Copyright
Cocksure © 2018
Wrecked Excerpt © 2015
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
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Because Words Belong to Everybody
♥
This all seems a little...cocky, doesn't it?
Some of you might be wondering what the cock is going on with this book, and yes...this book did come about because of a certain incident in which an author attempted to trademark a commonly used word..."Cocky".
It was a big dust-up and as often happens with writers, the whole debacle inspired a story, this one.
Dedication
♥
As always, with all my love to my husband and my kids. It’s been a hard year, guys, and I know I haven’t been the mom or wife I could have been. But thank you for being there for me. Thanks for loving me.
You’re my world.
A special thanks to a couple of friends...Renee, Andy, BJ & JP, only one of whom is likely to even see this, but you three helped pull back together over the past year. Every time I thought I was falling apart, when I didn’t know where I’d find the strength to go on, you helped me find it.
I’m so grateful God put you in my life.
To my sister-in-law...my sister, T. You’ve been a pillar of strength.
My niece & nephew, A & K. You made me laugh so much this past year. I see pieces of my brother in you, in that smart-ass sense of humor you’ve got, A, and in K’s adorable, goofy smile.
You’re so precious to me.
I love all of you, so much.
CockSure
The Cochrans of Cocker County
By Shiloh Walker
Chapter One
Sabrina
HE WAS THE COCKIEST bastard I’d ever met in my life.
“Has it occurred to you that I don’t give a damn what the tabloids or any other media outlet has to say?” Luke’s voice was low and smooth, like fine, aged whiskey, and if he talked long enough, I could get drunk just listening to him.
He shifted in his seat next to me and I had to fight the urge to squirm as his arm brushed mine.
He’d notice and want to know what was up. I could already feel his gaze as it landed on me. My nervousness had more than a little to do with the debacle that had landed me here with my boss, Luke Cochran, and his agent—my best friend, Kelly.
I was in a meeting with the two of them.
Kelly Horvath was one of the younger agents in Hollywood and already she was one of the most sought after. She had a reputation for being a ballbuster and she knew how to handle the arrogance possessed by many of her clients.
She was also one of my best friends and the reason I had this dream job.
Sometimes I didn’t know whether I wanted to curse her for the fact, or hug her tight. The urge to do both hit several times a day.
“Sabrina, do you want any cream or sugar?” Kelly glanced over at me as she poured some cream into her coffee.
I almost always took mine laden with both, but I was determined to shed some of the weight I’d put on since my mother had committed suicide a few years earlier.
The depression had hit me hard and before I knew it, I was no longer running, on top of sleeping too little and waking up in the middle of the night with the urge to eat chocolate-chip-cookie-dough ice cream.
“Just cream, Kelly, thanks.”
With a cocked brow, she pushed the little server of cream over to me. “You never drink your coffee without sugar.”
“Turning over a new leaf,” I said, hitching up a shoulder and giving her a dark look so she wouldn’t press any deeper. “Sugar is just so bad for us, you know?”
I saw the speculation in her eyes, but she let it go and shifted her attention to Luke.
He sat slumped in the leather chair next to me, reclining back into it with an easy, confident grace. He could have been sitting on a throne.
He shifted in the seat and I glanced over, feeling his attention swing my way.
Intense eyes—the most unique shade of blue—met mine and he studied me. “Miz I Want Sugar With My Sugar has decided that sugar is bad for her?”
“It is bad for you.” I made a face at him and looked back at Kelly, although I was far too aware of the man sitting next to me. Even after five years of working with him, he still had the ability to knock my breath away. Not that I’d ever let him know that. The hotshot young movie star was already so full of himself, it was a wonder he had room in that brain to remember his lines in any given movie.
Of course, it wasn’t as if he ever had issues remembering his lines.
Luke wasn’t just beautiful to look at—he was smart, too. Sometimes too smart. Combined with a natural charisma and his cocksure attitude, he drew women to him like bees to honey. He knew it, too.
That arrogance of his was the reason we were here—again.
“Luke, look...” she said, her voice weary. “You know why we’re here. If this wasn’t a problem, we wouldn’t be here. This is about a lot more than what the tabloids have to say.”
Luke held out a hand.
Kelly studied it, then met his gaze with a questioning look.
“Go ahead and smack my hand. That way, you can tell all the higher-ups that I’ve been thoroughly chastised.”
“I think it’s going to take a little more than a slap on the hand to deal with this,” Kelly said, her tone hard and flat. “For fuck’s sake, you’re getting ready to start PR for the new Sword movie. The production company is not happy. This is a movie that’s targeted toward all age groups. How do you think it’s going to play with your more conservative fans that you were caught in a threesome in a bathroom at one of the biggest museums in the world?”
