Shakedown
Page 1
Table of Contents
Shakedown
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Other titles by Lani Lynn Vale
Blurb
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
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Epilogue
Always Someone's Monster
Text copyright ©2021 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 everyone that begged for Bruno’s story.
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 thirty-seven times.
Kendra, Lisa, Laura, Penney, Brandi, Jen, Kathy, Mindy, Barbara & 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
Repeat Offender
Conjugal Visits
Jailbait
Doin’ A Dime
Kitty, Kitty
Gen Pop
Inmate of the Month
Shakedown
Battle Crows MC
Always Someone’s Monster
Make Me Your Villian
Rattle Some Cages
Not a Role Model
Get Tragic
Strange & Unusual
Never Trust the Living
Blurb
Wanted: someone to hand feed me Doritos so my hands don’t get orange. No weirdos.
Belle Pena was an editor. Not a writer.
When her brothers challenge her to create a dating profile, she makes up the most random biography she can think of. She never, not ever, thought she’d find anybody to respond. But she was sorely mistaken.
Sadly, she finds that she has way more interest than she ever could’ve imagined.
But only one profile catches her eye.
Bruno never meant to take the dating app seriously. Being the last single man in his band of misfits, he’s happy being the odd man out. Women spelled trouble, and he had enough trouble in his life to last him through the next decade.
Only his newfound family doesn’t feel the same. One innocent ‘sure’ has the women of the Souls Chapel Revenants MC creating him a dating profile that is too spot on to be comfortable. And just when he decides to delete the app entirely, a particular face catches his eye.
One innocent question of ‘Belle is that you? Do you remember punching me in the throat in high school?’ has him stepping into trouble neck deep, and he doesn’t even realize it until it’s too late.
CHAPTER 1
Pennywise isn’t special. I swallow kids, too.
-Text from Belle to her brothers
BELLE
“You won’t,” Bourne challenged, his eyes gleaming with mischief.
I sighed. “I will.”
“You won’t.” He shook his head. “I know you, Belle. You talk a good game, but you’re weak. You’ll overthink it when you leave, and then you’ll stop yourself before you can fully pull the trigger.”
I sighed. “Fine. I’ll do it before we even leave our parents’ house today. Happy?”
Booth, my other brother, snickered.<
br />
Like a little bitch.
“Yes, I’m happy,” Bourne said. “I have a great life. Meanwhile, you’re practically Old Maid status, and you’re not even trying to get out there and find someone.”
I narrowed my eyes.
“Boys,” my father warned.
But the ‘boys’ didn’t listen.
My oldest brothers, who also happened to be twins, had taken it upon themselves to make my life a living hell recently, and I didn’t know why.
Every time that I came home there were always comments from the peanut gallery about how I’d ‘not gotten out’ or I continuously tried to ‘wiggle out of dates.’
Well, when the dates that I was wiggling out of were duds, I didn’t see the problem.
It wasn’t my fault that I had an IQ of one hundred and forty-three.
I was, by all accounts, a genius.
I wasn’t in the top tier of IQs or anything, but I was definitely better than above average.
Though, my father likes to tell me the only reason I had an IQ of 143 was because I’d ‘gotten bored’ with the line of questioning.
Which, technically, I had.
I’d gotten extremely bored with it, and instead of answering the last few questions, I’d kind of… guessed.
Though, just sayin’, I didn’t need some test to tell me that I was smart.
“Dad,” Booth tried to explain away his ‘teasing’ as he liked to call it. “She literally made her date cry.”
Okay, so I had done that.
But the guy had been so freakin’ full of himself.
“I didn’t make him cry.” I rolled my eyes. “I made him emotional. And it was only because he kept trying to talk about himself, his cat, and his mother. So I told him that the statistics of men finding their soul mates when they lived with their mother was very low.”
“I heard that you told him that men who owned cats generally had an estrogen imbalance.” Booth reached for a roll and buttered it before continuing. “You also told him that using a heated laptop on your thighs all day could cause infertility. And this was after the guy told you how much he wanted kids.”
“He told me that he lived out of his mother’s basement, she cooked and cleaned for him, and he had no reason to leave it.” I paused. “And the laptop thing was serious. It can cause infertility.”
My father started to chuckle. “Just leave her be. The guy sounded like a loser.”
“Last week, she told her date, who also happened to be a man that I set her up with, that fifty percent of all women murdered are offed by their ex-husbands or ex-boyfriends,” Booth added.
“They are,” I said defensively.
“He lost his last wife by murder,” Booth said. “You basically accused him of murdering his own wife.”
I sighed. I had not, but there really was no reason in telling these two jerk-offs anything. They’d think what they wanted.
My phone buzzed, and I thankfully pulled it out of my pocket to read the text that flashed across the screen.
It was a one-word text from my best client.
Hastings: Mayday!
I sighed and replied.
Belle: What’s up?
Hastings: I lost my entire book. It’s just gone. G.O.N.E. Can you send it to me again? I can’t access my email.
I’d do absolutely anything to get out of this particular family dinner.
Belle: Yes. I’ll get it to you as soon as I can get home. You saved me from my brothers. Again.
Hastings: Glad that one of my lowest moments could be beneficial to you.
