Betting the Bad Boy

by Sugar Jamison

  “Sometimes I wonder if that was a mistake. Could never seem to get you out of my hair after that.”

  Levi had stuck close to him since he’d gotten out of prison. He could have stayed in Destiny. He was the best liked out of the three of them, but he’d left with Colt the day Duke was sentenced and hadn’t looked back. If nothing else, Levi was loyal to his blood.

  “We should have flown here,” Colt said after a long silence. His brother had barely spoken during the trip, and Duke wondered what was going through his mind as they got closer to home. He must have felt more out of place than any of them in their blue-collar town. It was even harder for him to fit in because he was always ten times smarter than anyone else. “We would have been there by now,” he continued, looking out the window. “I could have chartered a flight within an hour.”

  “It’s a waste of money.” Duke shook his head. “Nothing wrong with driving, Your Highness.”

  “Then you should have taken my SUV.”

  “I’d rather stick a fork in my eye than show up driving that,” Duke shot back. He wouldn’t be caught dead driving in something that came from Europe.

  “I’m going to agree with Colt on this one,” Levi interjected. “His SUV is sick. He’s got TVs in the back and wireless Internet and climate-control seats. Plus it’s a smooth ride with all that German engineering. A man could get some quality sleep in a car like that.”

  “You slept enough,” Duke told him.

  It was then they saw the familiar green sign that told them they were finally home.

  WELCOME TO DESTINY.

  They all fell quiet, and that low anger that’d always seemed to burn inside Duke when he was a kid returned. It wouldn’t be fair to say that he had no happy memories of this place. He did. But the cause of those good memories was the reason he went to prison. Other than that, this place only reminded him of his mother dying and his father walking away from them without looking back.

  They drove through town, noting that nothing had really changed. The place seemed to be stuck in time, stuck in an era that had long since passed. There was still the little market on Main Street. Still the same bar that probably had the same locals on the same stools. Still the same tired-looking diner serving the same dishes they had served for the last fifty years.

  Destiny was a dusty abandoned mining town turned tourist destination that kept most of the local people employed. But the economy had been drying up when he was sent away. People were losing their jobs and leaving the town in droves. The place had been pretty much dead until a casino opened up not far from town, which brought some life back into the community. Duke was almost glad for prison. He didn’t know what kind of life he would have had if he’d stayed here. He had a feeling he would have been stuck. Stuck being trash. Stuck being poor. Stuck in love with the girl who turned out to be the best-worst that had ever happened to him.

  “We’re here.” Duke pulled the car to a stop in front of Lolly’s old ranch-style home. The place had seen better days. The white paint was faded, the porch steps were rotting in places, the lawn needed to be maintained. It just looked sad. Kind of empty. It resembled the way he felt being back here. There were no young men there to make sure that everything around the house was taken care of. Lolly had done it all before they came, but she was younger then. Seeing the house in this kind of shape made him realize that things really do change. Lolly had changed. She was getting older and couldn’t do the things she used to.

  “We’re staying here?” Colt asked him. “There’s a fine hotel at the casino. Hell, there’s a motel in town near the mine.”

  “I lost my virginity in the parking lot there,” Levi said from the backseat. “Good times.”

  “You think you’re too good to stay here?” Duke asked him. Even before any of the shit had gone down with him, Colt was always trying to get out of Destiny. “You always thought you were better than this place.”

  “No, but the rest of the town sure as hell didn’t think we were good enough.”

  Duke nodded. He liked to push Colt’s buttons, but even he couldn’t deny that he was right. “Proved ’em wrong, didn’t we? I’m going to the hospital. ICU has twenty-four-hour visiting.”

  “What? We’ll go with you,” Colt said.

  “No. She’s wants to see each of us alone. I go first. You go tomorrow. Levi goes after you.”

