The Bad Boy Next Door Read online

  Sucking in a sharp breath, I turned to face him. His palms burned my hips, hot and confident and possessive. His eyes blazed with the same arrogance. And yet I could see in him an uncertainty. A vulnerability I’d never seen before.

  With a ragged sigh, I nodded. “I’m sure, Lucas. I need to know what’s going on, and you need to tell me. Before whatever this is between us becomes something else.”

  He searched my eyes, maybe to see if he could convince me otherwise. Maybe glad for the fact I was forcing him to finally share what he’d kept from me for so long.

  The thing was, now it was going to happen, I wasn’t sure I wanted it to. Ignorance is bliss and all. When I knew, I had no way of unknowing, and I’d spent so many years operating on the assumption the boy next door was a prick with an attitude and chip on his broad shoulder, I didn’t know if I was ready to discover he was anything but.

  “Finish getting dressed, Ronnie,” he said, his tone calm and enigmatic. “I’ll wait for you in the living room.”

  He dropped a gentle kiss on my forehead—quick and tender and utterly unlike any kiss he’d given me before—and then turned to leave.

  “Lucas?” I called after him.

  He stopped. “Yes?”

  “Why tell me to pack an overnight bag given there’s a whole wardrobe here for me?” I drew a steadying breath. “I mean, if I looked hard enough in these cupboards, what are the chances of me finding toiletries for me?”

  He let out a low chuckle. “The chances are very high.”

  “So why make me pack a bag?”

  He dropped his head. “Because the chances of me not surviving the trip here were higher.”

  I swallowed.

  Lucas turned and left me alone in the bathroom.

  It took me longer to get dressed than it should, given all I was doing was pulling on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt.

  The T-shirt was snug and had a deep V neckline that showed more cleavage than I was normally comfortable with. But even with the mayhem and confusion on the last few hours, the thought of Lucas being able to check out my boobs in such a way made my pussy contract with wicked excitement.

  The shorts were short. You could damn near see my butt cheeks peeking out from beneath the frayed hemline.

  I studied my reflection in the mirror, my heart racing. and let out a shaky sigh when I realized I couldn’t stand in the bathroom any longer.

  By the time I descended the stairs from the top floor to the living room level, the delicious aroma of freshly brewed coffee filled the air. My mouth filled with saliva.

  Lucas looked up from where he was placing a steaming mug on the dining table, along with what looked like a platter of freshly cut fruit. “Like the shorts,” he said.

  I flipped him off, even as my tummy twisted with in purely sexual delight.

  Without any other response, I crossed to the table, lowered myself in a seat and snagged one of the coffees.

  Lucas watched me take a sip. I watched him watch me.

  An enigmatic expression flickered over his face and then he walked back into the kitchen.

  Taking another sip of the coffee, I continued to watch him as he placed a pan on the stovetop and turned on the gas. The coffee was good. So good. The bastard. Of course he would make the best coffee I’ve ever had.

  “It was the cop who asked me to kill someone.”

  My stomach rolled at his statement, uttered in an offhand way over his shoulder as he cracked an egg into the pan.

  The sizzling pop and crackle of the egg frying filled the silence between us. I was glad for that. I had no fucking clue what to say. I’d grown up without hearing statements like that. The most horrific statement I’d ever heard in my formative years, those years responsible for how you deal with stressful situations, was, “Veronica, would you like to go to the Justin Bieber concert?”

  When Lucas turned back to me, his eyes were angry. And haunted. “The cop—a piece of work called Officer Dewey—became obsessed with me after watching me on the underground MMA circuit. One night, he followed me after a fight. That was how he discovered I was a member of Trinity. He used it as a means to initiate a relationship with me.”

  I didn’t like the way he said relationship. Not at all. My face must have shown it.

  Lucas chuckled, the sound bleak and dry and without any humor at all. “Yeah, he wanted to fuck me. When I emphatically said no, he gave me two options—let him fuck me or be arrested.”

