Prologue
I got two things from Lucas Pratt for our engagement: a two-carat solitaire diamond ring that made my stomach ache with how stunning it was, and a Doberman puppy.
Lucas wasn’t happy about the puppy. He wanted to buy a full-grown, trained-to-kill Doberman guard dog. I told him no. Now, I’ve told Lucas Pratt no many times before, just recently about his desire to get me a guard dog. I don’t need one. I’ve got Francis.
Brief recap: While Lucas was recovering from his showdown with Rufie, the newest leader of Lucas’s old gang, Francis and Fluffy were acting as my shadows whenever I stepped foot outside the house. Francis was a full-grown, trained-to-kill Doberman guard dog. Fluffy was Francis’s owner, a Marine and probably the second most intimidating person I’d met in my twenty-two years. The most intimidating person I’d ever met was a forty-five-year old veterinarian called Dr. Lila Winchester. I thank God ever day Lila was now my friend. If she wasn’t…
It took a little persuasion to convince Lucas I needed a puppy rather than a canine protector. By persuasion, I mean I took a page out of Lucas’s book and manipulated him through sex into finally saying yes to the puppy.
Lucas may be recuperating from some serious fight action, courtesy of his confrontation with Rufie, but he has never let being injured stop him from giving me the most incredible sex of my life. Trust me.
So yes, I used sex to get my own way, which was a puppy.
Am I proud of that? I’m not sure. Let’s go with I’m ambivalent about it.
But I got a puppy. An adorable Doberman puppy whose tail I insisted be left undocked, with uncut ears and a cheeky yap. And, I think, I finally got Lucas to acknowledge I can be as stubborn as he can.
Relationship growth is a good thing.
When your bad-boy next-door neighbor—a guy hotter than sin who you’ve secretly lusted after since you were sixteen—reveals he’s secretly been in love with you from nearly the same age, has dealt with corrupt cops and sadistic gang members for years to keep you safe because he loves you, you know you’ve found your HEA. The only trouble with that is, Lucas put me on a pedestal; his good girl who can do no wrong, who needs to be protected from the dark shit in life.
I may be a good girl—hell, I can’t remember ever once being grounded by my parents when I was living at home with them, or put on detention at school—but I don’t deserve to be on a pedestal.
Manipulating Lucas with sex to get my own stubborn way proved that.
I could be wrong, but I think Lucas admired me just as much as I pissed him off when he realized what I’d done. I swear I could see the twinkle in his eyes when we were collecting my new puppy.
Bastard.
God, I love him.
So, massive chunk of sparkly rock on my ring finger, an utterly adorable puppy Doberman I named Groot, two minders in the form
of a six-foot-five Marine and a sleek guard dog, and a fiancé who loves me enough to kill anyone who threatens me.
My life. In a nutshell.
My parents—at the halfway point of their eight-week cruise—were oblivious to the events of the last month. They had no clue about Lucas arriving naked in my house, bruised and bloody and delirious, before pretty much abducting me to what is now our home in the next state.
They had no clue about the corrupt detective obsessed with Lucas who tracked us there with the aim of making Lucas his sex slave by threatening to kill me.
They had no clue about Lucas’s old gang coming after him a week later, again threatening to kill me unless he let them beat him to death (my parents also had no clue Lucas was even in a gang. They just thought he was their next-door neighbor’s bad-news son).
They definitely had no idea I’d quit my job at the bakery and was now living in a house that belonged on a Kayne West video. They were clueless to the fact I was now friends with an ex-CIA agent (among other things) who spent her spare time—when not being a veterinarian—dealing out punishment to corrupt cops and gang members in ways I don’t even want to think about.
And last—but not least—Mom and Dad had no clue whatsoever I was now engaged.
Suffice to say, they were going to be surprised. Dad was going to be pissed.
Was I nervous? A little. But hey, I still had a while before they were due home. In that time, I’d figure out a way to break the news to them without Dad having an aneurism.
For now, I had my puppy, my minders, and Lucas. I couldn’t be any happier.
And then I came upon the little boy, and all hell broke loose.
Not because the kid was dangerous, or evil, or in any way a tactic used by those who still wanted to hurt Lucas (with his past lifestyle, there were a lot out there who fell into that category), but because the lost kid made me famous in the media for a brief moment.
And that brief moment, barely a twenty-four-hour news cycle, was enough.
Let’s start this story back then, shall we?
Chapter 1
Running dangerously low on milk, I decided to take Groot to the local market. I’m a bit of a milk junkie. I can drink a quart of milk by myself, straight out of the carton if the mood takes me.
The mood took me when Lucas was asleep. Around six-thirty in the morning.
I was up, watching the night sky slowly fade to that beautiful purpley-pink color of dawn, thinking about how I was going to tell Mom and Dad about…well, everything.