Dark Romance Books: Cocked & Unsheathed | BWWM Romance by Jamila Jasper

Dark romance books can't beat Cocked And Unsheathed, the gritty military romance novel released by Jamila Jasper in August of 2017. This interracial romance novel follows the story of a SEXY military man named Zane when he comes back to his home of Peach, Georgia.

He meets Dana Bright -- a strong, confident, black woman that he immediately falls for. This story is perfect if you love romantic stories and interracial romance books.

This story has a surprising twist at the end... 

Read the description below and then keep reading to get a full taste of the sample:

Home from the military with a fire of desire burning inside him and a 9-inch python that makes women scream...

Zane's instincts to possess Dana Bright kick in the first time he sees her.

Her guard is up, but she can't help but crave the sexy soldier just back from the Gulf War.

After a sultry night between the sheets, everything in Dana's life changes.

Zane's the first man to ever make her climax.

Dana knows he could be shipped off to Iraq at a moment's notice...

But now that she's addicted to all of his nine-inches,

She doesn't know how the heck she's going to say goodbye...

Dark Romance Book Excerpts: Cocked & Unsheathed 

Prologue

As Told By Dana Bright

I tried to forgive my father. Well, technically John Porter was my step-father. My daddy had died when I was five years old. But my mama still had bills to pay and her small-time job babysitting white ladies’ kids barely cut it. The first man that had come along and offered to take those burdens off her shoulder seemed like a God-send.

But John Porter had been far from a God-send. I’d known him as my father since I was eight years old. And he’d stuck around. Though by now, I’m sure my mama and I both wish that he’d left.

Like every toxic marriage, things had started off great with John.

My mama never had to worry about the lights getting turned off. All of a sudden we had food on the table. All of a sudden me and my sister Cleo were going to the dentist. We had new shoes in the middle of the year. By the time my mama wanted to marry John, hell we couldn’t wait to have a father.

Having a man around the house started off nicely.

I remember waking up on a morning, slipping into my jeans and t-shirt for school and running downstairs to meet John. Daddy.

It was only after the wedding that things changed.

But their wedding day was beautiful. John didn’t have much of a family so to speak, so it was just us Brights. My mama’s family was Southern and they knew how to throw down. Aunties and uncles who had migrated to New York all came down to Peach, Georgia for the affair.

I think the big to-do made things worse in the end. But at the time, there was pure bliss in my house. Everyone wanted to see mama happy and with John, we all thought she would be.

It’s possible the little signs had been there all along. It’s possible there were hints and clues that mama had shielded us from.

We’d always known John was a drinker. We’d known about his two year stint in jail up in Massachusetts. But he’d assured my mama that it was all a set up and he’d been falsely accused.

When a woman is desperate and in love, she’s willing to do crazy things.

Letting John Porter into our home was certifiably insane. 

They hadn’t been married one week when it started. Cleo and I were playing upstairs when we heard a blood curdling scream — our mother’s scream. We turned towards each other and ran out of the room. The sound of ceramic crashing against the wall startled us as we peered down the stairs. 

John’s fingers snaked through our mother’s hair and he was pressing her body against the wall, punching her in the back as she screamed.

We stood at the top of the stairs, still and stunned. We said nothing. We froze and listened to our mother scream and scream until he dropped her. She collapsed to the ground wailing and John walked off. She sobbed and sobbed there whilst Cleo and I stood powerless, wondering what we should do.

We’d never been exposed to that before. A man putting his hands on our mama was plain incomprehensible. But we knew that we should never tell. We knew that what we’d experienced had been shameful. Our childish minds couldn’t process whether the shame belonged to us, our mother, or to John.

Now that I’m old enough to understand, it’s too late. Our childhoods already happened. Our mother is already broken. And my sister and I are drifting through life pretending to be normal. But nothing that happened to us was normal. And any chance at being normal was stolen from us.

Cleo developed such a deep distrust of men that I think it changed her forever — even more than it changed me.

Cleo didn’t speak to either of them anymore — not John and not mama. I tried to convince her otherwise, but she was adamant about wanting them out of their lives. That meant mama — in all her old age — was my responsibility. 

