Love Letter for a Sinner (The Sinners sports romances) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Love Letter for a Sinner

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  A word about the author…

  Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  Also available from The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  Love Letter

  for

  a Sinner

  by

  Lynn Shurr

  The Sinners, Book Five

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Love Letter for a Sinner

  COPYRIGHT © 2013 by Lynn Shurr

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Contact Information: [email protected]

  Cover Art by Diana Carlile

  The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  PO Box 708

  Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

  Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

  Publishing History

  First Champagne Rose Edition, 2013

  Print ISBN 978-1-62830-141-0

  Digital ISBN 978-1-62830-142-7

  The Sinners, Book Five

  Published in the United States of America

  Dedication

  In memory of Linda Houle

  Chapter One

  Joe Dean Billodeaux, aging quarterback for the New Orleans Sinners, but still a star both on the field and now in motion pictures, stomped into the trailer assigned to him on location in New Mexico. Damn but he hated making movies. Now, he liked making commercials, especially local ones in Louisiana where people understood his Cajun accent with no problem. He touted everything from automobiles to zydeco albums, including his own hot and spicy barbecue sauce that funded Camp Love Letter for sick and handicapped kids. He had turned down the offer to sell a drug for erectile dysfunction as damaging to his reputation, but only that one.

  Joe slapped his black Stetson against his thigh to remove the pretend dust from its brim before tossing it aside. The words “fake” and “tedious” came to mind regarding moviemaking. Football might be just a game, but he took real hits and the action ran mostly nonstop and exciting. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, his character died in the first ten minutes of the film, yet they did the scene over and over until he figured the man would have croaked from boredom, rather than being shot in the back by cattle rustlers.

  Between each take, some woman rushed over to spray his face with water because he needed a more sweaty look, or to powder his clothes with extra dirt for additional grit. And they kept changing his lines, which had shrunk to about half a dozen. He had no trouble learning them, but his Cajun accent tended to come out whenever the director shouted, “Roll!” He got credit for sitting a horse well, and that was about all. He’d thought making a western would be fun, but no. Put this on his agent’s list of things he would not do along with ED medications. Fake and tedious.

  Figuring to shuck his dirty, sweaty clothes and take a shower, Joe slammed open the door to the small bedroom. Not fake, those large, perfect white breasts with their pink nipples staring at him from the mattress, and he should know from his youthful womanizing days when he’d had plenty to compare. This rack was attached to his co-star, Layla Devlin, sprawled seductively naked on top of his covers. He couldn’t seem to lift his gaze to her violet eyes or pouty lips. The nipples puckered in happy anticipation or maybe from the gust of cold air he’d let into the room.

  His arms braced against the frame, Joe stood frozen with one foot inside and one outside the sill. The little brain below the waist urged him forward. The brain in his head, rapidly losing control, ordered him to step back. He’d made a vow to his wife, Nell, never to cheat on her, and so far so good, until now.

  “Aren’t you coming in, Joe? I’m getting cold and need something to warm me up,” the devil, uh, Devlin woman said. She kept her voice low and throaty and played with a coil of her long blonde hair, the color toned down for the movie and still crimped from being in braids for her role. Nell wore her dark hair very short and did not play with it at all.

  Joe made a grab for his cell phone on a nearby shelf and wrenched himself back into the short hall. He retreated into the bathroom and locked the door. Squatting on the lid of the commode, he hit the speed dial for his wife. Layla’s voice, higher and more penetrating, called after him, “You needn’t shower. I like a sweaty hunk of a man. Come as you are. Let the fun begin!”

  Pick up, Nell. Pick up. She wouldn’t if their ten children were having lunch. House rules, no phone calls during meals. Joe consulted his wrist and remembered no watch because that would be anachro-whatever for the time period of the movie. Filming started at the crack of dawn, and tables full of food and drink dotted the set. People ate when they felt like it between takes. Four rings and at last, his wife answered. In the background, water splashed and the delighted voices of Camp Love Letter kids shrilled.

  “How’s it going, my favorite handsome movie star? Are women throwing themselves at your feet?”

  “Don’t you even say dat—that. Layla Devlin is naked in my bed. I had lock myself in the bat’room, bathroom. How do I get rid of her?”

  “Not tempted?”

  “I’d be a liar, me, if I said no, but I don’t want her messing up our lives, our kids’ lives.”

  He pictured his little wife, whom he called Tink, short for Tinker Bell, though she hated being compared to anything tiny even if the description fit. She sat poolside supervising the campers, maybe giving their eldest sons, Dean and Tommy, now nearly seventeen and sixteen, a break from lifeguarding. He needed her to save his life or at least his vows right now. Joe pled, “What should I do?”

