by Zoey Castile
Praise for STRIPPED
“Tantalizing . . . Their chemistry is intense.”
—The New York Times
“A witty, wonderful romance that speaks to who we are, who we are meant to be, and who we are meant to be with.”
—The Washington Post
“Vivid and naughty.”—Entertainment Weekly
“Much like Magic Mike, Stripped is swoony, exciting and an all-around entertaining ride.”—Booklist
“A sweet and sexy story that shows how life-changing—and gratifying—it can be to step outside of your comfort zone and question expectations.”—Shondaland
“A perfect read for fans of Magic Mike.”
—Smart Bitches, Trashy Books
“A sexy, funny contemporary romance . . . devilishly fun.”
—NPR
“Castile delivers genuine chemistry . . . thoroughly entertaining.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Take one sexy stripper hero, add one wild, witty school teacher heroine, and watch the fireworks. This book is my cherry pie!”—Ann Aguirre, New York Times bestselling author
“Castile’s writing sparkles with wit. Readers will swoon for Robyn and Fallon’s love story.”
—Alexis Daria, author of Take the Lead
“In a perfect mix of sexy attraction that sizzles on the page and enchanting romance between characters you fall in love with, Castile’s novel hits all the right notes!”
—Priscilla Oliveras, author of Her Perfect Affair
“Zoey Castile is a fresh and fun new voice, and the characters in Stripped will capture your heart (and possibly your dollar bills).”—Alisha Rai, author of Hurts to Love You
Books by Zoey Castile
Stripped
Hired
Flashed
Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation
FLASHED
A HAPPY ENDINGS NOVEL
ZOEY CASTILE
KENSINGTON BOOKS
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Praise
Also by
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
PAT
1 - Go Your Own Way
2 - Maldita Sea Mi Suerte
3 - Bidi Bidi Bom Bom
4 - Dime Store Cowgirl
5 - Pink
6 - Party in the USA
7 - Wide Open Spaces
8 - I Walk the Line
9 - Don’t Turn Around
10 - Colder Weather
11 - Love Is a Wild Thing
12 - Body Like a Back Road
13 - Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy
14 - La Cura
15 - The Monster Mash
16 - Save Me
17 - Patience
18 - Breakup in a Small Town
19 - Moscas En La Casa
20 - Te Duele
21 - Waiting for Tonight
EPILOGUE: Vivir Mi Vida
Acknowledgments
To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2019 by Zoey Castile
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1528-9
Kensington Electronic Edition: September 2019
ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-1528-9
ISBN-10: 1-4967-1528-4
First Kensington Trade Paperback Edition: September 2019
For Christine Higgins, sláinte and salud
PAT
December
Thirty-five was my lucky number.
I was thirty-five when I got my big break. A year before that I modeled on the cover of a book for a friend. That book went on to sell thirty-five thousand copies the first month it was out. My face was plastered all over airports, check-out counters, bookstores. Wherever books were sold, my mostly naked body was there—even a 350-foot billboard lighting up Times Square across three sides of a building.
I got picked up by the top agency covering LA, New York, and London. Signed my name away on a 3.5-million-dollar contract to star in the biggest summer blockbuster since Avatar. Matchmaking agencies were off the hook trying to get me to be photographed with or date starlets that my teenage self would never even have dreamed of, models from every corner of the world, even one duchess looking to get on the front pages of whatever gossip magazine would catch us in dimly lit Parisian bars. How many of them? That’s right. Thirty-five women.
I had the life I’d hoped for, dreamed of, prayed for between shitty jobs and endless nights. I had the life I thought I’d earned. No. The life I deserved.
I’d yet to learn that no one deserves anything.
It took thirty-five seconds to change my life, too.
To get in that car with my brother and our dates for the premiere of my breakout movie. Sure, it was ten seconds to win the drag race, speeding at over ninety miles per hour across a quarter mile of empty, glittering LA streets with fans waiting at the finish line. I should have done a lot of things that night. Hell, before that night while I’m at it.
Thirty-five bottles of champagne at the pre- and after-parties for just my friends, probably more. But all I can think about is the moments after the accident. The guys on the losing side trying to take my brother out of the passenger seat to pick a fight. My fists flying, knuckles on skin, crunching on bone. Blood down my nose and face. Then, it was over. The fight was squashed for some reason I can’t remember. We were okay for thirty-five seconds after that. I’m sure of it, even if it’s impossible.
“Get in the car, Jack,” I shouted at him.
I should have said more. I should have—
Ten seconds to rev the engine and get away from the nut job with a gun. Five seconds to get to the next intersection, screaming, laughing, slapping the dashboard at how fucking lucky we were. How alive.
Twenty seconds that the truck driver fell asleep at the wheel and T-boned my car and the world spun like a whirling firework on the Fourth of July, all brilliant sparks and red and blue lights on the spray of shattered glass.
