Deacon

  Deacon

  Kristen Ashley

  Published by Kristen Ashley

  Discover other titles by Kristen Ashley:

  Rock Chick Series:

  Rock Chick

  Rock Chick Rescue

  Rock Chick Redemption

  Rock Chick Renegade

  Rock Chick Revenge

  Rock Chick Reckoning

  Rock Chick Regret

  Rock Chick Revolution

  The ‘Burg Series:

  For You

  At Peace

  Golden Trail

  Games of the Heart

  The Promise

  The Chaos Series:

  Own the Wind

  Fire Inside

  The Colorado Mountain Series:

  The Gamble

  Sweet Dreams

  Lady Luck

  Breathe

  Jagged

  Kaleidoscope

  Dream Man Series:

  Mystery Man

  Wild Man

  Law Man

  Motorcycle Man

  The Fantasyland Series:

  Wildest Dreams

  The Golden Dynasty

  Fantastical

  Broken Dove

  The Magdalene Series:

  The Will

  The Three Series:

  Until the Sun Falls from the Sky

  With Everything I Am

  The Unfinished Hero Series:

  Knight

  Creed

  Raid

  Deacon

  Other Titles by Kristen Ashley:

  Fairytale Come Alive

  Heaven and Hell

  Lacybourne Manor

  Lucky Stars

  Mathilda, SuperWitch

  Penmort Castle

  Play It Safe

  Sommersgate House

  Three Wishes

  www.kristenashley.net

  Kindle Edition, License Notes

  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 the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Kristen Ashley

  First ebook edition: September, 2014

  First print edition: September, 2014

  Contents

  WARNING

  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

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Discover other titles by Kristen Ashley

  Connect with Kristen Online

  WARNING

  This book is an ADULT EROTIC romance featuring an anti-hero. This novel contains explicit erotic scenes that include light dominance, bondage, as well as anal sex and beyond. The hero in this novel lives life in a dark world not inhabited by your everyday person…until he reaches to the light. In an effort not to spoil it for you, I will not explain further. If you do not enjoy the above sexual situations or this kind of hero, I would suggest that this novel is not for you.

  *****

  Chapter One

  Not Reality

  “Cassidy, are you fucking kidding me?”

  “We need to update the units, Grant.”

  “Eleven microwaves?”

  I stared at my boyfriend, the love of my life, the man who gave up home in Oklahoma six weeks ago to follow me to Colorado to live my dream. The dream that was born when I was thirteen and Mom and Dad took us on a skiing trip. The dream I nurtured every time they gave in when I begged them to take us back. The dream of having every day what I felt the minute I hit the Rockies. The feeling of being precisely where I was meant to be, in the mountains, living a quiet life constantly in the midst of sheer beauty.

  And, of course, living that dream with the addition of a lot of snowboarding.

  I had found the cabins for sale on the Internet and talked Grant into coming with me, fixing them up, caring for them and the patrons who’d use them to have their time by a river in the middle of rock, pine, aspen, columbine, fireweed, wild iris, and glacier lily.

  We were young and being young, embarking on such a huge-scale adventure, possibly stupid. I knew that.

  My dad knew it too. He was concerned. He tried to hide it from me but he didn’t quite succeed.

  My mom wasn’t concerned. She was silently terrified that I was sinking my savings, something I’d been carefully hoarding since I was thirteen, into a broken down bunch of cabins in the middle of nowhere in the Rocky Mountains. Doing it practically just out of college. Only twenty-four years old (though, Grant was twenty-six).

  That didn’t mean Mom and Dad didn’t give us their blessings. They did. With Dad giving me twenty thousand dollars besides.

  “An investment,” he’d said. “You can pay me back when you make those cabins thrive.”

  When you make those cabins thrive.

  When. Not if.

  That was my dad. He believed in me. He was worried. He knew it was risky. But he did what he always did. Made a statement—this time a grand one—that he believed I could do anything.

  Even take on a bunch of ramshackle cabins, the even more ramshackle house that went with them, and make them “thrive.”

  “Since I’m buying so many, I’m getting a screaming deal on those microwaves, Grant,” I informed him of something I’d already informed him of. “Forty percent off and free delivery.”

  “Those units don’t need new microwaves, Cassidy.”

  I stared at him again since he knew they did. The ones that were working (and in the eleven cabins we owned, only eight microwaves were working) were old, crusty, and gross. I wouldn’t even pop popcorn in one of them.

  “Three of them don’t work,” I reminded him.

  “Folks can get along without microwaves,” he retorted.

