Repeat Offender

by Vale, Lani Lynn

  “Agreed,” he said. “But the weird, random acts of vandalism? The fucking with stuff that shouldn’t be fucked with? That’s all you, and you know it.”

  He did have a point.

  “What are we having for dinner?” David finally looked up at us. “And do I still have to take a shower tonight?”

  “You can jump in the pool with me. Since Daddy is out here…” Adele looked at her father adoringly.

  I rolled my eyes and walked back inside, stopping to check on Bruno the dog as I did.

  I found him curled up in the captain’s chair sound asleep.

  Knowing he would be fine there for now since he liked that particular spot, I made my way back into the kitchen and finished dinner.

  It wasn’t fancy.

  It wasn’t even all that healthy.

  But it was homemade, and all that I had the desire to cook at this point.

  I was exhausted.

  I was seven months pregnant, it was the middle of the summer, and I was apparently only capable of making hell children.

  Just as I was pulling the taco meat out of the pot to drain the fat off, Lynn came back inside without the children.

  “You seem to be missing two constant companions,” I said as I looked at my husband.

  Lynn rolled his eyes. “Bruno was guilt-tripped into watching them. I have to go dig the dog crate out before tonight so Bruno the dog can go to bed.”

  I looked up at him when he crowded me against the cabinets.

  “I love you.”

  I burst out laughing. “That’s still not going to make me watch them for you so you can go do whatever. I have to get this documentary filmed or I’m going to not have enough content for this week.”

  Lynn sighed against my face.

  “Your kids wear me out,” he said.

  I snickered. “How do you think I feel? And, just sayin’, but if you didn’t allow them to do half the things you allow them to do—like watch you fight and allow them to dig—then they wouldn’t know how to do half this shit.”

  He smacked my ass. “Check in every half hour so I know that you’re not lying dead in a ditch.”

  I filled myself a taco, grabbed my bottle of tea, and winked at him. “I’ll text you when I get there.”

  Then I was gone, doing what I loved to do.

  And when I got home later that night, the house was spotless, I had plenty of footage for the next three weeks, and Lynn was waiting for me in the bed.

  When he spotted me, he held up the covers.

  I all but dove in—as well as a heavily pregnant woman could—and snuggled up close.

  “The kids are sleeping in the same bed,” I said as I rubbed my chin against his chest.

  He squeezed me just a little bit tighter. “They were actually being nice when they went to bed. Not sure where they learned that from.”

  I threw my head back and laughed. “Definitely not from us.”

  He pressed his lips to mine, capturing my laugh. “No, definitely not from us.”

  • • •

  I hope you enjoyed Lynn and Six’s book, up next is Beckham and Troup in Conjugal Visits.

  Turn the page for a sneak preview.

  WHAT’S NEXT?

  CHAPTER 1

  People are so stupid.

  -Things Beckham repeats 100 times a day.

  BECKHAM

  “Who are you?”

  I blinked at the guy’s words.

  “Um, Beckham Spurlock,” I narrowed my eyes. “Who are you?”

  The boy—man—whatever he was, shook his head, and the hair that was covering his eyes swept out of his face.

  My heart all but leaped in my freakin’ chest.

  Oh. My. God.

  My boy/man was heartbreakingly sexy.

  As in, one look at him, and I was about to hyperventilate.

  I’d just asked him who he was!

  What the hell, Beckham?

  “What kind of name is Beckham?” the man-boy asked.

  I shrugged. “A name my parents gave me, so what the hell does it matter? I had no control of it.”

  My sarcastic attitude was an automatic response.

  I hadn’t actually meant for those words to come out of my mouth, yet they had.

  The man-boy’s lips twitched, and a lock of hair once again fell into his eyes.

  “My name is Troup. Trouper Aoki,” he held out his hand.

  Reflexively, I put my hand in his and shook it as I was trained to do from birth.

  His tattooed fingers wrapped around my small hand, and I was left stunned.

  Wow, he had really big hands.

  And his tattoos were beautiful.

  Honestly, I’d always thought hand tattoos were gross. But his?

  They were drawn so well. They were a work of art.

  “Are you going to high school at Kilgore?” I asked.

  Troup’s eyes went squinty. “Unfortunately.”

  “Are you a senior?” I continued.

  He nodded once.

  “Me, too,” I replied. “At least you’ll know one person when you get there.”

  He tilted his head slightly, causing that overly long hair to once again fall into his eyes.

  He did the head tilt thing again and twisted it out of his way so his eyes could once again see mine.

  “I highly doubt, you looking like you look, that you’ll even be anywhere in my vicinity,” he replied bluntly. “I’ll bet you’re a cheerleader, right?”

  I narrowed my eyes. “And what’s that got to do anything?”

  I wasn’t a cheerleader, but only because I was too busy with volleyball to have anything to do with cheer.

  He stretched his arms up high over his head, grasping on to the monkey bars above him.

  We were in the park, at ten in the morning, and for some reason, neither one of us was leaving, even though the park was starting to fill up with little kids.

  “I just think that you’re too blonde. Too pretty. Too… you. I doubt you’d ever slum it with the bad boy,” he drawled.

  Slum it with the bad boy.

  No, not usually.

  But as he slowly did a pull-up, causing his shirt to ride up and show off an impressive six-pack of abs, I realized that I might’ve been doing myself a disservice.

