The Bastard

by Julie Kriss

  The Bastard

  King Family, Book Three

  Julie Kriss

  Copyright © 2018 by Julie Kriss

  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 written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  The King Family Series

  The Tycoon by M. O’Keefe (Book One)

  The Bodyguard by S. Doyle (Book Two)

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  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  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

  A Note from the authors

  Also by Julie Kriss

  1

  DYLAN

  When it rained in Brujas, Panama, it got harder to throw the drunks out. On a clear night I could toss a drunk man out of the Yaviza Bar and he’d sleep it off on the beach, listening to the water. But when it rained—thick sheets of rain, hot and heavy and nearly black—they’d fight me. They’d throw punches, or curse my mother, or—if truly shit-faced—cry. It wasn’t a fun job on the best of days, but in the rain it truly sucked.

  There was only one drunk I’d thrown out tonight: a man who made an ass of himself in here at least once a week. There weren’t many others in the bar this evening, and it was relatively empty. I walked back to the bar, listening to the rain pounding on the roof, and took a seat on a stool. The bartender, a black-haired woman named Maqui, poured a shot of tequila and put it in front of me.

  I wasn’t the official bouncer at the Yaviza. That is, I wasn’t on the payroll. But I was strong, I’d been in the military, and when I came here to drink I sometimes made myself useful. I got free drinks in return, along with the gratitude of the owner, the occasional offer from Maqui, and a room in the back to sleep it off on the nights I’d had too much. I could throw out the other drunks, but there was no one big enough—or dumb enough—to throw me.

  I downed the shot and put the empty glass on the bar. I wasn’t drunk yet, but I intended to get there. When it rained like this, the sound always kept me awake no matter where I went. The only way I’d sleep in this rain was if I drank myself into it.

  What’s your problem, King? Life is supposed to be perfect.

  I looked around. The place was dim; with the excitement over, the remaining customers were nearly dozing off in their chairs in the steamy heat. Maqui took a rag to the bar in silence. There was nothing going on tonight. Nothing going on any night, if I was being honest. I’d left Special Ops five months ago, burned out and pushed beyond the limit of exhaustion. I didn’t want to work another day, see another death. I’d packaged out, packed my single bag, and gotten on the first airplane that was taking off.

  And I’d ended up here. It was supposed to be retirement in paradise, a carefree life, for once, that cost a few dollars a day. I was supposed to put my feet up, sleep with all of the local women, and drink. I’d thought I’d be relaxed for the first time in my life, finally, at age thirty-one after serving my country since I was a teenager.

  I hadn’t thought that I’d be…bored. Restless. Ready for something, anything, to happen.

  That was the problem with living on the edge: it was hard to back away from it.

  I signaled Maqui for another shot—she smiled at me, but I shook my head—and took the glass from her. The free drinks weren’t really that big a deal to me, since the average drink in Brujas cost a dollar and you could eat dinner for less. The rent on my apartment cost a whopping ninety-six dollars a month, and that was for the unit that didn’t have cockroaches. Not that it made a difference, since down here the cockroaches flew and banged against my windows. Another way to guarantee I’d never sleep.

  I could always go back to the States. I could leave this hot, steamy jungle hole and take myself back to New York or San Francisco or LA, even Texas, to The King’s Land ranch—my father’s legacy.

  Hank King had been a CEO and a real estate baron and a lot of other things, most of which made him obscenely rich. I was his son, but I was a bastard. My mother had been one of King’s strings of mistresses. She’d thought she had a golden ticket when she got pregnant. Instead, Hank had dumped my mother, but he’d given me his last name on the birth certificate.

  My mother had been bitter. When things didn’t work out the way she wanted, she’d kept me from Hank and wouldn’t give him visitation rights. Hank retaliated with lawyers; Mom retaliated by marrying a different rich man when I was two and hiring lawyers of her own. By the time I was a teenager, I was so sick of both of them and the never-ending war that was my home life, that I’d enlisted in the military and left the country.

  I moved up the ranks to Special Ops. The work was hard and exhausting, and I’d felt like a shell of a human being by the end, but it kept me out of the States and away from the clutches of both my mother and my father.

  Then my father had died. I hadn’t gone to the funeral, hadn’t answered any of his lawyer’s emails about the will. I had told my sister Veronica that there was no way in hell I was coming home for the funeral. Then I’d deleted my Hotmail address, quit SpecOps, and come to Panama. It was dull, but no one here knew I was a King. They only knew I was American, I’d been military, I liked tequila, and I could throw a man out the door.

  Works for me, I told myself. Or at least, I’d thought it would.

  Sweat trickled down my temples and made my T-shirt stick to my back. I scrubbed a hand through my hair and watched as Maqui reached up and turned on the boxy old television above the bar. Her shirt rode up as she turned the knob and one of the other guys at the bar whistled, but I looked at him and he stopped. Maqui and I weren’t a steady thing, but I didn’t let anyone hassle her. I knew she lived in a tiny place ten blocks away, where her mother looked after her four-year-old son while she worked. I knew she sometimes liked a no-strings fuck just like I did, and that her life was too complicated for more. Assholes at the bar were the last thing she needed.

