by Madison Faye
“Now what?” she hisses, her face scowling as I yank the wheel, turning us off one road and onto the next. I doubt any of Billy-Ray’s tweaker cooks are actually following us. I mean shit, they couldn’t even shoot us worth a damn from thirty feet away. But still. You rob from one of the biggest drug kingpins south of the Mason-Dixon line, and you’re gonna want to keep out of sight for a while.
I grin at that thought. Shit, despite the unexpected — the other armed thief, that other armed thief being her, and then her getting the drop on me, we do have the money. A million fucking dollars.
…Oh, and I do mean “we.” So long as she’s handcuffed to me, that money is as good as fifty-fifty in my eyes. All of it would be nice, but I’ll take half. Half might mean losing out on my goal, but half at least gets me squared with Law Banner on what I owe him. And Law is hardly the kind of guy you go to with less than what you owe him. Even if you’re a pro fuck-up like me.
See, I’ve always been the black sheep of my family — always the one stirring shit up. It’s been that way, ever since I was a kid. My older brother Colton was always the good one, and I was always the fuck-up. I don’t know what it is, it’s just always seemed to be that I find trouble. Or maybe it’s that trouble just finds me.
Hell, she did.
Colton was always the one looking out for me back when we were kids. When we got older and when Colton turned out to be the super-star young rodeo rider, he made sure the talent scouts he got took me along too. Hell, I was never much good — not nearly as good as my older brother who was deemed the “hot new face of rodeo” I think it was the sports channel called him. But I lasted one or two tours, if only because I didn’t know how to quit. I never knew how to just let go and when that horse had me beat.
Or maybe I just refused to ever believe I was down, even when I was. That “fuck the world” attitude got me a nickname from the sports channel too — Rough Rider they called me. I might not’ve won much, but I held the fuck on even when I was bloodied and fuckin’ wrecked on the ground.
But then, I found something I was really good at. I found something that just sorta clicked with me like rodeo never had.
Cards.
And man was I good.
I dropped the rodeo thing to hit the underground poker circuit, and I fucking cleaned up. Celebrities with a taste for the high stakes, mob guys, scumbags, even a few warlords from war-torn countries with cash to blow — I beat ‘em all, and I took ‘em all to the damn cleaners. The Rough Rider name stuck around too, only this time, it wasn’t about staying on that horse even when I was half-dead. This time, it was because if you were across the table from me? Well, I’d ride you fucking rough until I took every goddamn cent.
When our parents died along with our grandpa in that car crash, it was Colton again who stepped up to be the good guy. He’s the one that left his fame and fortune to take over our grandpa’s horse ranch. He looked out for our kid sister Taylor, too. Hell, someone had to raise her up through school and get her ass into college. And it sure as fuck wasn’t going to be me.
Like I said, I’m the fuck-up. Every family’s got one, and in mine, it’s me all the way.
But the money? The one sitting in the fucking bag between us in this very truck?
Shit, that was supposed to be my shot at making good. Because the card tables have gotten old. The traveling’s gotten old. The spending all my time in the seediest, shittiest little underground casinos around had gotten real old. And watching over my shoulder for pissed off criminals and scumbags who think I cheated them is getting old, too.
When I found out old man Wilson was selling his land, I jumped at the chance. A place of my own? And in Sugar County where I grew up?
Hell yeah.
Now, I’ve made some serious cash gambling, but, well, land ain’t cheap. Especially a few hundred acres of it. That’s pretty much what got me into this fucking mess. It’s also where owing money to Law Banner comes in. And if you knew the family history between mine — the Bronsons — and the Banners?
Well, you’d know I’d have to be real hard up to go to that guy for cash.
But I did. See, I’d pulled some strings, and through my old circle in the poker rings, I’d found out about this high-stakes game. This was some serious shit too. Drug lords, crime bosses, all sorts of rich lowlifes.
And me, ready to clean them out so I could cash out and retire to my new ranch.
