The Bastard

by Julie Kriss

  She caught sight of me from the corner of her eye and turned my way. She was obviously expecting my return, which was why she hadn’t left. I strode toward her, and I was sure I looked dangerous, but the only sign she’d noticed was a brief widening of her chocolate-brown eyes. “I have to go,” she said into the phone and hung up.

  “No flight, huh?” I said when I got close.

  “I warned you,” she said. “Honestly, Mr. King, if you hadn’t deleted your email address, or if anyone had the number to that phone you’re carrying, I wouldn’t have to resort to these measures. Next time you should listen to me.”

  “Or maybe you should listen to me.” I kept coming, closer and closer, until I was in her space. “I don’t know what you’re up to, but I don’t like anyone interfering with my plans.”

  I’d interrogated terrorists who looked at least a little bit disconcerted when I talked like this, but Madison White’s only sign of weakness was that she licked her glossy bottom lip. “Your plans to go back to Dusty Creek, Texas?” she asked. “What were you going to do there now that you’re not needed? Go sit at The Bar and guzzle Southern Star?”

  So she’d been to Dusty Creek. She’d talked to my sisters. She’d been to The King’s Land, the estate I hadn’t visited in years. In fact, if I somehow got on my flight, did the drive from Dallas, and got to The King’s Land, I wasn’t even sure anyone would let me in. And I sure as hell didn’t have a key.

  I couldn’t let on that she was even a little bit right, so I said, “What do you want with me?”

  She sighed, as if I was the one trying her patience. “I told you, we have to talk. There are things you need to know about the will. About your sisters and the rest of the family. You would know this if you’d responded to my email with something other than the F-word. Or if you’d responded at all to the registered letter I sent to your unit, which was your last known address.”

  I shook my head. My commanding officer had forwarded that letter on, and I’d thrown it away unopened. The one from Clayton Rorick, though—that one I’d opened. “I don’t want any of Hank’s money.”

  “If it was just about money, do you think I’d go to all this trouble?” For the first time her voice sharpened, and I caught a glimpse of the feisty bitch she probably was in the courtroom. It really, really shouldn’t have turned me on. Damn it. “Listen to me, Dylan King. No one has been able to drag you out of the jungle. No one. I’ve been waiting for you to come back to the States ever since your father died, and not because I need something to fill my time. I canceled your flight. I came all the way to LAX. I paid money for a ticket I’m not going to use. I’m standing in this depressing terminal in my six-hundred-dollar heels, and it isn’t because I need a hobby. Get it through your self-obsessed head. This is fucking important.”

  I felt my eyebrows go up. I should have been pissed off. Instead, my blood got a little hotter.

  It turned out I had a type, after all.

  “You terrify a lot of men with speeches like that?” I asked her, challenging her. “Make their balls shrivel up?”

  “All the time,” she said, her gaze never wavering from mine. “And if they don’t shrivel, I bust them. It’s what I do.”

  “You gonna bust mine?”

  “If I have to.”

  My balls had other ideas when it came to her, but I shut them up for once. Right now I looked like I’d rolled out of the garbage pit behind the Yaviza Bar, and I probably smelled like it, too. I had known a lot of women, and I knew when a woman wasn’t going to sleep with me. The way I looked and smelled right now, this woman wouldn’t touch me with a ten-foot pole.

  But there had been that zing of energy when she’d touched me. I was familiar with that, too, though I’d never felt it nearly so strong.

  Maybe getting my balls busted by Madison White wouldn’t be so bad.

  Aside from the long shot of getting her into bed, Madison interested me. She was a woman who had guts and obvious brains. When was the last time I’d had a woman challenge me? I couldn’t even remember. It had been a very, very long time.

  And I couldn’t get to know her better if I was on a lonely flight to Dallas, with nothing at the other end.

  “All right,” I said, shouldering my bag. “You win. I’m all yours.” She blinked, and for a second I thought her pupils went wide, but maybe I imagined it. I still gave her a grin. “Do with me what you will, Madison White. Lead the way.”

