Wicked Sin
Page 1
Wicked Sin
Ainsley Booth
www.ainsleybooth.com
Contents
About This Book
Also by Ainsley Booth
Foreword
1. Luke
2. Taylor
3. Luke
4. Taylor
5. Luke
6. Taylor
7. Luke
8. Taylor
9. Luke
10. Taylor
11. Luke
12. Taylor
13. Luke
14. Taylor
15. Luke
16. Taylor
17. Luke
18. Taylor
19. Luke
20. Taylor
21. Luke
22. Taylor
23. Luke
24. Taylor
25. Luke
26. Taylor
27. Luke
28. Taylor
29. Luke
30. Taylor
31. Luke
32. Taylor
33. Luke
34. Taylor
35. Luke
36. Taylor
37. Luke
38. Taylor
39. Taylor
40. Luke
41. Taylor
42. Luke
[ Epilogue 1 ]
[ Epilogue 2 ]
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About This Book
Bad girls shouldn’t have to beg to be punished. And once upon a time, Taylor Dashford Reid was very, very bad.
* * *
Detective Luke Vasquez knows better than to get tangled up with a complicated woman—no matter how tempting she might be. But Taylor is in his house now. Living with his rules. Sparring with him, hissing like a frightened kitten. Maybe the rules need to be broken, for both of their sakes.
* * *
This is the complete story of Taylor Dashford Reid and Luke Vasquez. The Forbidden Bodyguard series continues…
* * *
Also in this series:
Hate F*@k (Cole and Hailey)
Booty Call (Ali and Scott)
Dirty Love (Wilson and Tabitha)
Filthy Liar (Jason and Melinda)
Also by Ainsley Booth
the Frisky Beavers series
co-written with Sadie Haller
* * *
Prime Minister
Dr. Bad Boy
Full Mountie
Mr. Hat Trick
Page of Swords
Bull of the Woods
* * *
www.friskybeavers.com
* * *
the Forbidden Bodyguards series
Hate F*@k
Booty Call
Dirty Love
* * *
the Billionaire Secrets series
Personal Delivery
Personal Escort
Personal Disaster
* * *
and coming soon…
the Secrets and Lies series
Stuck
Crave
Shame
* * *
www.ainsleybooth.com
* * *
If you sign up for my VIP reader newsletter, you’ll get an exclusive sneak peek at Stuck, book 1 in my new series!
* * *
SIGN UP HERE:
http://ainsleybooth.com/newsletter/
Dedication
For everyone who sees themselves in Taylor, past or present. None of us get through life without making mistakes.
Foreword
Dear Reader,
* * *
I started writing this series in 2014. Much has changed in the real life world since then. If you read along as I published them, you may be wondering what happened to First Lady, the book I clearly set up in Dirty Love.
Long story short, the fictional world collided with the real world, and it was all too close for comfort.
I took a hiatus from writing this series, trusting that when ready, my muse would tell me which story needed to come next. Wicked Sin was it. This book poured out of me. It’s about redemption and hope. It’s about forgiveness, mostly towards ourselves for the ways we lash out at the world.
One day, I will write First Lady.
But first, we’re going back to the Dashford Reid sisters, and digging in to Taylor’s story, because she needs some love.
Finally, my apologies to all police officers out there. There’s nothing about this story that is realistic or by the book. Where’s the fun in that?
* * *
~ Ainsley
1
Luke
Los Angeles
I like catching a new case. It means I’m going to close it. Win. It gives me a goal, a target. Something to focus on.
Unless it’s the week I’m supposed to go on vacation.
Captain Woods asks me to hang back after the morning briefing—the first sign that my vacation isn’t going to start as planned.
She pulls me into her office and closes the door. The way she takes off her suit jacket, rolls her neck, and grabs a Coke from the mini fridge under her desk all contribute to the pile of evidence that she’s working up to telling me something has come up.
And not a good case, either. Something messy, because she’s working up to it.
She wiggles the cola at me. “You want one?”
“I’m good.”
She nods.
I like the captain. She has nearly twenty-five years on the job, a lot of them when she was the only black woman in her division. Sometimes she’s a little too by-the-book, but that’s true for everyone who gets promoted up.
Not me. I’m going to be promoted out. Transferred. Any day now, which is nothing to do with her and everything to do with my urge to get my hands dirty.
“Detective Vasquez,” she begins, and I cock an eyebrow.
This is formal. I don’t like formal. “Yes, ma’am?”