Law’s money got me in the door. And at first, it looked like I was doing well. Too well, actually. So well in fact that suddenly, there was a gun in my face, a big guy dragging me out of my chair, and three more guys pulling me outside and beating the ever-loving-shit outta me.
And just like that, the five-hundred grand I borrowed with enough interest to make your balls shrivel from Law Banner was gone. Five-hundred G’s owed to a man I don’t want to owe a single dime to.
So, I think that about brings us up to speed.
I’d already forgotten about my dream of owning the Wilson property. Fuck it. I’d written that off when I got dragged away from that poker table. But the money now was about survival. It was about paying my debts. And this heist was about settling things up with Law.
Around these parts, Law and the Banner family pretty much run things when it comes to crime. Law’s got a pretty strict policy these days about staying out of the hard drugs and anything to do with running girls. But just the same, Billy-Ray getting in on his turf with meth doesn’t fly. Billy-Ray is also a loud-mouthed bragger of a drug lord who’s pretty much made zero effort to hide the whereabouts of his main cookhouse, or the fact that it was also his bank.
Now, I don’t give a flying shit about the politics of whose crime turf is whose, but to me, that looked like a win-win when it came to squaring up with Law: take out the guy trying to muscle in on his territory, and get him back his five-hundred grand.
“So now what?”
Her voice drags me out of my thoughts, and I blink, turning to look at the gorgeous little spitfire perched next to me in the truck. Shit. Even with that petulant little scowl on her face, this girl is all sorts of tempting. Those boots and those skin-tight jeans aren’t exactly helping. Or maybe it’s that I know damn well what that hot little body of hers looks like underneath ‘em.
Maybe it’s that I know her panties are white, with a little pink-laced edge.
…Maybe it’s that I know her pussy tastes like fucking honey.
“Huh?”
“What now?” she snaps.
“Now? Now we fucking disappear.”
She frowns. “Excuse me?”
“We disappear, sweetheart.”
“Don’t call me that.”
I chuckle. “Didn’t seem to mind me calling you that last night.”
“That was different,” she mutters.
“Oh was it?”
“It was and you know it.”
I grin. Oh I think teasing her is gonna be fun. “Meaning?”
“Meaning last night was before you pointed your fucking guns at me.”
“Look who’s talking, shotgun Sally,” I mutter.
“This was my pull, you know!” she hisses back, glaring at me with those gorgeous green eyes. Goddamn, her mad even makes me hard.
“That why you ran out so quick this morning?”
She smiles thinly at me. “Aww, did you want me to leave my number?”
I roll my eyes. “Settle down princess.”
“I’m not a prin—”
“No shit.”
She yanks on the handcuffs. I just yank right back.
…Oh this is gonna be fun.
She groans. “We need to get these off.”
“Oh, do we?”
She glares at me before turning to look out the window. “Where are you taking me?”
“I’m taking us to my hideout.”
She rolls her eyes. “A hideout? Are you twelve?”
“You know I could have left you there, right?”
“Me
and the million bucks?”
“Nah, I’d have taken the money, don’t worry.”
“Dick.”
I grin as I gun the engine, turning the wheel and pulling us off the road and onto a dirt one. Man, does she drive me crazy, and yet, this mouthy little brat drives me fucking wild too. Maybe it’s in my blood. Maybe seeing a wild horse like her, breathing fire and tearing up the ground around her, scaring off anyone with any sanity, just does the opposite to me.
Maybe seeing a wild filly like her just makes me want to hold on tighter and ride her rough.
And you know what? I want her tied to me. I want her bound up close to me with these cuffs. Because now, she can’t get away again. Not like I let her get away this morning.
Now, this little piece of trouble is mine.
Chapter 5
Chastity
How in the world did I get here?
I close my eyes for a second, taking a deep breath and trying to center myself — trying to find the angle here. But no, there’s no good angle here. I’m fucking handcuffed to him, and man is that confusing.
