Deep South (Naive Mistakes #4)

by Dunning, Rachel

  DEEP SOUTH

  Naïve Mistakes Series - Book Four

  By Rachel Dunning

  Copyright © 2014 Rachel Dunning.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Book Cover photo, Copyright 2014 Vasilchenko Nikita

  Book Cover Design, Copyright 2014 Rachel Dunning

  Smashwords Edition.

  ISBN: 9781310263606

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Also by Rachel Dunning:

  Red Hot Blues

  Know Me, #1 Truthful Lies

  Find Me, #2 Truthful Lies

  Need Me, #3 Truthful Lies

  Finding North, #1 Naïve Mistakes Series

  East Rising, #2 Naïve Mistakes Series

  West-End Boys, #3 Naïve Mistakes Series

  Like You, #1 Perfectly Flawed Series

  Christmas Comfort, #1 Hot Holidays Series

  Easter Sundae, #2 Hot Holidays Series

  Girl-Nerds Like it Harder, #1 Girl-Nerd Series

  Girl Nerds Like it Faster, #2 Girl-Nerd Series

  Girl-Nerds Like it Deeper, #3 Girl-Nerd Series

  Girl-Nerds Like it Longer, #4 Girl-Nerd Series

  For news of upcoming releases, visit:

  http://racheldunningauthor.blogspot.com

  Or connect with me on Facebook:

  http://bit.ly/RachelDunning

  For everyone who reached out to me for a Book Four.

  Table of Contents

  FOREWORD

  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

  EPILOGUE

  POSTSCRIPT

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  FOREWORD

  Uh-oh. A foreword...

  This is just a heads up so you know what you’re getting into. It would be impolite to throw you into the Hudson River without at least some warning of what’s in it.

  Firstly:

  This is book four. But, of course, I did my best to make it readable on its own. And, also “of course,” you’ll probably have a much deeper appreciation of the story if you go ahead and read Books One to Three first—but you don’t really have to.

  Secondly:

  I brought the comedy back in this story. Oh, yes, there’s steam as well. Of course there is, it wouldn’t be a Rachel Dunning story if there wasn’t. But there’s also humor. And tension, and everything I believed made Book One such a success (except the parentheses. Kind of.)

  I did my best to replicate all the good and crazy things that made people say “Wow!” after reading Finding North (Book One.)

  I hope I did my job well. And if I didn’t, well, we’ll always have Paris. (Oh no, wait—that was Bogart. Shit! If I didn’t do my job well, then, you’re screwed. Sorry.)

  CHAPTER ONE

  -1-

  Starting college sucked.

  There I was: Nineteen—engaged to the most gorgeous, sexy, rich, caring, strong, loving, tattooed, unbelievable man...and now I was supposed to, what, “get an education?”

  I’m sorry to say, but it was the first time I, little ole Leora Caivano, admitted to myself that I was maybe ahead of my peers. It was the first time I saw what Conall Williams had probably seen in me when he’d met me a year and a bit before that, when I’d been only seventeen (almost eighteen) back in NYC. He’d told me that I was “mature” for my age. I’d never believed him.

  Oh boy, did I freakin believe him now!

  Maybe it was the lame attempt at an “initiation”—a party where a bunch of guys jumped me and Kayla and tried to throw us into a pool in the near-freezing temperatures of an English Fall. Of course, none of these bozos (and they were muscular bozos, let me tell you) had any slightest idea that Kayla and I were more than a little clued up on that Israeli Martial Art: The Kill-Or-Be-Killed Krav Maga. None of them knew that I’d been damn-near raped only a few months before, that I’d witnessed a man’s head blown off in front of my eyes, that one of our best friends works at MI6 (we think, because Trey is still super-secretive about it), that Kayla’s ex was a drug-lord who my husband-to-be had beaten the crap out of the same night he’d officially called me his “girlfriend” (woohoo!); and none of them knew that we rarely got taken by surprise or got caught flat-footed. None of these...kids (muscular though they were) had any remotest inkling that I knew how to disarm a man, take his gun and stick it up his holiest of holies when put in a fix—and then blow the trigger.

  No, we didn’t get thrown in that pool.

  Nothing at all happened to us. Although the “men” (boys, actually; little boys...) involved in that scuffle were holding their nuts for dear life afterwards; one of them had a blue eye; and more than a few of them got (ahem) turned on by us!

  Kids. Children.

  And most of them were older than us!

  Can you believe it?

  Maybe it was the looks we got the day afterwards from Bettina Langford, high queen and princess of the University of England, because her father’s uncle is of Blue Blood or maybe just because she gives a damn good blowjob and the Dean had availed himself of it. (I don’t know if that is true, I’m just being snide; but I was pissed.)

  Maybe it was how she thought that her comments, the looks she gave us, being kept out of her “clique,” had any fucking effect whatsoever on my and Kayla’s state of mind!

  It didn’t.

  It so didn’t.

  Kids.