  “Put me on speaker phone, and let me have a friendly chat with Layla.”

  Hoping his co-star might have taken the hint and gone, Joe cautiously exited the bathroom. Nope, she still lay on the bed but had rolled onto her back allowing her breasts to pool to either side of her chest. Her toned arms rested behind her head and her left leg cocked above the right as if accentuating her bikini wax job. He couldn’t help but notice what hair she had left down there was golden brown, not blonde. She resembled a painting over a bar in
a gentlemen’s club. Defensively, he held out the phone with the speaker button depressed. “My wife wants to talk to you.”

  “Really?” Layla’s finely plucked brows rose in her stunningly beautiful face.

  “Indeed I do, Miss Devlin,” Nell said. “Let me say I admire your work on screen. You certainly are an up-and-coming young actress. I am sure you wouldn’t want to mar your career by getting involved with Joe Dean Billodeaux.”

  Coolly, the actress answered, “Why would that be?” She didn’t bother to cover herself though she put down the provocative leg. He wished he could do the same with his third leg pulsing against his jeans.

  “First of all, Joe never uses a condom. He is Catholic and a firm believer in no birth control. We have ten children and no prenup. If I catch him having an affair, I plan to take him for all he is worth, but I will turn over custody of the entire brood to him and his new love. I do hope you enjoy children, because he’ll probably want more. You can kiss that tiny waist good-bye, and you will need a boob job after you nurse a few of his babies. I know.”

  Layla’s alabaster’s skin flushed the entire length of her body, then became even paler than before. In her current role, she portrayed the mayor’s daughter who had come to the ranch to flirt with Joe’s on-screen son played by a twenty-three year-old. It was possible for him to have a son that old, Joe guessed. Forty stared him hard in the face this year.

  After the rustlers killed the father, they made off with the girl as well as the cattle. Once the script let Joe rest in peace, his son pursued the thieves and redeemed the girl, kind of a thin plot. However, Layla put on quite a show as her tight corset and layer after layer of clothes were stripped away, symbolic of her return to savage nature, the director claimed. Because they shot out of sequence, Joe witnessed a few of these scenes. Sex sells without any deep inner meaning, he thought.

  Layla groped to cover herself as if she might get pregnant through eye contact. “Is all this true, Joe?”

  “Mais, yeah, sugar. We got ten kids, and we never use condoms. I am a Cat’lic, me. Don’t you never expect to get no abortion, neither.”

  Layla slid her long legs to the edge of the bed and robed her body in the top sheet. Her complicated costume from the very first scene lay at her feet in a tangle of stays, long lace sleeves, a high collar, and numerous petticoats. Hairpins littered the floor. Joe wondered how long she’d been here while he died over and over again under the hot New Mexico sun. Her dresser would have to put her back together again because he sure wasn’t going to help her climb back into that outfit. He stood aside as she gathered the jumble and made certain the sheet covered her like a well-tucked sarong. Barefooted, she padded from the room. Joe scooped up the high-buttoned footwear no one could put on without a shoehorn and deposited them on top of the pile before she made it out of the trailer. The humiliated actress glared at him.

  “Look, cher, it ain’t because you’re not gorgeous, but maybe you should try working up some passion with your co-star Brandon. He’s more your…” Joe almost said age, but backed away from that thought. “Brandon is more your type.”

  “Brandon Deal is gay. He hasn’t come out yet, the coward. He’s afraid it might hurt his career.”

  “Oh, you been to his trailer, too?”

  Without answering, Layla Devlin huffed away to her own domain where some poor soul would have to put up with her tantrum and get her camera-ready again.

  Joe closed the door and locked it. He headed back to the bedroom and picked up the phone. “You still there, Nell?”

  “I certainly am. I hope that commotion was Layla leaving.”

  “Yes, you terrified her, Tink.”

  “I told no lies.” Joe could hear the muted laughter in her voice. “That’s the first time I ever heard you use your cute Cajun routine to scare a woman off. Very effective.”

  “Yeah, and they say I can’t act. But you forgot to mention how your cancer treatments left you sterile, and since I’m so faithful we don’t need to use condoms. Not to mention you only gave birth using in vitro to half of those ten children. All the rest came to us this way, that way, all ways, as the traiteur told us they would.”

  “Don’t remind me. That old woman threatened us with two more.” Talk of having a dozen children always sobered Nell.

  “Not threatened. Madame Leleux had the sight. She saw what she saw.” A sudden thought caused him to wrinkle his still-handsome brow. “You’d never leave me and kids, would you?”

