by M. S. Parker
Reckless Heat
A Bad Boy Romance
M. S. Parker
Belmonte Publishing, LLC
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 Belmonte Publishing LLC
Published by Belmonte Publishing LLC
Contents
Free Book
1. Jinx
2. Jinx
3. Drew
4. Jinx
5. Drew
6. Jinx
7. Drew
8. Jinx
9. Jinx
10. Drew
11. Jinx
12. Drew
13. Jinx
14. Drew
15. Jinx
16. Drew
17. Jinx
18. Jinx
19. Drew
20. Jinx
21. Drew
22. Jinx
23. Drew
24. Jinx
25. Drew
26. Jinx
27. Drew
28. Jinx
29. Drew
30. Jinx
31. Drew
32. Jinx
33. Drew
34. Jinx
35. Drew
36. Jinx
37. Drew
38. Jinx
39. Drew
40. Jinx
41. Drew
42. Jinx
43. Jinx
44. Drew
45. Jinx
46. Drew
47. Jinx
48. Drew
49. Jinx
50. Jinx
51. Drew
52. Jinx
Bonus 1: Married A Stripper: Part 1
Bonus 2: Twisted Affair Vol. 1
Also by M. S. Parker
About the Author
Acknowledgments
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1
Jinx
I should’ve been happy.
Any normal person in my situation would be thrilled with this life. Within the last week, I’d turned twenty-two and graduated with a degree in journalism from Boston University – with honors, no less. And to top it all off, my parents had decided that, as a graduation gift, they’d let me have at least part of the summer to relax before I started actively looking for a job.
But I wasn’t happy. Not that I was unhappy, exactly, but I’d never expected to feel like this after graduation. This was supposed to be the beginning of the rest of my life.
So why was I sitting at this little coffee shop with my best friend, wondering why I didn’t feel any different than I had a week ago?
“Jinx? Earth to Jinx Lockley.”
I blinked, snapping back to the present. The man sitting across from me watched me with serious charcoal gray eyes, telling me that he’d been trying to get my attention for a while. Rhett Waters was my best friend and absolutely gorgeous. I didn’t have to look around to know that there were plenty of women here checking him out. He didn’t acknowledge any of them though. He never did when we were together.
“Sorry, Rhett.” I offered him a smile. “Just thinking.”
He raised one perfect eyebrow. “About anything specific?”
I shrugged.
“Come on, Jinx, I know you better than that.” He leaned forward and took one of my hands. “You’ve had that faraway look in those pretty sapphire blue eyes of yours from the moment we graduated. Talk to me. Tell me what’s going on.”
I sighed, letting his fingers tighten around mine for a moment before pulling my hand away. I couldn’t tell him all of it, not when what I’d been wondering about him was part of it, but I could tell him a bit.
“Are your parents still giving you a hard time?” he asked, running his hand through his dark hair. “You’d think after four years, they would’ve gotten used to the idea of a journalist in the family.”
“You’d think,” I said dryly. “But, yeah, that’s a lot of it. They’re proud that I graduated with honors, but they still have to put those clarifiers in, like how many more options I’d have if I’d gone into medicine or education or law, like everyone else in my family.”
That wasn’t an exaggeration. My mom was a forensic accountant, and my dad was a cardiac surgeon at one of the best hospitals on the East Coast. Grandparents, aunts, and uncles, they were all the kinds of professionals who needed to have several letters after their name. The more, the better.
And I wanted to be a journalist.
That hadn’t gone over well the first time I told my parents what I wanted to do, and it hadn’t gotten any easier since that moment. My parents had never been rude about it, and I knew they loved me, but I also knew they were disappointed that I hadn’t taken a better path like my cousin, Kerrigan.
“What about you?” I asked. “I didn’t see your parents after the ceremony. I was looking forward to meeting them.”
“They had to get back home,” Rhett said, his slight drawl thickening. “School’s still in session for another week and a half, so Dad’s got classes to teach.” He smiled at me. “Actually, that’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Your dad’s PE classes?” I asked, a little smile playing on my lips.
“About meeting my family.”
My stomach squirmed. I’d known Rhett since freshman year, but we’d gotten closer over the last two years. Everything we did, we did together. It hadn’t been a conscious decision, at least on my part, but it’d been natural. We just clicked. Even the things that we disagreed on weren’t important, and we could always talk about them in calm, rational discussions.
I’d always been the sort of person everyone liked. Popular but not so much so that it was obnoxious. I got invited to parties and asked out on dates. But Kerrigan was the only one I’d ever been really close to until I met Rhett, and even she had never understood how I could want something other than what our families wanted. Rhett got it. He got me.