“It was supposed to be a private bathroom,” Luke pointed out. “And technically, we were in the sitting area and it wasn’t like any of us were naked.”
“You had your dick out,” Kelly snapped. “And not only was it out, you had a woman on the floor in front of you, giving you head.”
My cheeks flushed and I kept my attention on the little notepad I always carried with me.
I’d long since grown accustomed to Luke’s sexual exploits. He was a manwhore of the highest order.
And I was pathetically, desperately in love with him. I had been since several months into our business relationship.
If only he had turned out to be the bad-boy manwhore Hollywood had made him out to be—just the bad-boy manwhore, I would have been okay.
But, sexual exploits aside, Luke was so much more.
I’d figured that out when I had to call, fighting back tears, to tell him I needed some time off. I’d been convinced I’d be fired. At that point, I’d only been working for him for three months and I’d been too shaken to think up a plausible lie, so I’d told him the truth—my mother had overdosed. Again. I needed to go see her.
He�
�d told me it wouldn’t be a problem, then asked if I’d taken care of my plane.
When I said no, he’d just ended the phone call, but a few minutes later, I’d received a text.
A friend of mine is going to be calling. Her name is Monica. Texting you the number. Be sure to answer.
Monica, as it turned out, was married to one of the actors Luke knew. Monica’s claim to fame? She and her father had created one of the biggest online travel agencies in the world.
I had been booked and ready to fly back to Toronto before we’d even finished talking, as well as arranging for a car to pick me up from my place, and taking care of a rental once I landed in Toronto.
And Luke had covered the expenses.
When I tried to thank him a week later, he acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about.
But I’d started to see the small kindnesses.
By the time my mother overdosed again, less than a year later, I was already so crazy in love with him, I knew I’d probably never be free of it.
I texted him, crying too hard to speak, and told him there’d been a death in the family.
He called me immediately, but I hadn’t answered. So, he got onto his motorcycle and headed my way.
I hadn’t even made it through packing my suitcase before he was at my little studio apartment in West Covina where I’d been living ever since he’d hired me. Prior to that, I’d lived with Kelly, renting out the mother-in-law suite for less than half of what she could have asked for.
He’d knocked and kept knocking, even though I wasn’t in the mood to talk to anybody. Finally, not knowing who it was, I’d stormed to the door and jerked it open with a vicious “What?”
He’d just looked me up and down, then pulled me into a hug.
I’d broken down crying and the story had come out. By the time I calmed down, I was hugely embarrassed and had slipped into the bathroom to wash my face.
When I came out, he was on the phone. I’d worked with him long enough at the point to know he was making arrangements to go somewhere on a private plane.
When he hung up, I’d frowned at him. “You’re due in the studio tomorrow. You have those scenes to reshoot.”
“The plane’s not for me. It’s for you.” He’d tucked his phone away and planted his hands on his hips.
After brushing aside my denial, my surprise, then my gratitude, he’d dropped a kiss on my forehead and offered to help me pack and drive me to the airport.
“You’re on your bike.”
“We’ll take your car. I’ll make arrangements to be picked up, that way you can leave your car at the airport.”
Then he’d just pulled me close again and held me, stroking my hair.
In the three-and-a-half years since then, I’d only fallen deeper and deeper under his spell.
And he was completely unaware.
Now, as he brushed aside Kelly’s concerns about his latest scandal, I tried to think about it from a logical standpoint, putting my emotions aside. I wouldn’t say it was easy to do so, but after being in love with him for so long, I was used to the process and managed with relative success. After a few seconds of pondering the matter, I reached over and touched the back of Luke’s hand.
He’d been in the middle of expressing how little he cared about what people thought of him, but broke off when he looked at me. It only took him a few seconds to figure out that I, too, saw a problem ahead.
“Luke,” I said softly, “think about this practically for a few minutes, okay? I know you don’t give a damn what people think, but the studio does.” Then I pulled out my ace card. Cocking my head to the side, I asked, “And besides, what in the world is your mother going to think?”
Immediately, the dark slashes of his brows dropped low over his blue eyes. “That’s playing dirty.”
“It’s an honest question.” I hitched up a shoulder. “Can you imagine the crap she’s going to get over this, back in your hometown?”
At the mention of Ulysses, the small Indiana town where he’d lived until he was eighteen, Luke’s lip curled and he looked away.
He had a bizarre love/hate relationship with the place, and a relationship with his family that confused me, to say the least. I’d been back there with him for family visits on a number of occasions over the past four years. I’d been with him on his first visit back in almost a decade. When he’d left at eighteen, he hadn’t planned on ever going back. He would never talk about why, but I knew there had to be a reason.
