by C. R. Jane
Dumb Girl
Stupid Boys, #2
C.R. Jane
Rebecca Royce
Contents
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Prologue
Chapter 1
How It Happened
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
About C.R. Jane
Other Books by C.R. Jane
About Rebecca Royce
Other books by Rebecca Royce
Dumb Girl by C. R. Jane and Rebecca Royce
Copyright © 2020 by C. R. Jane and Rebecca Royce
All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review, and except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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Prologue
I warned you and you didn’t listen to me. You liked me. I told you not to do it but you did.
Now here we are. In so much trouble I can’t see a path where all of us aren’t dead before the end of the year.
I’m not just dragging myself down to hell, I’m taking four incredible men—who had the unfortunate luck to run into me—with me. I targeted them, took them down. And now I might just get them killed.
They were stupid boys to fall in love with me, but I’m a dumb girl because I’m going to try to save them. It won’t work. But I’m going to try anyway.
Chapter 1
Holly
A Very Long Time Ago… Practically Another Life
Leaning against the banister, I was pretty much invisible to the adults talking in the front hallway. Well, almost all of them were adults. Annoying Anna, who they had gotten to come babysit for me tonight, wasn’t an adult—she was fifteen. Couldn’t even drive yet. But she got to tell me what to do. It was so not fair.
I hated her, and they knew it, and they were still leaving her here with me today because she was responsible. I was responsible.
“Mom?” I raised my voice so they’d pay attention to me. It worked. All three of them turned in my direction. When next I spoke, it was with my voice lowered. I wasn’t actually trying to make what my mother called a ‘scene.’ “Can I speak to you, please, for a second?”
My parents shared a long glance before my mom nodded at me and walked toward me with her hand extended. I linked our fingers, something I did less and less in public. Janet Jones had told me that it wasn’t cool to hold hands with your mom in public anymore. I didn’t really care what she said, but it stuck with me just the same. Janet was mean, and I was pretty sure that her mom didn’t want to hold her hand to begin with. My mother called the girl troubled. Whatever that meant.
I just knew that Mrs. Jones always smelled like too much perfume and the rum cake my mother made at Christmas. I didn’t like to be too close to her.
My mother led me to the kitchen. The light over the counter flickered. The bulb really needed to be changed, but my dad hadn’t gotten to it yet, and my mother flipped it off and put on the overhead lighting instead. She didn’t like flashing lights. They triggered her migraines.
“What’s going on, Bug?”
I hated that nickname. Maybe when I was born, my big eyes had made them call me that, but now it was just awful. Did I resemble some kind of beetle? Was that what she was saying? I let out a long breath and fisted my hands. “Mom.”
She sighed. “Holly, I am sorry, my love. I forget sometimes. Old habits die hard. I’ll work on it. No more bug. Now tell me what you need, because Dad is already annoyed at me that we’re running late. You know how he is about being on time.”
I did. We had to leave for the airport hours earlier than anyone else ever did. He couldn’t stand the idea of being late, of missing anything because of traffic. My dad was compulsively on time, and my mother often teased him about it in that way that made his ears turn red while he gazed at her lovingly.
She was beautiful, and she never smelled like anything other than her shampoo, which was fruity, and a dab of something she put on her wrists. Most of the time, she was pretty much the perfect mother, and that was why this was making me nuts.
“Why are you leaving me with her?” I kept my voice down. It wouldn’t be polite to speak loud enough that Anna could hear me. “You know how I feel about her.”
She sighed, touching my cheek gently. “Anna loves you. And you used to love when she babysat for you. It was just that one time she got cross with you, and you know you deserved it, Bu… Holly.” She smiled. “You’d been told no more dessert that night, and you snuck it anyway.”
Yes, I had. I’d own that. But, Stupid Anna had gone and told on me. Why did she have to do that? I crossed my arms. “That was a long time ago.” I’d been nine at the time. “And I’m older now. Why do I have to have a babysitter at all?”
She pursed her lips. “Because you’re my precious girl, and I need to know that you’re safe.”
“Hey, you two.” My father clapped his hands together as he strode toward us. “What are you whispering about? We’re going to be late. And then I’ll hear about it from the Arnolds all night. ‘Why were you late?’” He did an imitation of Mr. Arnold that sounded really dumb right now. I couldn’t hide my smile. I loved when my father imitated people. He had a smooth southern accent he told me once he’d worked on gentrifying, whatever that meant, but he could sound like anyone he wanted. It was super cool.