After work, I promised her I’d come over. John was out with one of his other women so mama thought it would be a good time to drop by. I was happy he was gone even if it was just for the afternoon. Despite my best attempts to forgive him, I still felt uneasy around John. I still felt that nagging sense that a whooping was just around the corner. Silly. John was too old to whoop anyone anymore.

That didn’t make my gut feel any safer.

I drove over to mama’s little house in Peach, just a few miles away from my own. 

The door was unlocked and as I walked in, I could hear her fussing over something in the kitchen.

“Momma I’m home!” I called out to her.

She didn’t reply.

“Momma it’s Dana!”

“C’mon into the kitchen child.”

I walked into the kitchen where my mother was cutting up some fresh cornbread she’d made in her cast iron skillet.

“Mmm. That smells delicious.”

“Lemme get you some butter.”

She buttered my cornbread, putting a fresh slice on each of our plates. When she’d served us both up, she led me out into the living room.

“John might not be back for another two or three days.”

I didn’t want to talk about John.

“He’s off with Edith?”

My mama shook her head, “No a new woman. Younger. ‘Round 55 years old.”

I pursed my lips in disapproval. My mother had known about John’s cheating for decades and she never did anything about it. After years of being beat down on, she didn’t have it in her to stop him. Even if he ran women ‘round her for decades, she did nothing.

“Okay mama.”

I bit into the cornbread, appreciating the flavor as my mama’s family recipe practically melted in my mouth.

“So how you doing? How’s work?”

“Work is work.”

“Mhmm. And what about that boy you were hanging round?”

I pursed my lips. My mama always brought up some boyfriend of mine right after I’d kicked him to the curb. I wasn’t one of those women who was confused about what the problem was. I’ll admit it to you right now. The problem was me. I was the one who kept choosing men that forced me to replicate my past.

I would see the good qualities that John had in other men and my magnetic pull towards them was immediate. Of course, just like with John, their bad qualities had come out immediately. The only thing I was grateful that I’d never done was get married.

Lord, I couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to be married.

The closest I’d come was Willy Morris. He was fifteen years my senior and a police officer. We’d been together for eight years. Seven of those years he’d beat me black and blue until I snapped, nearly killing him in self-defense. I shot him right in the foot and he howled like a goddamn coyote. Willy didn’t press charges, but I never saw him again after that. He never came sniffin’ round and I promised myself I’d never let a man whoop me like that again.

You know the saying “there are many ways to skin a cat”? Gross, I know. But that’s sort of what it’s like with bad men. There were so many ways for men to treat me wrong without laying a finger on me. That’s what I was forced to learn after Willy.

And well, the last guy I was with had found a way to hurt me again. But this time, I wasn’t the one who’d left.

“Orville?”

“Yes, Orville. What ever happened to him?”

“He moved out west mama.”

“So y’all are finished?”

“Beyond finished,” I mumbled.

I couldn’t bare to tell my mama the full story. Orville had a whole family out west. In this current age of social media and the internet, his wife had found me and she’d pleaded with me to convince Orville to come home. He’d been gone from them for a year without saying a word and the poor woman was desperate.

I had to end it with him. 

Yet another boyfriend that ended up not being worth a damn.

I wondered how many years I could go on blaming John for how I was. Maybe I was just broken. And maybe I was always meant to be broken.

“You’ll find someone else. Someone who treats you right. Look at me. After your daddy died, I found John.”

Yes, my mama still said stuff like that. Even after John had beat her black and blue and even after he’d cheated on her with everything with a pussy in a fifty mile radius.

“I’m hoping not to find a man like John.”

I knew my sharp tongue would get me in trouble with her, but I still had a little bit of Cleo in me. I couldn’t pretend that everything was okay.

“Listen… John has provided for me. He’s provided for you and your sister. The man has his flaws but you two sound downright ungrateful sometimes.”

I felt the cornbread turning in my stomach. Yes. John had done so much for us. 

I remembered the first night he’d climbed into our bed when we were ten years old. How he’d held a knife to Cleo’s throat and forced me to do things to him. I remembered how it had happened for years and years. I remembered how I’d wet the bed until I was seventeen. I remembered how Cleo had gone to that New Orleans witch doctor to have an abortion after John had gone too far.

