Text copyright ©2018 Lani Lynn Vale
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Dedication
Every once in a while, I know exactly what I’m going to say in my dedication. Other times, like now, I can’t really think of what to say. My toes are cold, and I’m really hungry, so…I think I’m going to dedicate this one to fluffy socks and the leftovers I’m about to devour…
<3 Happy reading!
Acknowledgements
Jacob Wilson- Model
Golden Czermak- Photographer
Danielle Palumbo- My awesome content editor.
Ellie McLove & Ink It Out Editing- My editors
Cover Me Darling- Cover Artist
My mom- Thank you for reading this book eight million two hundred times.
Cheryl, Kendra, Diane, Leah, Kathy, Mindy, Barbara & Amanda—I don’t know what I would do without y’all. Thank you, my lovely betas, for loving my books as much as I do.
Author Note:
This book takes place BEFORE Too Bad So Sad, so you may see a small difference here and there with the two books! <3 I hope you like it!
Lani
Table of Contents
Author Note:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Epilogue
What’s Next?
An excerpt
Other titles by Lani Lynn Vale:
The Freebirds
Boomtown
Highway Don’t Care
Another One Bites the Dust
Last Day of My Life
Texas Tornado
I Don’t Dance
The Heroes of The Dixie Wardens MC
Lights To My Siren
Halligan To My Axe
Kevlar To My Vest
Keys To My Cuffs
Life To My Flight
Charge To My Line
Counter To My Intelligence
Right To My Wrong
Code 11- KPD SWAT
Center Mass
Double Tap
Bang Switch
Execution Style
Charlie Foxtrot
Kill Shot
Coup De Grace
The Uncertain Saints
Whiskey Neat
Jack & Coke
Vodka On The Rocks
Bad Apple
Dirty Mother
Rusty Nail
The Kilgore Fire Series
Shock Advised
Flash Point
Oxygen Deprived
Controlled Burn
Put Out
I Like Big Dragons Series
I Like Big Dragons and I Cannot Lie
Dragons Need Love, Too
Oh, My Dragon
The Dixie Warden Rejects
Beard Mode
Fear the Beard
Son of a Beard
I’m Only Here for the Beard
The Beard Made Me Do It
Beard Up
For the Love of Beard
Law & Beard
There’s No Crying in Baseball
Pitch Please
Quit Your Pitchin’
Listen, Pitch
The Hail Raisers
Hail No
Go to Hail
Burn in Hail
What the Hail
The Hail You Say
Hail Mary
The Simple Man Series
Kinda Don’t Care
Maybe Don’t Wanna
Get You Some
Ain’t Doin’ It
Too Bad So Sad
Bear Bottom Guardians MC
Mess Me Up
Talkin’ Trash
How About No (11-6-18)
My Bad (12-4-18)
One Chance, Fancy (1-15-19)
Chapter 1
My hobbies include putting on my pajamas as soon as I get home.
-Henley’s secret thoughts
Henley
I put the finishing touches on my turkey sandwich and was about to take the first delicious bite when the music started next door.
I stared in utter horror at the wall that separated my duplex from the one next door. It vibrated and I started running.
This could not be happening. This could not be happening. This could not be happening.
I kept chanting to myself as I ran, staring wide-eyed at the door, and then the sidewalk, followed shortly by the grass, as I rounded the small dividing fence that separated my yard from my neighbor.
I hadn’t actually met this neighbor. In fact, I hadn’t really met any of my neighbors. I worked nights, and normally when people were out during the day, I was sleeping. I didn’t bother to switch to days when I wasn’t working—what would be the point?
I was a mail sorter at the post office, and worked every night of the week, and was off on weekends.
Every night but this night.
I lived with my sister. My sister was the woman that paid the bills—at least for the duplex, seeing as it was hers.
Although I made a pretty penny at fifteen dollars an hour, I wasn’t making big money like my big sister, Alana. Alana was a nurse at the hospital and worked the night shift. When she was working, which was only three days a week, my mother watched her child.
Only, this week, my mother had the flu. Incidentally, Alana’s daughter, Autumn, gave it to her.
We had two of the four females, as well as my big brother, down for the count, and nobody else could watch Autumn but me and my sister. Since my sister had already called in three times this week, I’d told her that I would call in seeing as her shift supervisor was an asshole and liked to make everything about him.
Though, now would be the time to mention that her shift supervisor was her ex-husband. Her baby daddy. Oh, and the reason that she had the job in the first place.