“Dad…”
My mother kissed my cheek where she’d stroked it. “Holly. We love you. This is settled.”
“Tonight, I have to go out to this dinner, and I’m dragging your mother with me. But tomorrow, I spend all day with my girls. This will be fine, Holly.”
“Dad,” I had one last chance. “If I can’t stay alone, why can’t I go to a friend’s?”
“It’s cold out there. And icy. I prefer thinking of you safe at home. Tomorrow, love. See you later. Try to have some fun.”
I watched them leave. My mother, gorgeous in her gray suit that she paired with a purple top. Once upon a time, she’d worked in an office and still knew how to dress for business dinners. Or so my father said. I didn’t really know what that meant. Who cared what someone looked like?
Gritting my teeth, I turned my attention to my babysitter. At least she’d be gone when I woke up.
We had a long night together. I was pretty s
ure she thought I was five and not ten. Was she serious about Candy Land? I went to bed happily, just to get away from her.
Waking in the middle of the night to an unfamiliar hand on my shoulder, I jolted, terror striking me for the first time in my life. I didn’t know who the woman staring down at me was.
“Sweetheart, I’m Anna’s mother, Mrs. Keileen. We’re having a little trouble finding your parents. Do you have any grandparents I can call?”
I swallowed, trying to understand what was happening. Okay. She didn’t want to hurt me. That was good… but they couldn’t find my parents. My hands shook. Where were my parents? What did that mean she couldn’t find them? “I don’t understand.”
She sighed. “Don’t worry, dear. We’ll find out.”
But she didn’t, and she wouldn’t. I knew, even at my young age, as my mom always reminded me, that nothing would have kept my parents from getting back to me. Nothing except death.
The next weeks were hell. The phrase whispered around me by my parents’ friends, when they thought I wasn’t listening, turned out to be the most important of my life: there was no will.
No one had been designated for me to go to. No one entrusted with my care. My mother had no family, an only child of a deceased single mother. But my father did, even if we had only met my uncle once, and my father said we’d never see him again. He had a mother, too.
And it was she who would come.
Gran. My savior. The woman who would give me to Him.
Holly
Now
I’d never had lessons on what to do after I killed someone. Or in this case, two someones. I dropped the gun to my side before I set it down on the table. Huh. I was blissfully numb. What a strange sensation for having just killed two people.
Of course, they were going to kill the four guys with me and drag me home to my uncle, where he would see to it that all sorts of unspeakable—nightmarish—things were done to me. Except that I thought about them all the time.
“They’re dead.” Charlie leaned over both bodies.
I nodded. “That was the idea.”
He stared up at me. “They were going to kill us.”
I hoped the others had caught on to the facts as fast as he had. Charlie, with his strong looks—not necessarily considered conventionally handsome but strong, striking, unforgettable—had seen a lot of death in his time. He was a cardiovascular surgeon, and although it was his job to stop death from happening, he’d certainly encountered it enough to know there was nothing he could do for these people now.
I wasn’t the best shot my uncle’s men had ever trained, but I was good enough. A shot through the head was a shot through the head.
Still, he was the only one who appeared calm and collected in the face of what had happened. The gun shots still rang in my ears, and I tilted my head, numbness not passing.
I needed to think. Graham was pale, his mouth wide open, and he blinked rapidly. Dark, handsome, with the genes encoded in him to take the spotlight in politics, he was pale and hadn’t moved since I’d fired the gun. In fact, none of them had run from the room. That was impressive.
Steven leaned against the wall, his hands fisted. Who or what he wanted to pound, I didn’t know. He was strong, an NFL quarterback who had been injured but mostly come back from his injuries. A quick glance told me that Jamie, the artist, was utterly silent and not moving.
Okay. I needed to think. A lot.
I cleared my throat. “They were going to kill you. I hope you all understand. I didn’t just shoot them for the fun of it.”
“You seem so unmoved by what happened.” Graham stared at me like I was a stranger to him. That was good. I was a stranger. I had loved these guys in turn, but not one of them really knew who I was. I’d seen to that like it was my job, because it was. I’d been set up to con them, and I’d been great at it.
But they’d each in turn wrecked me, and that was the only reason I’d just blown up my universe for them. My life sucked, but it was mine, and I was used to it.