On the one hand, this is the man who fucking rocked my word last night. This is the man who made me explode, and scream for more — the man who got somewhere inside of me I was pretty sure I’d forgotten about. The man who left me breathless and spinning and aching for more.
And yet, this is also the man who’s fucking up my entire plan.
This money is my one ticket out of this whole thing — this whole mess I’ve found myself in. This money is supposed to get me a new life and get me out of the one I’m stuck in — the one that’s being decided for me.
He called me a princess, and I know he meant it sarcastically, but he’s not exactly wrong. He’d know how on the money he is if he knew my name.
Huntington.
Yeah, those Huntingtons. The tobacco fortune. The controlling portion of most of the refineries in the coal belt. The racehorses, the race cars. The big houses, the yachts, the trust fund, the tabloids.
All of it.
Yep, that’s me. Chastity Huntington. Basically a princess. Well, “Heiress socialite” they might say — or at least, that’s what my parents want me to be. That’s what their PR team tries to get me to be in the gossip magazines, or when they used to try and set me up with random vapid pretty boys who also came from money.
And yet, I keep resisting. Because that life is not what I want. I don’t want the glitz and glamour. I don’t want the paparazzi and all that crap. I don’t want this ridiculous expectation of what I “should” be doing to “uphold the Huntington name.” Maybe that’s why I’ve always been a thrill seeker. I’m sure a psychologist would have a field day with that.
First it was skipping school or climbing out my bedroom window at night to go on joyrides in my stepfather Martin’s cars. When they found me out, well, I just got better. I learned to pick my way out of locked bedroom doors. I learned not to get caught when you steal a car.
But it was at twenty-one, just a few months ago, when things went sideways. When I accidentally figured out what my stepfather was really involved in. I’d been using the big safe in his office for practice for years. Only this time, I finally cracked it. I don’t know what I’d ever expected to find inside a rich man’s personal safe — cash? Legal documents? Gold bars?
Well, whatever I expected, it wasn’t what I actually found, that’s for damn sure. Because what I found in the safe was iron-clad proof of what business he was really into.
Drugs.
Prostitution.
Horrible, terrible things. He worked with a man who went by the name Cyril Coleman — another “society” man like my stepfather. A fellow businessman also into the “gentlemanly” things my father was into like horse racing and cigars and all that shit. We’d met at cocktail functions before. And while I’d always thought Cyril was a little creepy and maybe that his eyes lingered a little too long on me at times, I never thought much of it.
Until the day I opened that safe, and learned who he really was.
His real name was apparently Billy-Ray, not Cyril. And it wasn’t horses he was into. It was cooking and selling meth. That and heroin, oxy, girls — all of that. Basically, a real piece of shit, and Martin and him were apparently about to go into business together.
All that would’ve been enough to send me running. Just that was enough to shatter me. Except, that wasn’t all. Nope. You see, their “business arrangement” had a little extra on top from my stepfather — something to “sweeten the deal” and “secure their mutual advancement.”
Something also known as me.
That’s what else I found in that safe that day — that Martin wanted me to marry Billy-Ray Coleman to cement their dirty business deal. And it was all planned out. Martin may have married my mother when I was all of one, but we’d never clicked. We’d never bonded much. But this? Well, this was beyond anything I could have imagined.
I lost my shit, of course. I screamed at him, throwing the evidence at him and swearing that I’d go to the cops with it all. But Martin had just sneered.
“Sure, rat me out. But what do you think is going to happen to your mother when all the money and all her pretty things and all her mid-day cocktail parties with all her friends goes away? You want that for her? It’d ruin her, Chastity, and you damn well know it.”
He was right, and I did damn well know it. My mother wasn’t a strong woman — not anymore at least, not after living with Martin for so long, and not with her crutch of the never-ending glass of wine. If Martin got taken out, she’d have nothing.
“This is how the wealthy stay wealthy, Chastity,” he’d growled. “This is how you keep an empire.”
