Text copyright ©2017 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
Right now, my eyes are drooping, and I’m on a low-calorie diet. How does one expect me to write a dedication? I suck at them, and now my brain hurts.
I think I’ll dedicate this book to the cookie I’m going to demolish—because I have zero willpower.
Acknowledgements
Model- Joey Berry
Photographer: Furiousfotog
Cover Designer: Cover Me Darling
Editors: Gray Ink and Ink It Out Editing
Content Editor: Danielle Palumbo
Leah Michelle, Barbara New, Kathy West, Laura Green, Mindy Kugler, Diane Swenson, Kendra LaSalle—my betas—y’all are the best. I love each and every one of you!
Lori Vale, my mom and second pair of eyes—I couldn’t write without you. <3
Table of Contents
Author’s Note:
Prologue
Prologue II
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
Epilogue
What’s Next?
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
Charlie Foxtrot
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 (Mayish 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 (5-4-18)
Get You Some (6-7-18)
Ain’t Doin’ It (7-6-18)
Author’s Note:
The timeline has been drastically altered due to this being the first ‘Free Kids’ novel in this series. That means that we are starting fresh with timelines due to how far forward into the future I had to put these books to make it a believable age for the ‘kids’ of previous characters to be in order to start getting married and having babies themselves. So, the timelines won’t add up when you’re comparing these to the previous series and specific books where they are mentioned. I hope it doesn’t cause any confusion, and if you have questions, feel free to shoot me an email and ask, or hit me up on Facebook!
Also, as a side note…I will never write a book about cheating. I promise. So hang with me and know that I’d never put you through that. <3
Happy reading!
Prologue
Gave that bitch a wedding. Bitches love weddings.
Rafe
The first time I saw her, she said she was sorry I only had one ball.
The second time was a year later, bloody and bruised. She said she was sorry that my face looked like someone had taken a bat to it.
The third, I’d arrived with information that the Freebirds organization might want to hear, and I had earned myself a place in their infrastructure that would solidify our relationship for years to come. She’d been having a sleepover with her friends. Seven fifteen-year-old girls. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
The fourth, a year after the last time, I’d walked in and felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. Because between the previous visit and the latest visit, she’d shed her baby skin and was blossoming into the beautiful young woman she would one day become.
The fifth and sixth times had been over the course of the next five years. From the day that I’d felt that kick to the gut, I’d done my level best to stay away. If I had to go over to the Free compound, I went in the dead of night, visited with the boys and left. But, she’d caught me leaving both times—and both of those times she had been even prettier than she was the previous time.
The seventh time was two years after that when I had been coming home from a spec ops mission. I was dressed in my camo BTUs just like all the other soldiers who were returning home. I wasn’t actually a soldier. Not anymore, at least. I’d been there, working amongst other soldiers, on a classified operation posing as a soldier in an attempt to ascertain who the hell was the contact point behind a rash of stolen military paraphernalia.
She’d been standing there, smiling and waving, welcoming soldiers home.
It’d been the turning point for me.
No longer was she underage. No longer was I going to hide.
I couldn’t get her out of my mind. I couldn’t, and I should have.
But, the heart works in mysterious ways.
I didn’t get to choose who I loved. Who I wanted.
And, had things not turned south? Well, we might’ve both gotten what we wanted.
The hardest part of all, though, was forgetting she ever existed in the first place.
Oh, and that one night we spent together.
Prologue II
Thanks to breast implants, if there ever was a zombie apocalypse, there’d be a few with some fine ass titties.
-Janie to Kayla
James
“Yo
u’re not going,” I flat out refused. “You’re not. You’re…”
“I’m an adult, Dad!” Janie, my daughter who was indeed an adult, screamed. “You can’t stop me!”
“It’s fucking night time,” I snapped. “You’re not going to find a goddamn thing at night.”
Janie was shaking in anger as she stared at me with a look I’d never seen cross her face before right then. “He was shot. He could have drowned. I can’t leave him out there. I have to know.”
