Table of Contents
Depends on Who’s Asking
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Other titles by Lani Lynn Vale
Blurb
Prologue I
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
Epilogue
What’s Next?
Copyright © 2020 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.
To my family. Couldn’t do this without you.
Acknowledgments
Golden Czermak - Photographer
My Brother’s Editor & Ink It Out Editing- My editors
Cover Me Darling - Cover Artist
My mom - Thank you for reading this book eight million, two hundred and fourteen times.
Kendra, Laura, Lisa, Brandi, Jen, Kathy, Mindy, Barbara, Penney & 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.
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
Quit Your Pitchin’
Listen, Pitch
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
Too Bad So Sad
Bear Bottom Guardians MC
Mess Me Up
Talkin’ Trash
How About No
My Bad
One Chance, Fancy
It Happens
Keep It Classy
Snitches Get Stitches
F-Bomb
The Southern Gentleman Series
Hissy Fit
Lord Have Mercy
KPD Motorcycle Patrol
Hide Your Crazy
It Wasn’t Me
I’d Rather Not
Make Me
Sinners are Winners
If You Say So
SWAT 2.0
Just Kidding
Fries Before Guys
Maybe Swearing Will Help
Ask Me If I Care
May Contain Wine
Joke’s on You
Join the Club
Any Day Now
Say it Ain’t So
Officially Over It
Nobody Knows
Depends Who’s Asking
Valentine Boys
Herd That
Crazy Heifer
Chute Yeah
Get Bucked
Souls Chapel Revenants MC
Repeat Offender (January 2021)
Jailbait (February 2021)
Conjugal Visits (April 2021)
Doin’ a Dime (May 2021)
Kitty Kitty (July 2021)
Gen Pop (August 2021)
Inmate of the Month (September 2021)
Shakedown (November 2021)
Blurb
Saint & Caro
It was the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring… nope. No. Nuh-uh. That’s a lie.
The moment that Caro wakes up, she knows that she’s not alone.
One thump-thump from the living room and she quickly moves into action.
One 911 call later, and she’s ready to defend herself.
Only, she gets more than she bargains for when she steps out into her living room and comes face to face with a living, breathing nightmare.
And isn’t it just fitting that the man that saves her by coming down the chimney with a large black gun in his hand is named Saint Nicholas?
***
It seemed like the start of a bad joke.
Saint Nicholas comes down the chimney on Christmas Eve night, but he isn’t there to bear gifts. He’s there to take out the trash.
When he lands on his silent feet, he has no other choice but to put himself in harm’s way.
One look at Caro’s terrified face, and he can’t stop himself.
He steps in just as the bullets start flying, saving the damsel in distress and taking a wound to the shoulder for his trouble.
But one thing he can say is, heroes always win the girl.
And Caro is the best Christmas miracle of all.
PROLOGUE I
I may look innocent, but I screenshot a lot.
-T-shirt
SAINT
Seventeen years old
“Are you ready?”
I looked up at my mother who was bent down smiling at me.
I was ready.
I’d been ready for hours.
Yet, as the son of the President and First Lady of the United States, I was expected to do things that most other kids weren’t.
Like sit around for hours, doing nothing, on Christmas Eve.
I was also dressed like a pretentious asshole in layers and layers of fabric that itched. Yet again, I wasn’t allowed t
o complain.
Not and be ‘presentable.’
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, trying my hardest to sound pleasant and not the pissed off teen that I actually was.
At seventeen, I should’ve been at home, hanging with my friends, or spending time at a party with my family. Instead, I was at a fundraising dinner, or whatever, with my parents and about two hundred of Capitol Hill’s finest.
Or, at least I was told they’re Capitol Hill’s finest.
I didn’t like half of them. And the other half I was ambivalent about.
“Let’s go,” one of the two secret service agents that were sworn to protect only me ordered.
His name was Daniel, and he was an asshole.
But he was a protective asshole, so I guessed that worked in my favor.
The other secret service agent tasked to protect me, Phillipe, fell into step on my other side as my mother and her secret service agents fell into step beside her.
My father wasn’t far behind with his, but he got hung up by a senator that he was trying to win favor with and stopped. Again.
“Jesus Christ,” I said to nobody in particular. “Will this fucking night ever end?”
“Language,” my mother growled.
I looked over at her and narrowed my eyes.
“I’m fucking tired of this, Mother,” I ground out. “This is getting to the point where it’s ridiculous. I didn’t have to come with you tonight. I could’ve stayed at home, yet, alas, I was forced to because it would ‘look good for Daddy’s reelection.’”
My mother’s eyes narrowed. “Language, Saint.”
I narrowed my eyes back. “Don’t lecture me on my language. How about you tell me why we can’t spend a holiday on our own? Or, how about you tell me why, for the love of God, y’all just can’t leave me behind?”
My mother looked like she wanted to smack me upside the head.
She wouldn’t, because someone might very well see it and print it in the newspapers, but I could tell she wanted to.
We couldn’t do anything normal.
Every single move, every single shit we took, was scrutinized.
And it was getting really fucking old.
I’d spent four fucking years doing this, and I was tired.
Not to mention the two years before that my father spent campaigning.
Or the six years before that my father spent as the senator of Arkansas.
Politics had been my life for as long as I could remember. The only problem was, I didn’t want politics to be my life. I wanted to be a regular teenager.
And that wouldn’t ever happen if I hung around any longer than I had to.
Luckily, as of December nineteenth, and thanks to my homeschool teachers that taught me at the White House, I would be a graduate.
In the eyes of the world, I would be officially an adult.
That meant that I could say, do, and shit wherever I wanted, and my parents couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
Though, that was probably a lie I told myself, too.
They could likely stop me from doing everything.
If they knew what I was doing, that was.
