“You know how to work on cars?”
Kayla started to snicker. “That’s why she’s always so dirty. I think you’ll come to realize, my dear friend Rafe, that you shouldn’t underestimate any of the girls in this family. Scout, Rebel, Janie, me, Sam’s three girls. Hell, any of the Free girls, really. They all know their way around a vehicle. Janie here just knows her way better than most. She’s the one who spent the most time with them.”
Rafe looked at me, grinned, and put my baby into reverse.
His hand came perilously close to my left hip since I was half on Kayla’s lap and half on the console, but he didn’t touch me. Dammit.
“How fast do you think she’ll go?” he questioned.
My car shook and shuttered, the car seemingly struggling to stay alive.
That was a lie, though. My car wouldn’t die. This baby was perfectly primed and in the best shape a car of its age could ever be in. Hell, it was better than almost any new car I could drive off the lot.
“She’ll go about one twenty and stay within the lines,” I said almost instantly.
Kayla snorted.
Rafe didn’t say a word.
But his hands did tighten slightly on the steering wheel, almost as if he was upset that I knew my car’s top speed.
But…who didn’t know their car’s top speed? If you didn’t, you were likely a wiener.
I, most definitely, wasn’t a wiener.
“Where are you going?” I questioned as he expertly pulled out of the lot.
He didn’t even stall. That was pretty impressive with my car.
I had a modified camshaft in it, and the proper fuel ratio made it persnickety sometimes. It took just the right amount of gas on the driver’s part to get it to go without hesitating, and Rafe had applied it without ever being in it before.
That was damned impressive. My ‘Cuda was a finicky little bitch.
“I’ll go to your place. I have something I want to discuss with Sam anyway. Once I’m done, I gotta head to my sister’s place. Then I have to head back down to Hostel,” he answered, pulling out in front of a slow-moving minivan.
He went through the gears expertly, stopping in fourth gear and loosely letting his hand rest on the gear shift.
Glock and Kimber both woofed, causing me to snort. “Can you roll your window down for them?”
Rafe had it down moments later, and my hair started to fly all around my face.
“Their back windows don’t go down?”
I shivered as the cool air hit my skin. “No. That’s why I had this one and the other window cracked for them. The windows in the back need some work, and I haven’t had the time to fix them since they stopped rolling down.”
“Easy fix,” Rafe muttered, his eyes going to the rearview mirror before he switched lanes.
He accelerated past a slow-moving dump truck, and then returned to his original lane.
“Maybe,” I agreed. “What’s in Hostel?”
“A job.”
“What kind of job?” I questioned.
“One where I intend to work for a while,” he answered, looking over at me for a short moment before returning his eyes to the road. “Why?”
I felt my lips turn up.
“Just figured that you had plans of some sort. Hostel’s a small town,” I admitted. “And I’m just curious.”
“You’re always curious,” he muttered, sounding put out. “The road construction finished this way?”
I shook my head. “No, they hit a snag with a pipeline,” I said as I gestured to a side road he should take. “That one is faster.”
Rafe grunted but pulled off before the back road that I’d indicated. Instead, he’d taken some road that I’d never once seen before. A dirt road of some sort.
“Uhh,” Kayla said. “I’m not sure this is a road.”
“It is.”
Then Rafe didn’t say another word as we crawled carefully over the uneven road.
Minutes later, he pulled out onto the other side of the main highway again, right on the other side of traffic.
I’d lived in Kilgore my entire freakin’ life and not once had I seen that road.
Otherwise, I would’ve taken it a whole lot more than just freakin’ once.
“How did you find out about that cut through?” I questioned.
Rafe shrugged. “Research.”
And that was the last word he’d said until we pulled into Free ten minutes later.
Chapter 2
There are two kinds of people in this world. People with guns, like me. And people with stupid, smug faces. Like you.
-Rafe to Janie’s ex
Rafe
I was going to die if I had to sit next to Janie another goddamn second.
She smelled like sunshine and flowers, and I wanted nothing more to haul her into my lap and devour her mouth.
But, a dirty old man like me couldn’t be seen kissing the young daughter of a friend.
Why?
Because I valued my last surviving ball, that’s why.
Twelve years ago, I’d been shot in the upper thigh. That shot hadn’t taken out my ball. What it had taken out was the blood supply to my testicles. Unfortunately, when blood supply was restored, my favorite testicle was struggling. And, two days into my recovery, it was discovered that my left testicle had given up the ghost. Meaning, I’d gone back into surgery to have it removed.
I’d been asked at the time if I had any desire for a fake ball to be placed in my sac, but at the time, I hadn’t given a fuck. That fuck had changed when I got my first good look at it after surgery—then I had to have it fixed. Swear to God, it looked awful, and the moment my prosthetic ball was in, I felt immensely better.