  The wave of nauseous tension that had been churning in my stomach turned into a tidal wave of sickened disbelief. I knew cops weren’t all paragons of virtue, but blackmailing a teenager into sex? Jesus.

  “Wh—” I stopped, my mouth dry. “What did you do?”

  An image too horrific to describe filled my head. I wanted to wrap Lucas in my arms and hold him, protect him, take away the grief he must be living with.

  He chuckled again. “I got arrested.”

  I blinked.

  “My parents don’t know that of course,” he said, an unreadable emotion in his eyes as he watched me gape at him. “There was nothing to stick and no crime to pin on me. As I was leaving the station, Dewey caught up with me and made me another offer. Turn C.I. for him.”

  “C.I.?” Oh God, my tummy was a mess. “Criminal informant? That’s dangerous.”

  “It is. But I agreed.”

  “Why?”

  Lucas drew a slow breath. “He threatened me with something far more important than my anal virginity.”

  The way he regarded me told me I didn’t want to hear what that something was. And yet, I asked anyway. “What?”

  “You. Dewey told me he’d make your life hell. And by hell, he’d make sure your address and your picture made it into the hands of the kind of people who would love to get closely acquainted with a young, innocent teenage girl who looked the way you looked back then.”

  And there it was. I wanted to throw up.

  “How did I look back then?” I asked, the words barely more than a scratchy rasp.

  He looked at me, his gaze holding mine. “Like heaven. Like the sunshine after a nightmare storm. Like all that is perfect and right with the world.”

  “But why would he threaten me?”

  “He had me under surveillance, said he’d noticed how I looked at you.”

  “Lucas…” I whispered.

  “So I said yes,” he went on, reaching for his coffee and raising the mug to his lips.

  I watched him take a sip, my mind whirling.

  Oh God, he’d…he’d exposed himself to more danger than was imaginable because of me.

  “When did this all happen?” I asked, trying to pinpoint the exact moment Lucas’s life had been plunged into hell because of me. Trying to align his behavior since his family had moved in next door to us with what he was telling me now.

  “Three months after we moved in,” he answered. “When I was eighteen and you were sixteen.”

  Three months. Only three months. He’d…he’d agreed to be blackmailed, to essentially become a slave to a corrupt cop after only knowing me for three months?

  “And you’ve been his C.I. ever since? To protect me?”

  “Ronnie,” he said, his voice as unreadable as his expression, “if I told you half the stuff I’ve done to protect you, you would never look at me again.”

  I had no clue what to say to that. None at all.

  “Tell me about the woman in hospital,” I said instead.

  He took a sip of his coffee, closed his eyes and sat motionless for a moment.

  When he opened his eyes, I wanted to weep at the torment in them.

  “She was fellow Trinity member. A woman a few years older than me. She was at an MMA fight, in charge of the bets being taken on my next fight. As I was waiting, she slid her hand down my shorts and grabbed my cock. Told me she was going to suck it if I won. As an added incentive.”

  Hot and sour jealousy crashed through me at his statement. It blindsided me. I wanted t
o be disgusted with myself. He wasn’t mine; I had no claim on him. Why was I overwhelmed with a dark desire to smack this woman I’d never met in my life?

  “I withdrew her hand from my shorts,” Lucas went on, staring into his coffee mug, his expression distant, as if he was living the moment again, “and told her I’d rather a goat suck my dick than her.”

  A wry chuckle fell from him.

  “She punched me. Right here.” His fingers found the faint red mark where I’d smashed my knuckles into his jaw earlier. “And told me she was going to do whatever she wanted to my cock because she could and I would love every minute of it.”

  He raised his focus from his coffee and gave me a smile. It was empty and menacing at once. “I told her to go to hell, so she hit me again. Unfortunately, Dewey saw her do it. After the fight—which I won, by the way—he apprehended her on some bogus claim, drove her to the abandoned warehouse precinct by the river and beat her until she could no longer stand. He then drove her to the hospital and delivered her to the ER, citing a rival gang as the reason for her state.”