“How flexible are your vacation plans?”
Completely. I wasn’t going to do much beyond hitting some clubs and blowing off some steam. Sleep in each day and go out for a late lunch. Take a long run on the beach, then rinse and repeat. Something tells me my plans are about to change. “Depends who’s asking, ma’am.”
“We’ve caught a case I think you might be interested in. The feds have requested our assistance.”
“Requested or demanded?” I reach for the file. She doesn’t hand it over right away.
“Semantics. The L.A. field office reported an anonymous tip, which they aren’t taking seriously, except…” She trails off. That’s not a good sign.
“The FBI is asking the LAPD to run down bad leads now?”
“Not the FBI.” I take the file as she sighs. “Secret Service. They want to be hands-off for political reasons. Read the file. The thing is, the timing is funny. Charges were laid this morning in D.C. Her father’s wearing an ankle monitor, her mother is cooperating and has handed over her passport.”
“Her…” I snap my gaze to the label on the file.
Dashford Reid, Taylor.
Son of a— “The Blow Job Princess?”
“Detective.”
“Come on, if Time magazine calls her that—”
“They didn’t.”
“I swear I saw it in a headline.”
“Drudge Report, maybe. You need to upgrade to a better caliber of news media, Vasquez.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I don’t argue. I don’t read trash news, but sometimes the verbiage that starts there makes its way into the common lexicon. I know better.
But how often does an honest-to-god celebrity file land on my desk? Less often than you might think for Los Angeles. Now it’s my turn to sigh.
Ms. Dashford Reid is famously—or infamously�
�known for recording herself giving the Vice President of the United States a sloppy, giggly happy ending, and then leaking that to the press. Years have passed, and the VP in question didn’t run again.
The scandal will forever live on in Wikipedia entry references, I guess. And everyone’s collective memory, because the Dashford Reids don’t do shame. They don’t hide.
Except now that I think about it, I didn’t even know she lived on the west coast.
And the last I remember of her was the last scandal about her family when her sister Hailey was involved in the takedown of Gerome Lively.
Her father’s arrest today made headlines, of course. I saw it while I had my coffee and flipped through the news sites.
But his daughter wasn’t anywhere on the screen in the footage of the comings and goings from lawyers’ offices and courthouses.
None of the Reid daughters were visible. Only the son, who stands to take over the family business if his father goes to jail.
When his father goes to jail. He surrendered to a special prosecutor charged with investigating Russian interference into our—everything, really. Elections, lobbying for industry, lobbying for foreign countries, shaping foreign policy. Shaping domestic policy. You name it, Washington D.C. has Russia smeared all over it.
And it’s Morgan Reid’s third time facing serious charges.
This time, the feds are going to make sure they stick. It doesn’t matter what his top-notch crisis management firms do this time. The man isn’t going to skate.
“So what’s the so-called tip, exactly? Because I just passed my psych eval with flying colors. I’m as good as loaded into the undercover unit. I can’t get tangled up with a long-term case. Might be better off handing it to—”
“This isn’t that.”
I laugh out loud because we both know there’s no way to promise that. I open the file. Address. Workplace.
Workplace? The Blow Job Princess has a job? She doesn’t need to work, surely.
I scan down the cover page. The next two pages are so heavily redacted they’re illegible. Fucking Secret Service. The same name is scrawled at the bottom of each of the pages. Perry Newcomb, Financial Crimes Division. That makes me wonder if this is related to her father’s criminal difficulties after all.
But the fourth page has enough of a communiqué that it becomes clear why they’ve punted this task to the LAPD.
Our princess was a tad hostile with federal agents.
Fantastic.
And according to an anonymous tip—probably a crank call, after her father’s arrest—she had cocaine and meth in her car.
“Drugs? Do they think she’s dealing?”
“That would seem to be the angle.”
“She’s loaded. Why’d she be dealing? One call to Daddy—”
“I get it. It doesn’t smell right.”
I flip back to the cover page, looking for something that twigged in my mind. Her job. She’s working with a local non-profit for survivors of sexual violence, L.A.S.T. It took a minute for that to register, but it’s an odd choice for someone who—
The captain chuckles at me, and I glance up. Past the nameplate on her desk—Captain Deandra Woods—to her knowing gaze.
“What?”
“You’re struggling with this one. It’s all over your face.”
I frown. “She’s a contradiction, that’s all. Hard to make sense of her.”
My boss gives me a serene look and nods. “Aren’t we all, Vasquez?”