  I shook my head. “Babe, seriously, we went over this. All of it. I wrote out that business plan, you read it, and—”

  “Jesus, fuck,” he interrupted me in exasperation and lifted up his hands to do air quotation marks. “Your fuckin’ business plan. If I hear about that fuckin’ thing one more fuckin’ time, I’m gonna shoot myself.” He’d dropped his hands but threw one out. “Fuck, Cassidy, you don’t need a business degree from some Podunk university in Oklahoma to write some stupid document that tells us to make a go of this fuckin’ place, we don’t need microwaves.” He leaned in to me. “We need to rent cabins.”

  I stared at him yet again, seeing as he’d never spoken to me like that. We’d started arguing these past few weeks but he’d never said anything that mean.

  And as I stared at him, I tried to stop the hurt his words sent piercing through me. Hurt he hadn’t inflicted when we were back in Oklahoma and he was a good boyfriend. The kind who was up for adventure. The kind that listened to me in the night after he made love to me as I whispered my dreams to him. The kind who told me he was all in. He was there for me. He, too, believed in me and wanted to live the dream.

  I managed to do this as I
managed to reply quietly and with forced calm. “Yes, Grant, but to rent them at the prices where we need them to be in order to make a decent living, we need to fix them up.”

  “We can fix them up when we got some fuckin’ money in the bank.”

  It was then I knew where he was coming from.

  Because I bought the cabins. I had the mortgage. I had the rest of the money I’d saved and didn’t invest in buying the property and Dad’s money besides.

  Grant didn’t have much of anything except experience as a journeyman electrician and a fabulous body I’d hoped he’d use to help me paint walls and refinish floors.

  In the six weeks we’d been there, he’d painted walls. Three of them. Then he’d spent a lot of time “getting to know the locals” in order to “get referrals.”

  This translated into locating drinking, hunting, and fishing buddies.

  “You aren’t gettin’ those microwaves,” he informed me.

  “I am,” I returned. “And you’re gonna install them. After, of course, I refinish the cabinets and you install the new countertops.”

  His face twisted in a way I’d never seen before. It was also a way I didn’t much like.

  “I’m not doin’ shit with somethin’ I didn’t agree to buyin’.”

  “Since it’s not your money, it isn’t for you to agree or disagree,” I shot back nastily.

  His face twisted further and I so didn’t like the way it twisted that I leaned away from him.

  “You fuckin’ bitch,” he clipped, his voice rising.

  I felt my eyes widen as my heart twisted at his words. Words no one in my life had ever said to me, especially not Grant.

  There was no way I could stop the hurt that sent through me. Hurt so bad, I only had it in me to whisper, “Grant.”

  “I knew you’d fuckin’ throw that in my face eventually and you didn’t waste time. We been here weeks, you’re throwin’ that shit in my face.”

  “I don’t think you’re listening to me,” I pointed out carefully, because he was right. What I said was a low blow. I knew he didn’t have a load of money. He’d been up front about that.

  Then again, he’d been up front about it but told me he’d contribute by helping with the cabins.

  Still, I shouldn’t have said what I said. And now I needed to calm us both down and fight my way back to the high road.

  “I’m listenin’ to you,” he shot back, his voice still raised. “Seems all I do is fuckin’ listen to you. Hotshot college grad whose daddy thinks she shits roses. Babe, you got another thing comin’, you think I’m gonna crawl up your ass and treat you like a fuckin’ princess like that fuckin’ father of yours.”

  I did more staring at my handsome, thoughtful, supportive boyfriend thinking where on earth did that come from?

  I didn’t get the chance to ask. There was a knock on the door, and as we were fighting in the foyer, Grant close to the door with his back to it, he turned, grabbed the knob, and yanked it open.

  “What?” he barked, angrily and unwelcomingly.

  But I saw the man standing in the doorway and I took an automatic step back.

  I didn’t do this because he was handsome and handsome men freaked me way the heck out.

  Good-looking guys like Grant, no. Grant could turn heads. Even though he wasn’t tall, with his lean, defined body, shock of messy dark blond hair and clear blue eyes, he got more than his share of attention.

  But Grant wasn’t like the guy at the door.

  The guy at the door wasn’t good-looking. The guy at the door was handsome. Amazingly. Tall. Dark-haired. Rugged-featured. His large frame built tough and solid.

  He looked like the model a cologne company would choose when they decided to break in to the difficult market of trying to convince hardcore bikers they should smell good.

  But I didn’t take a step back because of that.

  I did it because he was terrifying.

  Utterly.

  Huge. Dark. His face a cold, emotionlessness mask. His chill swept through the foyer, causing a shiver to glide over my skin even though it was a sunny day in August, warm, and we had no air conditioning.

  Further, I knew in a glance he was gone. There was nothing there. He was standing. His blood was coursing through his veins. He was breathing.

  But that was it.

  He existed.

  He did not live. He did not feel. He did not smile. He did not laugh.

  In other words, he was the guy a cologne company would approach when they decided to break in to the difficult market of trying to convince hardcore bikers they should smell good. He was also the guy who would listen to this then rip the head off the person who suggested such absurdity.

