Respect

  Respect

  Copyright © 2018 by Jennifer M. Voorhees.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For copyright information address: Jay Crownover LLC 1670 E. Cheyenne Mnt. Blvd. Box# 152, Colorado Springs, Colorado 80906.

  Congress Cataloging—in—Publication Data has been applied for.

  Pretty much the bottom line is don’t be the guy who ruins something cool for everyone else by being the asshole who takes words that don’t belong to you and profiting off them. Don’t be that guy . . . no one likes that guy. I will sue the hell out of that guy!

  These are the talented folks who helped bring my book to life:

  Cover design by:

  Hang Le / www.byhangle.com

  Interior Design & Formatting by:

  Christine Borgford / www.typeAformatting.com

  Editing by:

  Elaine York, Allusion Graphics, LLC/Publishing & Book Formatting / www.allusiongraphics.com

  Proofreading & Copyediting by:

  Beth Salminen / [email protected]

  STANDALONE

  Recovered

  GETAWAY SERIES

  Escape

  Shelter

  Retreat

  THE SAINTS OF DENVER SERIES

  Salvaged

  Riveted

  Charged

  Built

  Leveled (novella)

  THE BREAKING POINT SERIES

  Respect

  Dignity

  Avenged (crossover novella)

  Honor

  THE WELCOME TO THE POINT SERIES

  Better When He’s Brave

  Better When He’s Bold

  Better When He’s Bad

  THE MARKED MEN SERIES

  Asa

  Rowdy

  Nash

  Rome

  Jet

  Rule

  Contents

  RESPECT

  Also by Jay Crownover

  Dedication

  Prologue

  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

  Epilogue

  Bonus Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Dedicated to all of you who stuck with this series through thick and thin.

  Thank you so much for loving these boys, who are actually bad, as much as I do. I don’t have enough words to tell you how much your support for this series and this dark and dangerous place has meant to me.

  Nothing wrong with those of us who like to read and write dangerously.

  The only way to make her his forever . . . was for him to set her free for now.

  Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess who called a corrupt kingdom home sweet home.

  Protected and sheltered from the worst the world had to offer, she fell in love with the crumbling city that burned and blazed around her.

  Every dirty corner, every scary shadow, found a place within her heart, and so did a man who was just as violent and dangerous as the streets she so innocently strolled.

  He was all business and brutality, except when it came to her.

  With her, he was calm, caring, and heartbreakingly patient with her foolishly hopeful infatuation.

  He warned her over and over again that he wasn’t the man for her, but she refused to listen.

  She never expected either the streets or their enforcer to hurt her, since she had given her heart so completely to both . . . but that was a misguided, naïve expectation.

  She should have known the streets in the Point were always going to be savage, and so was the man committed to keeping control in the hands of criminals and kingpins.

  Blindsided by a betrayal that cut so deeply she was sure the wounds would never heal, the princess fled the home she loved and the man who broke her heart.

  Throwing away her rusted, twisted crown was supposed to help her forget; instead, all it did was make her long for everything she left behind.

  She told herself she would never go back, but in this tormented kingdom, family is everything, so she has no choice but to return.

  While she was gone, the people who loved her worked hard to make the city safe, and the man who destroyed her sank deeper into the darkness.

  Going back shouldn’t feel like surrender . . . but it does.

  As this pretty princess hovers on the edge of the unknown, the past comes at her with a vengeance, reminding her that puppy love eventually grows and turns into something with sharp teeth and one hell of a bite.

  She never asked for the keys to the kingdom. She’d much rather go out and build her own.

  Two days before high school graduation

  Finally!

  It felt like I’d been waiting forever for my eighteenth birthday. I was counting down the days with a fervor that was different and more desperate than most teenagers. Nothing magical happened at eighteen, but I’d been longing to be considered an adult ever since I was sixteen. Hell, I’d felt like a damn adult much longer than the last two years. That’s what happened when you grew up on the fringes of a place like the Point and had parents who were more concerned with ruining their lives than making their children’s lives better.

  It didn’t matter how grown up I felt or even how mature I acted. Until I was eighteen, I was considered a kid, a child, someone too young and too inexperienced to know what they really wanted. Or, in my case, whom they really wanted. I was sick to death of everyone in my life acting like I couldn't make up my own mind. They took it upon themselves to decide what was best for me and who should and shouldn’t be allowed in my life.

  I was tired of hearing how big the world was and how there was so much out there for me to explore and experience. I felt like I was being shoved out the door under the pretense of it being for my own good. I wasn’t stupid. The people who loved me the most wanted me away from the person I loved the most. They never bothered to try and hide it.

