by Anne Conley
Text copyright © 2017 Anne Conley
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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.
Cover photography by Jeffrey Todd
Cover Model Stanley Fields
Cover designer: LoveBooks Cover Art
Editor: Tiffany Fox; Beyond DEF
Interior Layout: Deena Rae Schoenfeldt; E-Book Builders for Beyond DEF
Table of Contents
Other Books
Acknowledgements
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Epilogue
About Anne
Contact Anne
Anne’s Series
E-Book Layout and Design
Other Books
Pierce Securities:
Craze
Wire
Click
Grab
Murmur
Bond
Book B!tches
Power of Love
Master of Love
Hunt for Love (Coming Soon)
Fostering Love (Coming Soon)
Will to Love (Coming Soon)
Love’s Ward (Coming Soon)
Stories of Serendipity:
Neighborly Complications
Chef’s Delight
Dream On
Hot Mess
Falling for Him
Gambling on Love
My Mistake
Wrecked
Saving Charlie
Four Winds:
Falling for Heaven
Falling for Grace
Falling for Hope
Falling for Faith
Falling for Cyn
Falling for Eternity (Complete Four Winds Box Set)
Stand Alones:
Best Laid Plans of Boys and Men
The Fixer Upper
Acknowledgements
The usual suspects have been amazing: my formatter, my editor, my reader group, and my launch team. This book has some new additions, though—the photography of Jeffrey Todd and the images of Stanley Fields. Two nicer gentlemen haven’t graced the earth. Thanks, guys.
Dedication
Deena, you are a flipping badass, and without you in my life, this story wouldn’t be possible.
Chapter One
“I’ve got a job for you.”
Deena Rae looked up when Simon interrupted her thoughts as she ran on the treadmill in the office gym; all she could think about were the kickass leather pants she could almost fit into.
The oldest man in the room—having retired from the police force a few years ago—her boss was attractive, with light-brown hair, cut short enough to be professional but long enough not be harsh. He’d recently trimmed his beard to a goatee, and it actually looked nice, even though Deena Rae had thought goatees were for douchebags and dumbasses before she’d met Simon. Simon took care of himself, even if he did take a snort or two of scotch in his office when he thought nobody was looking.
Before she could respond, Andrew’s voice piped up behind her on the free weights. “I gotta job for you, too.” His voice was a low, pervy growl, surely not meant for Simon to hear, but the boss man had ears of a bat or some shit.
Simon’s weights clanked as he dropped them. “Andrew, you better watch your mouth with her. I will not stand for sexual harassment in my workplace.” Simon’s voice was loud, his face red, and he was starting to get all veiny on his forehead. Deena Rae couldn’t help but smile at him.
“Not a problem, Sarge. I can handle it.” Her words tinged with saccharine, she turned to Andrew. “You can kiss my pasty white ass, Andrew, but there’s no way you’d ever get that close.”
She and Andrew had one of those mutually snarky things, where they loved to hate on each other. Deena Rae did, anyway. He just made it so easy.
“If I had my way with your ass, it would be red from all the spankings for that foul mouth of yours.”
Deena Rae rolled her eyes. “In your dreams would you ever get to dominate me. In fact, if you touched my ass, you’d have my dildo so far up yours, you’d be tasting latex for a month.” She held her arms out about a foot to demonstrate the length of her imaginary dildo and watched Andrew’s face blanch. Turning back to Simon, satisfied Andrew wouldn’t be interrupting again, she smiled sweetly. “You said something about a job?”
Simon’s smile was forced, as he was no doubt contemplating her enormous sex toy, just like all the other guys in the room. “Yeah. Cecil Hodges is the mark. His ex-wife thinks he’s involved in something illegal with the club he owns and wants proof for her custody case. We’ll need a full work up, and it should be right up your alley.”
A job she didn’t have to work with someone else? That perked her right up. Andrew really was an okay guy; when he was working, he was all business. But this was her first solo gig, and her chest swelled with something akin to pride.
“Awesome. You want the paper background and all that?” That was her specialty, but she was really hoping for some action.
“Yep, and probably some casing of the club itself after you get the trail going.”
“Sweet,” she muttered under her breath. She was trying to play it cool but couldn’t help the small exclamation. Truth was, her job was the only thing Deena Rae really cared about since her parents were gone. And this job was awesome compared to her last one. She’d worked at a bail bonds office as an enforcer, but the reality of it was her boss was a pig who wouldn’t give her any of the retrieval jobs; he only let her do the paperwork he himself hated. Being a bail bond enforcer was far less glamorous than the TV shows made it out to be, and this security gig was a major step up. She’d even tried sleeping with him to get the good jobs, but that had backfired in a major way—the douche string was still showing up at her apartment.
