Breaking Her Rules
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Praise for Breaking Her Rules
“Jennifer Snow’s Breaking Her Rules is a knock out page-turner! I gobbled up this sexy, romantic, action-packed love story and was left wanting more. Main characters Grace and Walker generated plenty of heat along with deeply emotional moments that made this reader weak at the knees. I can’t wait for the next installment in Snow’s brilliant new series.”
—Karen Rock, award-winning author of YA and Contemporary Adult Romances
“Jennifer Snow has hit the trifecta of contemporary romance: humor, heat, and so much heart. Do not miss Breaking Her Rules.”
—National bestselling author Anna J. Stewart (author of the Tremayne Family Romances)
“Jennifer Snow’s voice draws you into the story with wit and charm, then Grace’s vulnerability and Walker’s tough sexiness with a side of honorable keeps you turning pages. Finally, you’re locked in the cage for some nail-biting tension. I thoroughly enjoyed this fast-paced, entertaining read!”
—Dani Collins, international bestselling author
“No contest! Breaking Her Rules is a total Knockout. Jennifer Snow combined a sexy underdog and a savvy promoter to create a story filled with so much heat, you’ll be rooting for these characters from page one.”
—Tawny Weber, New York Times & USA Today bestselling author
“With a bit of heat and heart, Jennifer Snow delivers an engaging story about the choice of playing it safe, or going after what the heart truly wants.”
—Nikki Lynn Barrett, USA Today bestselling author
“Jennifer Snow’s MMA series delivers a knockout punch . . .”
Jami Davenport, USA Today bestselling author
Breaking Her Rules
Jennifer Snow
InterMix Books, New York
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
BREAKING HER RULES
An InterMix Book / published by arrangement with the author
Copyright © 2015 by Jennifer Snow.
Excerpt from Fighting the Fall copyright © 2015 by Jennifer Snow.
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INTERMIX and the “IM” design are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
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eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-40896-8
PUBLISHING HISTORY
InterMix eBook edition / July 2015
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Penguin Random House is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
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Contents
Praise for Breaking Her Rules
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
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
A sneak peek at Fighting the Fall
About the Author
Chapter 1
“Whoa . . . occupied,” Walker Adams said, quickly reaching for a towel as the bathroom door swung open.
“Shit, sorry.” Grace shut her eyes as she slammed the door, but not before seeing much more of her best friend’s older brother than she expected. Something her fifteen-year-old self would have gone to extreme measures to see.
Well, that image was going to take a brain injury to forget.
“I’ll just be a second,” he called through the door as she turned to leave.
“No worries. Take your time.” She checked her watch. She had fifteen minutes before she had to leave for work. They would need to come up with a better routine if they were going to be roommates for several weeks.
Several weeks. Holy shit. How had Kylie talked her into this? When her best friend had called from California to ask the favor, Grace wished she hadn’t answered, because Kylie had asked her a question she’d been unable to refuse.
“He’s desperate,” Kylie had said.
Desperate was one word that failed to come to mind when she thought about Walker. She was pretty sure he’d never wanted anything too long before getting it. “Really?”
“Yes. I mean, he will never admit it, of course, but he’s left himself zero options. If he’s not attending classes, Dad says he’s not paying his rent or helping him financially until he wakes up and realizes he’s ruining his future.”
That sounded like Judge Adams. He saw one future for his son, and Grace didn’t expect the man to ever support the fighting career Walker had dropped out of law school to pursue. She’d sighed. “All I have is a pullout sofa—no spare room.” She cringed at the thought of someone sleeping in her living room . . . even for a few weeks. She’d never had a roommate, preferring her privacy and space.
Roommates were messy and loud and . . . messy.
“Trust me—he’s not picky right now. He’s been sleeping in his Jeep for the last few weeks. He finally told me and I’m a little worried about him living on the streets of Las Vegas.”
Her resolve melted. The idea of Walker Adams down on his luck was a completely foreign one. The high school valedictorian and football star was not exactly lacking in the “good fortune” category. Not when it came to success or brains or looks . . . so how had the guy voted “most likely to succeed” in high school ended up needing her pullout sofa?
“Okay, he can stay here . . . but you know I’m moving in three weeks, right? July thirty-first my lease is up and I’m moving in with Erik.”
“I was kinda hoping you’d come to your senses . . .” her friend had mumbled.
“Nope, still planning a future with a successful, gorgeous man.” She didn’t take offense at Kylie’s attitude toward Erik. The one and only time her friend had met her boyfriend, the Christmas before, they hadn’t exactly hit it off. Erik was kind of an acquired taste. His abrupt manner could be a little off-putting to those who didn’t know him well. Normally, if her best friend and boyfriend didn’t get along, it would be a cause of stress for Grace, but with Kylie a thousand miles away in LA and their visits rare these days as they both climbed their respective corporate ladders, her friend’s opinion seemed to matter less.