John. The provider in our family. He had done so much for us. We should have been eternally grateful.

“We ain’t ungrateful mama,” I whispered.

Speaking out against John would get you nowhere in her house. No matter what he’d done, my mama had been brainwashed into thinking it had been better than raising us alone would have been.

“Well Cleo’s damned ungrateful.”

I remembered the blood washing down her thighs after the witch doctor’s medicine that John had forced down her throat pushed the baby out of her. I stood with her in the shower, rinsing the blood down her thighs as she screamed in pain. Not just the pain of the induced miscarriage, but the pain of being impregnated by her stepfather. The pain of enduring years and years of rape, only to have it end like this.

We thought that maybe after we were older John would stop being attracted to us. But it never really stopped. And I never really knew how much our mama knew about it. We never told her and never spoke much about it. But she had to have known, hadn’t she?

How could she miss out on Cleo’s screams? Or the way our teenage years had been fraught with disciplinary infractions? How could she miss the fact that the life had been sapped from our faces? How could she miss out on the fact that we both carried the wounded empty expressions of woman who had been broken? 

John made no secret of his attraction to us when we were younger. So I told myself that she had to know. And I had to tell myself that she was just too scared to do anything about it. She was my mama, of course she cared about us. But she was under his spell too. I tried to forgive. I really did. 

And I thought I could forgive. My sister on the other hand couldn’t. Cleo had packed up and left Peach as soon as she turned eighteen. If she could have gone earlier, she would have. And I didn’t blame her the way my mama did. We hadn’t had real childhoods. Not after daddy died. John had stolen them away from us and each time I had to face him, I was reminded of that.

“I don’t think Cleo’s ungrateful mama.”

My mother snorted and then wandered off to the kitchen for more cornbread. I tried to relax. I hadn’t come here to get a lecture about Cleo’s malfeasance. And I hadn’t come here to be reminded of all the things I spent every day of my life trying to forget.

“You know… I know you two didn’t have the perfect life growing up.”

I said nothing.

My mother sighed, “But I’ve been praying for you Dana. I’ve been praying that the right man will come along.”

I snorted, “I doubt it.”

My mama chuckled, “You don’t believe me. But there’s a line in the Bright family that possesses the sight. I think you’ll meet someone very soon.”

I scoffed, thinking she was just trying to make me feel better. But I wondered how true that could be. Could there really be someone out there that would break my curse with men? Was it possible to attract a man who didn’t sense my dark past like a vampire? 

“Well mama I hope you’re right. I’m getting older and… it would be nice to have someone.”

“Don’t just settle for the first man who comes along.”

Sometimes my mama said more than she meant to say.

“Can I have some more of that cornbread?”

“Sure thing.”

I followed her into the kitchen. After I had another slice, we changed the subject to more pleasant things. No one wanted to talk about John anymore, or my last boyfriend, or the fact that Cleo hadn’t spoken to anyone in the family for over a decade. 

We laughed for a long time. My mama told me about new ideas for my yarn store. And she told me about Doris, her latest spades partner. Then after a while she got tuckered out and just fell asleep. I cracked open a book as she drifted off to sleep.

Her snores rang through the house. I read until I feared John would come home. I snuck out of my mama’s house, locking the door behind me with her keys. The screeching of cicadas created a soundtrack for me as I walked to my car. Once inside, I checked my phone and I saw a message from Cleo.

I was the only one she bothered talking to, but she’d made me promise not to tell mama.

“I’m getting married.”

That was it. I rested my head against the steering wheel and started to weep. Cleo had broken the curse of our childhood. She’d found a good man out there. I knew he had to be a good man because Cleo was no fool. She wouldn’t let anyone else get too close — not after what we’d been through.

My tears were both tears of joy and tears of envy. While Cleo had managed to step closer to happiness, I couldn’t have felt further away from it. I was still in Peach, dodging John, listening to mama deny the past, and falling in love with dead beats.

I was stagnant. 

And I wanted a big change.

This book will be available for purchase on Amazon soon. If you can't wait to get a taste of Jamila's stories, check out her latest release "Gang Bangers" here => http://amzn.to/2fT0J7F