I had a plan, though. Come December twenty-sixth, I had a meeting. One that I would be making. Alone.
For now, I would bide my time until everything was in place.
PROLOGUE II
I’m not Rapunzel, but you can still pull my hair.
-T-shirt
SAINT
One year ago
The op we were working at that particular moment in time was a fucking joke.
The old SWAT team knew it. The new SWAT team that I was a part of knew it. Yet, we were doing it anyway.
Honestly, I knew this was a test, that I should be taking this seriously, but I wasn’t.
We were at a repeat offender’s house.
A man that, according to the old SWAT team, got the cops called on him often. And when the SWAT team came, he nearly always went into defense mode and did spectacular things that really should get him shot. Yet, the guy always managed to live to do his bullshit another day.
Just as I was thinking this, the guy we’d entered the house to apprehend, did a spectacular swan dive into the frozen pool below.
According to everyone that I’d asked, he was a crazy motherfucker that did stupid things.
Like dive into a pool that was sheeted over with ice.
It was cold for Texas—something that I’d been told, anyway. I wasn’t originally from here. I had been born in Arkansas, moved to California, then back to Arkansas where my dad became the governor. Then we moved to Washington, DC when my dad was campaigning and then became the president. It was, indeed, cold during winter. Winter in Texas was Washington, DC’s spring.
Today, though, there was a bit of a chill in the air.
Fast forward five minutes and we were getting the dumbass out of the pool.
My eyes were on the guy’s dick that was swinging in my direction, as well as Booth’s body that was blocking most of the guy’s upper torso from my view, which had to be why I’d allowed the asshole to get the drop on me.
“Saint!” The growled words from Michael weren’t fast enough.
The guy sliced me open with a knife and I hissed at the pain that quickly burned through my arm at the move.
Just as quickly, though, I deposited a kick straight to his chest.
The knife went flying one way, and the guy the other.
Seconds later, I had him on the ground, my knee in his back, and was putting handcuffs on him. Then he was being led away with his arms behind his back.
Michael gestured me over frantically.
Thinking I was about to get reprimanded for my dumbass mistake, I was surprised to find him looking more freaked out than a slash to the arm warranted.
“Let’s go. You can drop me off with my girl before you go to the hospital to have that arm stitched up.” Michael turned to Luke. “I’m leaving.”
Just a minute after that, I was walking out of the yard with Michael hot on my heels.
Luke didn’t bother to argue.
“Baby, head to the hospital,” I heard Michael order. “I’ll be there in five minutes. You’ll be there in three if you don’t stop. Not even for another cop, do you hear me? They’re going to be on the lookout for your car, but they know to leave you alone. I have other officers heading toward where you got pulled over, okay?” After he said that to whoever he had on the phone, he looked over at Luke who’d followed us out. “You might want to give me an update on whoever the fuck just did that,” he said. “I’ll be meeting with them after I make sure that Caro and Saint are okay.”
Luke nodded his head. “We’ll finish up here and meet you at the hospital.”
The ride to the hospital took four minutes.
During those minutes, Michael explained that someone had tried to pull his daughter over. Someone that wasn’t a cop. And when she didn’t stay or hang around, they started to shoot at her car.
We arrived at the hospital in record time, and I was pulling into a police-designated parking spot much faster than I’d ever gotten here before. But that wasn’t due to Michael’s insistence that I drive faster, but the lack of people on the road to congest our commute.
“Where are you?” Michael asked tensely the moment he got out of the truck.
She must’ve answered because Michael looked up expectantly and breathed a sigh of relief when he saw a car pull in. He pointed at the parking spot next to mine and then met her at her car door.
My breath left my lungs when I saw her jump out of the car and throw herself at her father.
“Daddy!” she cried.
He caught her up in his arms and held her tight. After hearing what happened, I was unsurprised to find her body shaking violently.
I tried not to notice how fucking adorable she looked but couldn’t stop myself from checking her out.
She was short and curvy. Her shapely ass was covered by buffalo plaid leggings,
and she had a skin-tight black turtleneck that was plastered to every inch of her body, showing off delicate curves and generous breasts and hips. Her hair was midnight black, so black that it matched the color of her turtleneck.
Then her eyes turned to me and I felt something inside of me shift at her attention.
She had light blue eyes the color of the sky on a sunny, cloudless day.
“Tell me what happened, baby,” Michael ordered.
I lost her eyes then, and I felt like something in my chest all but deflated at the loss.
“I was driving home from Red’s house when I saw flashing lights come up behind me. The thing was, I passed the car on a side road as I was pulling out onto the highway, and the unmarked car didn’t look anything like any other car that I’d ever seen before. So, I became suspicious and called you, just in case. When you told me to leave, I put the car into drive, and that’s when the guy started shooting,” she explained. “I didn’t see much.”
Her eyes flicked to me when I growled.
This was the third such event I’d heard of in the last week of a fake officer pulling people over. This girl, Caro, was lucky that she didn’t end up like the others—hurt badly and robbed.
“He followed me until I pulled past the police station. Then a bunch of police cars surrounded him and forced him to pull over,” she explained. “Daddy, I have holes in my brand-new car!”
She whirled around in her dad’s arms, and he was forced to let her go. She stomped directly toward me and then pushed me out of the way with her hand on my hip so she could point out the bullet holes in her car.
“I just paid my first car payment!” she wailed.
I backed away warily, looking at her as if she was about to break.
She might’ve been.
But she was also pissed.
Once she was done pointing at her car, she turned then, surveying me.
“Who are you?” she asked. “And why are you bleeding all over the place? Go inside and get that taken care of.”
My lips twitched.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said quietly.
I started to walk away, but she stopped me before I could even get five feet. “You didn’t tell me your name!”
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