Simon had turned to someone else in the smal
l gym where they had their morning meetings when Zack came in the door, dropped his duffel bag in the middle of the floor, and walked over to the punching bag and started whaling on it, bare-knuckled.
Everyone just watched the normally jovial guy as he ignored everyone and throttled the bag like it had just eaten his puppy.
“Hey, man. Your dad doing okay?” Evan grunted out from the pull-up bar.
“Nope,” Zack said through gritted teeth. “They just put him in hospice.”
Deena felt for the guy, even though she didn’t really know him. She was a little jealous of his closure, but she kept that thought to herself. She’d never gotten the opportunity to say goodbye to her parents. They’d been huge in the local MC community, running their charities and stuff, even more so after their death. Their memory became bigger than their larger-than-life lives, if that was possible. It was why she had left the neighborhood where she’d grown up, to get away from it all. Deena Rae constantly wondered if she’d had a chance to say goodbye, to get some sort of closure, if that would have made anything easier.
“Sucks, man. I’m sorry,” Ryan muttered between reps.
They all had a moment of silence out of respect for Zack’s issues, and Simon started his morning updates again. After everyone chimed in with status reports and such, he turned back to Deena Rae.
“Hey, check with Evan before you get started. He’s supposed to have some equipment for you to use.”
“Her bag’s ready to be checked out, Sarge,” Evan said as he dropped from the pull-up bar.
“Stop calling me that,” Simon gritted out.
“On it, sir.” Deena Rae saluted him just to be cheeky and left to go get started. She would do this job and get it done like the goddess she was.
Chapter Two
Deena Rae was snacking on parmesan cheese carrot chips while she messed with the telephoto lens on the camera Evan had checked out to her. The bag he’d given her had this camera she was trying to figure out how to use. It also had two tracking devices—one for her and one for anyone else she wanted to track. Evan had told her to put the tracking device in something she wore a lot while working, in case something happened to her on the job. Earlier, she’d spent an hour sewing it inside the lining of her work boots—ones she could kick down a door with, yet they had a heel flexible enough she could run in them.
There was wire-tapping stuff she needed to learn how to use but wasn’t allowed to without explicit permission. An optional fingerprinting handbook to study as time allowed was also in the bag. Evan had included thumb drives with different software she was in the process of installing on her laptop. Last, but most exciting to Deena Rae, was a lock pick set she was ready to get started figuring out.
At the moment, Deena Rae was looking through the viewfinder on this fancy-ass camera. She couldn’t for the life of her manage to get a steady picture with the thing, even though she had the perfect place to practice.
Her apartment’s main selling point was a wall of windows along one side, which allowed bright light in during the daytime and stars at night, and the best people-watching ever. The apartment faced the rest of the complex, overlooking a courtyard with other units on the other side.
Most of the units were empty or had the curtains drawn. Deena Rae didn’t even have curtains. She didn’t care. If she had curtains, she wouldn’t be able to see the sky. And she wanted to be able to see. That was the shitty part about human nature: the desire to know about other people while preserving her own privacy.
Fuck that. She didn’t give a shit about privacy when it came to her comings and goings. If someone was so hard-up to know what she ate for dinner on this stupid low-carb diet she was trying to get rid of that last ten pounds of jiggle, more power to ‘em. Maybe they would take pity on her and share some damn recipes.
Like the grandma on the third floor, for instance, taking brownies out of the oven. No way those were low carb. Deena Rae’s mouth watered as she imagined the scent of gooey, chocolatey brownies. With salted caramel icing. And toffee chips.
Fuck. She was just torturing herself. For all she knew, grandma’s brownies were sugar free and tasted like cardboard.
Deena Rae snapped a couple of quick pics and looked at the display to see how they’d turned out.
Shaky.
Blowing her bangs out of her eyes, she brought the camera back up to her face, determined not to look at grandma anymore. Imagining all that chocolatey goodness while she was on a diet was like putting a recovering addict in a room full of meth.
Focusing on the ground level, Deena Rae put her eye to the viewfinder and made a path across the front of the complex facing her. All the curtains were drawn on these units, leaving her feeling deflated, yet undaunted. She would find something interesting. As she swept her camera toward the end of the building, the parking spaces on the other side came into focus.
Along with the sweetest ride she’d seen in a long time.