  4

  MADISON

  It worked.

  I mean, of course it worked—I’d backed Dylan King into a corner with nowhere else to go. But still, with a man like Dylan, you never quite knew what he was going to do. He’d been in Special Ops, dealing with some of the most dangerous and violent people on the planet. He had skills that would probably give me nightmares. Corralling him at LAX with a canceled flight was a little bit like corralling a tiger and hoping it started to purr instead of ripping your throat out.

  But my tiger followed silently at my heels as I led him out of the terminal and to the garage where I’d parked my car. He didn’t walk next to me and he didn’t try to lead. He didn’t argue and he’d stopped protesting. It was, in an unsettling way, exactly like leading a tiger on a leash, listening to the soft pads of its huge paws as it walked behind you.

  It gave me chills up my spine. And beneath my expensive dress, it turned me on.

  Don’t be an idiot, Maddy.

  I would not be sleeping with Dylan King. That was a given. The reasons were many. I never slept with clients; I never slept with men I couldn’t control. I didn’t have sex very often, and I didn’t do relationships. I wasn’t some sappy girl waiting for her white lace wedding day. I already knew that happy-ever-afters didn’t exist.

  I knew that people saw me as cold, and maybe they were right, but the truth was I liked orgasms. A lot. It was just that I had my hand and a careful selection of vibrators, and I could have as many orgasms as I wanted without all of the pesky interpersonal stuff or the risky body fluids. Frankly, it worked for me.

  “Where are we going, by the way?” Dylan asked behind my shoulder. “In case you were willing to tell me.” The drawl of his voice worked slowly and warmly up my spine. I hated to admit it, but his voice alone was better than the most expensive vibrator in my secret drawer. Damn it. Now I had a voice to go with the photos I’d been looking at for years. I practically had to press my knees together.

  “The Hexagon Hotel,” I answered him, pressing my key fob and clicking open my Porsche. “I booked you a suite there.”

  “That’s awfully nice of you, considering you had no idea I’d actually use it.”

  “I had a hunch,” I said, opening the driver’s door and getting behind the wheel.

  Dylan got in the passenger side, putting his single bag on his lap. He should have looked entirely out of place, a vagrant straight from the jungle on my expensive leather seats, but he didn’t look out of place at all. Dylan King looked in command of every situation, even when he was being driven around LA in a car that practically made him fold his legs to his chin. Instead of looking ridiculous, he looked like he could take out a hostage situation with his pinky finger. I pointedly ignored how hot he was and started the car.

  “The Hexagon is expensive,” Dylan said as we pulled out of the lot. “Why do I get the feeling you’re not being generous?”

  “Because I’m not,” I told him, putting on my sunglasses. “The suite is billed back to the King estate. So, in fact, you’re paying every penny.”

  “My sisters are, you mean,” he said, looking out the window at the freeway going by.

  “That’s one of the things we need to talk about.”

  “So talk,” he said.

  “I’ll wait until we’re at the hotel.” I’d had these conversations before, and it wasn’t best to do them while I was trying to concentrate on highway traffic. “Tell me about what you’ve been doing since you left the military.”

  There was a pause, long e
nough for him to let me know he was choosing to go along with the change of topic, for whatever reasons of his own. “Do you care?” he asked.

  He had no idea how much I cared about the details of his life. How many of them I knew. “Your father always wanted you to come back and take over the business. He could never figure out why you didn’t.”

  “Maybe it was because he was here,” Dylan said. “The entire country wasn’t big enough to hold me and him and my mother, as far as I’m concerned.”

  I could understand that. Dylan’s mother was one of Hank’s five-minute mistresses, and by the time their affair was done, she and Hank had hated each other. There had been a bitter custody battle when Dylan was young. He’d probably had more than enough of both of them.

  I knew what it felt like to want more than a continent between you and your parents. But that was my business.

