Betting the Bad Boy

by Sugar Jamison

  Even if he had, he couldn’t possibly think of her as much as she thought of him. She was reminded of Duke every time she stepped foot in her door.

  She had never been more glad for a code to be called in her life. She wondered what he would have said to her if he had reached her. If he would have explained why he’d completely shut her out of his life. She could accept it if he was mad at her for causing him to get into that fight that sent him to prison.

  But she was afraid of him telling her he’d never really loved her in the first place. That everything she had done in the name of love had been for no reason at all.

  Grace hadn’t been scared of much these past few years, but she had been scared of that.

  His aunt was in the hospital, she remembered when her brain stopped spinning so fast. That’s why he was here. To see the aunt who’d rescued him from poverty. The same woman who got him out of jail when he was fifteen and was caught stealing food from the market to feed his brothers. Hopefully it was just a quick visit. Hopefully he would be gone in a couple of days and she could avoid all the drama that came with a King.

  Until then, she was going to stay the hell away from him. How could one person be the last man she wanted to see and yet the only man she ever wanted to be with?

  “What’s wrong with you?” her thirteen-year-old son, Ryder, asked as he walked down their creaky stairs.

  “What are you doing here?” She stepped away from the door and marched toward him. “I dropped you off at your grandfather’s house before I went to work last night. You’re supposed to be there. He’s taking you to summer school.”

  “I hate it there. I hate him,” Ryder said with his usual hostility.

  Grace didn’t know what was happening with her son. He was always mad, at her, at the world. But he really hated his grandfather and she wasn’t sure why. Grace tried really hard to keep things pleasant between herself and her father. She’d never let Ryder know all the things that had gone down between them. Plus her mother was gone. He was the only family they had left, and yet Ryder’s dislike for him had grown over the years.

  “I’m sorry, baby.” She touched his cheek and her heart squeezed painfully. The way he looked up at her with that surliness combined with that leftover little-boy innocence reminded her so much of his father. “I can’t leave you here by yourself all night. It’s against the law and even if it weren’t, I would be such a worried wreck that I wouldn’t be able to get anything done.”

  “Why do you have to work this summer? Why can’t you stay home?”

  She was a school nurse at the local elementary school just so she could be home when Ryder was, but in the summer when school was closed she had to pick up shifts at the hospital to make ends meet. She worked a lot of overnights and double shifts. She couldn’t leave him alone all that time, even if his child care situation was less than desirable. “We need the money. The house is falling down around us. And you insist on being fed and clothed.”

  “Grandpa has money. Why don’t you just ask him for some?”

  “I’m not taking anything from Grandpa.” She’d beg on the streets before she went to her father for money. When he found out she was pregnant, she had no idea that he had arranged a marriage for her. It was to one of his friend’s sons. A wealthy lawyer nearly twenty years her senior.

  He’ll marry you. And he’ll raise that boy as his own. He’s the only chance you’ve got for a good life. He’s the only chance that your boy has of being raised right.

  He didn’t think she could do it. He didn’t think she would be able to raise Ryder or take care of herself without the help of a man.

  So Grace spent the rest of her life proving him wrong. She worked two jobs, she took out student loans. She made friends with other mothers in Boston. She had gotten a degree and a good job and she supported them all by herself.

  She’d be damned if she ever asked him or anyone for a dime.

  If it wasn’t for her mother’s dying wish, she would still be on the East Coast and far away from anything that linked her to this place. “Go get ready for school. I’ll make you a nice big bowl of steel-cut oats for breakfast.”

  He pulled a face. “Why can’t I have Pop-Tarts or frozen waffles like everyone else? Only old people eat steel-cut oats.”

  “They are good for you. They control blood pressure and blood sugar levels and give you energy so you can pass the math class you skipped so much during the school year that you failed it. The math class you’re stuck taking in summer school—and I’m stuck spending my summer driving you there and back.”

  “Okay, okay.” He sighed, defeated.

  She had really gotten good at this whole nagging-mom thing. “Go get dressed. I’ll go fancy with the oats this morning and put some brown sugar and bananas in it.”

  “Oh joy,” he said, dripping with sarcasm.

  She laughed and kissed his face. Most of the time he fought her affection, but today he accepted it. She had never thought that at thirty-two years old, she’d be the mother of a thirteen-year-old. Life hadn’t been easy for them, but she wouldn’t change any of the things that made her the mother of this kid.

  Chapter 4

  “How is she?” Duke heard Colt ask as he sat in the kitchen the next morning. Duke was usually always on guard—a by-product of spending a few years in a maximum-security prison where a fight could break out at any moment—but he hadn’t heard his brother come in.

  His mind had been too tangled up in what Lolly said. In what he was supposed to do for her. He looked up at his brother and shrugged. “I think you had better see for yourself.”

  “Cut the shit and tell me what’s going on, Duke.”