I walked right into that life lesson like a pro. “Yes, ma’am.”
“You want to go undercover, you need to stop fitting people into boxes. That’s not how life works. Sometimes people make choices for reasons we don’t understand, but they always have a reason.”
Yeah. And my task for the next few days—hopefully just the next few hours—is to figure out the right angle to not turn a nothing crank complaint into a big-fucking-deal investigation when the Blow Job Princess has proven she couldn’t care less about destroying someone’s reputation.
I’m going to have to make her trust me when she doesn’t trust anyone in a uniform. Maybe anyone with a dick, for all I know.
“Go talk to her. With an open mind,” the captain says, again reminding me not to pre-judge this situation. Whatever the fuck it is.
“You think this is a false report?”
“Almost certainly. Why report drugs to the Secret Service?”
I crack my jaw back and forth. Right. Fuck. This could get sticky at the highest levels.
“So, I need to do due diligence, but also make this go away if at all possible?”
“Something like that. I didn’t ask any questions. I thought I’d leave that to you to figure out after you talk to her and get a sense of the situation.”
“This is highly irregular.”
Her brows pull together in a tight frown. “Sure is.”
“I don’t understand why the feds are okay with us messing in their sandbox.”
“Gives them plausible deniability.”
I groan. Right. “If this turns into a PR nightmare, we’ll wear that, not them.”
“Try not to turn it into a PR nightmare, then.” She smiles. “Play nice with the woman.”
“Of course.” I wink. “And I’ll get my vacation after this? Maybe a few extra days for the trouble?”
“Don’t push your luck.”
I smirk. “You can come dancing too, Captain.”
She grins. “Get out of my office.”
2
Taylor
“I should have known,” my client says. Four soft, broken words.
First rule of peer counseling—it’s not about me. Curiosity and comparison have no place in the kind of support we offer. We offer the kind of support survivors of sexual violence have trouble finding anywhere else.
But deep in the back of my mind, the comparison whirls anyway.
I know how you feel, I want to say. I don’t. Of course, I don’t. Just like nobody can truly know how I feel about how I was raised.
I was twenty-seven when I realized I’d been groomed by my mother to use sex and beauty to control men. That in the process, she’d let men use me, long before I could consent.
It took me another year—three hundred and sixty-five days—to do anything about that.
Another three to get to this side of the counseling table, here in this cozy, warm space in a security-monitored building on the other side of the continent from my family.
It took me way too long to figure out how to be good.
Deep down, I know I have nothing to be proud of.
So I push away the thoughts of myself—don’t intrude now, don’t ever intrude here, I’m trying to be fucking helpful—and lean in.
“We are the hardest on ourselves,” I murmur to my peer counseling client. Easy to say. Not easy to do anything about.
“I just…” The woman sitting across from me sobs and wraps her arms tight around herself.
“You took a big step by coming here and talking to me.” I scribble that on the pad of paper between us. The first point on a tangible list of successes I want her to look at over the next week until session number two. “What else are you proud of?”
“Boundaries,” she mumbles.
Maintained healthy boundaries, I add to the list. “Great.”
It takes twenty minutes to get two more things jotted down, but when she leaves, she’s clutching the list tight in her hands, and I’ve done my job for another day.
I put my notes in her folder, and then lock that away in my filing cabinet.
Then I sit back down in my chair and close my eyes. I share this office with two other peer counselors, and one of them will be coming in shortly. But I have a few minutes to myself. I’m going to take them.
Deep breaths. In and out. Focus on the now. That was a good day. It was. There’s something calming about coming in for a shift here. I turn my phone off when I arrive, and the outside world fades away.<
br />
Nothing but healing. Nothing but service.
It comes with a price. I’ll be exhausted and need to have a nap when I get home. But later…maybe later I’ll go dancing.
I need to cut loose.
I’m wound tight, tighter than usual. There’s a faint, nervous tremor in my belly and my chest, and it won’t go away. I don’t believe in full moon stuff, but there’s something in the air today, and it’s not good.
Taking one last long, slow breath, I open my eyes and stand up. Time to go outside. Head home and figure out how to bring some of this calm with me.
Three days until my next shift.
It’s not healthy to need this job to be mentally stable. Nope. But that’s how it is, anyway.
I grab my bag, put on my sunglasses, and lock up. In the anteroom, one of our volunteers is staffing the front desk. She points to the video monitor we have that shows a live feed of the front door of the building.