I kind of felt bad, but kind of didn’t.
She should know better.
You always, always, always used two forms of backup when you were writing.
Always.
Most people found out the hard way, like she was doing now, to do that.
Because usually, when authors were first starting out, they’d think that it could never happen to them.
They would think wrong.
It happened to everyone that ever used a computer eventually.
The only thing was, most people didn’t lose what an author lost—hours and hours of hard work.
“I gotta go,” I said to my dad. “Hastings lost her entire book and she needs me to send it to her again.”
Bourne started to make chicken noises. However, I was able to ignore him.
Mostly.
After giving my dad a kiss on his cheek, and my brothers the finger, I walked outside and headed in the direction of my car.
It was raining, and like always, the two assholes inside had ridden in with each other.
Grinning like the loon I was, I walked over to their left front tire and pulled a set of needle-nose pliers out of my purse.
Removing the valve out of the stem, I watched with glee as the massive truck tire dwindled until the rim was sitting on the concrete.
That’s about when the bottom started to drop out of the sky.
I laughed and started to run to my car, not caring in the least about the rain.
I loved rain.
Even more, I loved when the rain turned into a torrential downpour.
I loved it even more when lightning flashed and thunder rumbled.
It took me ten minutes to drive home, five to get dry, and two to send over Hastings’ file, leaving me with almost an entire night to do what I wanted most: read.
Most people wouldn’t like reading if it was their job, but I loved it.
I loved even more that the book I was reading was about murderers.
Why did I like reading books about murderers? I didn’t know. But I’d always had a bit of a fascination with them.
I was deep into the psyche of the murderer’s mind when I got a text pulling me out of the story.
Bourne: You play dirty. Still, don’t be a little bitch all your life and chicken out of the dating profile. I’m going to bother the hell out of you until you do what I want.
The bad thing was, I knew he would.
Bourne was a stubborn jackass like that.
Even worse, I’d promised him that I would.
Which meant that I owed it to him and myself to keep that promise.
Penas didn’t break promises.
And I’d be damned if I would be the one to start.
So, though I was engrossed in my book, I put it down and pulled up the dating app that my brother had suggested I use.
Then I started to write.
Wanted: Man to feed me Doritos so my fingers don’t get orange. No weirdos.
I highlighted that sentence and sent it to my brothers and their wives in the group chat that I was in with them.
I knew that they’d want to add their input, so I would allow it.
For now.
Too bad I had no idea that by doing so, I’d be giving the longest, weirdest bio for a dating profile ever.
CHAPTER 2
I would call my fashion style: clothes that still fit.
-Bruno to Laric
BRUNO
“Why Farmers Only?” I asked, wincing when I read the website’s name.
“Bruno, you have pigs. You’re a farmer. This is perfect,” Six assured me. “It’ll work out great. You can invite your date out to meet you at your farm. Y’all can go feed all of the animals. Then you can cook her dinner.”
I looked at Six.
“I don’t want to do this,” I told her bluntly.
“If you do this, I’ll never bring up you leaving me behind again,” Six declared.
I stared at her, wondering if her words were true.
I’d do just about anything for her to never bring that up again.
A long time ago, when we were in high school, her father had given me an ultimatum.
Leave Six alone, and never contact her again, or he’d make Six’s life a living hell.
The bad thing was, I knew that he could do it.
So like any dumbass seventeen-year-old, I’d done it.
I’
d left her behind, gone my own way, and had never looked back.
At least, for appearance’s sake anyway, that was what I did.
In reality, I kept an eye on her from a distance, making sure that she was always okay.
At least, until Lynn, the man that might as well be my very own father, had taken a liking to her.
Then Six had come back into my life with a vengeance, and ever since she and Lynn had married, I’d found it almost impossible to get back into her good graces.
Which, might I add, was bullshit.
I’d done it for her.
Sure, once I’d ‘grown up’ I could’ve come back into her life, but who the hell would want an ex-con in their life?
I knew that I wouldn’t want anyone like me in Six’s life.
Hell, it was bad enough that I had to allow her husband, Lynn, to have a part of her life. If anything, Lynn was worse than I was.
But at least he loved her and would protect her.
That was more than I’d done for her.
“That’s not going to matter to him, honey,” Lynn said. “He believes that he deserves your ire, so he won’t care if you stop.”
That was true.
I did deserve her ire.
I’d left her, like she’d said.
Then again, I’d left a lot of people behind in my thirty-two years. Six was just one of many.
“Fine,” she said. “Then just do it because I want you to be happy.”
My eye started to twitch.
“I’m an ex-con, Six,” I said. “No woman’s going to want anything to do with me on Farmers Only. Or any website for that matter.”
Six rolled her eyes. “Bruno, you’re hot, successful, and you’re unattached. Trust me when I say that any woman is going to go for you, ex-con status or not.”
I sighed.
“I shot and killed someone. On purpose. There was no ‘oh, I might or might not have been high on adrenaline because he beat up my sister.’ I shot and killed someone. On. Purpose. People don’t just get over that because I’m hot,” I argued.
“You shot someone because you had to.” She waved my worry away. “And trust me when I say, someone out there will understand.”
Hell, I didn’t even understand.
And I’d been the one to do the shooting.