  He came back down, so controlled that it was obvious he did this a lot—worked out—and narrowed his eyes at me.

  “You have really weird brown eyes,” Troup rumbled.

  I blinked. “You have really light-colored eyes. They’re weird, too. The color of pond water.”

  He burst out laughing.

  “I’ve never heard that before.” He sniggered. “That’s great. Pond water.”

  I shrugged. “I guess.”

  I was such a dumbass.

  “I guess they look like honey. But you know, when you hold the honey up to the sun and look through it? That’s what your eyes look like,” he explained his earlier comment.

  A brrrrup had us both turning to see a cop car pulling up to the chain-link fence.

  When my dad got out, my breath hitched.

  “Ummm,” I hesitated. “That’s my dad.”

  “Of course, you would be a cop’s kid,” he grumbled. “Of fuckin’ course.”

  “Beckham, get your ass over here. You, too, kid,” my father ordered harshly.

  I frowned at his harsh tone.

  Hurrying to him, I started to get worried that something was wrong. When I finally got to him, I was a little out of breath.

  “What’s wrong?” I gasped, feeling the familiar panic start to rise up.

  I had panic attacks. Lots of them.

  My father waved me off. “Nothing is wrong unless you count three different calls from three different concerned parents about two teenagers, one of them that looked shady, being at the park making it impossible for their kids to play.”

  My mouth fell open. “You’re joking.”

  “Not joking,” my dad immediately replied. “Loo
k.”

  I did and saw that a bunch of concerned parents were now staring at us with relief.

  My shoulders slumped. “We weren’t doing anything bad. I left the house for a walk and wound up here. I…”

  “Who are you?” my father barked.

  Troup had finally joined us.

  “Trouper Aoki,” Troup introduced himself.

  That was it.

  Nothing more, nothing less. Not even an offer of a handshake.

  “Don’t you think you’re a little old for a place like this?” he asked.

  Troup shrugged. “I was only swinging on the swings. Then I saw your daughter and thought I’d say hi.”

  “How about you stay far away from my daughter,” my dad suggested. “And don’t play at the park anymore. You’re apparently intimidating.”

  Apparently intimidating.

  As if he didn’t have any other positive attributes, according to my dad.

  “Dad,” I said. “You don’t have to be so mean. We weren’t doing anything wrong.”

  “No,” he agreed. “Not right now.”

  As if we would have done something wrong had he not come along.

  I narrowed my eyes.

  “Come on, I’ll take you back home. Your mother’s been calling me for an hour, saying that you were missing.”

  “She has not,” I grumbled as I tossed Troup a look over my shoulder.

  Except, when I looked back, he was walking away, through the middle of the playground, as if he seriously didn’t give a single shit that he’d just been told to stay away from there.

  He made sure to walk right by the group of mothers that looked concerned for their child’s welfare all over again.

  “Dad, that was rude,” I told him. “He didn’t do anything wrong, and neither did I. There’s no age limit on who can swing on the swings.”

  “Maybe not,” Dad answered as he walked to the passenger side door and opened it for me. “But you need to stay away from him. He looks… pissed.”

  Pissed.

  Now that my father had said that, I agreed with him. He did look kind of pissed.

  “Well, maybe a little bit of compassion would go a long way,” I suggested as I plopped myself into the front seat.

  I didn’t bother with the seatbelt. The ride was literally two minutes tops, and the majority of that was navigating the parking lot.

  “How do you know that boy?” he muttered as he maneuvered us out onto the road.

  “I don’t,” I admitted. “I saw him walking down the street at the same time that I was. We met at the swings, him having gone the long way, and me taking the shortcut.”

  He grunted something that sounded like ‘magnificent’ but I couldn’t be sure.

  It was as we were turning into our driveway that I saw a flash of black.

  I turned and watched out of the passenger window as Trouper walked across his front lawn to the front door of the house that was right next to mine.

  Score!

  “Son of a bitch.” My dad had obviously seen the same thing. “What are the fuckin’ odds?”

  “What?” I asked innocently.

  “Don’t ever, ever, ever go near that boy. Not unless you want to be a single mother at seventeen. That boy is Bad with a capital B.” He made sure to hold my eyes and let me know just how serious he was about that statement.

  “Dad, he’s just a kid,” I said. “A teenager. What is this immediate dislike you have going on? That’s not like you.”

  That wasn’t like him at all. My dad was normally very open-minded about everything.

  That was why I had a tattoo at seventeen, because he’d gone with me to get it.

  That was why I was allowed to do what I wanted, when I wanted, and had no curfew. Because he trusted me implicitly.

  At least, he used to.

  I wasn’t so sure that he would continue to think this way when it came to some random boy.

  I mean, it wasn’t like we were dating or anything.

  When we got inside, my mother all but rushed me. “You aren’t answering your phone!”

  I frowned. “I don’t have my phone. I never have my phone when I go out on a walk.”

  She frowned. “You went out on a walk?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I told you this before I left.”

  “Oh,” she smiled sheepishly. “Sorry.”

  I shrugged and walked into the kitchen for a bottle of water, coming to a stop when I looked through our kitchen window and saw Troup standing in his.

  His eyes lifted and our gazes connected over the length of the separation between us.

  Don’t ever, ever, ever go near that boy. Not unless you want to be a single mother at seventeen. That boy is Bad with a capital B.

  Grab your copy here.