  Duke just lifted his coffee cup and took a long sip. “She’s expecting you.” He took the keys out of his pocket and set them on the table for Colt to take. He wasn’t giving anything away. Colt needed to see Lolly for himself. She must want something out of him, too. The last thing Lolly wanted was money from any of them. Colt didn’t do favors for anyone, but if there was one person he had a soft spot for, it was Lolly. He spent the most time with her, working in her beauty shop after school while Duke was working as a mechanic’s assistant. He had to give it to Colt. It took a strong man to work in a salon with all those chatty women and come out with his senses intact.

  “You should know that there’s a woman named Zanna here. If she pulls a shotgun on you, be careful. She’s not easy to disarm.”

  “What?” Duke swiveled completely around to look at him.

  “I think you had better see for yourself.” He walked out then without another word.

  Forty-five minutes later Zanna appeared while Duke was absorbed in his plans. He could only think of one word to describe her, and it was damn.

  Luscious and curvy with thick long hair and long red nails. She was the kind of woman that could get Duke’s motor running, but as she sat next to him at the table with her bowl of cereal, he felt nothing. Maybe because he knew she was the type of woman Colt secretly went wild for. Colt dated elegant types that went with his image, but Duke knew his brother loved fiery in-your-face beauties who often needing taming. And Zanna seemed to fit that bill.

  She wasn’t afraid of him, or even uneasy around him, and he liked that about her. He could tell she’d probably already had a convict or two in her past.

  He turned the page in his little black journal he kept with him and scratched some notes about a design for one of his upcoming projects. It had been a while since he had done a car in red, but the color of Zanna’s long fingernails made some ideas spark in his head. A 1960 classic Chevy Corvette in hot-shit red with a white top and white paneling and red and white rims. He could see this woman driving around in a car like that.

  “You’re not from around here, are you?” he asked after a few silent minutes, knowing that Destiny, Nevada, had never produced a woman like this. He would have remembered her.

  “What makes you say that?” she asked, seeming uneasy.

 
Ah. A woman with a past she wanted to forget. It made sense why she was here now.

  “Your accent,” he said, still making notes about the car. They hadn’t spoken more than a few words of introduction, but he could hear the flavor in her voice. “Oklahoma. Right near Keystone Lake.”

  Zanna sat up straight, her almond eyes going wide. “How the hell did you know that? I thought Colt would be the first one to run a background check on me. You beat him to it.”

  “I’m the last person who’d run a background check on anyone. I went to prison with a guy who was from there. You’ve got Native blood running through your veins, don’t you?” She looked Native American, maybe mixed with something else that made her exotic and interesting to look at.

  “My grandfather lived on the reservation his whole life. What’d you go to prison for?”

  “Killed a man just to watch him die.” He looked at her over the rim of his coffee cup to see how she would react.

  She laughed. “Did you fall into a burning ring of fire after that?”

  One side of his mouth curled. He liked her. “You’re all right, Zanna Jacobs.”

  “You are, too, Duke King.”

  “You must not have been here long. Everybody around here knows why I went away.” It was on the front page of the local paper. The whole town had talked about it. There hadn’t been such a big scandal in town since another King man did a bad thing that nearly cost someone their life.

  “They don’t talk about it much,” she said. “They only refer to you all as Lolly’s boys. The new thing is that the pastor of New Hope was caught having an affair with the principal of the elementary school and got her pregnant. He broke down in front of the whole congregation to confess his sins. Whatever you did must have been forgiven.”

  Duke finally looked fully at her, knowing that wasn’t true. There would always be people in this town who hated him, if not for what he did, then because he was born with the last name King. “It may be old news, but I don’t think anybody here has forgiven me for what I’ve done.”

  She looked him directly in the eye. Not something a lot of people did. “Are you sorry?”

  He shook his head. “Not for what I did, but for what it did to the people I cared about.”

  “Where’s Levi?” Colt walked into the kitchen, interrupting them.

  He looked so damn haughty and slick, so damn out of place in this dusty little town. It annoyed the hell out of Duke.

  “I haven’t seen him yet today.” Duke looked back down at his notebook, not sure why he was so annoyed by Colt’s presence. “It’s not my turn to watch him.”

  “Excuse me. I had mistaken you for his nanny. You look just like Mary Poppins.”

  Duke left his chair and stood toe-to-toe with his little brother, feeling the undeniable urge to pop him in the mouth. “What the hell does that mean? You taking a shot at me?”

  He wanted to see Colt cower a bit, back down, something to convey that he didn’t think he was the ruler of the world. But he stood tall, looking bored as usual.

  “If you’re going to get in my face every time I say something that displeases you, big brother, it’s going to be a very long thirty days.”

  “She asked you to stay?” He wasn’t surprised by it, but he was surprised that his brother had agreed.

  “Judging by the way you’re acting like somebody shit in your cereal, I’m assuming she asked you, too. I know the prospect of spending thirty days trapped in this house with me doesn’t appeal to you, but if we’re both going to make it out alive I think we should attempt to be civil to each other.”

  Civil? He wasn’t sure what that meant when it came to Colt. They should be on better terms. Colt was ultimately the reason he had gotten out of jail. He had hired that fancy lawyer who got Duke’s conviction thrown out for malicious prosecution. They had such a weird relationship. They needed each other, but they couldn’t stand each other.

