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
This book is dedicated to cheese sticks. I wrote it while on a diet. Anything that is even remotely funny is because I ate a cheese stick and it made me happy.
Acknowledgements
Chase Ketron- Model
Golden Czermak- Photographer
Danielle Palumbo- My awesome content editor.
Ellie McLove & Ink It Out Editing- My editors
My mom- Thank you for reading this book eight million two hundred times.
Cheryl, 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.
Table of Contents
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
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Epilogue
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
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
Furious George (July 23, 2018)
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 (7-6-18)
Too Bad So Sad (8-8-18)
Bear Bottom MC
Mess Me Up (September 2018)
You want some?
She snarls those words at him with barely concealed hostility the moment he arrives at her window to ask for her license and registration.
After a few choice words, he lets her go with not one ticket, but three.
Next time she should check the attitude at the door and realize that he’s a cop, and just doing his job.
Come get some.
Fast forward a week, and he’s still unable to think about anything else but her and her bad attitude—oh, and those sexy lips, angry eyes, and her promise to make his life hell.
Knowing he should stay away, he takes a step back and tries not to think about anything that has to do with those long legs, and that mouth that could be used for much better things than spewing venom.
Then she makes a mistake.
At an interview, she rattles off a random number to use as a reference for a job that she desperately needs, and that number just happens to be Johnny’s.
She’ll regret being so rude, and one day she’ll think twice when she decides to throw attitude toward a man like him.
Vowing to make her life hell, he decides to have a little fun.
Never get enough.
What he doesn’t expect is to fall for her.
The more Johnny learns about June, the deeper he digs his hole. Soon, he doesn’t know which way is up, and he’s just fine with that.
Then he learns that not everyone bothers to dig past her prickly demeanor and get to the woman that lives deeper.
When one too many citizens of Hostel, Texas tries to back her against the wall, he’s had enough.
After all, you don’t mess with what’s his.
Prologue
If you see a hooker standing on the corner, do not pick them up. You will get arrested.
-Hostel PD FB page
Johnny
I felt like I was suffocating.
Each breath I took led me farther and farther down into the abyss.
I could feel their eyes on me, and I hated it.
Fucking. Hated. It.
All of them stared, but they never did anything more than that.
My mother was too worried that she would break me, and my father thought I’d get over it. However, thanks to my mother’s worry, he too was bothering the hell out of me.
It wasn’t like men didn’t come home from war all the time.
I wish I could’ve stayed.
However, life didn’t work like that.
Which sucked, because I was just as healthy now as I was before the accident that had sent me spiraling downhill.
My mother and father thought I was fucked up due to the accident that had sent me to the hospital in the first place.
I wasn’t.
What I was fucked up about was the fact that I couldn’t go back with my squad and finish what I’d started. For all those years, it’d been my life. I’d help protect the innocent, while also being with some of the best guys that this Earth had to offer.
However, a tracheotomy, apparently, is something the Army medically discharges you for…who knew?
After taking shrapnel to the throat from a bomb exploding next to our Humvee, they performed an emergency trach on me to help me breathe. When I woke up, it was to find myself in Germany, a pint short on blo
od, and the doctors telling me I was going to be just fine—but that I would never be back with my squad ever again.
That was what fucked me up.
Especially when, moments after stepping foot onto US soil, I’d gotten word that two men from our squad had died while on patrol.
Somebody landed hard on the couch beside me, and I looked over to find Janie staring at me with a bored expression on her face.
“Why is it that you always have to be in the dark? It’s cold over here,” she wondered, crossing her arms over her chest.
The large diamond ring on her finger caught my attention.
“Why don’t you go hang out with your husband?” I suggested.
She shrugged. “I’m mad at him right now. And, I just hate seeing you sitting here all by yourself. You just look so pitiful.”
I flipped her off.
Janie laughed. “Seriously, though. There are about eighteen willing women over there,” she pointed and I followed her finger with my eyes. There were, indeed, women over there. And they may, perhaps, be willing. But I wasn’t. Not at that moment in time, anyway. “Why are you over here all by yourself? That’s not normal for you.”
I shrugged. “I’m fucking tired.”
She rolled her eyes. “Why? Last I heard you weren’t even working.”
I grinned. “You aren’t holding back the punches, are you?”
She blinked innocently at me. “I don’t know what it is you’re speaking of.”
I grunted. “Sure, you don’t.”
“But seriously. Why don’t you have a job yet?”
That was the hundred-dollar question.
Why didn’t I have a job yet? Because everywhere I wanted to apply had family. And honestly, I was just a little bit tired of them hovering.
“I was going to apply at the police station, but then Trance and Loki started to butt their business into it, and I changed my mind,” I answered honestly.
I loved my family. Truly, I did. But I was a grown ass man. I’d spent six years in the military, away from their prying eyes. I didn’t know how to function anymore with them trying to dictate my every move and show me how I should do things.
I knew how to do things.
Janie looked speculative for a few moments.
“Maybe you should come to Hostel,” Janie suggested. “It’s a small town. No family in sight…and nobody to look over your shoulder to make sure you’re doing all right.”
I grinned at the prospect of leaving Benton in my rearview mirror.
Janie and I knew each other well. Janie, her best friend, Kayla, and I grew up together.
I had once thought that I might try to go down that path with Kayla, but then I met a girl in high school that made me realize the difference between interest and interest.
I honestly thought that girl would wait for me when I deployed…but I’d been wrong.
Speaking of the devil…
“What the hell is she doing here?” Kayla asked as she plopped down on my other side. “Seriously, she disgusts me.”
I snorted.