  I had no plans to leave the Point. It was ugly, mean, hard, and unforgiving, but these streets were home and I couldn't imagine being happy anywhere else. This place had long since made my hands and the edges of my soul dirty. It was something I would be hard-pressed to hide should I go anywhere else. I’d have to spend my days trying to camouflage the filth I was so familiar with. Here, no one looked twice at the pretty teenager with shadows in her eyes and blood on her hands. I was one of many.

  I wasn’t interested in leaving behind my sister or her fiancé, Race. We were an odd, dysfunctional family, but we made it work.

  I didn't want to be too far away from my mother, who was living in a group home as she slowly, painfully tried to recover from her alcoholism and PTSD from an accident she caused that ended up taking the life of a young mother and her child.

  But more than anything, I absolutely didn’t want to leave him.

  I couldn�
�t imagine a day going by without catching a glimpse of Noah Booker. I mean, he was impossible to miss. Six-and-a-half-feet tall, body built like a professional athlete, dark and brooding with the prettiest gunmetal-gray eyes, he was the entirety of every one of my teenage fantasies. I barely noticed the jagged scar dividing one side of his face. White and raised, it cut one of his black eyebrows in half, slashed over a high cheekbone, and ended somewhere under the chiseled edge of his hard jaw. He never talked about it, but Race, Booker’s boss, let it slip that Booker got the scar when he was locked up. Or maybe it wasn't as much of a slip-up as a thinly veiled warning. Race never kept it much of a secret that my infatuation with his massive, dangerous, ex-con enforcer made him extremely uncomfortable. He’d warned me over and over again that Booker wasn’t for me. And he’d made it clear to the man who broke knees and smashed heads for a living that he was to stay as far away from me as possible.

  They called it puppy love. It wasn’t.

  To me, it was a vicious kind of love, filled with teeth and claws that I could feel digging at my insides every single time someone patted me on the head and told me how young I was, how much life I had yet to live. This love was rabid, and I was tired of having it on a leash. I wanted to let it free, wanted to let it sink its razor-sharp fangs into the man who had awoken the primal need inside of me. It was only fair he felt the same kind of crushing bite and painful pressure around his heart that I did every single day.

  I was solely focused on getting to Booker. It barely registered I was done with high school and had new doors opening all around me. I couldn’t care less about getting my hands on my diploma. A piece of paper with Karsen Carter written on it in pretty calligraphy meant exactly nothing to me. The only thing I was focused on was the fact I was finally old enough to make my own choices. And I’d always picked Booker. Over and over again he was my number one priority.

  My sister was so excited that I was finally about to graduate. I knew she was proud of me and proud of herself. For a while there, when both of our parents crashed and burned, she doubted she was going to be able to take care of me. She viewed my graduation as a badge of honor; proof we both made it, we both survived after we were tossed into the deep end by the very people who were supposed to love us above all else. She wanted me to be as thrilled as she was. She didn’t want me to lose sight of how far we’d both come.

  Brysen was only a couple of years older than me, trying to put herself through college, and holding our entire family together. She thought she was going to break, but then she met Race, and like a fairy-tale prince, he swooped in and fixed all the places in Brysen’s life that were cracked and broken. Only Race wasn’t a prince, and the Point didn’t have room for anything as frivolous as fairy tales. No, Race Hartman was the golden king of the underground, ruling over criminals and misfits. His throne perched upon broken laws and questionable morals. His story ended with blood and brutality, but my sister stood by him anyway. She didn’t want to wear a tainted crown and rule next to him, but there was no way for her to avoid it completely. Race was always there for her, to clean the rust and grime from her tiara every time it touched something nasty. He did his best to shield both of us, but when you lived in the Point, there was no escaping the way the city bled into everything.

  My sister was frantically throwing together a graduation party. She wanted it to be perfect. She needed it to be flawless. Our parents had left us to our own devices for so long, we both forgot what it was like to celebrate being together and enjoying every milestone for the massive accomplishment that it was. Ever since Race gave her stability and built us a place to call home, Brysen went big any chance she got. Birthdays were ridiculous. Holidays were insane. And now graduation was going to be so over the top, I was almost scared to see what she put together. I offered to help, but when she shooed me off and ordered me not to ruin the surprise, it was easy enough to slip out the front door of our apartment in the iron and glass castle near the water. Race moved us into the high-tech fortress two years ago. Booker moved into a unit a floor below ours around the same time. It was such a sweet kind of torture to have him so close, yet so far.