  I got this all from a look, and as I kept looking, I knew with complete certainty I was right.

  And it scared the heck out of me.

  He scared the heck out of me.

  But this was only part of the reason he scared the heck out of me.

  The other part, the bigger part, was even feeling all that, I had a near-overwhelming urge to go to him and wrap my arms around him.

  Tight.

  And maybe never let go.

  For eternity.

  Yes, standing in my foyer with my boyfriend, staring at that man, and thinking these thoughts, he scared the ever-living crap out of me.

  His deep voice rumbled through the hall, and as deep as it was, there was no warmth to it. It wasn’t even benign. Even saying everyday words, it was ominous and wintry.

  “You got a unit open?”

  “We got eleven units open,” Grant replied, tossing out a hand toward the door to indicate the cabins down the lane. “Take your pick, man.”

  “Unit eleven,” the man stated instantly and I was not surprised by his choice, though I was unnerved that he knew which cabin to pick. He’d either been there before or he’d checked out the lay of the land before he approached us.

  Number eleven was the cabin up the hill, almost fully surrounded by woods, removed from the other cabins. Secluded.

  I stood there, staring at him, thinking I didn’t want him to rent a cabin. I didn’t want him on my property. He wasn’t a threat and yet, some part of me knew he was. I didn’t think he’d harm me or Grant. It wasn’t like I got a serial killer vibe off him (not that there was such a thing).

  It was just that his menace came from something else. The hurt he could deliver would be the kind of hurt you’d never recover from. The kind of hurt that didn’t cause scars to the skin but it was still the kind of hurt that would destroy you.

  The problem with that was Grant was not entirely wrong. We had limited money that wouldn’t stretch forever, especially considering how much needed to be done to the cabins.

  We needed to rent the units, even in their state.

  Because of this, I forced myself forward and said, “Cabins are forty bucks a night.”

  His eyes came to me, beautiful tawny eyes, and my stomach twisted.

  It twisted because I didn’t want his attention.

  It also twisted because those eyes, if they were warm, smiling, affectionate, happy, were eyes you could look into and immediately feel what he wanted to make you feel. All those things. The warmth. The smile. The love. The joy. Lose yourself in them. Lose yourself in him.

  Just like right then, staring into those eyes with their dark spiky lashes, I felt precisely what he wanted me to feel.

  Cold down to the bone.

  It took effort but I forced my lips to tip up, stopped by the spindly-legged table where we had our registration book, and said, “We just need you to sign in. Name. Address. Telephone. License plate number. And I need to run a credit card and see your ID.”

  He stepped in, pulling out his wallet, his eyes, thankfully, now on the registration book.

  But his lips said, “Cash.”

  I looked at Grant who was sizing up the man, something in his snit he didn’t do before.

  I was about to explain why we needed a c
redit card on file when Grant said, “Cash’ll be fine. How long you stayin’?”

  The man had picked up the pen lying on top of the registration book and he didn’t look to Grant when he replied, “Three days. Maybe four.”

  “Works for us,” Grant muttered.

  I gave him big eyes.

  He narrowed his at me, an indication to keep my mouth shut.

  I didn’t want to keep my mouth shut but I also didn’t want to say something without Grant taking my back, which he was making clear he wouldn’t do.

  I didn’t mind someone paying in cash.

  I did mind that he interrupted his sign-in when he handed Grant his ID, no credit card, and two hundred dollars. I hadn’t been in the business very long but I wasn’t sure this said good things. Credit cards were kind of important for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they verified ID.

  He finished signing in and Grant moved to the locked cabinet where we kept the cabin keys, saying, “I’ll get your change.”

  “No. What you got should cover tax. We’re good,” the man replied.

  That didn’t bode well either. If he stayed four days, the cost of his cabin was $160 and tax on top of that wasn’t an extra forty.

  Now, who had forty extra dollars to throw around? More importantly, why would they throw it at a sub-par cabin in the middle of nowhere?

  I couldn’t think on this too long because I saw Grant pocket the money as he handed the man his key.

  It was then I stopped thinking we weren’t making such a good decision about renting a cabin to this guy and I was thinking maybe I hadn’t made such a good decision about Grant.

  The man took the key and turned to leave.

  This prompted me to take another step to him and call out, “You need a receipt?”

  He looked over his shoulder at me. Right at me. Right in my eyes. And instantly, I got another shiver.

  He didn’t do a top to toe. He didn’t even give any indication he understood I was a human being, much less a female one.

  This, too, was unnerving.

  I couldn’t say I looked like a pageant queen but I wasn’t entirely hard on the eyes. I had all the right parts in relatively right proportions in all the right places. I wasn’t statuesque and striking. I was five foot five. I had black hair. It was long and thick, though you couldn’t really tell that right then as I had it up in a messy bun at the top back of my head.