Regardless, her ex should’ve understood. In fact, he should’ve fucking helped.
Did he? No. Why? Because he was a titty baby and refused to be around her when she was sick.
Which was honestly quite comical seeing as he worked at the goddamn hospital with sick patients.
The noise from the party had me almost covering my ears due to the pitch. It was so loud that I could feel it in my bones.
I was different than the majority of human population. I processed things in an uncommon way compared to everyone else.
Absentmindedly, I reach
ed up and started to fiddle with the speech processor that was being partially hidden by my hair.
Yes, people. I was deaf without it. I was not handicapped in any way. I lived a normal life. I talked a little oddly due to my first year and a half being hearing impaired, but if I wasn’t flustered, I was able to compensate.
Now, though? I was fucking flustered.
Why? Because my niece hadn’t slept in a full fourteen hours because she’d been up with the flu. She had to sleep propped up on pillows, and she had a continuous nasal drip that really rubbed me the wrong way if I focused on it too long.
I pounded on the door, wondering if anybody would hear me at all.
Nothing happened.
I pounded again.
It was less than ten seconds later that the door was yanked open and bodies started to shuffle out.
In the scuffle of those bodies leaving, they didn’t see me standing there, and dislodged me from my spot at the front door.
Not able to think with the mass of bodies, I fell backward onto my backside, hitting hard because for some reason I was trying to protect the sandwich in my hand rather than my ass.
But whatever.
When I hit the ground, I went back onto my back and rolled partially to my side. Yes, still protecting my sandwich. This time from the bush at my back.
The moment that I rolled, my entire world went silent.
There wasn’t a single sound in the world. Not one single one.
I guess I should be thankful that by those men coming out of the house, they’d turned on the security light as they went, because now I could clearly see everything.
What kind of fucking light was that? I sure as hell didn’t have that on my part of the duplex!
I rolled up to my knees and turned around, searching for my speech processor that had somehow gotten yanked off during my fall.
Absently I took a bite of my sandwich almost out of habit seeing as it was in my hand and hummed when I found my transmitter clinging to a twig.
Snatching it up, I stood up and turned, coming face to sternum with the biggest man I’d ever seen.
My eyes trailed up the very bare chest, between some fabulous pecs, and even farther up to a very muscular neck before it came to a well-trimmed, bearded jaw.
I stalled hesitantly on a pair of lips that would’ve done any woman proud. They were thick, luscious…lickable.
And those lips started to move, but since his back was to the light, I couldn’t see his lips quite well enough to read what he was saying.
So, I ignored them and continued past them to a crooked, nose, and finally stopping on a pair of sea foam green eyes.
So, of course, that was when I raised my sandwich up to take another bite.
Before I could so much as sink my teeth into the bread, I was hauled back roughly. So roughly that my head snapped to the side, and my hand holding my transmitter convulsed.
The transmitter fell to the floor, and it hit the ground. I watched as the booted foot of the man holding me stepped on it, pulverizing it to little tiny pieces.
My stomach sank.
“Oh, God,” I moaned. “Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.”
Five thousand dollars down the drain.
How do I know how much was down the drain? I’d just gotten that new unit just last month after saving for it for three long years.
My knees sagged, and the fingers holding the sandwich let go.
Tears started to immediately leak out of my eyes as I watched my hopes and dreams literally swirl down the drain.
My eyes went up to the man that was holding me by the arm, and he gave it another good yank, causing me to cry out in pain.
I wasn’t a big girl. In fact, I was a five-foot-three, one-hundred-and twenty-seven-pound woman. The man holding me was at least my brother’s height—which was six-foot-four—and looked to be made of solid muscle. I already knew that his one hand could fit around my entire arm.
“Let me go!” I cried out.
The man didn’t let me go until I was on the sidewalk, which was a good twenty feet from where I’d been originally.
The minute I was free, the tears came faster.
Then I ran up the walkway to the still open door of my house, slammed it closed, and fell to my knees, continuing to sob.
Chapter 2
Sometimes there is crying in baseball. Sometimes players also take fast pitches to the nuts, too.
-Rhys to Henley
Rhys
“What the fuck was that, Colder?” I barked at the bodyguard that the league had begun to require that I have.
Apparently, I was a hot commodity, and if I wanted to keep starting and playing for the Texas Lumberjacks, I’d let the owner have peace of mind by having a bodyguard. Though, he wasn’t there if I was at home usually. However, tonight I’d had a party, and the owner had practically demanded that we have security present.
