Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Rights
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- Epilogue
- DON'T FORGET
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- ALSO BY JESSICA GADZIALA
- STALK HER!
SHANE
A Mallick Brothers Novel
—
Jessica Gadziala
DEDICATION
To all the lovely ladies that asked for (read: nagged me about) Shane and Lea’s story after I lost the first draft to a computer crash. If it weren’t for your excitement, I never would have sat down to rewrite it. You are all the best.
Copyright © 2016 Jessica Gadziala
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author's intellectual property. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for brief quotations used in a book review.
"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."
Cover image credit: Shutterstock.com/Kotin
ONE
Shane
The blood swirled to a pink color as it circled the drain in the sink. The skin around my knuckles was raw but hadn’t broken open. That was thanks to the endless years of toughening them up. It was damn near impossible to make me bleed anymore.
I dried my hands on the guy’s towels and flicked the light off in the bathroom to find him just where I left him, curled up in a ball on the living room floor. He was being a bit of a pussy to be honest. It wasn’t that bad. A broken nose, a couple nasty bruises. At worst, a busted rib from the crowbar. He’d gotten off relatively easy but only because he’d been screaming loud enough for the neighbors to call the cops.
See, when you fucked over my father, you had a chance to make good. First, my brother Ryan would come pay a visit. He’d likely give you a warning, try to work with you, keep it amicable and blood-free. If that didn’t yield results, maybe Mark would come knocking. When that failed, my fucking shadow darkened your door.
And then there was blood.
Then, last course of action, if my ass-whopping didn’t make you fork over the money you owed, we sicced Eli on your sorry ass. If you were still able to move afterward, you sure as fucked coughed up the dough. Likely along with a shitton of blood and half your lungs.
I was a violent fuck; Eli was an animal.
That was how we were raised.
That was also how we managed to survive in a town crawling with crime like Navesink Bank. If you weren’t hard, if you weren’t a strong united front, you didn’t survive in the criminal underbelly.
If you wanted to be a big dog, you had to fucking fight when someone rattled your cage.
“You have until the fifteenth, Van, or I swear to fuck you’ll regret it.”
With that, I closed the door and went down the hall, taking the stairs two at a time. I had just made it out onto the sidewalk when the squad car came to a halt out front.
“Shane,” Collings said as he hefted himself out of the passenger side.
“Collings. They got you in a squad car? Not enough open cases to put your detective cap to work on?”
“Let’s just say we got a call about someone who matched a description of several open assault cases I’ve had sitting on my desk for months. Figured I would cut to the chase and see if this was another one to add to the pile. You wouldn’t know anything about a call we got about screams in that building, now would you?” he asked, brow raised, knowing I sure as fuck did, but also knowing that he wouldn’t find much to pin on me.
“Nah, man. I was just taking a stroll.”
“A stroll, huh? Wasn’t that your bike down half a block?” he asked and I swear his fucking lips twitched. I liked Collings. We all liked Collings. He knew how things were in our town and while he did his job, he didn’t go out of his way to create useless problems.
“What can I say,” I started with a smirk, “my feet get tired easily.”
“And that little stain on your neck?” the rookie street cop asked.
“Must have cut myself shaving,” I mused.
“Must have,” Collings nodded with a smirk, no doubt noticing that I hadn’t bothered to shave in at least two days, but letting it drop. “Well, we have doors to knock on and valuable time to waste on a useless errand. So we’ll let you get back to your… stroll.”
“Catch you around, Collings,” I said as I started away.
“Hey Shane,” he called.
“Yeah?” I asked, looking over my shoulder.
“Orthotics.”
“What?”
To that, he gave me a rare full smile. “For those tired feet of yours,” he added before turning and walking away.
With a laugh, I jogged the rest of the way to my bike, slipping on my helmet, and turning in the direction of Willow to the gym.
My gym.
See, the loan sharking business, it was surprisingly profitable. But with a lot of dirty money came the need to try to make it seem like at least some of it came from legitimate sources. Dad had his bar. My brothers had liquor stores and tattoo shops and a whole slew of other ventures. Me, I had the gym, among another side thing or two. It worked for me because I spent a lot of time working out. It just made sense to siphon my bloodstained money into something that was useful to me.
“Did you call Mom back?” Mark asked after I changed and met up with him over by the weights. Looks-wise, all five of us were the spitting image of our father and therefore, one another. We were all tall, black-haired, and blue-eyed. The differences were in the small things. Me and my brother Hunter had a shitton of tattoos. Him, because he was a tattoo artist. Me, because I just fucking liked them. But I had a good fifty pounds of muscle on Hunt. Mark, Ryan, and Eli had a tat here or there but weren’t fully committed to being human canvases. Mark spent nearly as much time in the gym as I did and was therefore cut, but he liked to keep the muscle bulk down and I liked to pile it on. His hair was normal length and neat. Mine was whatever the fuck it looked like after I showered and whatever length it happened to be between when I remembered to get haircuts.