  Come one at a time, she’d ordered. If she didn’t want to see them all together, it must mean … He didn’t want to think about what it meant. There were few people Duke owed anything to, but he owed Lolly. She’d stepped in and raised them even though she hated their father. She paid for clothes and Duke’s first car and the course he took to learn the technical parts of car customization. She was their only family, and he sure as hell wasn’t ready to say good-bye to her.

  “I’ll go first thing in the morning,” Colt said.

  “No, you won’t.” Duke looked at him, still thinking about their aunt. “If you wake her before nine she’ll crack you in the head with whatever is closest.”

  “My head is still sore from the time she got me with that damn ugly cowboy boot.” Levi rubbed his head. “I might have been as sharp as Colt if it weren’t for that.”

  “Go get some rest,” Duke ordered both of them, even though he knew the task was probably going to be impossible. “I’ll be back later.”

  For the first time that night no one argued with him. Colt and Levi stepped out with their overnight bags, and Duke drove off.

  *

  This hospital was one place Duke never wanted to see the inside again. He’d share a cell with a seven-foot-tall 350-pound murderer named Tiny before he willingly went into one. But here he was. The last time he’d been here was when his mother was dying. His father dragged the three of them there to see her hooked up to IVs and beeping machines. She was barely conscious. She didn’t even know they were in the room. She had been too far gone to even say good-bye to her boys. The memory was burned into his mind. Her bald head, dull-gray skin, and unfocused glassy eyes. That was his last memory of her. It was hard to think of her any other way.

  He sure as hell didn’t want to remember Lolly that way. He walked through the lobby and back toward the elevators. There weren’t many people milling around the hospital this time of night, but a nurse in a pink sweater and blue scrubs caught his attention. She was standing at the end of the hallway and he could only see her from the side, but the way she held herself stirred something inside him. She was elegant, even in those baggy scrubs. Her blondish-brown hair was swept up, one piece falling across her cheek. Her chin was delicate. Her nose ever so slightly turned up.

  Any other time, any other day he would have walked past her, not noticed her, thought she was unremarkable. But today as he was waiting for the elevator that was taking too damn long, he studied the woman. She reminded him of his past. Of Grace. He hadn’t seen her since he’d gotten arrested for defending her, the night his life changed forever. Her family had made sure that the daughter of a judge stayed away from the son of the town’s biggest drunk.

  That didn’t stop him from thinking about her, though. He’d thought about her a million times since then. He’d wondered how her life had turned out, who she’d ended up with. Probably married to a lawyer with a bushel of kids. Probably hundreds of miles away from here living the life her well-to-do family wanted her to, the life she was meant to have.

  The nurse looked away from the chart she was staring at and over to him as if she could feel his gaze on her. She froze, her eyes wide and now that he could see her face fully, it was like being zapped back to the time when he was looking at the beautiful girl with huge green eyes who’d loved him despite his rough ways and difficult past. He knew that face too well. Thirteen years and a long prison sentence hadn’t changed the fact that her face was permanently burned into his memory. But it couldn’t be her. Not here. Not back in the town that had ended it all for them. He took a step toward her, but a code blue was called an
d she was gone. Just like she had disappeared into thin air.

  The elevator doors opened then and Duke got on, not sure if he had really seen Grace or if she was a figment of his imagination.

  Chapter 3

  Lolly King was awake even though it was well past midnight. She was sitting up in her hospital bed, engrossed in one of those romance novels with a bare-chested man on the cover. She had a bag of cheese curls in her lap and giant cup of soda sitting on her nightstand. Duke had been expecting the worst. He had been expecting to see a frail, elderly woman barely hanging on to life.

  What he got was the old battle-ax he remembered. His chest loosened slightly. He hadn’t realized that he could barely breathe until that moment.

  “What are you up to, old woman?”

  “Well, well, well,” she said, giving him a once-over. “If it isn’t the original badass come to pay his old aunt a visit. How are you, convict?”

  “I drove ten hours with two pains in the ass to get here. How do you think I am, Lolly?”

