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  You rock!

  BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE

  Copyright © 2020 by Jennie Kew

  Published by Wooden Key Press

  Edited by Hot Tree Editing

  Cover design by Wooden Key Press

  www.jenniekew.com

  What readers are saying about Jennie’s books

  Revenge and Redemption – Sexy Scribbles Award 2018 Contemporary Romance – Finalist

  Third Time Lucky – Stiletto Award 2019 Erotic/BDSM Romance – Finalist

  Third Time Lucky – Passionate Plume Award 2019 BDSM Romance – Finalist

  “Be prepared to be taken along on a wonderful, sexy, heartwarming, sometimes tear inducing, slightly kinky joy ride!”

  Review for Third Time Lucky

  “The story is heartwarming and empowering. The plot is gripping and keeps you turning pages. Definitely one click worthy.”

  Review for Third Time Lucky

  “This novel was so romantic! I'm in love, love, love with Rafe! I will read this book again it was so good!”

  Review for This Time Around

  “The characters will pull on your heart strings and leave you breathless.”

  Review for Revenge and Redemption

  “…enough steam to have you needing a cold shower…”

  Review for Dirty

  Between A Rock and A Hard Place

  All day I’ve watched Chloe trudge boxes from the truck to the house, moving her entire life one cubic foot at a time.

  I don’t know how many years I’ve waited for her to return home. How long has it been since she discovered her imaginary friend wasn’t imaginary, since she blabbed about it to her parents who promptly shipped her off to boarding school, then sold the house and moved far, far away?

  Admittedly, the way Chloe found out I was real could have gone better. I hadn’t meant to startle her, and I certainly hadn’t meant for her to fall off the damn roof, but she’d tried to kiss me! And call me old fashioned but a girl’s first kiss should be with a boy her own age, not an ancient lump of rock like me.

  Although, as I watch the seductive sway of her hips as she carries a chair up the front steps and into the house, I know I wouldn’t mind if she kissed me now. Little Chloe isn’t so little anymore. Only a full-grown woman walks with that much swagger, and I wonder with a smile if she’s still as gloriously weird as she was as a child.

  You see, that’s how Chloe and I became friends all those years ago. Imaginary friends, but still. Children her own age thought her peculiar. And sure, I could see why they’d think that. Collecting animal skulls and sleeping with jars full of spiders beside the bed is not exactly usual behaviour for a child, especially a young lady, but Chloe never cared what anyone else thought and did it anyway. Just like she defied her parents and climbed up to the roof at every available chance to sit at my side and chatter away about the people buried in the graveyard behind her house, to wonder at the lives they must have led.

  Not that she knew I was listening, not really.

  She was a special child—one of the last of her kind, if I had to guess—for she carries the blood of the masters. The people who created me and my kind.

  Some people call us gargoyles. Some people are idiots. And before you get all pissy and say, “I know a fucking gargoyle when I see one!”

  Firstly, no, you fucking don’t.

  Secondly, a gargoyle is a glorified waterspout designed as a part of the plumbing. Don’t believe me? Fine. Take another look at my cover. Check out those abs. Go on, I’ll wait….

  Now, you tell me. Do I look like a fucking waterspout to you? No, didn’t think so.

  Shit. Where was I…?

  Oh yes, humans are stupid and I most definitely am not a gargoyle.

  I am grotesque. A guardian who protects the people and wards off evil. It’s an unusual name, I grant you, for someone as spectacular as myself, and not the name given my kind originally. When we were created, when the masters carved us from the purest marble, and gave us the faces of angels with bodies to match, we were known as something quite different. For you see, Winchester may have had his geese, but Canterbury had his wolves.

  Confused? I don’t blame you. So here’s a quick history lesson.

  It is universally acknowledged that even in the toughest of times, prostitutes make money, and in the twelfth century, the churches and the bishops knew a good thing when they saw it and taxed said prostitutes, took a little—or a large—piece of the pie for themselves. But here’s the thing, humans in the middle ages were not the cleanest of individuals, and if the missus didn’t kill you for visiting the stews, the syphilis would. And the Bishop of Winchester took his cut either way.

  That’s where Canterbury came in.

  The Archbishop was a clever man, and using his knowledge of courtier life and who was—or was not—sleeping with whom, he had the idea to keep the money coming in by tapping into a frequently overlooked and underutilised source of capital.

  High born women.

  After all, what’s good for the gander is good for the goose. But, ever aware of the scandal that would arise if the fairer half of his flock suddenly contracted an STD, or worse, fell pregnant while their husbands were otherwise occupied with one crusade or another, he gathered the best sculptors money could buy and gave them a task.

  Me and my stony brethren.

  But it didn’t matter how exquisitely carved we were, every detail of our marble bodies painstaking and precise, we were still lifeless lumps of rock. No better than statues. But it turns out all those secret societies the conspiracy nuts are always banging on about were actually a thing way back when, and not only were the masters handy with a chisel but some of them knew their way around the art of anthropomorphism too. One by one they breathed life into us, gave us emotions and thoughts and a sense of touch and before we even knew what we were, we were being instructed in the finer points of pleasuring a woman for coin.