  “You know I’m not the one that’s going to end up dead if we go at it,” Duke said to him.

  “Don’t be so sure of that. I fight dirty.” Colt folded his arms over his chest. “You’ll never see me coming.”

  Duke smiled unwillingly. He may not like Colt half the time, but he sure as hell respected him. “You’re a son of a bitch. Sometimes I like that about you.” He grabbed his notebook off the table and the car keys from Colt and walked out.

  He needed space to think. He still wasn’t sure how he was going to grant Lolly’s wish.

  *

  He found himself at the little park on the edge of town, a few miles down the road from the high school. This was where he’d gone when he skipped class. It was always deserted, due to some urban legend about a crazy banshee woman living on the grounds. That made it the perfect place for him to think. There was a small man-made pond and some trees, making it one of the few truly green spaces in the area. Duke wasn’t sure why more people didn’t come here—everyone knew that the legend was bullshit—but he was glad for the silence. There was another car at the other end of the parking lot, but judging by its rusty condition it was either abandoned there or belonged to some teenager who was skipping school.

  He got out of his car and walked around the edge of the pond as thoughts of Grace filled his head. They used to meet here, once upon a time. They couldn’t be seen together in town. They couldn’t date like normal couples even though she was eighteen and technically an adult when they first started things up. He was older than her by a few years but she was smart and had been placed in a few of his classes his senior year.

  For a long time he ignored her, avoided her. Not even looking at her until after she got out of school. The judge’s daughter had no business being anywhere near a kid who had been arrested for stealing. But he didn’t miss the looks she had given him. He didn’t miss how kind she was to him when others treated him as barely tolerable. He couldn’t ignore how she sat next to him in class and volunteered to be his lab partner when she could have chosen anyone else.

  At first he thought she was just trying to get her daddy’s attention by dating a bad boy, but there was a lot more to Grace Truman than that.

  A woman walked out of the wooded area and froze as soon as she saw him. He knew instantly that it was Grace. “Come here,” he called to her. As she came closer, he could see a little bit of fear in her big pretty eyes, but he could also see that she was tired, bone-tired, and that her light-blue dress was faded and out of fashion. She was still lovely, though. Still moved effortlessly, but she wasn’t the Grace he had pictured in his head when he thought of her.

  “Duke…” There were tears in her eyes as she reached up to touch him. She ran her hands gently over his chest and his shoulders. Touching him as if to confirm he was real. His eyes drifted shut, and he felt himself getting hard. He never thought he would feel her warm, soft hands on his face again. He never imagined that her touch could still feel this good to him, especially when he’d spent so long being mad at her. “I wasn’t sure it was you. I thought my mind was playing tricks on me.”

  He could hear the emotion in her voice, and when he opened his eyes she was crying.

  “Don’t cry, Grace.” He wiped her tears away.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Lolly is sick. She called us home.”

  “I’m so sorry, Duke.” She wrapped her arms around him and pulled him close. He hugged her back, craving her closeness, reveling in her smell that hadn’t changed in all this time. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  “Don’t cry,” he said, kissing the side of her face. Why hadn’t things changed? Why did it still kill him to see her so upset?

  He should walk away from her, and stay away. She pursued him all those years ago. She went after him and he was the one who ended up paying for it. Even though he had changed so much in the past thirteen years, in that moment he realized that she would always have the same effect on him. He couldn’t tell if it was magical or toxic. “I thought you hated me,” she said.

  “An
d here I was thinking it was the other way around.”

  “You thought I hated you?” She blinked up at him, her confusion clear.

  “What else was I supposed to think?” Thirteen years and not a single word.

  He had broken up with her. He rejected her when she told him that she wanted to marry him. He had wanted to be her husband, to be the one who took care of her, but he knew that he couldn’t give her the life she deserved. So he told her to date somebody like her, to move away and lead the life she was meant to lead. It wasn’t her fault that obeying his wishes was the reason he’d ended up facing a ten-year prison sentence.

  “I tried with you,” she said. “I wanted to make it work with you but you threw me away.” He could see the anger in her eyes. He had remembered her as calm—serene even. The only time he could ever recall seeing her truly mad at him was when they broke up. She said she would fight for him then, and that had turned him on and broken his heart at the same time and now it was happening all over again.

  “I didn’t throw you away.”

  She shook her head and took a step back. “I don’t think I can do this right now. I need to go.”

  But he didn’t want to let her go. He smoothed his hands down her arms and looked down at her, taking her in, cataloging her changes.

  “Damn it, Duke. Only you could ever look at me like that.”

  She reached up and brushed a kiss across his lips, which was a mistake. This was exactly how it had happened the first time, in this very park. She’d reached up to kiss him and he was a goner. It was impossible to let her go now. He deepened the kiss, brushing his tongue across her lips, and she let him in, letting him taste every inch. She was kissing him back with everything she had. That’s what he had loved about Grace. She didn’t do anything half-assed. She always gave her everything to him and she was giving it to him now, rubbing herself against his body, letting out little breathy moans that reminded him of their past, of when she was naked beneath him, with her legs wrapped around him and him pumping fast and hard into her sweet tightness.