  Race and Brysen had spent the last year trying to convince me to go to college out of state. I received more than one scholarship offer and visited a couple of beautiful campuses as far away from the Point as one could imagine. None of them felt right. The air was too clean. The people around us smiled too big and wide. The cities all felt too clean, bright, and shiny. But the biggest problem was that Booker wasn’t in any of them. I couldn't imagine the boys my own age looking at me like they saw every secret I was trying to keep, and there was no way I could imagine showing interest in any of them. No one mattered as much as Booker did. It had been that way since I was sixteen. My infatuation with him was innocent and unchecked because even when I didn’t know how to control what I was feeling, he always understood what was at risk and kept a purposeful and respectful distance between us.

  But today was different. I was eighteen.

  I was an adult.

  I was legal.

  I was ready.

  There wasn’t a single reason, aside from Race’s objections, for Booker to turn me down anymore. Yeah, Race paid him, but Booker was more than intimidating and there was a call for his kind of work in plenty of places around the Point.

  I convinced myself that once we were together, once he told Race he loved me the way I loved him, he could find another king of crime to work for. He could catch bullets for any of the bad guys who called the Point home. And if Race got violent, Booker was bigger. It wouldn’t be pretty, and it would piss off my sister if her man’s very pretty face got pounded into a bloody pulp. But I fully expected him to fight for me, just as he’d done so many times in the past. There was no way the elegant and refined Race could put down a bruiser like Booker. Very few could. It was one of the reasons I was so drawn to him. Booker had a habit of saving my life, and he never hesitated to put himself between me and whatever was trying to hurt me.

  Today I was finally old enough to have him.

  Best. Birthday. Present. Ever.

  It wasn’t uncommon for me to bop down to Booker’s place. He even left the door unlocked most days so I could get in. We lived in a fortress that had more eyes in the sky than a casino in Vegas, so he didn’t need to worry about simple things like locked doors. My crush on the behemoth of a man was pretty much common knowledge all around. Booker tended to treat me like I was an annoying kid sister. But there were times, when no one else was around, I could tell he was looking at me differently. He was hard to read, something that kept you alive in these parts. But I spent so much time watching him, I could see what no one else could. Those steely eyes softened, melted into a soft dove gray when he looked at me while no one else was paying any attention.

  I glanced up at the camera that I knew was tracking my every move. I gave a little wave to whomever was monitoring the feed tonight. Race’s security guys were a part of my everyday life. Where I went, they followed. It was sort of like having an army of overprotective big brothers. Annoying yet necessary. It was a good thing I was obsessed with Booker. Having eyes only for him over the last few years meant I didn’t bring boys home to meet the family. I was pretty sure trying to date a guy my own age would have been impossible with those eagle-eyed brutes hanging around.

  The butterflies in my stomach started sword fighting the closer I got to Booker’s door. I spent a lot of time making goo-goo eyes at the giant man and aimlessly trying to make conversation with him. He was too cold and reserved to attempt any harmless flirting, and I was always very aware of the line in the sand where Booker was concerned. He tolerated my infatuation and presence, but he always made it clear he was humoring me. He was the one who often reminded me there was a big, wide world out there, ripe for the picking. He told me I should never settle. However, when I tried to explain the only thing I was dying to experience was him, he diverted the conversation and pointedly told me that I was w
ay too young for him. He also believed I was way too nice. He didn’t talk about his past, or his time in prison, but I had a feeling that wherever Noah Booker had been before made the Point look like Sesame Street.

  When I was in front of the door, I took a second to make sure my white-blonde hair was smooth and sleek. I ran my tongue over the front of my teeth to make sure none of the plum-colored lip gloss was stuck to the surface. I wiped my hands down the front of my black skinny jeans, the ones that made my admittedly long legs look even longer and took a deep breath. It was now or never.

  Today was the day.

  As I was lifting a hand to knock on the door, a high-pitched giggle from the other side drifted through the wood. A deep rumble of sound that I assumed was Booker responded. His chuckle sent chills racing up and down my spine. I frowned when the sound of another giggle, even higher than the first, followed. I fell back a step when a very female moan assaulted my ears.

  I lifted a shaking hand to my chest and took another breath. I knew Booker wasn’t a saint; there was no way to expect a man as virile as he was to wait for me to graduate past jailbait status. Sure, I quietly hoped he would, because that was how fantasies worked. But, reality was rough and I knew none of the men circling my life spent much time without beautiful companions, Booker included. However, today was special. Today was important. Today was the day everything changed. I knew he knew it. I’d told him no less than fifty times over the last week that today was my eighteenth birthday. He had to know what today meant. He had to understand the wait was finally over. There was no reason for him to be in his apartment with someone else when he could be inside with me.

  My hand shook when I turned the knob. There was a loud voice screaming inside my head, one warning that I was about to make a huge mistake. I could practically see a red warning light flashing, telling me to ABORT, ABORT, ABORT! I was a smart girl, but smart girls do dumb things when a foolish heart is involved.