by Noire
“Is she all right?” Dane whispered, and reached over the seat to pat his mother’s shoulder.
Barron shook his head real quick. Hell no, she wasn’t all right. How the hell could she be okay when that little Harlem bandit had run up in her world and pulled a stickup on her heart?
Barron was fuming, and he swore that no matter what happened with the board’s vote at Dominion Oil, Mink wasn’t getting another dime of his family’s fortune. He was busy pulling together the threads of a scheme in his head when his cell phone buzzed and he reached to answer it.
He frowned when he glanced at the caller ID, then he turned slightly away from his mother and barked into the phone, “Hello?”
The wimpy-ass voice on the other end brought out the beast in him, and Barron had a satisfying flashback of drilling his fist into this idiot’s grill and breaking his fuckin’ nose.
“Um, yes, Mr. Dominion?”
“What do you want?”
“Um, hi. This is Kelvin Merchant at Exclusively DNA... . I’m sorry to bother you, but I just got a report back that I thought you might be interested in. And you know, after what happened the last time we met, I just don’t want to take any chances or mess anything up again.”
“Man, what the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about a lab report. We had another specimen come in this week from a young lady in Philadelphia. I was asked to run tests on her sample and compare the results to your sister Sable’s DNA.”
“Yeah, okay? And?”
“Well the results just came back, and I know you probably don’t wanna hear this but ... umm ... we’ve got another match.”
To Be Continued ...
Discussion Questions
1. Mink LaRue is a beautiful and cunning con artist who is all about getting her hands on some quick money. Can she handle the shrewdness and power of the Dominion family? Or is she in over her head?
2. What kind of doubts and suspicions would you have had if someone like Mink showed up at your door on a crazy misadventure?
3. What kind of friend is “Bowlegged” Bunni? Was taking her to Texas a good idea?
4. Barron was cool on Mink immediately. Do you think he would have responded to her in this manner if she wasn’t so sexy and he wasn’t battling such an intense erotic attraction to her?
5. Pilar is digging for gold. In your opinion, are her and Barron “kissing cousins” or are the traditional family barriers irrelevant because Barron is adopted?
6. What did you think about the shower scene between Barron and Pilar? Was Barron wrong for getting it on with Carla while Pilar was hiding in the bathroom? Should Pilar have come out and let Carla know she was there?
7. Uncle Suge is a skirt-chaser. What do you think are his true intentions toward Mink? Does their relationship violate any taboo family boundaries?
8. Selah is obviously guilty because of her role in losing Sable. Do you think her guilt is clouding her judgment when it comes to Mink being her daughter?
9. Jock witnessed a tragic event in the pool house. Will Mink finding out about it come back to bite him?
10. Viceroy Dominion is still in and out of consciousness while his family and the financial empire he built is facing a state of chaos. What do you think he was saying with his eyes when Mink looked down on him in that hospital room?
Up Next
Sexy Little Liar
In stores November 2012
CHAPTER 1
New York was my shit! Our plane had just landed at JFK, and after ballin’ hard on a crazy misadventure down in fabulous D-Town, me and Bunni were hyped as hell to be back in the Big Apple.
We had dipped outta Manhattan with nothing going for us except mad dreams and devious schemes, and after working our grind and flipping the state of Texas upside down, we were rolling back in town with more dough than we had ever baked before.
“We need a taxi!” My best friend and partner-in-grime hollered as a bellman wheeled our luggage outta the crowded terminal. Bunni was posted up in a bright pink cat-suit and a matching pair of silver-buckle gladiator sandals, and I was rocking a platinum-white Glama-Glo wig that had big orange streaks down the bangs, and an orange and white tank top tucked into a skimpy white tennis skirt that barely covered my apple ass.
For two hood-bound Harlem girls, me and Bunni had crazy suitcases everywhere, and every last one of them was stuffed with mad jewelry and the hottest designer gear that money could buy.
I had recently become an official member of the Dominion oil family of Texas, and using my new status as the once-missing and now-found oil heiress Sable Dominion, me and Bunni had hit the rich folks’ mall in Dallas and killed every store in sight. I mean we ransacked that mall like a pair of greedy cat burglars, oohing and aahing as we touched, and admired, and tried on every damn thing we saw. We shopped like fiends for hours, and we didn’t come up for air until we were broke-down tired and all twenty of our toes had corns.
“Now, see there, Mink,” Bunni rolled her eyes and sucked her teeth as she struck a funky pose on the sidewalk outside the terminal. Bunni had a real stank shape and she always dressed to show that shit. Almost every dude who zipped into the terminal stole a quick peek at her round titties and bouncy ass as he passed by. “I knew we shoulda called us a limo before we left Texas. We got mad ends now, baby. How we gonna look pulling up around the way in some beat-up yellow cab?”