I liked his family, so most of the time when he went back and tried to nag me into going with him, I went. Sometimes it didn’t work out, but I’d been often enough that I’d come to love his family, had been around them all long enough to see the wounds in all of them slowly being healed.
The reminder of his mother had him groaning, and I watched him slump in his chair, dragging his hands over his face.
Kelly shot me a glance, her brows arched high over her eyes. She’d told me once that she’d learned early on never to bring up Luke’s family and it was a lesson she wouldn’t forget.
I gave a small shrug and focused back on Luke.
“I suppose you can always hope none of London’s friends hear about this,” I added, mentioning his younger sister and knowing just how he’d react. London Cochran was in her second year of medical school at Tulane University, and ever since a cute interaction between them went viral a year earlier, she’d become a social media darling.
“You’re my punishment, aren’t you, Ina?” He dropped his hands and met my gaze with baleful eyes.
Giving him a wide, innocent stare, I pressed my hand to my chest. “I’m just trying to be helpful, boss.”
He gave a derisive snort.
“It’s too bad that Liam just got back from that missionary trip to Haiti,” I added. “If he’d been out of the country and working with one of the teams building houses and all, he probably would have been too tired and out of touch to pay attention to anything online.”
“All right!” He shoved back from the table and got up to pace the length of the conference room.
Finally coming to a stop in front of the floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall windows that delivered a stunning view of downtown Beverly Hills, Luke blew out a hard breath and shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. Those jeans cost more than my monthly house payment, and as with most real estate in Los Angeles County, my home was anything but cheap.
Those expensive jeans, deconstructed so they looked years old, offered an amazing view of his ass. Careful to keep my eyes away from that particular...asset, I waited for him to speak.
“All right. I get the point.” He eventually turned back around, hands still shoved defensively into his pockets. He looked at me for a long moment then shifted his attention to Kelly. “What do you want me to do?”
“Stop being such a hound dog for once,” she said bluntly. “You’re not a newbie to all of this, and you’re old enough to know that actions like this don’t just affect you. You know how the press loves to latch onto a scandal. And this...” She blew out a breath. “Well, it’s a scandal.”
He winced, red rushing up to color his cheeks. Luke might not care much about his own public image, but he didn’t like it when other people got dragged down because of things he’d done or said. He’d spoken up more than once when that sort of shit had happened before. “It should blow over easy enough, right?”
“Oh, it will blow over, but you’re going to take some heat for this, especially from Bellerive Productions.” Kelly tapped her pen on the surface of the desk. “You’re contracted for another movie after this and they’ve expressed interest in doing more projects in the future. But I’ve already had my ass handed to me from their PR department. You’ve met Howard Rivers. You know how old-fashioned he is.”
At the mention of the owner of the up-and-coming independent studio, I rubbed my forehead where a headache was already starting to pound. I’d had several calls from the top PR guy from Bellerive,
too. I’d yet to answer any of them, but I knew I couldn’t put it off too much longer.
Luke let his head fall back and as he pondered the ceiling, as if searching for the answers to life’s great mysteries, I shot Kelly a look.
The fine line between her brows still hadn’t smoothed away and I wondered just how ugly this thing could get.
Maybe if he wasn’t most well-known for his role in the Sword movies—one already released on Blu-ray and the second due out in six weeks—where he played Michael Sword, a cop-turned-hero after a freak accident, this wouldn’t be as big a deal. But while Sword didn’t quite rank up there with Captain America, he was supposed to be the good guy—the ultimate good guy. There were Sword action figures now. Moms might not like their little tykes playing with an action figure who went and had threesomes in public places. It didn’t matter that it hadn’t happened in the movie. Too many people associated the actor with the character after a franchise got big enough.
“I can handle Howard,” Luke said with his regular arrogance.
“It’s not just Howard you have to handle,” I reminded him. “You’re going to have to handle your mom. Especially if any of your siblings catch flack for this.”
His gaze came back to me and he jabbed a finger at me. “I should have realized shit like this would come up once the two of you got together on Facebook.”
I stuck my tongue out at him. “I’m not the one caught with my pants down.”
To my surprise, he actually flushed.
After heaving out a hard breath, he looked over at Kelly. “All right. I’ll straighten up.”
Chapter Two
Luke
I CRINGED AS I LISTENED to my sister on the other end of the line.
So far, she’d listed twelve different people who’d stopped her to talk about me.
She had been out with Mom for three of the incidents and Bella hadn’t hesitated to let me know just how embarrassed Mom had been. She hadn’t shown it in public—Joanne Cochran was too classy for that.
Cocksure (The Cochrans of Cocker County) Page 1