  “Still jolly as Santa Claus, I see.” His chest loosened more. Sassy intelligence danced in her eyes. Lolly was the kind of person who seemed to be in on a joke that no one else knew the punch line to. It was something about her that drove him crazy, but he liked it, too.

  “You’re the healthiest-looking sick person I’ve ever seen. What are you playing at?”

  “Excuse me, boy, but do you think I would be in the intensive care unit of this hospital unless I was really sick? This ain’t no hotel. There is no free HBO or vibrating beds, and I don’t appreciate you walking in here and accusing an old, sick woman of playing games.”

  She still had a sharp tongue. He had been a tiny bit afraid of her as a kid. Maybe he still was. But he admired the hell out of her. She had come to see him every week when he was away, without fail. He’d tried to get her to come live in Vegas with the rest of them, but Lolly refused. She’d told him that her place was in her little beauty salon in Destiny.

  “Come here, Duke.” He obeyed her order and took the seat beside the bed. He looked into her face, studying her closely. She was paler than he was used to seeing her. She held her body a little more stiffly. Her eyes weren’t as bright as they were when he was last with her. Maybe she really was sick.

  “What’s wrong, Lolly?”

  “Give me your hand, convict.”

  “You aren’t going to slap my knuckles with a comb, are you?” he asked her as he took her hand. He noticed that it was cold, that her fingers felt bony. “You used to do that when I got fresh with you at the salon.”

  “Only if you put your grubby paws on my stuff.” She looked at him for a long moment. “You’re my favorite, you know.”

  Duke laughed. “I very much doubt that.”

  “Shut up, damn it! I said you’re my favorite and if you call me a liar again, I’ll kick you square in your man parts.”

  “Okay.” He winced, not putting it past her. “Go on.”

  “You’re my favorite. You took care of those boys for a long time after your no-good, deadbeat, dumb-ass father left and before I pulled my head out of my ass and came around. You’re honorable. You always do what’s right, no matter the cost. There are few men in this world that I can say I’m proud to know, and you are one of them.”

  He didn’t know how to respond to that. Lolly wasn’t one for sentimental moments and sweet words. And the fact that she was saying them now really worried him. “What did the doctors tell you?”

  “My kidneys have gone to shit and I have done too much partying and drinking in my day to qualify for new ones. Plus I’m old as hell.”

  “You expect me to believe what some doctors in this little shitty town have to say? We’ll take you to Vegas for a second opinion. In fact, I’ll fly a specialist out here to see you.”

  “Hold up there, big spender. I didn’t ask you to come here so that you can try to save me. I asked you to come here so you could get some peace for yourself.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Grace is back in town.”

  His head spun slightly at the news. His eyes hadn’t deceived him. It was her. That sleepy-looking little nurse in the baggy scrubs was the same girl he had fallen head-over-ass in love with nearly fifteen years ago.

  “She’s a nurse in this hospital?” he asked already knowing the truth.

  “Only part-time, when she needs the cash.”

  “What?” The richest girl in town needed extra cash. “Why?”

  “I don’t know, but you are going to find out and you are going to make peace with that girl.”

  “I don’t need to make peace with her.”

  “She is the reason you went to prison, Duke!”

  “No, the fucking Andersens and her father are the reason I ended up in prison.”

  “We both know that it all had to do with Grace. And we all know that once you got locked up she ran out of here like her hair was on fire.”

  That was true, but he knew her father had a lot to do with her disappearance from town the day after he was arrested. He was mad as hell at her, but he didn’t blame her for what happened. It was his fault, too. His fault for falling in love with the last girl he should have. “That part of my life is over.”

  “It’s not. You still care about what went down here, because if you didn’t you would have come back here. You wouldn’t have spent the last seven years hiding away from the world.”

  “I’m not hiding away. My name is all over auto parts and car shops.”

  “Then why Levi is hosting the show that features all your hard work while you stand in the background?”

