Cruel Temptation (Underground Kings 1)

“Where are the guys?” I asked and opened the fridge to grab a beer before going back to my room and showering.

“Jaxon told them to get lost before you came inside. Did you tap that fine ass of his?”

“Ingrid!” I hissed, giggling from her crass words.

“You did, didn’t you? Good for you, Rabbit.”

I did many years ago. And if it was better now than it was then, I would probably die if we ever had sex again. The kiss was enough to leave me weak in the knees for a few days. His lips were aged like fine wine, and I wanted to drink him down and get drunk. “Why do you call me that?” I twisted off the top and tossed the cap in the blue recycling bin he had under the lip of the counter.

“Because it looks like you’re about to bolt at any second. You’re a skittish little thing, but cute. It makes sense to me.”

“Right,” I said, not understanding why she thought I’d leave, I hadn’t made one single attempt to.

Holy shit.

I hadn’t tried to actually leave. I threw a fit, sure, but I could have tried harder.

You don’t want to leave.

The thought had me pausing mid-tilt of the bottle before I sipped the beverage. I was learning a lot of truths today, and they were causing me to get a headache. I reached into the fridge for another beer, so I had one to drink while I took a bath. I needed to unwind before I decided to throw myself at Jaxon.

My days were numbered.

The countdown began the moment I saw him standing up in that church. He was always the kind of man that broke the rules, and I was always the kind of girl to follow them until Jaxon invaded my life and taught me that rules were made to be broken.

Rules were meant to be erased and changed.

My love for him, I treated it like a rule, but it was the exception. No matter what he did, no matter the rules he broke, no matter the people he has killed, my love for him was the one thing that stayed constant.

It should scare me, loving a man so lawless, so fearless, willing to do whatever it took if it meant he was on top.

Him on top was where I liked him.

Why bother counting down? My time was up.

Chapter Fifteen

Jaxon

“We have a job,” Sebastian said, throwing a file at all of us as we sat around in the living room. We didn’t come up with our mad plans in a secret room. We laid it all out in the open where we were comfortable.

My mind wasn’t on work, though. It was on Quinn and how fucking good she felt in my arms again. My focus was clouded, but work was how we made money and how we donated it. I needed to get my head in the game. If we wanted, we never had to work again. Selling those diamonds set us up for life, and now we didn’t work as often, but we were criminals at heart, so we kept on.

At least we were the good kind of criminals.

“What do you have for us, Sebastian?” I asked, flicking the file open to see the faces of two men. I recognized one. He served fifteen years for rape and attempted murder. “I know him. He was in the same prison as us, a different block. He got out?” I asked, flipping through the pages of the hefty file. Page after page of arrest reports from the time he was thirteen.

“Yep, released a few days ago, and guess what?” He clicked a button, and an image popped up on the TV. “Bank robbery in his hometown. Two million stolen.”

“Why do you think it's him? Bank robbery isn’t his MO. He likes to rape women; this isn’t him.” I closed the file and tossed it onto the floor.

“I thought so too, until I saw this.” He clicked onto the next screen and a picture of him holding down a woman, holding a gun to her head and her shirt torn filled the screen.

All of us grumbled and looked away. I hated seeing shit like that.

“I know it’s hard to look at, but it’s him. He has a sparrow on his thumb, look,” Sebastian pointed out and zoomed in on the screen until the sparrow with red eyes stared back at all of us. “It’s him.”

I leaned forward. My elbows bending until they dig into my thigh. “Two million? It’s kind of low for what we usually go for,” I said, and a few of the guys murmured an agreement.