He’d never made a move on me, kept all of his touches platonic, but he’d also never dated anyone during college. Like, at all. Unless, of course, he hadn’t told me about his dates, but after four years, I was pretty sure I would’ve noticed, even if I didn’t think he would’ve told me in the first place. I told him about my dates. He’d never acted jealous, but he’d always been overprotective.
All of these things ran through my head as soon as Rhett said he wanted me to meet his family. All of it...and then the thought that automatically came next.
Why did he want me to meet them?
Four years we’d been friends, and he’d never even mentioned wanting me to meet his family. What’d changed?
Except, as the question turned over in my head, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer.
Rhett was still looking at me, waiting for me to say something. So I did. I repeated his statement back to him as a question. “You want me to meet your family?”
“Well, yeah.” He sat back and grinned at me. The sort of grin that made half the panties around us wet. “I mean, it’d be kinda rude of me to ask you to come to North Carolina with me and not have you meet them.”
“You want me to go to North Carolina with you?”
“Are you going to just turn everything I say into a question, or are you actually going to give me an answer?”
I folded my arms and gave him a look that jus
t made that damn grin widen. “We’ve known each other how long, and you’ve never once wanted me to go down to your hometown or meet anyone related to you. Why now?”
He hesitated, his eyes sliding away from mine for a split second before he answered, “I think it’d be good for you to get away for a while. I mean, you grew up here in Boston, and then you went to college here. Most kids go to college to get away from their families.”
“I lived in the dorms.”
He gave me a look that I recognized all too well. “I’m serious. Your parents are nice and all, but for the past four years, I’ve watched you swimming upstream against your family. I can see how exhausting it is, how much stress you’re always under.”
I swallowed hard around the lump that’d suddenly formed in my throat. This was why he was my best friend. Because he saw me better than anyone ever had. He grabbed my hand and squeezed.
“Come to North Carolina with me,” he said. “Meet my family. Let me show you how much fun a small Carolina town can be.” When I still didn’t answer, he added, “My parents’ house is twenty minutes from the beach.”
I didn’t know if he was asking me only because he thought I needed the break...or if he wanted our friendship to become something more. Even worse, if he did want things between us to shift into something romantic, I wasn’t sure if I wanted the same thing.
Then again, indecision wasn’t exactly abnormal in my life right now. I had the degree I always wanted, and no loan debt. Still, I had no idea where to go from here.
But maybe a trip to North Carolina was the perfect time to figure out what I wanted.
2
Jinx
I couldn’t help but watch the Boston skyline fall away as the morning sun rose higher and higher overhead. Rhett kept his eyes on the road, fingers thumping against the wheel to the pop song on the radio, but I kept taking last looks until I couldn’t anymore.
“Nervous?” Rhett asked.
I glanced over at him. Out of the two of us, he arguably looked more nervous. His eyebrows furrowed in a hard line on his face and his lips were spread thin.
“Nervous? No.” I chuckled, shaking my head.
What I wanted to say was that I never thought that my first act after finishing college would be to take a trip to some little town in North Carolina. I thought I’d have it all figured out by now and would be on to the next step toward my career.
Instead of all that, I said, “I’m just tired. I didn’t sleep well last night.”
Rhett must have sensed that wasn’t all that was on my mind because he reached a warm hand over to me and squeezed my fingers.
Again, I wondered what the purpose of this trip was. Why was it so important that I meet his family? I didn’t feel anything in the brief touch besides familiarity and friendship. Was I supposed to feel more?
“How long of a drive is it?” I asked, trying to distract myself.
I already knew the answer because I’d googled it almost the moment I’d gotten home after Rhett asked me. What could I say? As a journalist, I liked to be prepared.
“Long,” Rhett answered, bringing his hand back to the wheel. “Take a nap if you want.”
“Don’t you want me to keep you entertained?”
He chuckled. “Trust me, there’s enough of a circus going on in my head to entertain me for hours. Get some sleep. The last thing I need is to introduce my family to Grumpy Jinx.”
I snorted but didn’t try to defend myself. Rhett knew me better than anyone.
Instead, I leaned my head against the backrest and let my eyelids flutter closed. I really hadn’t slept well last night. It wasn’t the prospect of the trip that kept me awake, but rather the realization that there was nothing waiting for me on the other end of it. After so many years of exams and papers and late night cram sessions, I was free.
And it scared the living hell out of me.
“Hey.” Someone nudged me. “Wake up.”