There was an approved guest list, however, and there wasn’t a single person here that I didn’t know.
Except for the woman, of course.
The moment I saw her, though…well then, I’d wanted to know her.
I’d been asking her for her name, too, when Colder had yanked her away like she was a prize I’d stolen out of the machine without winning it fair and square.
“Unauthorized…” he started to explain as I held up my hand.
“She’s obviously my neighbor,” I pointed out.
Colder shrugged, then his eyes narrowed on something in the grass.
He walked over and picked it up, and I knew the moment that I saw it exactly what it was.
My sister was deaf. My sister, at the age of two and a half to my seven, had gotten cochlear implants.
I still remembered, to this day, what she looked like after she’d come out of surgery. Her entire head had been wrapped so completely with gauze that I could make out nothing but her little nose and her cute bow tie lips.
“Give it to me,” I snapped.
He did, and I nearly moaned at the sight of the speech processor and transmitter, obviously broken, in my hands.
“Shit,” I muttered. “Fuck it all.”
I immediately started toward the door that was slammed so sharply shut just a few feet away from my own and started to knock.
When I felt Colder’s presence at my back, I turned around and shot him a glare.
“Back the fuck off.”
“Yo, pretty boy,” I heard Hancock ‘Parts’ Peters call. “You were the one that interrupted my night with Sway, the least you could do is spend the fuckin’ time with us.”
I flipped the motherfucker off and continued to knock, then started to curse.
If I was holding the goddamn transmitter in my hand, then she wouldn’t be able to hear me knocking.
Goddammit!
I immediately reached for my phone and called my sister.
My sister, Renata, was on my speed dial, but it wasn’t her that answered, it was her husband.
“’Lo?”
“Winston,” I said, though that wasn’t his real name. I made it a point not to use his real name, which was Dewight. It just sounded so weird and outdated. “I need to talk to my sister.”
He muttered something beyond the phone, and a short while later my sister was there.
“Rhys, what are you doing calling this late?”
I didn’t mince words and told her the complete story. “I need your help.”
I didn’t know what was compelling me to help this woman, and I also didn’t know why it was so urgent that I do so now, at ten o’clock at night. All I knew was that I couldn’t leave things the way they were and live with myself.
I immediately started to explain what had happened.
“What kind is it?”
I turned on the flashlight app on my phone and shined it on the side of the device. Once I read it to her, I put it back to my ear.
“I think we mi
ght have one in stock…” she muttered. “Can I do it in the morni—”
I didn’t even let her finish before I interrupted her.
“No, tonight,” I said. “Preferably by morning. I don’t want her to go a single second longer than she needs to without it.”
That was when I heard the hard, thumping music start up again.
The two assholes that I’d herded out of my house—rookies that’d been on the guest list but I’d revoked when they’d turned that bullshit on—started up again.
“What is all that noise?”
Fuckers obviously didn’t take the hint of me kicking them out.
I turned and tossed a ‘fix it’ look at Colder, who immediately made some hand signals toward another man that was standing on the opposite side of the three-foot dividing fence.
The sound was cut off moments later.
I sighed at my sister’s aggravated words.
My sister had to be up in less than six hours for her job, even though she was currently working from her bedroom due to being on bedrest. She wouldn’t take too kindly to me waking her up like this. I’d pay for it later, but she understood more than most the imperative nature of my request.
“How did you break it?” she asked.
“Fucking Colder stepped on it after she dropped it,” I muttered. “Startled her, and she dropped it on the ground. He didn’t do it on purpose or anything, but still.”
She grunted. “Gonna cost you, buddy.”
I didn’t doubt it.
Not in the least.
“Wouldn’t think the same of you if it didn’t,” I countered. “Night, sis. Love you.”
My sister muttered something under her breath and hung up, leaving me smiling.
Looking one final time at the door, I left.
That night, I dreamed.
I dreamed about a tiny woman, who was deaf, staying in a house by herself who should have a man with her to protect her. Someone like me.
It sucked.
Chapter 3
Every time you clog a toilet, you’ve exceeded someone’s expectations.
-Henley to Alana
Henley
“Yo, sis!” Alana likely called.
Not that I could hear her. I read her lips, though.
“Hey,” I replied.
She stopped cold and turned to me, her eyes narrowing on my face.
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