Bunni had it right. Image was everything in our hood, and I was damn sure tryna elevate mine. I was not the same con-mami Mink LaRue from the ’jects who had skied up outta New York just a few weeks ago. After chilling in a phat mansion and ballin’ around town in half-a-million dollar whips, I had the head and it was sure nuff big too.
“That’s okay,” I told Bunni. “We gonna roll with it for right now,” I said and grabbed her arm as I pulled her toward a waiting cab. “But this is gonna be our last damn time slumming around in a hooptie, okay? We’s paid now, mami! Our pockets are swole! As soon as we hit Harlem I’ma lease us a limo and a driver too, cool?”
We climbed our booties in the back of the cab and left the driver and the porter standing outside tryna figure out how to cram all our stuff in the trunk. It seemed like just yesterday that we had climbed in a cab at the Dallas International Airport and headed toward the Dominion Estate where we were on a mission to pull the biggest scheme of our lives.
It had all started when Bunni walked into the Food Land up the block from her crib and saw my picture on the back of a carton of milk. The National Center for Missing Children had just kicked off a new campaign aimed at some of their biggest cold cases, and a three-year-old girl named Sable Dominion—a rich little oil heiress who had been kidnapped from a midtown drugstore—was one of their featured kids.
Bunni had taken one look at Sable’s age-progressed photo and swore all out that the rich chick was me. She said me and Sable looked so much alike that my own mama wouldn’t be able to tell us apart. And she was right. I was a dead-ringer for the missing little girl, and we even had the same birthday too.
We did a few Google searches and damn near flipped out when we found out that not only was Miss Sable about to come into a hundred grand inheritance on her twenty-first birthday, but if Bunni pretended to turn me in, she could get a crack at the twenty-five thousand dollar reward money that the Dominions were offering to anybody who coughed up information that led to Sable’s return.
Well desperate times damn sure called for a desperate hustle, and me and Bunni almost burnt our brain cells out tryna cook up a scheme to get our hands on that Dominion dough. We were broke as hell and we needed that shit. Not only was Bunni and her brother Peaches about to get booted outta their tenement apartment, but a psycho drug dealer named Punchie Collins was tryna kill me for ganking him outta some ends and I had a shitload of court-ordered fines to pay up real quick, or else a warrant was gonna be issued for my arrest.
And if that wasn’t enough to light a fire under my big ass, my gangsta boo Gu
tta was finishing up a little bid upstate and he was about to be back on the streets in a minute, and I do mean on the streets too! See, Gutta had left me sitting on a stash of twenty-five g’s, and he needed that money to rebuild his drug empire as soon as he hit the bricks. But a rat like me just couldn’t help nibbling. A grand here, five grand there, shoes, wigs, chronic, jewels and parties ... shiiit ... me and Bunni had burned through Gutta’s cash so fast that before his bid was even halfway over his crib was a wrap and so was all his loot.
Pulling off a hustle for Sable’s hundred grand was my last crapshoot, my final shot at street redemption, and me and Bunni had used every flim-flam in the book to convince those super-rich black folks in Dallas that I was really the kidnapped daughter that they had lost so long ago. We’d busted up at their estate in the middle of their Fourth of July barbeque, and you can trust and believe that we set that joint on fire!
Those Texas folks didn’t know what to do with me as I laid my slick Harlem flow on their asses. In no time at all I had Sable’s mother, Selah, eating outta the palm of my hand, and my fine-ass play “uncle” Suge Dominion had done a damn good job of eating out the rest of me!
Bunni had played her role like a champ too. She’d scammed her way up on a freaky pain slut named Kelvin Merchant who worked at the DNA lab, and in return for whipping his ass and pinching his balls, Kelvin had hooked us up with a fake DNA report that guaranteed me a slice of the Dominion family pie.
With the DNA results on the table, I had rolled outta Dallas with a hundred-grand in my bank account, and Bunni made out like a street bandit with twenty-five large in reward money for all her hard work. All in all, it was the biggest hustle of our guttersnipe lives, and we were amped up and feelin’ ourselves for pulling off a gank so lovely. All I had to do now was pay my fines to the city of New York, tear off some ends to crazy Punchie Collins, and stash twenty-five grand in Gutta’s safe to keep that fool from slumping me when he came home.
After that, life was gonna be one big freaky-ass party, and as long as I handled my bizz I could get as wild and loose as I wanted to! Hell yeah, my blood surged with hood excitement as our taxi pulled up outside of Bunni’s building and the hater-bitches on the front stoop got to peeping all in the windows. Handle ya bizz, Miss Mink LaRue! That’s all a slick hood chick like me had to do.
DAFINA BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2012 by Noire
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the Publisher and neither the Author nor the Publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
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First trade paperback printing: May 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7582-7939-2