  Kayla and I were both nineteen, and we both felt like we were decades ahead of these people in maturity.

  In truth, we were.

  -2-

  This, of course, was all happening before Kayla got married. She would get married in January of the following year. That pool party had been in October. And I know we’re backtracking a bit, but you need to know this stuff.

  Kayla’s wedding would be a rough-and-tumble affair in the middle of winter. We didn’t know this at the time. At the time, she was hoping Brad from Bushwick—hard and ripped love of her life with the scorpion tattoo—would go all out and prepare a massive wedding for her just like every princess in the world had ever dreamed of.

  Kayla, however, was far from your average princess. She was (is!) a shaved-on-the-side-of-the-head, pink-haired, gazillion earrings on both ears, tattooed up-the-kazoo bad girl.

  Only, she wasn’t bad. She was (is!) just foul-mouthed. And she’s also my greatest friend in the world.

  The foul-mouth and tough-girl look are just a front. She’s the most sensitive, caring, loving, wonderful best friend anyone could ever want.

  Of course, I’m a little protect
ive of her, as she is of me, and maybe that’s also where the shit began.

  She and I have been through everything together. She’s saved my ass, I’ve saved hers. It was love at first sight with me and her back when she was sixteen and I was fifteen (we met at a hospital!) And we’re inseparable. So much so that she followed me all the way to the UK from New York, brought her bad-boy boyfriend with her (now her fiancé—Brad), and now we were all living it up in West Sussex, home of the snore and world of the snooze.

  A few weeks had passed since the now famous “Pool Incident” as the kids at UE were calling it. Kayla and I had been called dykes, heavyweight UFC contenders (that one hit a small nerve with me because of the weight insecurities I’d had growing up), as well as numerous other more flattering things by pigs who obviously had nothing better to do than sit in their dorms fantasizing about how we’d kicked their asses, and then maybe touched themselves while—

  Urgh, I don’t even wanna think about it.

  Conall Williams—my knight and king and...yowser!...an absolute god in bed!—was not as well known here as he was in Mid Sussex, where his mansion is. (It’s not really a mansion, but it certainly has enough rooms to be, so that’s what I call it...) And even though he picked me up in his Porsche (or sometimes his metallic purple Mercedes) almost every day, no one really knew that he was the son of one of the most powerful families in England.

  I confess, neither did I... But we’ll get to that.

  Why didn’t they know him? Because he was the first of generations of Williams men to break with tradition and go to college at Oxford, and not the University of England.

  But the Williams name itself was indeed known here. More than I at first understood.

  I tried to put myself in their position, in the position of these kids making these comments (good and bad) to me and Kayla. At nineteen, I’d learned to fend for myself, to survive, to earn a living. Sure, it was only waitressing, but I’d survived on my own two feet without anyone’s help for six months and had been doing pretty well at it. I purposely didn’t touch any of the fortune my parents had given me access to on turning eighteen just so I could prove to myself that I wasn’t one of those people with “First World Problems,” as Kayla once used to make fun of me for being.

  And I’d made it.

  I’d also found love—true love. I’d found it in a man not much older than me (just shy of seven years) who was perfect in every way—except for the dark secrets about his sister, who’d been murdered when she was fourteen, and the unbelievable burden he’d carried with himself at feeling responsible for anything that went wrong with the people he loved. I didn’t care about his money, his hard-as-sin body, his tattoos—although those were definitely bonuses! But I’d fallen in love with him, as he’d fallen in love with me.

  He’d even killed for me: A drug-dealer, a murderer, Kayla’s ex-boyfriend!—Conall had shot him in self defense before that slimeball could take another innocent life in front of our eyes.

  I was a grown up. Age had nothing to do with it. I was ready to take on the world. And what was I doing? I was in school!

  And what had these other people—kids!—done? Broken a nail? Lost their access to Netflix? Missed a month’s subscription to Nylon magazine?

  Kayla and I were out of our element. And, for the first time, we were the grown-ups!

  I almost lost my mind.

  -3-

  Kayla and I were walking up the steps to UE’s entrance. It was early morning. Chilly. Pretty damned cold actually. Steam billowed from our breaths as we held our books with gloved hands and huddled them to our chests with chattering teeth.

  It was November now.

  Guess who was on those steps? Right.

  Bettina Langford stood there (in a mini skirt!) with her tumbling blond hair and her sparkling blue eyes. Her lips looked lusciously round, perfect for...ahem. She’d crossed her goosebumped legs (long ones, sexy ones, I confess), and mumbled just loud enough to her coven of followers so that Kayla and I could hear her. She’d been throwing audible comments in my direction for a while, ever since that pool incident in October. Things such as “Oh, there goes the girl whose man can’t get it with a real woman.”

  And who was the “real” woman—her?

  By this time, of course, they’d come to know at least that Conall was twenty-six.

  The other comments were ones I’ve mentioned already—things about that pool fight, jokes about my weight. I wasn’t fat as such now, I’d rounded out a little bit. But I’ve always been a little stocky because of the weight training I did for so many years to keep my Italian body from ignoring its natural tendency to spiral out of control with blubber as soon as I hit my teens.