  “If I caught you cheating, I’d do worse than that. But, I’d never willingly abandon you and the children.”

  “No need to worry, but Tink, seeing that girl naked made me horny. Wish you were here.”

  An enormous splash drowned out her answer. A whistle sounded. Dean’s voice grown deep and manly shouted, “Hey, no cannonballs! You want to drown the little guys?”

  Nell had to repeat her answer. “Me, too, Joe. Me, too.”

  Chapter Two

  Weary, Joe entered his trailer the next afternoon. The director had finally called his death scene a wrap. All he’d had to do was stare with his dark eyes wide open and the New Mexico sun glinting off the silver strands in his black hair while his mouth hung slightly open adorned with a trickle of fake blood as the cameras homed in on his beard-stubbled face. A stunt double having the same wide span of shoulders and narrow hips as his own did the actual falling backwards into the dust because his Sinners contract forbid him to engage in any dangerous activities. Joe felt he could have pulled off the dive with ease. He’d been sacked often enough in his eighteen-year career.

  He still had to face doing the opening scene with Layla again. The part where he’d herded a few head of cattle into the corral and leaned over the neck of his mount to latch the gate went perfectly. The animal wrangler provided him with a great cutting horse as long in the leg as Joe, very like his horse, Lazy Boy, back home but not as flashy. Rascal could do tricks, too, like fall down dead in the shooting scene. He might make an offer for the animal since L.B. was getting long in the tooth, not that his stud couldn’t still service a mare if given the chance.

  Joe opened the door of the small refrigerator and plucked out an icy, dark Turbo Dog beer. They’d asked what he wanted stocked in his trailer and got it for him all the way from New Orleans. He chugged it down and considered having another. Might get him through the dialog with Layla, now more awkward to perform than before she showed up in his bed. Nope, better stay sober. Joe Dean Billodeaux did not drink when he had a tough game ahead, not since the early years of his career. He’d take a nap until some flunky called him back to the set. Plenty of flunkies around the set. Layla Devlin had a personal one, a pretty blue-eyed girl appropriately named Patsy. Joe might be willing to bet poor Patsy had borne the brunt of the star’s anger after yesterday’s rejection.

  His bedroom door sat ajar. Sure he’d closed it before going out, Joe moved cautiously into the room. A scorned woman like Layla Devlin might just put rattlers in a man’s sheets, and here he was without a real gun that fired actual bullets. The holster slung low on his hips held a weapon loaded with blanks.

  Good Lord, not another naked woman, this one wrapped in a blanket with only the very top of her dark hair exposed for the moment. He almost wished it had been snakes until he saw Tink’s big brown eyes twinkling at him as she did a slow reveal of her pixie face, then her small, full breasts. Joe knew she wouldn’t go any farther down the road, self-conscious of her C-section scar from having the triplets. Guilty about that for having pushed her to have so many babies at one time, he told her over and over that the scar didn’t turn him off. Hell, he had scars everywhere from playing football and having surgeries to repair torn muscles and ligaments. Nell said that didn’t count. Scars, a little silver in the hair, deeper lines in a man’s face, only made him more distinguished. They caused a woman to look old. She kept her hair the same dark brown as the day they met and wasn’t adverse to small nips and tucks to stay attractive for him.

>   An impish smile played on her lips. The little lines at the corners of her eyes crinkled. “Glad I’m here?”

  “Oh, baby, yes!” His gun belt fell to floor with a clunk. Joe stripped his leather vest, sweat-soaked shirt, jeans, and modern briefs in record time, forgetting about his boots and spurs until they entangled his feet he was that eager. As he bent over to escape their snare, Nell stroked his backside with her small hand. He thought the hardness of his erection might poke a hole in his gut if he weren’t careful. Vaulting onto the bed, he joined his wife under the covers and said, “Top or bottom?” He liked to be considerate that way because it made no never-mind to him. He enjoyed sex any way it came with Nell. Now that he knew Brandon Deal to be gay, having the guy weep over his body and hug him to his chest in the death scene became off-putting, but that scene was over and done. Tink had come all the way from Louisiana to play.

  Then, his wife said those dreaded words. “Let’s talk first.” A little sap left his woody.

  “Could we talk after?” he bargained.

  “No. I got on a five a.m. flight to get here, and I might fall asleep afterwards. I want to go over what we discussed before you came out here one more time. You promised me and the children you would retire from football at forty.”

  “I always keep my word.”

  “You do, but we want you to retire with dignity and grace. No embarrassing yourself with cell phone pictures of your genitals sent to pretty women. No trying to prove you’re still young by driving fast sports cars or going to drunken parties.”