ARROGANT BASTARD
Series: Dark Desires #3
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Author: Zara Cox
Release Date: September 12, 2017
I’m known as the Black Widow because the desires I hide inside are pure poison.
I was a different person once. Faith, a young wife, hoping to become a mother. My life was pleasant. Stable. It was hell. Until Killian Knight opened my eyes to a world of espionage and intrigue. He saw something in me, something I was too afraid to acknowledge. I didn’t want to be excited by the danger. Didn’t want to crave the wicked passion only he could provide. But I did want, so now I run. And I pay.
I never meant to corrupt her, but I’m not sorry.
After all, I’m already damned.
After four years of searching and longing, I’ve finally found her. Faith, the one person in the world I breathe for. She lives beneath my skin as surely as I wear proof of our transgressions inked on my body. And like the forbidden fruit that doomed us from the beginning, our end is inevitable. We lived with no regret. We loved without inhibition. We betrayed those closest to us. We killed for that love. Now…we will burn in hell together.
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Chapter One
Killian
Present Day
I’ve found her.
After four years and two months.
I stare at the screen, my blood pumping relief and shock and fury and joy through my veins. The cocktail of emotions paralyzes me for several minutes.
Then I force myself to analyze what I’m seeing.
Her hair is different. Longer. Darker. Pin-straight and rigid where soft, friendly waves used to be. The curve of her jaw captured by the camera lens also shows the difference. She’s leaner. Meaner. Even from this obscure angle, I can tell any trace of gentleness has been wiped clean. Eroded by sin and tragedy and horror. The change was probably inevitable, but I still don’t want to see the evidence.
To anyone else, the picture would seem ridiculously vague, the image nothing more than a blurred black-and-white pixelation of hair, chin, and shoulder.
It’s the reason my algorithm spat it out almost reluctantly, a last batch of possibilities in the dregs of to-be-discarded possibilities, and then dumped it in my supercomputer’s equivalent of a spam folder, the code scrolling impatiently as it waited my command to delete, delete, delete.
But I know it’s her. Despite the dark leather cap pulled low over her forehead. Despite the bulky jacket designed to hide her true shape. Her stealth speaks volumes. Besides, she’s in my blood, in my heartbeat. After so many years of dead ends and fruitless hoping, of agonizing disappointment and withering despair, this time I simply…know.
It’s her. The Widow.
My hand shakes as I hit the zoom-in key. My gut churns, and I feel a little sick as my ever-helpful brain cheerfully supplies me with all the ways she could’ve continued to elude me—if I’d turned away, for a second, to stare at one of the other three screens on my desk. If I’d trusted my supersmart computer and accepted the prompt to delete without reviewing this particular needle in my mountain of haystacks. If I hadn’t tweaked the code yet again last night to capture just such an obscure image.
Hell, if I’d blinked at the wrong time…I torture myself with infinite possibilities as I stare at that mesmerizing angle of chin and shoulder.
A chin I’ve trailed my treacherous fingers over many times in helpless wonder.
A shoulder I’ve rested my guilty but secretly unrepentant head on.
There’s so much more to her. And I treasured every single inch of her forbidden body, fucked her at every opportunity she granted me. Until she systematically erased herself from my life.
But why New York? And why now?
I know how good she is. Hell, she’s the best or she wouldn’t have eluded me for this long. The thought of another four years without her punches a cold fist through my gut. With it comes the certainty that I wouldn’t have survived those next four years without her. That I’ve been clinging on with the very last dregs of my endurance to make it this far.
But here she is…
The Widow.
I can’t see her eyes, but I don’t fool myself into thinking they’ll hold an ounce of softness. What we did changed us forever. And not for the better.
I lean back in my chair. Exhale slowly. Terrified of blinking in case she disappears from my screen. It doesn’t matter that I’ve copied and stored the longitude and latitude of her location in a dozen vaults on my server and memorized every single piece of data on the screen.
New York City. East Fifty-Third Street. CCTV camera. A one-in-a-billion shot.
Without taking my eyes off her, I reach for my phone and press the voice activation app. “Good evening, Mr. Knight.”
“Nala, how many times do I need to tell you to call me Killian?”
“You have yet to change my default settings, Mr. Knight.”
My lips twitch but a smile doesn’t quite form. My eyes water with the need to blink. But I resist. “I changed them last week. You reset them again, didn’t you?”
“I assure you, I’m quite incapable of doing that.”
“Yeah, right. Fine. Place a call for me. Pilot. Home.”
“Dialing pilot. Home,” the female AI obliges me.
Nelson Whittaker, my LA-based English pilot, picks up on the second ring. It’s three a.m. but he answers as if it’s normal working hours. Which it is, to be fair. Everything is normal for me in my line of work.
“Good morning, sir.”
“How soon can you get to the airport?” I snap.
“As soon as I put on my trousers and chuck a bucket of water over my son to wake him up,” he replies with a dark chuckle.
My fingers fly over the keyboard as I save her information in a few more electronic vaults. “Give William my apologies,” I say.