A Harley Davidson Sportster, with the iconic Harley engine, this was a motorcycle that had been around awhile. As Deena Rae adjusted the focus on her camera, she saw this one was an older model—her mom had had one like it. Her stomach panged at the thought of her mother dying and the bike that had been wrecked when she was killed.
She forced her brain back to the bike in front of her instead of the twisted metal in her mind.
Her mouth watered as she focused on the powder-coated features, the shape of the exhaust, the tooling on the leather. It was obviously babied—someone loved this machine.
Someone who owned the curves of the ass currently bent over washing it.
Damn.
Deena Rae’s mouth pooled with saliva for wholly different reasons, but salted caramel sauce suddenly played in her fantasies with this guy as she adjusted the zoom and focus once more on the camera.
With tattoos down one side of his torso—partially hidden by a black tank top—one shoulder with a tribal cross, maybe Celtic, made her wonder what the tattoo meant. She didn’t have any tattoos, but that was just because she couldn’t ever decide on one thing to place on her body that would survive gravity when she got old. Everything she thought of didn’t sound great when she was old and wrinkly.
But thoughts of age swiftly fled her mind while her eyes wandered the sculpted outline of his tank top as he washed his bike. His faded jeans had holes in the knees, and when he turned, one of the pockets had a rip.
Zooming in on his hands, they were clean and soapy, yet long and slender fingers gave Deena Rae fodder for fantasy time later.
His hair and eyebrows were dark, shaggy, and almost menacing in their refusal to be tamed. His eyes were dark, dangerous. And the tilt to his mouth spoke of things. Dirty things.
Yup. She was hooked.
This was better than she’d anticipated when she’d come home with this camera and instructions to get familiar with its features. She snapped off a few rounds of pics, then settled in to watch him dry off the beautiful machine.
Deena Rae pondered the other tools she’d been sent home with to learn to use—like the lock pick—Simon’s words echoing in her brain when he’d showed her how to use them: We don’t break the law, but we do what’s necessary to do good things.
As she watched Mr. Fine Ass walk up the stairs to his apartment, she vowed she would only use her new tools for good things.
Very good things.
Mr. Fine Ass lived in an apartment in the building directly across from her, on the first floor of the four-story complex. Deena Rae observed him as he went into his living quarters, inhaling sharply when she saw the definition in his back as he stripped off his tank top on the way to the bathroom. Who the hell knew there were so many muscles in one man’s back? Her mind went a little crazy, imagining all sorts of uses for those particular muscles. The meme she’d seen on Facebook—A good man doesn’t break hearts, he breaks headboards—was prominent in her current fantasies.
Mr. Fine Ass walked with a machismo that made her squeeze her thigh
s together against the pulsing need she suddenly had. With a hot flush racing across her skin, she was glad she was in the privacy of her home.
As he went into the bathroom, he stopped at the door, one hand on the doorframe above his head. Twisting his torso around, he showed off more muscles and a smattering of dark hair across his chest, a trail that led to very happy things, and a smirk that was nothing short of devilish.
He looked right at her … and winked.
She dropped the camera, totally busted, and giggled into the back of her hand. It was actually more of a guffaw and a snort, as Deena Rae didn’t really giggle, but whatever. She’d been caught, and by the time she could catch her breath, he was in his bathroom, presumably under his shower.
She was turned on by her little voyeurism escapade, and Rick was coming over soon. She might as well get some use out of it.
Rick was the ex—the old boss who couldn’t get the picture he wasn’t a part of her life anymore. Essentially, he was a mistake; just one in a long string of them. They had a relatively mutual agreement to just use each other for sex, although it was clear he wasn’t using her as hard as she was using him.
He didn’t seem to mind, and kept showing up at her place on Tuesdays, so she kept using him.
She didn’t see anything wrong with the arrangement, even if her guts twisted when she thought about the meaninglessness of it, and the fact Rick didn’t make her happy. But who could? Deena Rae glanced back at Mr. Fine Ass’s apartment and snorted to herself.
Yeah, right. He had trouble written all over him.
Maybe some fun could be had anyway?
Chapter Three
Slade was getting dinner ready for his mom, rushing through the motions. He didn’t really want her here, but she’d asked, and he couldn’t say no to his mama. He could make her dinner, anyway. Lori was making it sound so innocent, which told Slade it was anything but. He was predicting she needed money for something.
Money he owed Cecil.
But the ginger across the way was a pleasant distraction, and as he put the chicken in the oven and went about prepping vegetables, he played fantasies in his head.