  “Even after Hank died, you stayed away,” I said. “Why? What was so great about Panama?”

  He didn’t catch the subtext of my question: Who was she?

  “I was taking a vacation,” Dylan said. “It was pretty fucking relaxing. You should try it sometime.”

  He hadn’t looked relaxed in any of the pictures I’d seen. He’d looked debauched, sure, but he’d also looked coiled with tension. Then again, in every photo I had of him, that was how Dylan King always looked. It was how he looked now.

  Still, I couldn’t exactly tell him I didn’t believe him because of my file of photos, could I?

  “It must have been a nice vacation after all those years in the military,” I said.

  Dylan replied by changing the subject. “How did you come to work for my father?”

  That was easy. “He was a client of my boss, Jack Stoneman,” I said. “Jack was his lawyer for years.”

  “And he isn’t your boss anymore?”

  “Jack is dead, actually,” I said. “By the time he died, I was close to becoming partner in the firm. He passed the King file to me and made me partner before his last illness. Hank took to me and didn’t fire the firm, so I’ve worked the file ever since.”

  “So Jack Stoneman and then my father,” Dylan observed. “You seem to have a way with powerful old men.”

  My defenses went up and my back went tight. I glared at him. “Is that an insinuation?”

  He gave me half a grin. “No, it isn’t. I don’t think you slept your way to the top. Though if you did, it isn’t my business. I’m just saying that powerful assholes don’t intimidate you.”

  “How did you know Jack was an asshole?” Hank was a given.

  “All rich, powerful men are assholes. That’s how they stay rich and powerful.”

  I turned back to the road. For a second I couldn’t say anything. How many times in my career had I been accused of fucking my bosses, my clients? Too many, either in outright digs or murmured accusations. The jokes behind my back were probably even worse. No one could believe that I was good at my job. It was true, I had a way of handling powerful men like Jack and Hank—I knew how to look them in the eye and give as good as I got, just like a man would. It made them respect me. The fact that I was good-looking and liked to dress to show off my assets made everyone think they knew things they didn’t.

  But Dylan didn’t think like everyone else. I’d met him half an hour ago, and he’d figured me out right away.

  “I wasn’t,” I told him. “Sleeping with them, that is.” Shit, I could kick myself. I didn’t need to explain myself to Dylan King, or to anyone. “I got where I am because I’m an excellent lawyer. No other reason.”

  Dylan shook his head. “My commanding officer in SO was a fifty-year-old man who had done six tours of duty,” he said. “He had burn scars on his arms he didn’t talk about. He was two hundred and fifty pounds of pure muscle. He could make new recruits cry. I’ve seen him stay awake for forty-eight straight hours. And you somehow got me into this car faster than he could have. If he’d waylaid me at the airport, we’d still be arguing.”

  I tried not to feel flattered, even though I was. “Simple,” I said. “You agreed because you want to have sex with me, and part of you thinks that by agreeing you’re improving your chances.”

  That made him laugh, which sent a shiver down my spine. “So you’re not above using sex to get what you want.”

  “The promise of sex. Not the delivery of it.”

  “Duly noted.”

  “I mean it,” I said, gripping the wheel and hoping I sounded icy cool. “I suppose we should clear the air right away. I won’t sleep with you. I don’t mix sex with business. Even if I wanted to, which in this case, I do not.”

  Liar, liar, I thought.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll make a note.” He didn’t sound angry. He didn’t even sound concerned. He just looked out the window again. Something told me this wasn’t over.

  Something told me it was only beginning.

  5

  DYLAN

  I hadn’t been to the Hexagon before, but everyone knew the name. It was one of those hotels where you could see an A-list movie star sitting in one of the lounges, being interviewed for Rolling Stone. They’d keep talking and you’d just walk on by, because at the Hexagon that wasn’t an unusual occurrence.