“Fine . . . well, at least he hasn’t proposed yet, so there’s still hope.”
Grace rolled her eyes. “So when is Walker getting here?” Changing the subject was always the best course of action whenever their talks turned to her relationship.
“I’ll text him right away with your address and he’ll be there soon. He can’t be that far away.”
Fan-fucking-tastic. Her best friend’s brother, a guy she’d been completely in love with at fifteen, and a man she hadn’t seen in almost five years, would be her new roommate in a matter of minutes. “Can’t wait to see him,” she’d lied.
And boy, in less than twenty-four hours,
she had certainly seen him. Every last perfectly tanned, sculpted inch of him. From the short dark hair, chiseled chest and shoulders to his drool-worthy abs and—ahem—everything else. Everything else.
Oh, God help her.
Going into the kitchen, she poured coffee into a travel mug as she heard the bathroom door open. She reached into the cupboard for a cup and turned as Walker entered the kitchen. “Coffee?” she asked.
“Yes, please,” Walker said, running a hand through his short, messed-up, still-wet-from-the-shower hair. “Sorry about that.”
She handed him the coffee. “The bathroom door does lock.” She fought to control the slight annoyance she heard creeping into her tone. He’d only been there a day and already she wasn’t sure how she would make it through several weeks. In the five years that she hadn’t seen him, he’d barely crossed her mind. Okay, fine, that was a lie, she thought about him . . . but only every other week or so and usually only after speaking to Kylie or her mother. In the last twenty-four suffocating hours, she’d thought of little else. How could she? He was there at every turn in her thousand-square-foot apartment. And he would be . . . possibly for three long weeks.
“In my defense, the door was closed. You could have knocked. I think you wanted to see me naked and wet from the shower.” He winked at her above the rim of his coffee cup, and she nearly dropped her own.
How did that simple gesture still have the knee-weakening effect on her that it had when she was fifteen? At twenty-six, she would have thought the halfhearted flirting attempt would have no effect at all. Especially since she hadn’t spent time with him in years, not since she’d moved away from their small town of Lovelock, Nevada, to go to the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. By now, her best friend’s older brother should have been just a pesky, unexpected houseguest—a favor to Kylie until he got his shit together. He had three weeks. And after that morning’s episode, she hoped he’d be out sooner. Or at least part of her did—the sensible, rational part. “Don’t flatter yourself. I see naked men all the time . . . much hotter than you,” she said, grabbing her purse from the counter. She had to get out of there. She could finish putting her makeup on in the car.
Twenty-four hours and he was already making her want to escape her own apartment.
“So you’re admitting I’m hot?”
The man needed an ego check. He may have been the Channing Tatum of Lovelock, population two thousand, but here in Las Vegas, his tanned, tattooed, muscular build and sexy-as-all-hell smile was just one of many. As an MMA fight promoter for the MFL, Grace was surrounded by men exactly like him every day.
Of course none that she’d wanted to marry when she was fifteen.
“Maybe we should set some ground rules.” She paused, noticing the crumpled blankets on the edge of the pullout sofa.
He set his coffee aside, and rested his chiseled forearms against the counter. The full-sleeve tattoo on his right arm, disappearing beneath his tight-fitting T-shirt, caught her eye. The last time she’d seen him, the tat had been a work in progress, and at the time she’d thought it was another attempt to rebel against Judge Adams. “Okay. Ground rules. Go,” he said when she was silent.
Right. Ground rules, she thought, tearing her gaze from his arm. Maybe she needed to set some for herself as well. “First, when you’re not using the sofa as a place to sleep, I’d appreciate it if it looked like a sofa,” she said, pointing to it.
Immediately, he stood and grabbed the blankets. “Got it, sorry . . . continue.”
Bending, she picked up his jeans off the floor. A sock fell out of the leg and she simply raised an eyebrow.
“No clothes on the floor, not a problem.”
She turned and pointed to his suitcase and duffel bag of MMA training gear in the corner of her living room. “If we can store this stuff . . .” She scanned the small space that hadn’t seemed so small yesterday, not without his six-foot-two body standing in the middle of it. “. . . in the closet next to the door, that would be great . . .”
“Sure, I’ll stash the suitcase. The fighting gear I’ll store in a locker at the gym.” He quickly reached for the set of hand wraps he’d draped over her pole lamp to dry.
She shut her eyes and suppressed a sigh. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t see that. So, you found a place to train?” MMA clubs were as common as pawnshops in Las Vegas, growing in popularity in the last ten years as mixed martial arts had become the new boxing. New ones seemed to appear overnight, and then disappear just as quickly. Fighters wanted to train, but few of them could afford the monthly gym fees. Fighting took more than it gave—it was physically and mentally demanding, and the weak didn’t survive. Out of the hundreds of fighters the MFL’s recruiters considered each year for the league, only ten or twelve were actually offered contracts, and half of them didn’t return for a second fight.