  Yep. That’s right. I was a medieval man of the night.

  A Canterbury Wolf.

  A lady knew when she entered our den she had no chance of contracting the pox or falling with child. Safe from the fragility of male egos and assured a night of pleasure, she would be the most important woman in the world, even if only for an hour or two, depending on the size of her purse.

  And now you’re scratching your pretty little heads and thinking, “But Arnaath, how did you go from prostitute to pigeon post?”

  That’s my name, by the way. Arnaath. I’ve never liked it. Personally I think it looks like how you’d spell the sound gas makes as it escapes the confines of your arse.

  But I digress.

  The way we came by our name of grotesque was violent and painful and cruel beyond measure. I mean, really, there’s a reason most of my brethren are as anatomically correct as a Ken doll and it has nothing to do with the ravages of time. No, as educated as we were in the ways of women and their pleasure, we were innocent of the ways of men and their petty jealousies.

  They attacked us. Resentful husbands and outraged fathers smashed and hacked and shattered us. And when they had disfigured us beyond repair, they hunted down and murdered our masters, ensuring we remained broken and damaged and ugly—grotesque. Ensuring their women would never seek comfort in our arms again.

  But I was one of the lucky ones.

 
My creator survived and managed to restore me, well, most of me. Definitely all the parts that matter.

  And upon inspecting the carnage and seeing what had become of those who could not be repaired, the Archbishop offered us a different life from the one we’d known, and like so many eunuchs before them, my brothers resigned themselves to a life of duty within the church. They took to the rooves, to the steeples and belfries so they could watch over their lovers, protect them from afar.

  And perhaps take a little pleasure in haunting their attackers, reminding them they would never satisfy their wives as well as a broken-down lump of rock. And even though my creator had left me mostly whole and hearty, I joined my brethren at their post and settled into the new life the Archbishop had granted us.

  But time really is the enemy of the immortal. Endless, ceaseless, mind-numbing time. Watching each excruciating second slip into the next and the next and so on and so forth….

  God, I was bored.

  I went from pleasuring women every night, hearing them sigh and moan and cry out their ecstasy, knowing I had done my job well and would be rewarded with another willing female the next night and the next, to being the medieval equivalent of a hood ornament for the Archbishop’s pimp-mobile.

  Yeah, I lasted less than a year before I decided the church was not for me and struck out on my own.

  Now you’re wondering what the fuck this has to do with anything and how the hell I ended up on the roof of a reclaimed country church in the middle of buttfuck nowhere.

  Well, it turns out the world wasn’t ready for anthropomorphic sculptures who loved fucking, and not long after I liberated myself from the cathedral in Canterbury, I went back into hiding, tucked myself up in the back of a tithe barn where I figured the local priest wouldn’t bother to look for me. And while in hiding I kinda, maybe fell asleep for a century or two.

  Or seven.

  You know how it is when you wake up after a really weird dream and it takes you a moment to get your bearings and realise you’re still in bed…? Well, don’t fall asleep for 700 plus years and expect to wake up where you fell asleep.

  No. I woke up just as I was being offloaded from a ship. And when the crate they’d boxed me in was opened, a man who looked surprisingly like my creator told me my whoring days were done, then he brought me to this church-come-quirky-country-cottage I now sit upon and told me to behave myself. Which begs the question, what the fuck did I do when I was asleep that he felt the need to chastise me?

  “Arnaath?”

  Shit. I got so lost in my musings I didn’t hear Chloe climb up to the roof. I dare not move. Not yet. If I had a heart it would be beating its way out of my chest right about now. If I had breath it would be stuttering in and out of my lungs.

  I’m nervous, though I’m not sure how I know that. I’ve never been nervous before.

  “Arnaath, I know you can hear me,” she says, her words hesitant, like she doesn’t fully believe what she’s saying. Her voice is richer than the last time I heard it. Fuller, more grown up. More sensual. It makes me shiver and my cock starts to rise. The tentative touch of her hand sliding over my shoulder, feeling the warmth of her soft skin makes me smile.

  I forget to be nervous. “You’re not allowed up here, little mason,” I say. “What if you fall off the roof again?”

  Slowly I turn to look at her. I can’t not look at her. I’ve watched her all day, wanted to reach out and touch her all day.

  Standing with her arms akimbo and one brow cocked, she says, “I didn’t fall. You pushed me.”

  If it wasn’t for the cheeky glint in her eyes or the lifting of one corner of her mouth, I’d be insulted. “I didn’t push you, wench,” I tell her, folding my arms across my chest. “You startled me.”

  “Startled you,” she scoffs. “I kissed you.”

  “You tried.”

  “You saying there was something wrong with my kiss?”

  “Since you think I pushed you off the roof afterwards, you tell me.”

  For a brief moment, Chloe’s expression resembles that of a gasping fish, then she bursts out laughing and shakes her head. “I knew you were real. I knew it! And my parents knew too, didn’t they? Or they wouldn’t have made us move house when I’d insisted you’d saved me.”