  It worked for me. Celebrities bored me stupid, and I hadn’t seen a movie in years. The desk clerk only gave me a slightly surprised look, taking in my less-than-formal attire as I checked in. At first I assumed he didn’t question me because I was with Madison. Then I realized that even as I was, I was probably dressed better than Johnny Depp after a bender.

  Madison hadn’t lied—she’d booked a penthouse suite. It was huge, it was immaculate, it was quiet, and it probably cost someone’s salary, but at the moment I didn’t care. The minute I was through the door I kicked off my shoes and pulled my T-shirt over my head.

  “What are you doing?” Madison asked, alarmed.

  “Taking a shower,” I said, my hands dropping to my belt buckle.

  She pointed to herself with one manicured nail. “I’m standing right here.”

  “So leave,” I said, hooking my thumb over the waist of my jeans and boxer briefs and pushing it all down. “I’m not waiting.”

  “Jesus.” She whirled, putting her back to me so fast it made her hair swirl. “What did I just tell you about sex and business?”

  “This isn’t sex, it’s nudity,” I said. “Nudity is our natural state, Maddy. You were born that way. I assume you were born, and not created by Zeus on a particularly bad day.”

  “Bite me,” she said, her composure returned. “Don’t call me Maddy. And go take a shower. You reek.”

  I padded away from her turned back and headed for the shower. I really was rank. “Feel free to search my things,” I said over my shoulder. “You’ll probably find it interesting.”

  I took more time than my usual thirty seconds in the shower, scrubbing myself clean. It felt good to wash the jungle off me. The old injury in my right shoulder was acting up, sending pain down the center of my back. My right knee was aching, and the scar tissue on the side of my neck felt tight. At thirty-one, I felt the effects of the road I’d been traveling. My left middle finger didn’t sit straight—it had been broken twice—and my head throbbed with exhaustion, but otherwise I was in one piece. I’d survived twelve years in SpecOps without losing a body part or losing my life. I called that a goddamned achievement.

  After months of boredom masquerading as relaxation, I was ready for action.

  I turned off the shower and wrapped a towel around my waist. When I came back out, Maddy—yeah, I was going to call her that—was sitting on the penthouse sofa, a drink in front of her. She had her usual perfect composure.

  “You’re still here,” I observed.

  “Was I supposed to go somewhere?” she asked.

  “I thought maybe you’d run away.”

  “Because you took your clothes off?” She rolled her eyes. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

  I felt myself grinning
at her. “Men strip for you all the time, do they?”

  “Only when I tell them to.”

  I had picked up my bag, but I paused and looked at her. “You know what that was, right? Flirting. You just flirted with me.”

  She looked surprised for a second. Then she said, “I told you—the promise of sex, not the delivery. It was a persuasion tactic. Don’t get the wrong idea. And do not take that towel off.”

  “The lady protests too much,” I said, but I spared her this time. I pulled clothes from my bag and retreated to the bathroom to change.

  I wasn’t really sure why I had stripped in front of her. I didn’t usually act like that. It had been an impulse, a desire to see if I could push her buttons, make her react. And, I’ll be honest, part of me wanted her to see the goods, as it were. Just in case she was interested.

  In my experience, most women were interested. But of course Maddy White had to be different.

  She hadn’t taken the bait. But she also hadn’t called security or the police, and she hadn’t kicked me in my exposed nuts. I’d have to take it and call it a win.

  I put on my clothes—dark green cargo pants, navy blue T-shirt. I brushed my teeth. My hair and beard could use a trim, but otherwise I looked almost American again. I came back into the main room and found Maddy pouring me a drink, which she handed to me without asking. “Sit,” she said, all business now.

  I took the drink and sat on the couch. I looked into my glass and saw that it was whiskey, which was my favorite drink. A lucky guess, obviously. I tilted my head back and downed it.

  Maddy took a seat on the sofa across from me. “Here it is,” she said in her blunt way. No lawyer-speak, which I admired. “Your father died, and you’re in his will. In a roundabout way.”