by Imani King
CONTENTS
Title Page
© 2015 Imani King
I was always a good girl. One of the smart ones, one
Prologue
Chapter One
Red
Chapter Two
Red
Chapter Three
Red
Chapter Four
Gabi
Red
Chapter Five
Red
Chapter Six
Red
Chapter Seven
Red
Chapter Eight
Red
Chapter Nine
Red
Chapter Ten
Red
Chapter Eleven
Red
Chapter Twelve
Red
Chapter Thirteen
Red
Chapter Fourteen
Gabriella
More from Imani King
Copyright
Her Hollywood Hitman
A Dark Romantic Suspense
by
Imani King
© 2015 Imani King
All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locations is purely coincidental. The characters are all productions of the author’s imagination.
Please note that this work is intended only for adults over the age of 18 and all characters represented as 18 or over.
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I was always a good girl. One of the smart ones, one of the pretty ones. The girl who was supposed to have it all.
Inside though, I’ve been craving something different.
As soon as I saw him, I knew. He was a violent man, a paid criminal who worked for my father. And tonight, he was paid to protect me.
I didn’t know that being absorbed into his world would put us both in grave danger. I’d never thought I’d be desperate for a hitman to take me into his arms, but here I am.
And I just might be his redemption.
PROLOGUE
Gabriella
“Gabi! Gabriella! Come on and get ready! We’re going out tonight!” My roommate Madison waltzed into my room, flinging the door open as she came in. I pushed my glasses up my nose and shoved the chemistry textbook under my pillow.
“Uh, I don’t think I can tonight, Maddie.” I looked Maddie up and down. She had somehow managed to get her thick, natural hair to fall in perfect ringlets around her face, and she’d poured her hourglass of a body into a tight, sequined tube dress. “But you look amazing. Seriously. Is Sabrina going with you?”
“Gabi, why can’t you go out?”
“I have a… sore throat. Probably strep. Don’t get any closer. I was, uh, working in the lab with the strep A samples. So it’s probably a super-strain or something.” I coughed dramatically.
“I saw you shove that textbook under your pillow. It’s fine to stay in and study sometimes, but I’m beginning to worry you’ll graduate Berkeley without anything exciting happening to you at all.”
“That’s the plan,” I said. “Medical school, residency, family practice… and that’s it. I’ve had enough exciting to last me a lifetime, really.”
“But Gabs, it’s the night before spring break. Can’t you spare a moment, some time to get your groove on?” Madison shimmied her hips from side to side, stepping toward me to take my hand. I backed up against the wall and shook my head.
“I’ll be getting my groove on enough when I go to L.A. tomorrow. My dad has my schedule planned out for me. I’m supposed to go to three different parties next week to meet with producers and directors I don’t even know.”
“Sounds terrible. Hollywood producers, all trying to get a piece of Art Sanchez’s daughter,” Maddie said, shaking her head. “Might even offer you a movie role.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to go to the damn things. I worry that… maybe I’ll like it too much. Like my mom did.” The words sounded strange. I knew Maddie wouldn’t understand, but I blurted it out anyway. My identity always got confused, mixed up with my mother’s, when I went home. It was like I turned into a different person. And I preferred the unexciting nerd I was at Berkeley.
Maddie’s voice softened. “Why are you going to these things if you don’t even like to go?”
“My dad asked me to do it, Maddie. And my dad’s all I’ve got.” She didn’t understand. How could she? She’d grown up in Oregon; she’d never seen what Los Angeles did to people, didn’t know the evil hiding inside my father.
“Fine then. I’ll get Sabrina and head out. Don’t let anything to exciting happen over break.”
“I’ll try not to,” I said. I pulled the textbook out again as Maddie walked out. I flipped through the pages of the chemistry book, trying to find the page I was on. But the words all seemed to fade away.
What Maddie didn’t know is that I could fall too far in my father’s world. It was easy for me to get lost, to hide from the feelings of grief at those Hollywood parties my dad sent me to. At Berkeley, studying was my safe distraction from the past, from the coldness of my father. In Los Angeles, booze and pills were far too readily available for a girl who’d always needed to escape.
My secret life at home. If only they knew. My sorority sisters wouldn’t know what to do with themselves.
Maddie was all fabulous tonight, getting ready to go out and get tipsy with friends, maybe kiss a boy if she was lucky. In Hollywood, there were darker rabbit holes to fall into, and every time I went home, there was some new disaster. Trouble followed me around every time I went home. And the person I was when I was there terrified me. With every trip, it was like I was closer and closer to becoming my mother, the woman whose body was owned by Hollywood. And like so many women of color, she’d ended up alone, bruised and battered, and dead in the end.
