was going to be a dusty affair. Shielding her eyes against the late-morning sun, Petunia chided her morals. Here she was, fresh out of a sermon on the seven deadly sins, and she was about to commit two of the worst: the sins of gluttony and—she paused before stepping back up onto the opposite walk—lust. And she blamed it all on Maddie Miller’s cinnamon rolls. Because if Petunia had never smelled the delicious aroma of those baked goods wafting out from beneath the pink-and-white awning that decorated the front of Maddie’s bakery, she never would have stepped through the door the very moment that Ace Parker had stepped out. Would never have smashed her face into his chest; would never have associated the temptation of cinnamon rolls with the scent of hot, masculine man. At least that’s