“Phone is in my locker. Why? What’s up?”
“Sunday dinner.”
“What about it?” I asked, sitting down no the bench and reaching for weights. Sunday dinner was a mandatory thing in my family and had been since I was biting ankles. There was no excuse good enough to skip out so we all stopped trying to come up with any a decade past.
“We need to bring dates.”
“Oh, fuck off,” I said, shaking my head.
“And, I quote, ‘not some skanky chicks you pick up at a bar’,” Mark added.
“She does know who her sons are, right?” I asked. It was no secret that none of us, save for Hunt, showed any signs of settling down. Or even spending more than a night or two
with any particular woman.
Mark held up his hands. “You don’t have to tell me, Shane. I don’t like this any more than you. But she said we bring dates or we don’t eat. And you know Ma; she means that shit.”
And she did.
Helen Mallick was nothing if not true to her word. And to be married to a man like Charlie Mallick and raise five sons like us, she had to be a strong, fearsome woman. But if there was one way a mother knew to control her sons, it was to take a good, hot, home-cooked meal away from them.
“Where the fuck am I supposed to find a woman around here that she’d approve of?” I asked, leaning back and raising my weights.
TWO
Lea
The first time a man pins you by the wrists and calls you a whore, your knee-jerk reaction isn’t always to run screaming. At least, not when you have been dating for a long time and had a very active and creative sex life and you were completely convinced he was just spicing it up, trying something new, indulging a dominant fantasy.
And, see, the first two or three times, that was true. Or, at least, I thought it was true.
Until it wasn’t true anymore.
That was the day I told him he could go take a flying fucking leap off a tall building and I would dance around his mangled remains, paint my body with his blood like some sick war goddess, wear his teeth like a pearl necklace.
Until that wasn’t an option
Because in my life, nothing could ever go to plan.
No decisions could ever be mine and mine alone.
I didn’t exactly have the basic human right of free will.
So for years after it first started, with no other choice, I stayed. I stayed and gritted my teeth and silently, or often, not so silently, seethed. When the anger was burned through and I could bring myself to ask, I asked to be let go. Then finally, when my pride was too shriveled to care anymore, I even begged.
I begged.
I had never been the begging kind of woman.
I had always been the kind of woman to do as she damned well pleased and fuck what you or anyone else thought of that.
So to get to the point of feeling like I needed to beg, yeah, that was my lowest place.
And even when I begged, it got me nowhere.
I guess I always knew it wouldn’t.
That day was the day that I knew there was only one choice.
I had to go.
I had to disappear.
I had to leave everyone I knew and loved to suffer whatever fate they would for my actions.
I had to become someone new and never show my face there again.
Because if I showed up, well, let’s just say that the consequences would be of the painful bloody death kind. If I was lucky.
And that, I reminded myself as I stood outside the unfamiliar building in a much less seedy part of town than the part where I was currently living, was why I was going on an interview to work at a freaking phone sex business.
It wasn’t that I was a prude. Actually, when I saw the ad, I figured it was right up my alley. I had never been shy about the dirty talk in my personal life and I was pretty sure there was no dark and twisted, disgusting, or outright silly fetish that I wasn’t aware of.
It was kind of a perfect fit.
The nervousness, yeah well, that had everything to do with the fact that I had forty bucks in my wallet and rent was due in six days and my fridge and cabinets were bare. While I had never lived an especially privileged or spoiled life, I had never been at the point where I ever had to worry about getting my next meal. I had never struggled to make rent or pay my water or light bills. But I had sank everything I had into getting as far away from my past as possible.
And apparently, this Navesink Bank place wasn’t handling the new economy super well. When I had looked online and checked the paper, expecting to see pages upon pages of job listings, all I had found was three places hiring part-time servers, an opening for a receptionist, and a big-as-life ad for phone sex operators.
I didn’t exactly have the disposition for a server. There was no way I was going to drop fifteen extra things off at your table with a smile and then accept the two dollar tip with a shrug. Fuck you and your extra mayonnaise you cheap piece of shit.
And, well, I couldn’t create a spreadsheet to save my life.
So, phone sex it was.
And if I didn’t land the job, I would become intimately acquainted with what an empty stomach felt like.
That was why I was stressed; everything was dependent upon this Fiona woman hiring me.