“Are you okay?” Janie asked, drawing me out of my ball contemplation.
“Fine,” I answered. “Your parents change the gate code lately?”
Janie nodded. “Once a month like clockwork.”
I sighed. “Are they going to make me jump through hoops to get it this time?”
Because, if I was an honest man, that really pissed me off.
I’d proven myself time and time again with them, and time and time again they made me prove myself all over again.
I should be used to it by now, but honestly, it was annoying.
I’d been loyal to them for over ten years now. I’d done everything they’d ever asked me to do, and yet they continued to treat me like the unknown. As if I was the man they always suspected me to be.
See, when I was a child—twelve or thirteen at most—my father had done something to a few people.
And one of those few people had been someone that the men of Free had known. An old Army captain of theirs that had just been starting out in life. One who’d invested in my father’s Ponzi scheme and had lost his entire life savings—right when his wife was due to give birth to their first child.
From there, my father had just moved on to another unsuspecting soul. While Jerrod Teeterman, later known as Captain Teeterman, had struggled to keep up with what life had thrown him—which had been a wife who died shortly after giving birth to their very sick little boy. A very sick little boy who had struggled to live for four years before passing away when I’d just turned sixteen.
At sixteen, I hadn’t realized that a man was losing his world a thousand miles away from me. What I had known was that in my own personal hell, life sucked. It was my sister and me, struggling to not get on my father’s bad side.
If we got on that bad side? There would be hell to pay—there was hell to pay. I’d also found that out the hard way.
Lucky for me, after receiving the beating that put me in jeopardy of losing my life, my father had been taken into police custody.
It was then that they’d discovered not just the sins that had brought him under police scrutiny, but they also uncovered schemes he’d been a part of when his mug shot was plastered all over the news for hi
s part in nearly beating me to death. They found over three hundred poor souls whom he’d cleaned out of their life savings and left floundering.
But life didn’t get better after my father was in jail. Nope. Not for me, and certainly not for Raven, my baby sister.
How could it get worse?
Going from the devil that you knew to the one that you didn’t.
Raven and I? We weren’t strangers to bad situations. We’d spent years in fucked up situations.
After our mother’s overdose, they’d placed Raven and I both in foster care. I had six months to realize that the life with the foster care family we’d been placed with was no better than the house we’d come from.
The judge that was the foster care father from hell was well known in the community. So well known, in fact, that he was always going to be believed over some delinquent boy insisting that something was wrong.
Raven had been subjected to the same treatment, but on a much smaller scale than me.
And the day that I turned eighteen, I tried to get her out. I’d made it to the next county over when I’d been pulled over by the sheriff of the county.
Then I was charged with kidnapping a minor.
After being thrown in jail on that bogus charge, Judge Paul Pearlman, the man who had ruined my life for the previous six months, informed me I had two choices. One, try to take my sister—his property—again and go to jail for some of the ugliest crimes I’d only ever heard about. Or, two, I could get the hell out and not come back.
He’d allowed me one concession: Raven’s safety.
I’d held onto that promise as I packed my bags, and then walked out on my sister, not looking back as I became the newest soldier in the United States Army.
Life didn’t get better after that.
Not even a little bit.
Raven thought I betrayed her and refused to talk to me. I was sure that Judge Pearlman fed her lie after lie.
What I didn’t know was how bad it really was for her—something that I still wasn’t sure I had the full story on.
Then there was the fact that my father’s shenanigans hadn’t just stopped at our small town. Nope. They’d extended into the military where he’d screwed over about fifteen different men just like Teeterman.
And, wouldn’t you know it, but I somehow found myself with Drill Sergeant Teeterman as my personal torturer throughout my first six weeks in the Army.
But, it didn’t stop there.
Every step I took, I encountered another man my father had screwed over.
At one point, I’d thought about giving up. Especially when I was deployed the first time. Then the second. And the third.
When I was finally able to come home, I realized that things would never be better.
After being skipped over for promotion after promotion, screwed over, nearly killed, and basically treated like a piece of dog shit, I’d decided that was it.
I was getting out.
It’d been years of continuous torture.
The icing on the cake, however, had been when I was shot in the leg.
I’d found out that my doctor was yet another man who my father had screwed over.
I couldn’t prove it, but it was just too damn convenient that he had the chance to fix what was wrong with my testicle and my leg, but conveniently didn’t do his goddamn job?
No, I was far from stupid.
That was when I took the medical discharge that the US Army offered me and then found someone who would help me exact my own revenge.
From that day forward, I was just as involved in the Army—as well as the Navy, Marines and Air Force—as I was before I’d left it, but this time as a private consultant. One who worked with the military to uncover situations exactly like the one I’d been in during my four years in the Army.
Trace and me? We’d both been fucked over. We’d been treated like low lives—battered, bruised, hazed, fucked over and forced to do many things that we’re not proud of today.