No one, however, was going to hurt them. Not my uncle, not while I had breath in my body.
“Shouldn’t we be calling the police?” Graham turned away from me and spoke to the others. “Why are we all standing here doing nothing?”
“The last thing we should do is call the police,” Jamie spoke up. “Am I right, Holland? The last thing.”
I nodded, walking past him. It didn’t surprise me at all that Jamie understood these things better than the other three. He’d had a darker life, lived more on the edge. I didn’t know for sure, but my guess would be at some point, he might have even encountered this kind of violence peripherally, if not right up front. Or maybe I was just imagining a similarity we might share. We didn’t have the kind of relationship anymore where I could find that out.
“Which one of you has a car?”
These guys… they’d all had difficult childhoods in their own ways. But I wasn’t sure any of it could prepare them for this. Steven, whose parents wanted him to be a quarterback above all other things. That was all they cared about and nothing else. Now that he’d made it, they had almost nothing to do with him. His surgeries had been annoying to them. They hadn’t helped with his recovery.
I had. Not that I expected him to remember, considering how things turned out.
Graham’s father could challenge my uncle for the role of chief psychopath. Yeah… not a nice word, but it fit. He was dead now, but I couldn’t believe the years of things Graham had endured under the man’s abuse. In fact, his father had tried to rape me, and I wasn’t the first to have experienced that. He either got Graham’s girlfriends consensually, or he took what he wanted. The difference was that my own psychopath had killed the man for his attempt. Graham was the type who should be living in the light. What did those years in the dark do to him?
Charlie never lived up to expectations, which was insanity because he was a surgeon who saved lives. But he didn’t do what the family wanted when they wanted him to. He didn’t like the country club, didn’t enjoy the way his parents lived. When I’d been with him, he’d been emotionally starved. I wasn’t sure that anyone had ever given him any real vocal love. It was all about restraint, all about not seeming like they weren’t absolutely perfect all the time. The fact that he was amazing? Why acknowledge that?
Jamie… his parents were incredibly emotionally abusive. His father and brother were the worst; his father beat his mother. Jamie was angry, and I didn’t blame him. The darkness in him gushed out sometimes, and damn if I didn’t understand, because it coursed through me, too.
I’d loved them all. Needed them all.
And now I’d killed for them.
It didn’t even seem like a big deal. Of course, I’d kill for them.
No one touched what was mine.
Even if I didn’t get to keep them.
“Come on.” I snapped my fingers. “Who has the car?”
How It Happened
Chapter 2
Graham
A Few Months Earlier
A fucking NFL quarterback.
Holland had balls of steel evidently. Between myself and Steve Wolf, the likelihood that she would be locked up after she’d conned us was high.
Except neither of us had turned her in. I still wasn’t sure why I hadn’t. She’d left my life in ruins. My father was dead, something I was sure she was somehow responsible for, although I couldn’t prove it.
He had died, balls deep in a hooker from an overdose of fentanyl and OxyContin.
Of course, the public didn’t know that. They thought that the stately senator had died from a heart attack brought about by the stress from watching after the American public. The Kempners were nothing if not experts at spinning the public discourse the way we wanted it.
Which made it even stranger that I hadn’t called the FBI, the police… anyone when I realized what she must have done. I could have easily used that to my advantage to turn the public in my direction for
my upcoming congressional run.
But I didn’t.
My mom was currently drinking away her troubles at a spa in Palm Springs, and I didn’t expect her to leave there anytime soon. She hadn’t loved him. She was actually free. But I was sure that it wouldn’t last long. Women like my mother needed a rich man who treated them shitty like human beings needed water.
I stared down at the picture I had come across. I’d had a program running a search for Holland’s face for a few months now, and it had finally come across a photo of her. She was in the background of the photo following behind Wolf as he came out of a grocery store, but the camera had caught it just right to get a good enough profile to make a match.
Her hair was so dark, it appeared black in the picture. It was stunning on her. But maybe every color would be good on her. Blonde sure had.
She could change her hair color all she wanted. Wear different clothes, even change her mannerisms, but those eyes. The fucking eyes that haunted me every second of my life. She couldn’t hide those.
I dragged my attention away from Holland and stared at Steve Wolf. What kind of man was he? Had she fallen apart in his arms, sucked him dry in the middle of the night on a whim? Had he looked at her and wanted to offer her the world?