  “The TV show was Colt’s idea. I never wanted to be in the spotlight.”

  “No, but I want you to show her who you are now. What you’ve become. I don’t want you hiding from this town. I want you to come back and stick it in their faces and I want to be alive while you do it.”

  “My work speaks for itself. I’ve got nothing to prove.”

  She squeezed his hand. “I’ve never asked for you for a damn thing. Not a penny, not even a birthday card. But now I’m calling in a favor. Now I want you to show that girl, and this town, what kind of man you made yourself into. I want them eating every bad thing they said about you boys. You think you can manage that for me?”

  He exhaled slowly and then nodded. When she put it that way, he really didn’t have any other choice.

  *

  Grace Truman rushed inside her house the next morning and leaned against the door as if to bar anyone else from coming in. Her chest was heaving, her breaths not coming easily. It had been hours since she’d seen him. She was positive that Duke wasn’t after her, but when she saw him, she still felt the urge to flee.

  It had been thirteen years since she had last seen him in person. Thirteen long, hard years for both of them. She was surprised that exchanging just one look with him could cause such a rush of feelings to return to her. She had been brought up to like clean-cut men, to want highly educated ones, with influence and power. Her father had set her up on dates with the young men his friends were related to. The daughter of the judge and granddaughter of a congressman had an image to uphold. Grace wanted to go along with it. She wanted to like those perfectly nice boys her family wanted her to see, but she never felt anything toward them.

  The only man she had ever felt anything for was Duke. He was the poor kid who had spent most of his life living in a trailer on the outskirts of town. Raised wild, her father liked to say. The only thing wild about him was how beautiful he was when he was younger. He was big, brutish even, but he had the most gorgeous, soulful brown eyes and a gaze that shot straight through her every time he looked her way. He had made her heart pump. And seeing him today at thirty-five, seeing that he was bigger, harder looking, and knowing that he’d taken the hand dealt to him and made himself into a man anyone could be proud of made her heart nearly explode out of her chest.

  But he hated her. He never said the words. He didn’t have t
o. His silence said it all. She wanted to blame him for his lack of communication, for the dozens of letters that went unanswered. But she tried to put herself in his shoes. She would have blamed her, too. He may have thrown the brutal punches that landed him in jail. But she was the reason he’d had to. She had gone out with a guy he hated, just to get back at him for breaking her heart. She had gone out with a guy she knew was a little too fast, a little too cocky. A guy who was the exact opposite of the man she fell in love with. Her plan was to make him jealous, but her plan ended up sending him to prison.

  She didn’t know what they would say to each other if they ever did cross paths. She had tried not to think about it. Because it hurt too much. She had been alone for so long, struggling for so long, and she wanted to blame Duke for rejecting her for his own stupid noble reasons. And her father for sending her out of town the day after the fight and trying to force her into a life she didn’t want to live. But blaming them was useless. In the end she had made her own choices. That’s all she had ever wanted to do.

  And when she was alone, in pain and more scared than she had ever been in that hospital in Boston all those years ago, she swore she would never be dependent on another man for as long as she lived.

  She had sworn she would never come back to Destiny.

  But her mother had gotten sick. Her mother who’d loved her but was no match for her bullheaded husband, so Grace had watched helplessly as the two people she loved the most went to battle. Grace had come back to Destiny to be with her in her final days. And it was then Grace made the promise that was probably going to be impossible to keep.

  Take care of your father. Try to love him again. He did what he thought was best for you.

  So she made the move back here, back to the place that held so many hard-to-handle memories, to do what her mother asked.

  But she honestly never thought she would see Duke here. Destiny had never been good to him. This town was the thing that almost broke him. Somehow he had returned and come to the hospital, but it wasn’t because he knew she was there. He was too surprised when he saw her. As if she were a ghost. All night she kept seeing the way he looked as he stepped toward her—almost like he wanted to capture her. It made her wonder if he’d thought of her at all in the past thirteen years.