But, we’d gotten our men—and one woman.
We’d made the US military a better place to be, and in doing so, I’d found my calling in life.
Shortly after our first few years together, we’d branched out even farther into more global investigations, like the one that led me to Hostel.
After wrapping up the job overseas, I was heading straight to a town that was apparently the central hub of stolen military surplus.
But, while I was down there, I had a few other plans. Plans that centered around the fucking man who had purposefully held off on my surgery and nearly killed me in the process.
Over the years, I’d let go of a lot of my anger.
I’d taken Captain Teeterman’s torture tactics. I’d taken the shit deployments. I’d done just about anything that was ever asked of me.
But, the one time that my life had been in danger for real, a certain Army doc had played God with my life.
And he wasn’t even discreet about it. He’d taunted me for years with it—he still taunted me with it.
I wanted him to know that I was there, and I was watching.
I also knew he had a daughter around Janie’s age, and she was completely clueless to the fact that her father was a total piece of shit.
I was going to love uncovering the lies and deceit of Layton Trammel. I would also fucking love informing Elspeth Trammel that her father violated his medical oath to do no harm and purposely botched my surgery. And once I’d taken Trammel down, I’d be blowing that popsicle stand, hopefully never to look at that scum bag’s face again.
“The code is 9191933,” Janie said softly, pulling me out of my contemplation of how life was going to go for me for the next few months. “And all you have to do next time is text me, and I’ll give you the code. My dad and uncles should know better.”
I snorted. “Life doesn’t work like that, Janie. Never has, never will.”
Janie didn’t have anything to say to that.
Twenty minutes later, when we parted ways—her going to her office, which was new, in the Free office building and me going to the conference room with Sam—I realized that Janie was still getting under my skin.
Only now, it was even worse than it once had been.
Staying away from her was going to be an impossible task.
Her ass in those jeans was the entire reason for it, too.
Chapter 3
People always look startled when you call them fuckface.
-T-shirt
Rafe
4 months later
Things were not always what they appeared to be.
“No fucking shit,” I said to Trace. “This place? It’s a goddamn smorgasbord of crime. And the person I thought was just another asshole in all of this is even more stupid than I originally thought. Apparently, the student has become the teacher.”
This place was a complete clusterfuck. The cops in this town were corrupt. Shit was going on that even I didn’t have the vein tapped on, which was saying something because not a thing went on around me that I didn’t know about. It made me twitchy.
“What do you mean?” Trace asked warily.
“I mean that this entire fucking place is corrupt, and that dumbass, Layton Trammel, is at the epicenter of it all,” I said, rubbing my eyes in a way that made my wariness known. “I haven’t gotten anywhere near as much time devoted to this as I’d like with all the side jobs I’m doing, but I don’t have a good feeling here. Something big is happening, and Trammel is right there in the thick of it.”
“You need to drop the other jobs.” Trace stated what I knew would come out of his mouth the minute I told him that I suspected a whole lot more was going on here than what we’d initially thought.
“No,” I immediately declined. “They need me. I’m doing it; it’ll just take me more time to get shit done. Which might be a good thing. If I’m seen around town more, I might be able to wiggle my way further into Trammel’
s operation.
Trace sighed. “Just don’t let the other jobs get in the way of this one,” he ordered.
I gave him a half-salute. “Yes, Daddy.”
Trace flipped me off. “I’m not your daddy.”
“No,” I agreed. “Because you don’t want to be my daddy.”
Trace was older than me by about fifteen years, and I more than trusted his judgment on most matters.
As long as it wasn’t matters of the heart, that was.
Trace had been through five wives. He has twelve kids with four of them and a child from a random hookup in another country during his first deployment.
He loved his kids…in his own way.
I think he saw them twice a year and talked to them about four times that on the phone. Then again, with twelve children, it was understandable that he’d not have as much time for them all as he would if he had a single child.
“So…Janie.”
My eyes flicked up toward Trace and then shifted away. “We’re not talking about her. Ever.”
Trace started to laugh, not stopping even when I’d turned my back on him.
“Oh, come on!” He guffawed. “It’s hilarious, and you know it. Admit it! You fell for a girl whose dad is going to kick your ass when you finally get in there.”
“I’m not getting in there,” I lied.
I was totally getting in there.
As soon as this job was done, anyway.
“You lie.” He sat straight up and looked at me while rubbing his stomach. “And don’t get too deep in this, man. Trust me on this. You won’t like having to fight for her.”
Trace would know. He’d had to fight for his current wife. The one who was ‘the one.’ Marci was a sweet lady, and she was like a mother hen, even to me, a man who was well into his forties.
Forty-one was in your forties, wasn’t it?
I looked at my friend and sighed. “Back to Layton.”
Trace’s eyebrows rose.
“How does he not know who you are yet?”
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