Rich Dirty Dangerous (Bad Billionaires 3)

L.A. Fucking L.A. The city I’d come from, the city I never wanted to see again as long as I lived. The city where I’d had my shitty childhood with Devon, culminating in the day when my mother was killed like an unwanted dog on our apartment floor.

I’d left. I’d vowed never to go back. And then I’d decided to be a white knight, and save Dani. And there was only one city we needed to fucking go.

This was just my goddamn luck.

We stopped in a small town called Preston, off the beaten track again. It had a K-Mart, and I got Dani’s shoe size and went in and bought her shoes, because this was still Black Dog territory

and she was extra conspicuous in those high heels. She was already tall, slender, and gorgeous, with that silky black hair. Add jeans, a t-shirt, and heels, and she was a knockout no one would forget.

I bought her flip-flops, some kind of sandal made of cheap leather, and white canvas sneakers. I bought her a sandwich and a Coke and a bag of chips, because she shouldn’t just live on protein bars. My eight hundred dollars dwindled further and further.

I was going to have to do something about money. Which was crazy, considering I was partly a billionaire.

We ate our sandwiches in the K-Mart parking lot, sitting in the car, because apparently I know how to show a woman a good time.

“One more thing,” she said when she finished, licking chip grease from her fingers. She pointed to a little shop in the strip plaza next to the K-Mart. “I’m going in there.”

“A haircut?” I asked, looking at the sign. Two things crossed my mind at once: One, that it was practical and probably a good idea; and two, complete fucking horror that she was going to cut that gorgeous hair.

“I have to,” she said, and then, as if reading my mind: “It’s just hair. It’ll grow back, right?”

I made myself give a nod before I could beg her not to. “Be quick. We have to keep moving.”

She nodded and got out of the car, trotting across the parking lot in her canvas sneakers. Which fit pretty good, considering I’d never bought shoes for a woman before. I tried not to watch her walk, the way she moved in her jeans. Tried, and failed.

She’d been in there for ten minutes—I was using the paper map from the glove box to check the route to L.A.—when my phone rang. My actual phone, not the burner phone I’d bought in Datsun for cash. I picked it up. It was McMurphy.

“What do you want?” I said when I answered.

“You fuck her in this room?” McMurphy said.

Shit. He’d found our motel room already. I did a swift calculation. We’d driven for two hours; McMurphy, and whatever brothers he had with him, were only two hours behind us. But if our guess was right that he’d tracked Dani by her phone, then he didn’t know where we were right now.

I had to play this cool. Not show fear. “None of your goddamn business,” I answered him.

“I’m going to kill you,” McMurphy said, his voice like ice. “I’m going to torture you first while the brothers hold you down. And then I am going to kill you.”

“I dumped her phone, McMurphy,” I said. “You’ll have to find us.” I kept my eye on the door of the hairdresser’s, hoping Dani would finish up and get the hell out of there.

“What’d she do to you?” McMurphy said. “I left her alone with you for an hour, ink man. One fucking hour. And now she’s got you by the dick. So what’d she do? She blow you the minute I got out the door?”

I may have made a lot of mistakes, and I may have a lot of doubts, but never for a second would I doubt that I’d done the right thing getting Dani away from this asshole. “She didn’t need to blow me to know she’d like me better than you,” I said. “It was just a natural understanding.”

He laughed, a nasty sound that sent chills up my spine. “She didn’t blow you,” he said. “She doesn’t like to do that. I didn’t go without, though. Sometimes you just have to tell a woman how it’s going to go, you know? Sometimes you have to make it crystal fucking clear.”

My stomach turned. I didn’t like it, Dani had said. It wasn’t good. I thought there was something wrong with me. He really would touch her again over my dead body.

“Are you in our room right now?” I asked McMurphy. “Are you looking at the bed? I know you are. Looks a little rumpled, doesn’t it?”

“You cocksucker,” he said. Because of course he was looking at the bed. I could tell.

I mentally begged Dani’s forgiveness, sucked in a breath, and made myself say the dirtiest things I could think of. “She screamed my name,” I told McMurphy. “I made her come so hard she practically called me God. I fucked her until she couldn’t walk. And I’m going to fuck her again, McMurphy. She’ll let me bend her over anytime I tell her to. She’s insatiable. She loves my dick. She says she can’t get enough.”

It was crude, and disgusting, and I didn’t mean a word of it, and I was grateful that Dani would never hear me say this shit. But there was method in my madness.

McMurphy was paranoid, especially when it came to Dani. If I could convince him she was used goods, maybe he’d leave her alone. And if that failed, and if I could convince him that I was using his woman like a whore, it would be me he’d come after first. Me he’d kill first. Which meant that Dani had a shot at getting away clean. Me, I didn’t care about.

So, yeah, I said that garbage. Because I’m a fucking gentleman.