  The TV blared to life. A baseball game came on, the announcers speaking in Spanish. Maqui clicked the antique remote control and the image flipped to a soap opera, a woman weeping with smeared mascara as she shouted at a man who was leaving and slamming the door. Maqui rolled her eyes and clicked the remote again.

  “—kidnapping of heiress Sabrina King—”

  Maqui hit the button and the image flipped to two puppets dancing on the screen, singing in Spanish.

  “Maqui,” I said, my voice sharper than I intended. “Go back.”

  She looked at me, blinking her long dark lashes. I’d spoken in English, which I didn’t usually do with her. Her English wasn’t great, but it was good enough, and she caught my drift. She hit the button.

  “—not clear if ransom is a motive. What we do know is that the high-profile reality star was taken from her home during an engagement party thrown for her sister—”

  “Hey!” one of the men across the bar shouted in Spanish. “Put the baseball game back on again! I don’t want to see this sh
it!”

  I barely heard him. I was leaning back on my stool, my attention glued to the crappy TV screen. A female newscaster was speaking in front of a photograph of a gorgeous young woman, her dark hair cascading around her shoulders, her makeup perfect, pink gloss on her smiling lips. She seemed to be wearing a dress made of a few knots of material and not much else. She looked like a spoiled socialite, but she didn’t have a socialite’s blank, polite expression. Instead, she looked like the kind of girl who could tell you a rude joke and cuss you out. The picture had caught her on the edge of a laugh, as if the photographer had said something funny.

  I knew that face. I knew that laugh.

  Jesus. Sabrina King. My half sister.

  I had three half sisters. Ronnie and Bea were from one of Hank’s wives. Sabrina was from yet another mistress, one he’d married after Ronnie and Bea’s mother died. Hank had been a real class act, and he didn’t always use protection.

  “—disappeared from her sister’s engagement party at the Texas ranch that had belonged to her late father, real estate tycoon Hank King. There were reports last month that Sabrina King ended her reality show, Cowboy Princess, and left Los Angeles due to threats from a stalker.”

  Someone had taken Sabrina. My littlest half sister, the one who had been sweet and overweight as a kid, then had grown into a sexy, gorgeous TV star. The half sister my military brothers teased me about relentlessly. Hell, that’s your sister? Hot damn. Can you get me her number or what?

  But we weren’t close. I’d been shit to my sisters, and it wasn’t their fault. Ronnie was the dutiful one, sending me updates and big news when it happened, even though my replies were always one sentence, usually sent from an ancient laptop in a barracks in a godforsaken desert somewhere while the Wi-Fi cut in and out and the guy behind me told me to hurry the fuck up. Bea was trouble, and she wasn’t interested in me, so I never heard from her at all. But Sabrina was the sister who could have maybe used a big brother. A real one.

  “Hey!” the man shouted again. “Turn the channel!”

  “Yeah,” his companion added, also in Spanish. “No one cares about this stupid American TV star. Put the baseball back on!”

  I glanced at Maqui. She was watching me, her expression unreadable. Someone took Sabrina. I was seeing red, and my entire world was fucking rocked—but none of these people knew it because they didn’t know who I was.

  Don’t let on, idiot. Keep it together. I nodded at Maqui, a little stiffly maybe. “It’s okay,” I said, in English again. “Change the channel.”

  She frowned and turned back to the TV. She switched back to the baseball game, and the other men at the bar muttered happily, then began commenting on the game. No one paid any attention to me, which was what I wanted. I pushed my stool back and stood.

  Maqui glanced at me. “Another?” she asked.

  I shook my head. My urge to get drunk was gone. Sabrina had been abducted straight from the goddamned ranch, where she should have been secure. Where the hell was her security detail? What about the cameras and the electronic alarms? Had she taken any personal belongings? Had they seen anyone strange hanging around the ranch lately?

  The questions tumbled through my mind, each on the heels of the other. Because I’d had a specialty in Special Ops: kidnappings. The high-profile ones that came with ransom demands. I was skilled in getting people out of those situations—without bloodshed, if possible, but if it wasn’t possible—well, I had training and skills, and I knew how to use them.

  Skills I could use to find Sabrina right now, if I was in the middle of the action instead of sitting in this hellhole.

  I had to get out of here, now.

  I’d been here for months, but it would take me fifteen minutes at most to clear out. Pack my single bag, leave a note in Spanish for my landlord along with a few dollars. There was no one here to even say goodbye to.

  It was seven hours’ drive to the nearest airport, over roads that were sketchy at best. The rain wouldn’t help. Still, I’d get there as fast as I could. If I wasn’t already too late and Sabrina wasn’t already dead.