I sighed, climbing out of my clunker of a car that I was sure qualified for Lemon Law, turned, and looked at my reflection in the window. How one was supposed to dress for an interview to be a phone sex operator was beyond me, so I dressed in tight skinny jeans and an uncharacteristic light blue silk tank top. My long brown hair was left around my shoulders to do its typical wavy, bed-messy thing and I had done my usual mascara and black liner around my dark eyes routine. That was it.
“You got this,” I told myself with a firm nod as I turned from my car and walked to the plain brick building and pulled open the glass front door where For A Good Time, Call… Inc. Was written.
The inside of the building was decidedly upscale. I wasn’t sure what I had been expecting, maybe some dark cubicles full of unsavory types or something. But this wasn’t that. In fact, it looked like the kind of place where a bunch of women in great clothes picked out Fall’s best fashion trends instead of where women talked dirty to masturbating men on phones.
The floors were sleek, a gorgeous tiger strand bamboo hardwood. The walls were painted a fresh sage green and the entire space seemed empty of typical office clutter, everything seeming to have a place and be living in it. The whole center of the room had six small glass-enclosed cubicles where women sat, most of whom were on hot pink phones.
Now, you might hear “phone sex operator” and think “freak”. Maybe you’d picture goth or punk women, women with black, blue, purple, or pink hair, piercings, and tattoos who looked like they spent their evenings doing burlesque shows. What I found instead, though, was half a dozen soccer moms of varying ages.
Freaking soccer moms moaning into phones while men jacked off on the other end.
I had led a colorful life.
I had thought I had seen everything.
But that was a new one.
“Can I help you?” the pretty, slightly mousy, girl at the font desk asked, her voice a hesitant little whisper.
“Hi. Yeah. I’m Lea. I’m here to see…”
“Me,” a voice said from my side, making me start and turn.
And there was the owner of For A Good Time, Call… Inc.
Fiona Mallick.
She, like her workers, was nothing like I had expected. First, because she was much younger than I would have thought. She couldn’t have been any older than her early thirties. She had beach-wavy blonde hair, green eyes, and a killer rack. Her sense of style made me feel a little dumpy standing next to her in her tight skirt and bandeau-type top with ankle-aching five inch heels on her feet.
Unlike her soccer moms working for her though, Fiona did have tattoos. They completely snaked up her arms and I could see one peeking out from the hem of her skirt on the side of her thigh as well.
“Oh, hi,” I said, lamely, giving her a smile. “I’m Lea.”
“Fee,” she said with a smile. “Come on, let’s get some coffee,” she said, nodding toward the open office door to the side and I followed her.
Her personal office, like the main room, was freakishly neat. The walls were white. The furniture was white. Every single little accessory was either black or white. There were no toppling piles of papers or scattered paperclips.
“I know,” she said with her back to me as she poured coffee from a white carafe on her all-white sidebar. “I’m pretty fucking anal about having things in order. I have a weird past. I’ve never been able to shake the habit. How do you take your c
offee?”
“Cream, no sugar,” I said, watching as she made her own.
“Okay,” she said, handing me my cup and taking her own back toward her desk, sitting on the edge of it. “So, you want to be a phone sex operator?”
To that, I snorted quietly and exhaled. “Um. Well, I want a job,” I said honestly.
“I didn’t exactly want to listen to guys get their jollies off either when I started. It was out of pure necessity that I did it. That being said, the money is good. The hours are usually negotiable. And, well, listening to some random grown ass man call you a naughty girl to the sound of his mother calling him to dinner can be downright friggen hilarious. There are definitely worse jobs.”
“There are practically no jobs,” I said, sipping my coffee.
“Yeah, Navesink Bank has a, ah, unconventional workforce,” she said oddly, not seeming like she was going to elaborate on it. “So you do know that the job opening we currently have is for the graveyard shift, right?”
“Yeah,” I agreed. It was actually what I liked best about it. Now, I was a pretty strong, independent kind of woman. But my apartment building and neighborhood in general wasn’t the most comforting of places in the harsh light of day. At night, it was downright scary.
“Our usual night girl just went into labor three nights ago. I’ve been taking the shift since then but, well, my husband has been having a hell of a time getting our girls to bed and, well, the point of being the boss is not having to work the shitty shifts anymore,” she said with a smile.
“I will happily take the shitty shift.”
“So, just a quick, random question,” Fiona said, eyes twinkling. “What is a double-fishhook?”
I had been taking a sip of my coffee and immediately snorted and started choking on it hard. “You’re… serious?” I coughed, setting my coffee down.
“We both know I could pick a worse term to explain than that one. Out with it,” she demanded with a wicked smile.
Shane (The Mallick Brothers Book 1) Page 1