There was no love lost between Janie, Kayla, and Rosie. None. Honestly, it surprised me that they hadn’t done anything more than just toss glares her way since we’d broken up.
“She has every right to be here,” I pointed out. “It is a public bar.”
Janie and Kayla both snorted.
“Well, she’s a whore, and I don’t like her.”
I found myself laughing for the first time that night, which drew everyone’s attention to me, my parents and Rosie included.
“I think I’ll take you up on the offer of sharing your new town. Tell me, do they have a police department?”
Turns out, they did.
Chapter 1
WWJD? What Would Johnny Do?
-Probably not the correct words for those letters but fuck it.
June
“Just put down some random number. Employers don’t ever call references,” my best friend, Amanda, ordered.
I looked over at her.
“I really need this job,” I told her. “I need to pay rent, and I can’t pay rent if I don’t have a job. I—”
“Would you shut up already?” Amanda took a puff of her cigarette. “Seriously, you’re driving me insane. I already have it paid for this month. We’re good.”
I didn’t agree. Amanda had paid the rent in full the last two months. I hadn’t had a choice since losing my job.
I was a twenty-six-year-old fuck up, and my life wasn’t showing any signs of getting better.
I not only couldn’t use my degree—because I couldn’t find a job in the field I’d chosen—but I also couldn’t find a job—period.
The ones I did find didn’t pay anywhere near enough for me to pay my school loans off…and it was just snowballing from there. It fucking sucked.
“Did you get any calls back yet about the applications you sent in?”
I shook my head. “Negative.”
To get a job in the field that I wanted—criminal justice—I had to have a clean record…and I most certainly didn’t have that.
I was not squeaky clean and hadn’t been since I was a young kid too hungry to care about laws.
That fact hadn’t even entered into my brain until I applied for a job as a crime scene tech at the Hostel Police Department.
I’d failed the interview process spectacularly because I hadn’t lied about my past—which, I would admit, wasn’t good. It was somewhat really bad.
But, that was then, and this is now.
Unfortunately, after reading up about other jobs, I realized that most likely I wouldn’t ever get a job doing what I wanted because my background was important. Which, I suppose, it should be.
I wouldn’t want a criminal working on a case involving a murdered family member, either.
But I wouldn’t necessarily count myself as a criminal when all of the things that I’d been charged with had happened under the age of seventeen.
And now, here I was, unable to get a job.
Why, you ask?
Because I was overqualified for minimum wage jobs that I could get, and I was underqualified for the rest.
I was freaking out.
“Just put some random name,” she suggested.
“Like John Smith?”
“Most of the time they don’t require last names. Just put ‘John’ and a number. But make sure that it has this area code, otherwise it’ll look suspicious,” Amanda replied helpfully.
I bit my lip, then did the only thing I could do. I lied on the application indicating that I was qualified to do a job that I wasn’t, and then I wrote down a random number as a reference.
“Here goes nothin’,” I said as I clicked submit.
Chapter 2
I want to practice making babies with you.
-things not to say to a police officer
June
The dick pulled me over.
What. The. Fuck?
I might’ve been speeding, but not bad enough to deserve getting pulled over—at least I didn’t think so.
Apparently, Officer Douche didn’t feel the same way.
I sighed and started looking for my insurance, wondering whether I’d stowed it in the glove compartment or the middle console.
Really, it was a mystery. I would be lucky to even find it. Especially with all the crap that only multiplied every single time I opened them.
I was halfway bending over my seat, searching for my purse in the backseat, when I heard a throat being cleared from behind me.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I have such a mess in here.”
“Ma’am…”
I continued to sift through the stack of wadded up papers that were now in my hands.
“Ma’am,” he repeated, more forcefully this time.
I looked up at his sharp tone.
And my breath left me.
&nb
sp; Oh, holy God.
The cop was hot.
So. Freakin’. Hot.
Holy shit.
“Yes?” I squeaked.
“I can look your insurance up. Just hand me your license.” He held out his hand.
I reached for my purse again and then laid it on my lap before starting to dig through it.
I found my wallet at the very bottom—which was how it always went when you were in a hurry to find something.
“Here.” I held out the license.
“This is expired.”
I nearly groaned.
It was.
By three days.
“I…it’s only expired by like three days. I forgot to renew it, and with the holidays last month, I never got the chance to get it updated,” I blurted.
He grunted. Then turned around and walked away without saying another word, leaving me the time I needed to admire the view.
He was tall, about six three or four based on his head height in comparison to my SUV.
He had dirty blond hair that looked a tad bit disheveled as if he’d been running his fingers through it while waiting to pull poor, innocent people like me over.
And then there was his uniform. He was decked out in head to toe navy blue, and that big belt around his slim hips held a gun, a flashlight, and a few other things that I had no clue what they were—but wanted to—and a taser.
Oh, and did I mention he had a beautiful ass? It wasn’t just round, but it was shapely and looked like he did a shit ton of squats to make it look the way it did.
He had scruff but it wasn’t a huge, thick beard like was popular nowadays. More like a well-groomed beard that was on the short side. Somewhere in between a beard and a five o’clock shadow.
His eyes were the color of amber, too. They almost looked fake, but a man like him? I highly doubted he put on contact lenses to make his eyes look like that.
It was captivating.
And he had the longest eyelashes I’d seen on anybody in my life—man or woman included.
He was so freakin’ beautiful.
I moaned and let my chin drop to my chest.
I was wearing yoga pants that were the pair that I wore only when I had nothing else to wear. They had holes in them, a couple of questionable stains, and I was fairly sure the words on the ass no longer said ‘secret’ and now said ‘e’ on each ass cheek. They were that old.