  So, I’d ignored all of Bettina’s comments for weeks.

  Kayla—my bad-ass, ready-to-kill, takes-no-shit-from-anyone best friend—didn’t do the same and once or twice I actually had to hold her back with brute force to prevent her from clawing Bettina’s frickin eyes out! But, all in all, it hadn’t come down to an all-out brawl despite Bettina’s constant comments and lambasting. Yet.

  Today, however, would be different. Because today, Blondie Bettina The Blue-Eyed Slut, would go lower than low. Lower than anyone should go—even in trailer parks (where I figured she was secretly from.)

  She must have done some googling. And maybe even some blowing for information.

  She said this, in her pompous, prissy, I’m-trying-to-get-fucked-up British accent: “Oh, dear, it’s the cradle-snatch duo: The one who shags South American drug dealers in exchange for drugs (also known as prostitution)”—she was talking about Kayla—“and the other who does the same in exchange for a place to live and a college education. Oh, and not to mention that she’s probably the unconscious substitute for her boyfriend’s long-dead little sister who was, what, the same age as—”

  I didn’t let her finish.

  I was so fast that Kayla didn’t even see me move until Bettina and I crashed and tumbled and rolled over the side of the university steps and fell on hard, thorny brambles!

  But I didn’t stop there.

  I slugged her! Hard!

  I was all over her! I pummeled and punched and hit and cracked my fists into her pretty face!

  By the time three guys got me off of her (and, of course, other idiots were also cheering me on because they got turned on by the “girl-fight”) Bettina had a broken nose, a bleeding lip, a black eye, and a swollen jaw.

  Er, yeah, this was not good.

  CHAPTER TWO

  -1-

  The Dean called my dad all the way in NYC. It was three A.M. in New York.

  I’m glad it wasn’t my mom.

  Dean Whithers, a white-haired man who sat up very straight in his leather chair, in an office that had way too much tradition in it, held the phone with his index and thumb, a little away from his ear—as if talking to a self-made man from The Bronx was catching.

  Kayla and I sat very straight on surprisingly comfortable leather seats ahead of the Dean’s desk.

  I couldn’t fucking believe I was going through this.

  Getting all postal on Bettina’s ass had been pent-up frustrations for a situation that I had known—ever since the first day, even before that pool party!—was a bad setup.

  I wanted a degree, but I didn’t want to be treated like a kid.

  Dean Whithers wriggled his nose and I heard my dad’s voice bellowing from the phone.

  The Dean looked suddenly indignant. In his posh accent, he said, “Mr. Caivano”—he pronounced it Caivahhrno, silent R—“it is unbecoming of a young lady and of the ethos of the University—”

  I heard my dad, in his decidedly unposh Bronx accent: “Listen here, mista. I raised my girl to fend fuh herself. And if some tramp is causin shit wit my little girl then I’m sure she got what was comin ta her!”

  “Mr. Caiv—”

  “Dontchoo fuckin mister me, pal! I’ve told you I wanna talk to my little girl, now put her on!”

&nbs
p; My dad was talking really loud.

  “Mr. Caivahhrno, I’m only trying to impress upon you—”

  “Hey! I’m payin yo fuckin bills, now put my little girl on before I impress something up your—”

  “Fine! Fine! Mr. Caivahhrno! No need for such language!”

  Whithers extended a resentful hand, holding the phone, in my direction. He rolled his eyes and exhaled loudly while doing it.

  I was secretly grinning.

  “Baby?”

  “Hey, pops.”

  “What happened?”

  I told him—as best as I could with Whithers looking at me like he’d sat on a piece of dung.

  “And Kayla?” my dad asked.

  “Well, she kind of took out two of the other girls for me.”

  I looked over at my pink-haired best friend. She smiled widely at me, her liquid green eyes looking innocent and pure. I extended my hand over the seat onto hers, and held it. Thanks for having my back, the gesture said.

  Dean Whithers looked like he was gonna be sick.

  “She always had yo back, didn’t she?” my dad said.

  “Yeah,” I croaked, looking down at my knees.

  “So, Leo, whatchoo wanna do about dis school?”

  I said nothing.

  “Leo?”

  I felt tears prickling at my eyes. My chin started to tremble. Dad could feel it.

  “That bad, huh?”

  I nodded, as if he could see me! But I did get the feeling pops understood.

  “How’s things with Conall?”

  I laughed suddenly, happy, thinking of how Conall and I had taken time out to chop wood in the lawn together just last week. Conall had insisted on wielding the ax and then I’d told him I was strong enough. Soon I’d discovered I wasn’t, and the ax hung suspended on a log... “Things are great with him.”

  My dad sighed.

  Dean Whithers coughed like he’d been forced to eat a frog.

  “Call me when you have some privacy, babe. No one’s gonna force you ta do summin you don’t wanna do.”