I swatted blindly at the source of the disruption. “Noooo... five minutes.”
Cool air blew strands of hair against my cheek, tickling me. I tucked my chin in further and bunched up my shoulders.
The next nudge was harder. “Jinx. We’re here.”
The words settled in somewhere in the back of my head, and I rose groggily up to the surface. I opened my eyes, and Rhett was staring down at me. The air I’d felt had been from the open door.
I gulped down some of the fresh air and took a bleary look around. My first glance of North Carolina. I’d woken up sometime in the afternoon and taken over the radio for a bit, but after grabbing some dinner at a drive-in, I was back to Snoozeland.
We were in a quiet suburb, parked just under a buzzing street lamp. The lawns and houses that stretched down either side of me were perfectly manicured and pleasant.
“Are we back home?” I asked. It didn’t look all that different from Boston. How had we driven all day and wound up in the same place?
Rhett extended a hand down to me, and I took it. “For some of us, it’s home,” he said, hoisting me up.
Rhett grabbed our bags from the trunk and started toward the house we were parked in front of. I had to wrestle my bag away from him, as he fully intended to lug both up the driveway.
So, this was where Rhett came from. The lights were mostly off in the house, and I wondered what time it was.
“We’ll just say hi before heading off to bed,” Rhett said as if sensing my question. “Nobody expects you to socialize...” he trailed off as he gave me a once over, a cheeky grin curling on his lips, “...in your current state.”
I shot him a sour glance, which quickly melted away as the door opened and a small figure darted out toward us. I barely had time to register what was happening before a girl around my age, probably younger, launched herself at Rhett.
“I’m so glad you’re home!” Her voice was muffled in his t-shirt, but I could make out the words as well as the emotion behind them.
“Good to see you too, sis.” He patted her on the back and lowered her to the ground.
The door opened again, and an older woman walked out onto the small porch. She smiled warmly, wrapped a thin blanket around her shoulders, and stepped down to pull Rhett into a hug.
I still hadn’t spoken a word by the time Rhett and his family hustled us into the house. That wasn’t to say that I didn’t have words spoken at me.
“Oh, you must be Jinx,” Rhett’s mother said. “It’s so nice to meet you. We’ve heard so much about you, and it’s nice to finally put a face to a name.”
Then his sister butted in. “Rhett says you’re going to be a journalist. Does that mean you’ll get press passes to fashion shows and stuff like that?”
“Don’t trouble her with your million questions, Bess,” Rhett chided. He turned to me. “She’s obsessed with fashion. Don’t let her get started on it or it will never end.”
I opened my mouth to respond, but Bess beat me to it.
“Hey! Let her find that out on her own. You ruin all my fun.”
It felt like less than a minute before I was in one of the downstairs guest bedrooms. Alone. In the quiet.
The bed was a little softer than I normally preferred, but it was miles better than the seat I’d slept on for the journey here. Sleep wasn’t as forthcoming for me as it was during the car ride, but nonetheless, I was eventually able to drift off.
When I awoke, it took me a few minutes to realize where I was. The room smelled faintly like sandalwood, and a light breeze swirled through the open window, bringing with it the sound and smell of freshly mown grass.
North Carolina. I was in North Carolina with Rhett.
I exhaled and slowly dragged myself out of bed. What time was it? Why hadn’t Rhett woken me up? I checked my phone and saw that it was only just eight a.m. No wonder Rhett hadn’t woken me – he’d always been a late sleeper.
I felt awkward walking around his house by myself, so I opted to stay in my room and wait for someone to come get
me. I texted Rhett to tell him I was awake, and soon afterward heard the mower turn off. Not long after that, someone knocked on my door.
“Jinx?”
“Come in!”
Rhett strolled into my room, sweat making his cotton t-shirt cling to his muscular chest. His face was dewy and pink, hair slightly tousled.
“Don’t tell me that was you mowing the lawn,” I said flatly.
He grinned. “What? Can’t a man mow the lawn at his own family home?”
“What the hell happened to you? I’m pretty sure I can count the times I’ve seen you up and at ‘em before eight on one hand.”
Rhett pulled the shirt away from his body, fanning it against himself. “Couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d get up and be productive.”
I raised an eyebrow but didn’t question it. Something had been off with him since he first suggested this trip, but I knew he’d tell me in his own time, so I didn’t pry.
“Are you getting up?” Rhett asked. “I’ve got a whole day of sightseeing planned.”
“Sightseeing?” I rolled to the side of the bed and stood, stretching. “Can’t we just go to the beach?”