“No need. He’s been champing at the bit to take the new girl for another spin.” The new girl being the Bombardier Global 8000 I added to my collection of private jets last month.
“In that case, I expect to see you at Van Nuys within the hour.” At this time of the morning, traffic from their Santa Monica apartment should be light enough to get them there fast.
“We’ll be there.” He clears his throat. “I expect the paperwork regarding out-of-curfew flights—”
“Will be taken care of. I’ll text you the details but we won’t be straying far from the usual parameters.”
“Very good, sir. Destination?” he asks crisply.
My gaze tracks that chin. That shoulder. The hair. Four years’ worth of turbulent emotion threatens to rip free. My chest burns with it, but I contain it. “New York.”
We went from forbidden fruit to torrid lovers without pausing to take a breath. Then added the dangerous ingredient of international espionage to the mix right up until it all blew up in our faces. Then I took the only option available to me and ran like hell.
I have a slight obsession with this series. Zara Cox has a signature grit to her writing that I simply can’t get enough of. Her stories are passionate and with a dark undercurrent that never fails to satisfy this picky reader. Arrogant Bastard had a slightly different feel that the other books in this series. Killian wasn’t the broody alphahole like Q or the tortured alphahole like Axel. He was a man that lost the only woman he loved and was determined to do anything to get her back. Even if all the odds were stacked against him.
Known simply as the Black Widow in the Punishment Club that she works for that’s owned by Axel Rutherford, B is not a woman that you want to mess with. She metes out punishment like the deadly creature that she is, leaving men panting in her wake. But she’s a woman that’s clearly running from her demons and secrets so dark, that not even those closest to her know them. But then the man that she ran from all those years ago tracks her down, and her carefully constructed new world gets tilted on its axis.
B and Killian share a past that no one knows about. It was a convoluted and dangerous connection that in the end, cost B everything. She’s been running since. But when a dangerous enemy learns that she’s alive, Killian knows that he’s the lesser of two evils and will stop at nothing to protect the woman that he’s never forgotten or gotten over.
Arrogant Bastard was an action packed, sizzling combination of espionage, suspense and romance. B is one hard core woman on the outside, but on the inside she’s never healed from the scars of her past. Killian is a dangerous enigma that’s as lethal as he is sexy, but beyond the man’s magnetism and allure, he’s completely head over heals for B and makes no qualms about it. Their road to a HEA is not an easy one but entertaining from start to finish. Zara Cox wrote a real page turner that kept this reader up well into the night, eager for each little morsel of information that ultimately led to one mind blowing revelation.
My only quibble is the hows and whys of B getting into the line of work that she did. It seemed a little much even if I did suspend my disbelief for the sake of enjoying the story. But ultimately, I stopped caring because I was enjoy the story and couldn’t get enough of her and Killian together.
THE DARK DESIRES SERIES
BEAUTIFUL LIAR | BLACK SHEEP | WICKED S.O.B. | ARROGANT BASTARD
Zara Cox has been writing for almost twenty-five years but it wasn’t until nine years ago that she decided to share her love of writing sexy, gritty stories with anyone outside her close family (the over 18s anyway!). This series is Zara’s next step in her erotic romance-writing journey, and she would love to hear your thoughts. Visit her:
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WICKED S.O.B.
Considering just how much I loved 
BLACK SHEEP
If I said that I was an insta-fan of this author after I finished 
Black Sheep delivers on another twisty story full of betrayal and revenge. Zara Cox is truly a master of her craft and I’m absolutely captivated by her writing style and the characters she creates. I couldn’t put this book down for even a second. I walked the edge between hating and loving Axel. But between all the secrets and twists that kept unearthing, my mind was too busy spinning to focus on any singular emotion.
Each book in the Dark Desires series is a standalone in an interconnecting world. So if you’ve read the first book, you’ll appreciate Quinn’s cameo in this one 🙂
BEAUTIFUL LIAR
HOLY. SHIT.
Q is a man of wealth and power. He’s a man skirting the fine edge of revenge and depravity and he makes no excuses or apologies. Every single move is calculated to achieve his end goal. His revenge. To right a wrong of years past, to punish those responsible, even if he doesn’t survive to bask in the glory of the fallout. It’s not time to make his most calculated move yet. Everything he’s been doing has been leading up to this…his grand plan. And the key to it is a woman with haunted eyes and a closet full of skeletons who may be hiding more baggage then even him. Lucky.
A voice cleverly disguised by state of the art technology and a face hidden behind a steel mask is all she sees of Q. The rest is a veil of blindfolds, mind games, and sex so mind-blowing that she struggles to hold on to the fact that none of it is real…and it doesn’t take long for the lines to begin to blur… for both of them.
This story is so much more than a romance. It’s a story of survival and revenge. It’s a sizzling romance wrapped around a captivating mystery. It’s a splash of dark and suspense. And while the book is long, the pacing was perfect.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to immediately dive into book 2!
BLACK SHEEP
BEAUTIFUL LIAR (Previously published as I, Porn Star)