  He studied me with a guarded hesitancy. Did he know how I was feeling, or was he worried about my feelings? Either way, I wanted to ball my fists and scream.

  “How do you know all this?” I asked.

  “He told me. Before he told me he would do the same to anyone else who touched me. Doubly if it was you.”

  I shoved myself from the table and ran for the powder room. It was that, or throw up there on the dining table.

  I heard Lucas follow me.

  I felt his hand on my shoulder as I dropped to my knees and shoved my face into the toilet bowl.

  What little food and liquid was in my stomach lurched and gurgled and broiled about but didn’t defy gravity and come up.

  I gripped the rim however, eyes closed.

  Oh God. Oh God, what…

  Lucas smoothed his hand up and down my back. There was no way I could deny what he was doing. There was nothing sexual or arrogant about his touch. He was calming me. Being there for me. Caring for me.

  When it was obvious my stomach wasn’t going to launch everything in it out of it, I lifted my head, scraped my hair back from my face with a shaky hand and offered him a wobbly smile. “You certainly know how to show a girl a good time,” I mumbled.

  He moved his hand from my back and brushed his thumb over my bottom lip. I could see the torment in his eyes as they followed his thumb’s movement. “Ronnie, I never ever wanted you to get caught up in the shit that is my life. I’m sorry.”

  I shook my head. “It’s okay, Lucas. I’m okay. Really. And as masochistic as it sounds, I’m glad I’m caught up in it.”

  He raised his gaze to my eyes. I saw hope and something far more profound in their dark depths.

  My chest tightened. I tried to convince myself I didn’t want to see it, but I failed. The thought of Lucas fucking Pratt being in love with me…it did things to me, to my heart, to my soul that I had no defense against.

  “Are you okay?”

  I nodded at his gentle question.

  He cupped my cheek in his palm. “Want to finish the conversation back in the living room? Or are you happy to stay here in the bathroom?”

  A soft chuckle slipped from me, accompanied by a crazy urge to lean forward and kiss him. That he could make me laugh at this point in our surreal adventure swept a warm wave of what could only be called happiness through me.

  Crazy, indeed.

  “Let’s try the living room,” I said.

  He straightened to his feet with that inordinately fluid grace and latent strength of his and helped me to mine. There was no denying how nice his hand holding mine felt. How…right.

  We walked back to the living room without talking. I hugged myself the whole way. Mainly because I wanted to take his hand again but knew if I did, any hope I had of getting through all this rationally would be gone.

  The man was nothing like the annoying, arrogant bad boy I’d long believed him to be. He was also right about me not being gay, damn him. Accepting that was already beginning to erode my ability to deny what I felt for him.

  And what I felt for him was…too raw and powerful and scary to contemplate, let alone surrender to.

  Sinking onto the very sofa Doctor Winchester had tended to Lucas’s medical situation, I continued to hug myself as I watched Lucas lower himself onto the sofa on the other side of the coffee table.

  “So, I am,” he said, elbows on his knees, gaze fixed on my face, “or was a C.I. for a corrupt cop completely obsessed with fucking me. He’s blackmailing me to feed him everything I can on the Trinity, or he’ll make sure you’re exposed to the kind of people I don’t want to even know you exist. The Trinity will kill me if they know all the recent takedowns and arrests of their members are because of the intel I’m giving Dewey, and I’m still fighting on the underground MMA circuit, placing bets on the outcomes that would see me dead if anyone knew.”

  “You’re gambling on your fights?” I didn’t know anything about underground fighting, but something about that sounded way too risky. Possibly dangerous. As if Lucas needed more danger in his life. “Why?”

  “To get out. To have enough money to make sure you’re not in danger.”

  “Lucas…” I murmured. I didn’t know what else to say.

  We stared at each other, as if under a spell. The urge to move to his side, no, to straddle his lap and wrap my arms around his body, to kiss him, rushed through me. I let out a soft breath.