My daughter’s friend, who happened to be a forty-one-year-old man named Rafe, was missing.
Earlier in the day, he’d been in an altercation. Earlier in the day, he’d been hurt. Earlier in the day, he’d then gone to help a woman who was drowning in her car—which had been purposefully pushed over a bridge with her child inside.
Then, somewhere after the woman and her child were saved, Rafe went under. Rafe, for all intents and purposes, died.
At least in the eyes of all the other search crews.
We’d arrived from our hometown of Kilgore, Texas to help in the search. But, after hearing of Rafe’s gunshot wound—which, according to the man who had helped Rafe save the woman, had been fairly serious—it was determined that Rafe had passed out in the water and had died.
The banks had been searched. The immediate area dragged by boats. The area surrounding the river had been searched.
Literally, the only thing left was for the remaining part of the river to be dragged.
There was nowhere else he could be.
They’d searched twenty miles of river and bank. There was no way he was alive.
None.
And Janie knew it.
“Daddy…”
My heart broke, and I wrapped my arms around her shoulders, pulling her into my chest as I’d done a hundred thousand times over the course of her young life.
“I’m sorry, baby.”
An altercation in the hallway beyond the stairwell we were standing in had me glancing up through the tiny window, and what I saw made my heart stop.
But, as if the universe was laughing at me, the man himself came falling out of the elevator.
He was wet. He had blood running down his face and pooling in the collar of his shirt, and he looked about ready to pass out.
He did pass out.
He hit the ground about two steps outside of the elevator.
I reached for the stairwell door, and it didn’t take my daughter long to hear the commotion, and the name that everybody was screaming.
She stiffened in my arms, and then bolted.
“Rafe!” Janie cried. “Oh my God! Rafe!”
And, as I watched my daughter land on her knees beside the man who I always suspected wasn’t just a friend, I realized a few things.
One, my daughter was in love with a man that was almost twenty years older than her.
Two, Rafe was going to die—by my hand—if he ever hurt her.
And three, this could go nowhere good.
Especially, I realized, hours later when we found out that Rafe didn’t remember any of the last six months. Meaning, the period of time in which he and my daughter had grown the closest. Nearly choking on my spit at where my thoughts were going, it occurred to me that they’ve obviously become more to each other than I ever expected.
Janie was devastated—beyond broken.
I had a feeling I didn’t have the entire story.
You look like duct tape and handcuff material.
-Things you shouldn’t say to a man you have a crush on
Janie
The day Rafe no longer saw me as forbidden.
I watched the airport terminal, my belly jostling with nerves.
Rafe would be there soon.
I’d been looking his name up on flight manifests trying to figure out where he was at least once every three or four days. (Yes, I knew I was obsessed.) But, since I had no clue where he was going, I’d started searching specifically for his name, even though I always wondered if he had an alias.
I’d known, of course, that he was going to be there. But honestly, from day-to-day, I wasn’t quite sure what exactly it was that Rafe did.
Though, this time I’d gotten a little help from the man himself—albeit inadvertently seeing as he hadn’t actually given me the information. He’d given it to my Uncle Sam—not the government Uncle Sam, but my actual Uncle Sam.
A girl had to do what a girl had to do if she wanted to see the man she’d fallen in love with, after all. Even steal information off of her uncle’s desk.
It seemed like one day Rafe was home on American soil, working as a liaison between three governmental agencies, and the next he was deployed.
No matter how hard I tried, I could never find anything out about the man. He was too good at hiding.
Jack, my pseudo-uncle and mentor, and his wife, Winter, had taught me everything I knew about computers, and now there was literally nothing I couldn’t find out if I put my mind to it.
Nothing, that was, unless it came to Raphael Luis.
I had no fucking clue why I couldn’t find anything on him.