  If I wanted excitement, it looked like I was about to get it.

  I turned to the door and glanced at Maqui one last time, to say something—what, I had no idea. Not goodbye, because we’d never been anything to each other in the first place except a few casual fucks. We had always been clear on that. But she was still watching me, and her expression had gone stony.

  “She is very pretty, yes?” she said to me in English.

  Sabrina. She was talking about Sabrina. “It isn’t what you think,” I said.

  Maqui shrugged, her expression still hard. Whether she followed what I’d said, or simply didn’t care, I couldn’t tell. “You know this pretty girl, Sabrina King,” she said. “You’re leaving for her.”

  The men who came to the Yaviza Bar liked to make passes at Maqui. They all wanted to get into her bed. I was the only man she’d said yes to—in fact, it had been her idea. She had made me an offer one night, and I hadn’t said no. It was an offer she hadn’t made anyone else since her child’s father left.

  If she was attached, then that was too bad, because whatever we had was done. But she had the wrong idea about why.

  I hesitated, the words on the tip of my tongue: she’s my sister. But the King family was too famous, too prominent, and far too rich. It would be all over town in seconds. I couldn’t admit to her that I was one of them. The instinct, even after all these years, was always to protect the family. The name. The privacy. At any cost.

  So I settled for an explanation that wasn’t one. “She isn’t mine.”

  Maqui picked up a glass from the bar and turned away. “Goodbye, Dylan.”

  Well, I fucked that up. I should have played it differently, somehow, though I was damned if I could see how. In the meantime, someone could be hurting Sabrina with every second that passed. I turned and walked out the door.

  It was time to go home after all these years. Time to be useful for the first time in forever. Time to be, however reluctantly, a King.

  I was going back. And there was nothing anyone could do to stop me.

  2

  MADISON

  “You have got to be kidding me,” I said into the phone.

  The woman ahead of me in the Starbucks line glanced back over her shoulder, giving me a glare. I pushed my sunglasses up onto my head and glared back.

  “I’m not kidding,” said my investigator, Max, on the other end of the line. “My source in Brujas says Dylan King has left town. Apparently he saw something on the news about Sabrina’s kidnapping and he walked out the door.”

  “Right,” I said. “And who exactly is your source in that backwater place?”

  “Maddy, you know that’s confidential.”

  “Which means it’s a woman,” I said. “Is she pretty, at least?”

  “What do you care? The information is good.”

  “Shit.” I had only landed in LA a few hours ago. I’d flown to Texas for Ronnie King and Clayton Rorick’s engagement party—at which Ronnie’s sister Sabrina had been kidnapped by a crazy stalker. Sabrina had been tracked down pretty quickly by Garrett Pine, who was the sheriff and Sabrina’s maybe-boyfriend, and she hadn’t been seriously hurt, but it had been a crazy night all the same. I’d spent part of the next day helping deal with the press and the local cops, and then I’d flown back to California. As a partner at my firm I couldn’t stay in Texas, kidnapping or no kidnapping.

  So with Sabrina safe and everything on the mend, I’d come back to LA. But I was exhausted. I needed caffeine more than anything, and then I needed to get to work. And this line wasn’t moving.

  “I take it Dylan doesn’t know Sabrina is safe,” I said to Max.

  “Probably not,” he replied. “That news report that leaked out before Sabrina was found went viral. There was an update by this morning, but if Dylan was already on the road, he wouldn’t have seen it.”

  “Do we know fo
r sure that he’s coming back for her, and he isn’t headed somewhere else?”

  “Since he bought a ticket for a flight to Dallas that took off ten minutes ago, my guess is yes, we’re sure,” Max said.

  Damn, he really was a good investigator, even though he was pushing seventy. Worth every penny. I tapped my spiked heel, thinking. If Dylan was coming back, this was big news for the King family—my clients. Very, very big. “What else do we know?”

  “He paid for the ticket with cash and he didn’t check a bag.”

  Which meant that either Dylan didn’t think he’d be in the States long, or he didn’t have any belongings to pack. My guess was option two.

  Dylan King had spent his adult life in military barracks or on assignment. He’d quit Special Ops over five months ago, but he was still living out of a bag. A fact I knew because of Max and his informant, whoever she was.

  “It makes no sense,” I said to Max as the Starbucks line moved up a painfully slow step. “After all these years, he thinks he’s going to suddenly play hero?”

  “He doesn’t have to play hero at all,” Max pointed out. “Twelve years in Special Ops makes him bona fide. As for why he’s coming now, we know he specialized in kidnapping cases. Maybe he feels he can help out.”

  “And he’s going to find out it’s already over.” The woman ahead in line glared at me again, and I moved the phone away from my mouth. “It’s business, bitch,” I told her. “Deal with it.”

  “Asshole,” she said, and my respect for her actually went up a notch. At least she wasn’t a pushover.