“Jack?” I shouted only a single time before my luck ran out.
1
Go Your Own Way
LENA
June
My red 2005 Honda Civic wheezes and jostles its way up the dirt road to the McMansion. After half an hour of getting lost on Hyalite Canyon Road because I mistook the old ranch’s entryway for a dead end, I’m praying to all the gods that this is the right place. I can feel every single rock and pebble that my busted shock absorbers fail to—well—absorb. You’d think that a place looking for a live-in housekeeper could afford to, I don’t know, pave their driveway. If I get the job, I’m going to have to find a smoother back road that won’t shake my car apart.
I clutch the wheel, my shoulders tight and my head leaning forward. “Hold on, baby. You can do it.” But after a mile, I don’t see the house, only the bright green landscape just south of Bozeman, Montana, I’ve grown accustomed to.
Right now, I’m 75 percent sure that I’m still lost. Even if I know I took the right turn, this pothole-marked road feels more like an entrance to a haunted house than anything else. I groan as the path slopes up and my motor makes the same sound I make when I’m coughing up phlegm. I shift gears and my car bucks.
“Come on, Selena, my darling,” I beg. I turn off the CD player (yes, my car still has a CD player) and hit the gas, leaning forward as if I can push this thing up the hill with my sheer willpower.
Then, I’m up at the top of the hill. Bright-green trees in the distance make the view practically a postcard. It rained a lot this spring, and out here, there’s a wildness to the surrounding lawn, overgrown in a way that looks almost forgotten.
“Okay,” I say, this time to the Porg hanging from my rearview mirror. “Do you think I have a chance at the job, Leia?”
The stuffed animal my ex-boyfriend won for me at a movie theater does not respond, which I’m sure is good considering my state of being. Leia Porgana, as I instantly named her, is a gift I’ve kept as a token of home. Sure, that same ex sat through the movie screening clutching his soda angrily because I’d just told him I was leaving New York to go back to art school all the way across the country. The movie is a blur. I don’t know why I didn’t wait until after it was over. I just had this tingly sensation the second he captured the porg with the metal claw. He handed it to me and he was going to tell me he loved me. I felt it in my bones. He said, “Lena, I l—” That unfinished L haunted me across my entire trip here. He might have been ready to say, “I love spending time with you or I like crowded theaters with arcades for public declarations of romance.” It wasn’t right on my part to do that, but it was better to rip off the Band-Aid and break up in person instead of over the phone. Still, this tiny stuffed porg kept me company in that theater while my ex was spilling Coca-Cola on his lap, neither of us paying attention to the exploding cars and chase scenes on the big screen.
I know I made the right decision to leave. At least, I thought I did. I’ve been in Bozeman for six months and it’s scary how little I miss from my life back home. I can count those things on one hand and they go as follows—my little sister, Ariana, pizza (real New York Italian pizza), hearing seven different languages at any given time on the way to work, having a twenty-four-hour pharmacy open for when I get a serious cookie craving and also realize I ran out of tampons at two in the morning, and the Colombian restaurant at the corner of my block. So, family, food, and convenience?
Before I can analyze my levels and limits of human connection and attachment, I breathe a sigh of relief when the McMansion finally comes into view. Having spent all of my twenty-six years of life in Queens, New York, and only Queens, New York, I don’t know the difference between a working ranch or a ranch mansion or what the locals like to call Darned-Californian-Tax-Evaders. This is definitely not the rustic wooden house I’m used to seeing atop green hills. It’s modern in a way that looks alien to this landscape, all clean metal lines and glass walls on the entire second floor. It has the sleek exterior of a possible serial killer’s lair, gray and white and devoid of color. I pull up on the unfinished gravel lane near the front door. What might have been spiral topiary trees line the perimeter of the house, but they’ve outgrown their shape and weeds sprout all over the grounds.
To my right is a huge lawn equipped with a metal firepit and beyond that, a thicket of woods that goes on for miles . . . or acres. I honestly don’t know the conversion. The point is, there’s more property here than the square of backyard I grew up with. Practically a million times more. That’s the thing I love about Montana. I can feel the outdoors here even when I’m in someone’s backyard.
I put my car in park and grab the wheel to steady my nerves. I can do this. Yesterday, I answered a Craigslist post for a job. For hours I grappled with whether or not to call. The job was, after all, for a live-in housekeeper. My mom was a maid for a service on the Upper East Side and my aunt was a hotel maid. It was good, constant work. For years they toiled hard and put food on the table. But when my mom died, I knew that I didn’t want to work myself to death. I didn’t want to let some rich assholes bleed me dry. My mother was Mexican and my dad Puerto Rican, and I’m as New York as you get. But that also means—as a twenty-six-year-old Latina college dropout—cleaning houses is about where my college advisors thought I’d end up. It’s honest work and yet, I still turned my nose up at the posting because when people who look like you are only seen in one dimension, one role, one type of job, you start to forget that you’re more than a punch line. That maybe you have your own dreams and aspirations.