  “They knew,” I say, confirming her suspicions. “And your father was none too happy with me after that little incident. Thankfully all he did was move away. Especially after he threatened to take a chisel to my cock and balls. Forcing me back into endless slumber was definitely the lesser of two evils.”

  Her brow pulls down and I have the urge to reach out and smooth it away. “What do you mean by ‘endless slumber’?”

  “When I am apart from my creator’s bloodline for too long, I fall into a deep sleep. I become the statue. A failsafe apparently, to keep us out of mischief. And as it was with your father, being near to you has awoken me again.”

  Chloe looks unimpressed by this knowledge and folds her arms across her ample bosom, drawing my gaze to follow the contours of her softness. “That’s the excuse you’re going with? Really? You didn’t once offer to help me unload the truck because you were what? Defrosting?” she says, but again there is a teasing lilt under the surface of her words.

  So I tease back. “You want me to pitch you off the roof again?”

  She looks pointedly at her full, lush figure, then back at me, the challenge clear in her dark blue eyes. “I’d like to see you try.”

  Arnaath’s smile is slow and disarming. My old friend is big and built for strength and his reflexes haven’t dulled with age. In the blink of an eye, he hauls me against his naked chest and squeezes the soft globes of my arse.

  When my feet leave the ground I wrap my arms around his head, inadvertently burying his face in my cleavage. “Don’t you dare!” I say. Well, squeal is a more apt description. The unnaturally high pitch of my voice makes me wince.

  “Or what?” His deep voice is muffled by my flesh and it’s a good thing he probably doesn’t need to breathe. At least, I really hope he doesn’t need to breathe because I have no intention of letting go until my feet are on solid ground again.

  “Or I’ll… um….” I’m shaking, my bravado banished in the face of my greatest fear. “Please put me down.”

  But even after I feel the roof beneath my feet, I find I am sufficiently freaked out, to the point I can’t seem to loosen my grip on Arnaath’s head, and it’s only when he pries me off him that I’m able to take a step back.

  And he immediately grabs me again. “Careful!”

  Glancing over my shoulder, I realise I was about back into the parapet that edges the flat portion of the roof. It’s not particularly tall and easy to trip over. Believe me, I know.

  A whimper escapes me and I find myself wrapped in Arnaath’s arms again. “I’ve got you, little mason. I won’t let you fall again.”

  His body is so warm, his skin so soft. But how? He’s made of stone. How the hell is any of this possible? Maybe I really am crazy. Maybe this is all just a figment of my imagination and I’m actually just a lunatic hugging an inanimate sculpture on the roof of my childhood home. But as he hugs me tighter and my breasts and belly squash against the press of his hard, muscular chest, I figure this ain’t so bad. Especially when I feel what I’m hoping is his cock dig into my thigh.

  As figments of my imagination go, this one is pretty freaking awesome.

  “You’re shaking like a leaf,” he murmurs by my ear. “May I suggest we climb down from here?”

  I don’t refuse, and allow him to lead me down the narrow staircase that heads to the back door of the cottage.

  My house is an odd one. Originally built as a church over a hundred years ago, and designed to look like a small castle, it was an interesting place to grow up, what with the backyard full of dead people and all. And yeah, before you run away thinking, “Weird-O!” let me just say that being normal isn’t something I’ve often been accused of.

  I know
I’m strange, okay?

  I am very aware of that fact.

  I was reminded of it every other day of my life growing up until finally, one day, I simply accepted I was “that” girl. I was the weird girl no one wanted to sit next to in class, who grew up to become the weird chick who couldn’t get a date, who went on to take over the family masonry business and bought back my childhood home, the one that came with its very own graveyard.

  And a large, marble statue of a nearly naked man on the roof.

  Not that I have to worry about anyone seeing me. The house sits on the outskirts of town, way back from the edge of a lonely pockmarked road. A sad ramshackle of a building hidden behind an unruly thicket of hazelnuts and blackberry brambles, it’s exterior leaves much to be desired. In the twenty years since I fell off the roof the old girl has had four owners. Each of them well-intentioned and enthusiastic and choc-a-block full of the over-confidence that can only be garnered by watching too many home renovation shows on “reality” TV.

  Of course, when they found out exactly how much it would cost to renovate the quaint stone castle in the middle of bloody Nowhereville, they put it back on the market quicker than you can say “money pit”. The upshot being that every time it went back on the market the value dropped just a little closer to what I could afford.

  So here I am, the proud owner of a stone mason’s wet dream, following the walking embodiment of another sort of wet dream as he shoves open the kitchen door and leads me inside.

  It’s dark in the house, and cold. I haven’t had the electricity put on yet but I did put a box of candles on the kitchen table, so we’ll have some light at least. Squeezing past Arnaath, I find what I’m looking for and light just enough candles to give the room a soft glow.

  Then my guest takes a candle and my box of matches and moves through the house to the living room. The ease with which he finds his way around leads me to believe he’s done this before. He’s too damn comfortable in my house, knows exactly where to find what he’s looking for, which is the fireplace apparently. I watch him crouch down and build a fire in the grate, watch the flickering candlelight dance across his cheek and shoulder, highlighting marble so smooth and pale it’s almost ethereal.