  With a ragged sigh, he scrubbed his balled fists on the tops of his thighs. “I never planned to stay in Trinity, or to become a C.I. I’d always seen my MMA fighting as a means to an end—to make enough money that one day I could buy a house. Ask you out, on a date, a real date. Take you to the movies. Maybe even a cruise. Exist like normal people. That’s all I wanted. From the second I met you, I wanted a normal life with you. I knew that was never going to happen while I was letting Dewey or Trinity control me. So, over a period of time, I sent everything I had, everything I knew about Trinity and Dewey to a mutual acquaintance I have with Lila Winchester. That acquaintance now has in their possession the ability to tear Trinity apart and see Dewey end up in prison for a long fucking time.”

  “Why isn’t he there yet?” I asked, although the words were barely more than a scratchy whisper. “Why did you…how did you end up in my bed, like you did? Did you get found out?”

  Lucas closed his eyes at my question and dropped his head, clawing his fingers over his scalp.

  “I got impatient,” he said without looking up at me. “Every day you were at risk, every day my mom and stepdad were in danger…it was eating at me, ripping at what I had left of a soul. Despite having suspicions that Dewey wasn’t the only fucker on the force with his own agenda, I went to the cops. Took a chance and spoke to a detective there called Kitchner. Told him everything.”

  He finally lifted his head. The haunted, furious look in his eyes chilled me.

  “That night—the night I ended up in your bed—I was grabbed off the street on my way to a fight, taken to the same abandoned warehouse by the river that Dewey took Lucille, and was beaten to an inch of my life.”

  A dust storm filled my mouth. A vice clamped my chest. “Who…who grabbed you?”

  “Cops. And Trinity members. It turns out some cops and Trinity members are friendlier with each other than most.”

  I tried to swallow the dust storm. I failed.

  “They drugged me,” he went on, holding my gaze. “Tortured me. Told me when they were done with me, they were coming for you. That they were going to take turns raping you in front of me until I told them who else I’d spoken to.”

  My stomach lurched. I seriously feared I was going to throw up. Really throw up.

  “I didn’t tell them anything. What I did do…” He looked away. Ground his teeth. “Let’s just say I got away and leave it at that. But I now know Dewey isn’t alone. I now know Kitchner is in on it. The fact
he was there, taking his own turn beating me kind of sealed that deal.”

  “Wh-what are you going to do?”

  He looked back at me. The tormented rage in his eyes grew darker. “What I do best.”

  “And what’s that?”

  A cold smile curled his lips. “Fuck people up.”

  Chapter 5

  I don’t know when I fell asleep.

  At some point, I must have though. I remember rising to my feet after Lucas told me his plans, plans that were scary and dangerous and involved using himself as bait. I remember crossing to the other sofa, taking his jaw in my palms and telling him we could just leave the country. Move to Canada or Australia or Paraguay or something.

  He told me if we did that, they’d come after his mom and stepdad, my folks and anyone else we loved or cared for.

  He’d insisted he’d be okay. That he was quite adept at taking care of himself.

  I also remember him pulling me down to him, tugging me to his body until I sat astride his thighs.

  He’d threaded his fingers through my hair as he lowered my head to his. I remember his lips finding mine, his tongue doing the same.

  I remember him stretching me out on the sofa and exploring my body with his mouth.

  He made me come just by sucking on my breasts.

  He made me come again by sucking and biting and licking on my clit.

  And then he made me come a third time, but this time he came with me as we moved together, his thrusts deep and powerful and steady inside me, my nails raking his shoulders, his back, his name falling from my lips in whimpering gasps over and over again.

  After we came together, Lucas tucked me against his body and we stretched out on our sides, my back and butt pressed to his chest and groin, our fingers threaded.

  “Please, don’t die over me,” I’d whispered.

  “Hush, Ronnie,” he’d whispered back. “When it comes to you, I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  I’d replayed his declaration in my mind, the words bringing with them images of Lucas in pain, Lucas being beaten by uniformed cops and Trinity members.