And I wasn’t ever able to say goodbye. Worse yet, I had no idea who had taken away the only person I’d ever loved.
I thought of the clink of glasses, the sounds of dancing and drinking. There was excitement contained in those sounds, but there was something else too.
And it felt like danger.
CHAPTER ONE
Gabriella
There are days that seem like ordinary days at first. Nothing special is planned, and you’re going about everything the same way you always do. You ought to get a warning. A text message like you get when you’re about to get your cell phone bill.
Today, your life is about to change course. Forget what you knew before. You’re about to become a different woman, and all that you feared will come to pass.
Perhaps then you’d be better prepared. But that’s not the way shit happens.
There was no text message or email alert letting me know that I’d meet him that day. That everything in sweet Gabriella Sanchez’s life would start to crumble and come crashing down.
So that day, the day that it all started… well, it started in a pretty ordinary way. Like days do. I woke up, showered, and brushed out my long, dark hair, working coconut oil into the ends. No one gives you a manual on dealing with hybrid Latina-African hair that’s curly in one place and straight in another. Maybe I should have gotten a text message about that too.
Coconut oil. Also, keratin treatments. Plenty of expensive keratin treatments.
Seriously, either one of those messages would have saved me a ton o
f time. And heartache. At twenty years old, I’d figured out enough about my hair to make it passable most of the time. And it looked pretty damn good with my caramel-cocoa porcelain-smooth skin—one of the things I’d inherited from my dangerously beautiful mother.
I sighed and twisted my wet hair into an elaborate bun for the car trip to L.A. I slung enough clothes for the week into my Stella McCartney bag and threw my pre-med text books into my backpack. My dad probably had thirty things planned for me, and none of them would involve studying. I swear, the man had gotten a little too creative about parenting since my mom had died—as if he could distract me with parties and things. It almost hurt to go home from Berkeley, but since he was the man footing my pre-med bill, visiting was a must. Even if I didn’t have anything in common with him anymore, I could act grateful over spring break and attend the parties he wanted me to attend. And maybe next year, he wouldn’t insist on showing me off to each and every director in Hollywood.
“Seems a lot like pimping to me,” I said to myself as I walked out to my car. “Goodbye for now, Berkeley. I’ll see you soon.” The truth was, I didn’t fit in at Berkeley any more than I did in Los Angeles. It was just easier for me to fade into the background and be that quiet girl who never sought out trouble. Hell, hardly anyone asked me about my mother in Northern Cali, and that in itself was a win. Not even my sorority sisters. Interested in my life in Los Angeles? Yes, certainly. Interested in the topic of my dead mom? Absolutely not. I guess they thought it was tacky to ask after a dead Hollywood star.
I hopped into my ridiculous Audi and wound my way home through the blank zone of California that lay between the Bay and the City of Angels — the city of sin and decadence that never truly seemed like home.
In half a day’s time—a heartbreakingly ordinary half-day of driving while drinking Coke Zero and listening to Jill Scott—I was home. When I got out of the car, the hot, dry air hit my skin. I pulled off the cardigan I’d worn in the hazy morning mist of Berkeley.
Here, I’m different. Everything is different.
“No need for that damn sweater here, Gabi,” I said as I popped open my trunk. Before I’d even picked up my laptop bag, one of Dad’s staff appeared and draped every piece of my luggage over his lanky body.
“Anything else, Miss Sanchez?” I looked at his smiling face, stunned. “Name’s Federico,” he said, his smile growing wider. “I’m here to serve, make sure things go smoothly.” Where did he even come from? I shivered. My dad had half the former felons in the county working for him.
“No, nothing else right now.” I watched as the man walked up the path in front of me. He looked back at me with haunted, suspicious eyes. Something about him made my skin crawl. The sprawling stucco mansion with its criminal staff still mystified me. So different from the two-bedroom apartment I’d shared with my mother in Santa Barbara until my fifteenth year. My mother. I stood still for a moment, the California breeze kicking up around me. My grief hit me like a knife, opening the wound again. Yet another thing my father didn’t—couldn’t—understand. I walked up the gray stone path, passing fountains and artificial-looking grass to the great doors leading inside.
“My father is a man of expensive tastes,” I muttered, eyeing the twisted gargoyles and snakes on the door. The man stood in front of me, his hand on the golden-hued knob. He pulled the door open and looked at me with dark, hollow eyes. This man had seen some shit, and it was probably all the various shit my father had gotten him into. That was always the way with his crew.