“Yeah, Cage Masters over on West Sunset Road. I’ve been training for the last couple of weeks since I moved out here from California.”
“Dawson Miller’s place? I thought that gym had closed last month.” The building itself was practically condemned, and the gym was one of the oldest and most run-down in Las Vegas. The MFL recommended their fighters train elsewhere . . . anywhere but there.
“Nah, it’s still open. Barely.” He set the blankets on the edge of the couch, and folded in the bed. “Anything else?” he asked, stashing his suitcase in the closet.
She thought for a moment. “Besides locking the bathroom door . . . I think that’s it.” She turned to go, then swung back. “Actually there is one more thing. No women.”
He grinned, revealing the set of dimples she’d stared at far too often in her teen years. “I’m not allowed to date?”
She scoffed. “As if you could go a week without sex.” She clamped her lips shut when his grin turned into a full, cocky smile.
“Are you calling me a man-slut?” He didn’t appear offended.
If the shoe fit, she thought wryly. “All I’m saying is screw them at their place, not on my sofa . . . and we should get along fine.” Reaching past him into the closet, she got her suit jacket. Now she was really desperate to escape. It was too early in the morning to be talking about sex with Walker Adams.
He took the suit jacket from her and held it open. “Understood.”
She awkwardly slid her arms into it and stepped away from him. “Great. See you later.” God, if only she wouldn’t. If he could spend all of his time at the gym, that would be ideal. Everything about this temporary living situation had her on edge.
When she reached for the door handle, he caught her wrist. “Gracie.”
The sound of her old nickname didn’t help. If it had been anyone else, she’d have insisted her name was Grace, but with Walker she had always been Gracie—awkward, dorky, taller-than-all-the-boys Gracie, who hadn’t known how to flirt and hadn’t inherited any of her mother’s feminine qualities. She had been just Gracie, his younger sister’s annoying best friend. “Yeah?”
“I really do appreciate this,” he said, his hazel eyes sincere as they locked with hers.
“It’s not a problem.” She pulled her arm away and tossed her long, dark hair over one shoulder as she opened her front door. “Don’t forget to go see Maria—I left the address for the bar on the pegboard in the kitchen. She’s expecting you.”
He nodded. “Thanks again.”
Outside her apartment, Grace released a deep breath. What had she been thinking to agree to this? Walker Adams had been in her apartment and back in her life for twenty-four hours, and she was already regretting it. She hoped she could make it three weeks.
***
Like all of the other casino clubs on the strip, ShadowDancers Night Club was dimly lit and gave the impression of night, despite being midday. A long mahogany bar ran the length of one wall, and above the premium liquors on a raised platform, girls danced behind thin, red curtains. The rest of the space consisted of red, plush velvet-covered booths that offered a view of the show,
while providing intimate seating to the patrons. He’d spent a lot of time and money in bars like this while studying for his law degree. Now with any luck, he’d be working in one.
Funny how he wouldn’t have considered that “luck” a month ago.
“So you girls aren’t actually naked behind there?” Walker asked a cute, petite blonde sitting on the barstool next to him as he waited for Maria Kelly, the manager of ShadowDancers.
“Nope,” the young woman who’d introduced herself as Rainstorm, obviously her stage name, said, her loose curls dancing around her shoulders as she shook her head.
“Wow, way to crush a man’s dreams,” Walker said, taking a sip of his soda, as another song started and one of Rainstorm’s coworkers started a tantalizing sway of her hips behind the curtain.
At the sight of a slightly older woman coming out of the back office, the dancer slid from the barstool and leaned closer, handing him a business card. “I’m not naked here . . . but if you want to get a better look, I also work at B.J.’s on the strip,” she whispered, before leaving in the opposite direction from which the older woman approached.
Walker tucked the card into his shirt pocket and watched her ass as she walked toward the back of the bar. Working here, he would definitely have a fantastic view anyway. And if he didn’t get the job, B.J.’s was his next stop to fill out an application.
As the other woman stopped next to him, he stood and extended a hand. “Maria?” Gracie’s description of the woman had been perfect—bright red hair, five foot nothing, tiny diamond studs pierced into her cheeks, and a cross tattoo under her right eye. Any one of the attributes would have been enough to make Maria stand out in a police lineup, but oddly enough, they combined to give her a unique look that he suspected represented the personality in the tiny body.
She ignored his outstretched hand, instead letting her gaze drift over him, the way a butcher might assess a piece of meat. “Can you mix a drink?”
That depended on the drink. Rum and Coke—sure. “Yes ma’am.”
“You can start tonight,” she said, nodding, indicating for him to follow her to the office.