Literally, there was absolutely no information that was safe. There was nothing that I couldn’t find out. I knew that my dad was once a porn-aholic before he’d met Shiloh—which happened to be over twenty years ago. I’d been on his old computer trying to figure out how to get into the hard drive and had unfortunately discovered that interesting tidbit, something that no girl wants to know about her father. I also knew that my little sister was talking in some nerd chatroom all hours of the night and apparently had a secret boyfriend that she was keeping from my father.
I knew that there were quite a few people in town who were curious enough to Google Free, the organization that Uncle Sam—again, my actual Uncle Sam, not the literal Uncle Sam—had started with my father and the rest of my pseudo-uncles. They wanted to know more, and I understood their curiosity. But to protect Free and the women we helped, I pointed them in a direction that wouldn’t give them any more information than what the rest of the population could come up with.
For that organization that my family had created—the one for which I now worked—I basically did what Uncle Jack and Aunt Winter did, just on a much broader scale.
I’d surpassed the masters, but I still had such a thirst for knowledge that I continued to push myself.
Which was why it was so frustrating that I couldn’t find a damn thing on Rafe.
Not a single, solitary thing.
The fact that I could find nothing on the man was disconcerting.
Not a birth certificate. No social security number. Not even his high school baseball pictures.
Someone jostled me, and I looked to the side to see a very pregnant woman shifting from foot-to-foot. “I’m sorry. I think I’m in labor. My balance is a little off.”
I smiled and scooted away slightly, causing her to laugh.
“It’s not contagious,” she teased.
I shrugged.
Maybe I didn’t want her water breaking all over my shoes. I knew quite a bit of medical related information, and usually when one was in labor, their water broke.
Just sayin’.
“Who are you here for?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I’m one of the welcoming committees. I’m here for soldiers who don’t have anyone to come home to. We give them a welcome home goody bag.” I showed her the bags that had a bunch of different shit in it.
I’d been procuring little things from local businesses. Gift cards. Samples of their products. Fun stuff that wasn’t related to a goddamn thing. Sometimes I went to Walmart or a drug store and filled the rest of the bag with candies and things that they couldn’t get while deployed out of the country.
She smiled a warm smile. “That’s so sweet!”
I guess.
But, when I’d started this particular chapter, it was due in par
t to Rafe.
He’d once said one of the hardest parts about coming home was that no one was here to care if they were home, or back in that hell hole, and my fifteen-year-old self had taken that to heart.
I’d worked with my stepmother, Shiloh, and had founded this chapter.
Ever since, I’d been attending every single welcoming home that I could possibly muster without taking time off from work or school. School that I was doing to humor my father.
Then the line of men getting off the plane shifted, and I caught sight of him. He was the last one off the plane. Literally, even the flight attendants had beat him off.
He was looking at the ground as he made his way down the long hallway that led to the open room where the family of the returning home soldiers waited. Even though his head was down, I knew for a fact that he was very much aware of the men and women ahead of him.
Butterflies swarmed my belly as I watched him prowl in my direction.
He hadn’t seen me yet.
He wouldn’t be happy to see me.
While he was still unaware of my existence, I watched him walk.
Watched the way he moved with purpose.
He was dressed in his military uniform.
Brown, darker brown, and tan digital camouflage head-to-toe. He even had a hat that matched his pants. The top shirt was open and flapping as he walked, showing off the skintight tan t-shirt he wore underneath. Was that part of his uniform? I didn’t know. Then again, I didn’t really care.
And boy, those pants.
His pockets looked like they were filled to the absolute brim with shit—and I wanted to know what he put in those pockets. Food? Socks? Guns?
Then there was that arm that was up by his neck that was latched on to the massive canvas bag that was slung over his shoulder. The veins in his tanned arm were thick and prominent, and I licked my lips.
He looked so unbelievably hot.
The pants he had on were tight. Not so tight that they hindered his movements, but tight enough that I could see his hips and thighs. I also noticed that he was wearing boxer briefs—mostly because I could see the seam around mid-thigh.
The shirt he was wearing was tight, too. His chest muscles bulged, and I vaguely wondered whether or not he had to go one size bigger due to the girth.