“Yes, Miss Sanchez,” said the man. “The door is quite a work of art.” I walked past the man and into the cool, dark foyer.
“Just… uh… take that stuff up to one of the guest rooms. Doesn’t matter which one. None of them are really mine.” The man hurried off, apparently unsure how to respond to the young Miss Sanchez. “Better get this over with,” I mumbled, turning down the hall to my dad’s office.
I walked past the platinum albums on the wall and the signed photographs of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. I rolled my eyes. My dad wasn’t nearly as classy as he let on. Annoyed, I threw open his office door without knocking.
“Hey, Dad,” I said, trying to make my voice bright. He was talking to some man, probably another servant, and his voice sounded serious. The man had his back to me, and all I could see was his very expensive suit and the shock his of his wavy red-gold hair.
Probably not half-Mexican or half-Jamaican, I thought. All gold, like the sun.
“Darling… Gabi… I’ve told you to knock before coming into my office.” Dad spoke through gritted teeth, trying to conceal his irritation. His bald head turned the faintest shade of red as he forced a smile.
“Sure, whatever,” I spat. “I’ll go study and… um, I’ll come back later. Your business always takes priority.”
“Don’t worry, Gabriella. No problem.” Dad smiled again, this time more genuine. The golden-haired man stood and turned toward me, his blue eyes locked on mine. “Oh… uh, this is Redmond North, one of my… employees,” he added. “He’s a man of means himself, but let’s just say he enjoys his work.” Dad cackled, and my blood ran cold.
My breath caught in my throat. The man stood nearly a head taller than me, and his body was broad and muscular, in a way that most of the boys I knew at Berkeley were definitely not. His strawberry blond hair highlighted the blond freckles on his chiseled, Roman face. His eyes were the only deviation—steely, cold blue, boring right through me. That cold look made my heart skip a beat, and I almost backed away from him in some primal reaction of fear.
“People call me Red.” He smiled. The smile lit him up, softening the hard lines of his face. He offered his hand and I took it, still unable to respond. The warmth and strength of his touch shot through to my core, my body reaching out to his. The reaction felt entirely against my will, like it was something I had no choice about. They say that you can’t help who you’re attracted to, and you definitely can’t. I could plainly see that he was arrogant, broken, criminal. But when his hand touched mine, that thing that happens between a man and a woman… that urge, the longing for more, for touch and release, the need to join my body with another… it happened. Gooseflesh rose over my skin, and a rush of desire slid through my body. I gulped.
I looked at Red’s face. Even though he was maybe ten years older than I was, his eyes made him seem years beyond his age. His face was a study in hard lines and scars, so tiny that most people wouldn’t notice them. Heat pooled between my legs, like I was being lit on fire from the inside. If I could have stopped it, I would have. But there was no stopping this. It would have been like stopping the tides, or the rush of a summer storm.
Suddenly, I gasped, my hair standing on end. It was him.
This was the man my mother had warned me about years ago.
The man that did my father’s dirty work. His hitman.
Red
“Alright, boss,” I said absently, my consciousness still blurry from Art’s shindig the night before. His daughter was coming into town or something, and the slimy old producer had used her impending arrival as a reason to invite every “up and coming” starlet in Hollywood to his place. The whole thing was a mess of drunken girls, each one skinnier than the last, overly impressed with Art’s suits and his collections of platinum albums and weird expensive samurai shit.
I was always Art’s muscle, and hell, it wasn’t a half-bad job, even knowing what I knew about the nasty old man. I wasn’t doing anything my mother would be proud of, but he was the kind of man who paid a seven-figure salary to keep his Hollywood kingdom rolling. And for that kind of green, I wasn’t one to question his decisions. No matter how illegal, immoral, or disgusting.
“Red, are you listening? You drink too much last night?” Art chuckled and leaned back in his office chair. The sky was stark blue, blurry with Los Angeles heat and haze. But otherwise, there wasn’t a damn cloud to be seen.
“Something like that,” I mumbled, pulling at my tie
. For a strawberry-blond Irish kid from Queens, I stuck out like a sore thumb in L.A. But for some reason, Art’s girls seemed to like me just fine. I’d paid off a couple of them to leave me alone last night, and Art was none the wiser. Hell, I was tempted. But there was the small issue of a guy from the FBI wanting to talk to me. My gut had twisted up in all directions when I met with the fool. I’d never give anything up on Art—he knew too much about me, had access to every single account I had. He’d crush me if he even smelled a wire.