Right, by marrying your step-daughter off to a creep.
Even if I knew I couldn’t report him, I’d thought about running. But really, what was I going to do? My marketable skills were stealing cars and robbing safes. Besides that, what I had for money was a trust fund, and if I ran, I knew that would disappear.
…It’s pretty hard to run without any money.
So I started digging. I started hitting up seedy clubs and dive bars until I found what I was looking for: Billy-Ray’s main operations facility. Hell, it wasn’t even that hard — the man practically bragged about it openly whenever he went out. And some basic surveillance on the cookhouse revealed that he basically kept all of his drug money there too.
After that, the plan was set: rob the piece of shit I was supposedly engaged to, run away with my mother, and start a new life. Hell, it’d even be easy. The only ones “guarding” the place were Billy-Ray’s meth cooks, and they were all addicts themselves. They’d never see someone like me coming.
…And well, they didn’t.
But then, I didn’t see him coming.
Not at all.
And now here we are, and everything is fucked up.
* * *
“This place?”
The beat up old pickup truck rumbles to a stop. And there, up a rough little gravel walkway, is a cabin. Well, no. “Cabin” makes it sound quaint. Charming, even. But this place? Yeah, no. This place looks like a fucking horror movie. This isn’t the kind of cabin where your grandmother comes to knit holiday gifts next to a toasty fire.
This is the kind of cabin where people come to get murdered.
I swallow, turning to eye the rough cowboy sitting next to me. Yes, he’s gorgeous, and hot, and can fuck like a god. But, ax murderers can be hot sex-gods too, right?
“Sorry, the Four Seasons was all booked up.” He rolls his eyes, and he goes to open his side door and step out before his arm jerks back. He groans, turning to glare at the handcuffs.
“Hey, you put them on, jackass.”
“Let’s go,” he growls, pulling me towards his side of the truck.
“Sure, but we’re going this way.”
He squares his strong, chiseled jaw, those silvery gray eyes of his narrowing at me.
“You’re difficult.”
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“Aww, thanks.”
He growls.
“Are we going inside your creepy cabin or what?”
I grin, knowing I’ve got him and taking a small pleasure in the fact that he’ll have to crawl over the truck’s bench seat to get out on my side. I mean, what’s he going to do? Pick me up and carr—
I scream as he suddenly grabs me, yanking me across the bench seat of the truck cab and hoisting me right out the driver’s side door.
“Are you kidding me?”
He chuckles deeply, throwing me right over his shoulder and marching towards the cabin, the bag of money in his hands.
“Put me down!”
“Your highness,” he says with this smug grin, setting me down when we get to the door.
“Yeah, you need to get these handcuffs off, now.”
“Right, because this was all part of my plan,” he mutters, grabbing a key out of his jeans and unlocking the door. We step in, and even I have to begrudgingly admit that the place is nicer on the inside than it was outside.
“Was it?”
“Was what what?” he frowns.
“Part of your plan? Finally found a girl who’d toss you a pity fuck so you though handcuffing me—”
“A pity fuck, huh?” He grins widely, that smile pulling across his gorgeous face. “Oh is that what I gave you?”
I roll my eyes, turning away from him.
“I mean, it sure was tight enough.”
My jaw drops.
“I’m betting it’s been a while?”
I whirl, fuming as I glare daggers at him. God, he’s so crude. And so damn cocky. And so infuriatingly smug. So infuriatingly hot.
…So infuriatingly right.
Okay, maybe it’s been a while. Maybe it’s been a long while. And maybe that’s why I went wild last night — stepping into that divey little bar, spotting the dark, gorgeous, rough looking cowboy, and letting my inhibitions go. One last night of wildness before there was no going back.
…Or maybe it was him. Maybe it was the way just seeing him when I walked into that place sent heat through my body. The way feeling his eyes on me had my skin tingling, my thighs clenching, and a fire burning inside of me.