I should blame my stepmother for forcing me into a financial deficit, but I don’t have time to dwell on that, thankfully, as a short, plump woman in a red plaid shirt walks out of the house. She gives me a concerned look as she makes a beeline for me.
“Heya, I’m Scarlett.” Her voice is bright and friendly. Up close I can see the fine age lines around light-brown eyes and the smatter of burnt-red freckles over her nose. She scratches at the spot under her wedding ring with short sparkly nails. “Glad you found the place. You must be Magdalena Martel.”
I inwardly cringe at the pronunciation of my full name. Only my dad used to call me Magdalena. Ariana calls me by my whole government name—Magdalena Luz Martel San Sebastián. But it never sounded right during roll-call periods where old teachers said my name like they were coughing up furballs.
“Everyone calls me Lena,” I say, and smile as I shake her hand.
“Thanks for coming at such short notice.”
I really need this job because my stepmother ruined my credit is probably not the correct response, so I pivot. “Your home is—lovely.”
She barks out a rough laugh. “Oh, honey, this piece of modern manure, pardon my French, isn’t mine. The house belongs to a friend. It’s a long story, but the short of it is he needs someone to keep the place clean, prepare meals, do the laundry, the works.”
“Is he, like, a millionaire recluse?” I ask, then instantly regret it. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
Scarlett’s too busy laughing and cuts off my apology with a wave of her hands. “You’re absolutely right he is. He’s a pain in the ass, but he’s been through a lot and he means well. At least he might mean well if I could get him to leave the property once in a while. But that’s neither here nor there.”
Scarlett doesn’t elaborate, and I know enough to not ask. She walks back to the house and I follow behind, leaving my car unlocked. Ariana was shocked when I told her people here don’t lock their cars or home doors.
The foyer is pretty clean. I’m not exactly sure what kind of mess she might mean until we enter the living room. First, there’s the beautiful parts of it. The high ceilings and exposed beams of pale wood, the place feels like a dome. Floor-to-ceiling windows give a startling view of the surrounding area, including the hill I crested with nothing but cheap gas and fairy dust. You know, I feel like maybe it’s better I don’t get this job because the idea of having to repeat this drive might shatter my car into hundreds of pieces.
I ignore my self-sabotaging thoughts and turn to a fireplace big enough to fit three people inside—I mean, if this was the witch from “Hansel and Gretel” and you were into that sort of thing. The walls are still unfinished, but there is nothing I love more than a blank canvas. A very empty bookcase flanks the entire main wall. A wall. For books. Then there’s the stuff that’s not so beautiful—dozens and dozens of boxes in various stages of unpacked, broken bits of wood from what could have been a coffee table. When I bump into one of the boxes labeled FRAGILE, the unmistakable sound of broken glass rattles.
“I can’t tell if he’s moving out or just moving in,” I say, only half joking.
Despite the layer of dust on the fireplace mantel and the general disarray, I can see the promise of the space. It’s a little more modern than I like, but I’m about fifty years away from being able to own my own house at the rate th
at I’m going, so what does it matter?
“The place was finished eight months ago,” Scarlet says. “The Donatello Ranch was all but falling apart so Pat, as the oldest living son, made the tough call and built something over nothing.”
For the first time since our introduction, she isn’t cracking her warm smile or boisterous laugh and I take that as a sign that there’s more to this story.
“Let me give you the tour,” she says, and loops her arm through mine.
The gesture takes me by surprise. It’s friendly, warm, and damn, it’s been so long since I’ve had human contact like this that part of me wants to give her a hug. Growing up, I’ve always been used to physical contact. When I’d sit on the couch and do my homework, my mom used to brush my hair or plait it in two braids. When we walked in the mall, my mom and aunt and myself would walk hand in hand. Before I went to bed, I kissed Ariana on the top of her head even though all she’d say was, “You’ll see me in the morning, ugh.”
But what if I didn’t? What if something happened? I wanted to make sure she knew that I loved her. Here, on my own for the first time in my life, I’ve forgotten how much I miss that.
I clear my throat and let Scarlett lead me out of the living room and down a wide hallway. My skin is chilled at how cold it is in here. The black wood panels are so sleek it almost looks like oil. I wish I’d taken off my boots because I’m tracking dirt and gravel on the gray marble floors. Scarlett shows me four empty bedrooms like this, two of them with bathrooms. Bed frames and side tables are still in their boxes waiting to get built. Light fixtures tucked in corners have collected dust.