The Bad Boy Next Door Read online

  “Can’t we just run away?” I’d pleaded again.

  “No,” he’d murmured back. “Trust me. I’ll get it sorted.”

  That was when I’d decided I was going to wait for him to fall asleep, call Doctor Winchester, ask her to come back and sedate him and then…then…

  I think it was just after that I fell asleep.

  It wasn’t until I woke up that I realized I’d fallen asleep mid-scheming.

  Squinting at the unfamiliar light, I pushed myself up onto my elbows on the bed.

  Bed.

  I was in a bed.

  I was in Lucas’s bed.

  When had I moved from the sofa downstairs to his—

  Snapping wide awake, I looked at the space beside me on the bed.

  “Fuck.”

  It was empty.

  Empty and with no evidence Lucas had ever been beside me in it.

  Fuck. He’d carried me up the stairs while I was asleep, put me into his bed and was now…where? Heading back to challenge Officer Dewey and Detective Kitchner? Heading back into the violent maw of Trinity?

  I scrambled out of bed—holy crap, where had my shorts gone?—and ran down the stairs. My cell. I needed my cell. And the gun Doctor Winchester had given me.

  I couldn’t find either.

  Fuck.

  Lucas had either taken both, or hidden them, along with the card with her cell number on it

  Fuck. Again.

  Running to the landline phone in the kitchen, I picked up the handset and dialed Doctor Winchester’s number. Lucas may be a bad ass with a plan, but I had a photographic memory for numbers. Ha, take that Lucas fucking Pratt.

  The veterinarian’s cell rang four times before it was answered.

  “Doctor Winchester speaking,” her calmly poised voice slipped into my ear. “I have my arm inserted up to my elbow in a stallion’s anus at the moment, so please make this brief.”

  “Lucas has left the house and taken the gun you left me and I have no idea where he’s gone,” I gushed, even as I pictured in my mind exactly what she had described. If I weren’t so worried about Lucas, I’d be severely grossed out.

  Silence followed my rushed declaration.

  “Doctor Winchester?” I said.

  “The fucking stubborn pain in the ass,” she muttered.

  I actually hiccupped out a startled laugh of agreement.

  She sighed. “Okay, lock all the doors. Head down to his gym. There’s a panic room next to the safe room. The door is concealed but I can walk you through finding it.”

  I blinked. A panic room? What the—

  “I’m not locking myself in a panic room while Lucas is out there getting potentially killed,” I exclaimed.

  The good doctor sighed again. “Veronica, you need to do what I’m telling—”

  “Do you have another gun?”

  Another heartbeat of silence followed my blurted question.

  “Why do you want a gun?”

  I frowned and turned on my heel to scan the room, just in case the gun she’d left me before suddenly and miraculously had reappeared on the coffee table.

  It hadn’t.

  “To go after Lucas,” I answered.

  “Go after…” She laughed. She actually laughed at me. “Oh, honey child, I can see why he loves you so much. But if I was to tell Lucas I let you go back to—”

  She stopped.

  I grinned, a cold triumph snaking through me.

  Back. Go back.

  I knew where Lucas was. Or at least, where he was headed. Back home. From where we’d come from. Maybe, if I left now, I could catch him on the road. Maybe…

  A part of my brain wanted to focus on the he loves you so much. I wouldn’t let it. Not until I found Lucas and knew he was safe. Whatever he was going to do, we could do it together. He wasn’t going to do it alone. He didn’t need to. I was with him.

  In every way, I was with him.

  He loves you so much. Huh, who knew the feeling was entirely mutual?

  “Veronica,” Lila Winchester said my name like it was a warning. “Please don’t be thinking you can save—”

  “Thanks, Doc,” I cut her off. “I’ll take a knife instead.”

  I replaced the phone’s handset to its cradle before she could respond, hurried to the stainless steel knife block and yanked out the biggest. The same knife I’d first selected last time Lucas had gone AWOL in this house.

  The butcher’s knife was at least ten inches long and wickedly scary looking. It was perfect. Let’s see Officer Dewey and or Detective Kitchner come at me when I was wielding this.

  Knife in hand, I sprinted upstairs and grabbed a pair of jeans, a T-shirt and a pair of Chucks from the massive walk-in closet.

  It took me less than seventy-five seconds to get dressed. I counted each one, a desperate fear Lucas was going to get himself killed over me building inside me. By the time I tied my last lace, my hands were shaking.

  But I was angry. Seriously pissed.

  When I caught up with him, we were going to have a very long chat about making me worry. And then I was going to climb him like a pole and ride him like a pony until we both came screaming.

  Yes, I was that angry I’d resorted to tired clichés and mixed metaphors. Sue me.

  Dressed for ass kicking, I picked up the knife and then ran down the stairs. If I was really really lucky, Lucas would have left the Ferrari in the garage. Surely whatever misguided mission he was on required stealth?

  I didn’t need stealth right now. I needed speed. I needed to catch him.

  Stop him.

  I needed—

  A soft thudding noise sounded near the front door.

  My heart smashed up into my throat in one swift leap.

  Lucas. Had to be. With the security at this place, who else could it be?

  Knife still in hand, I ran to the door and pulled it open.

  I froze at the sight of the tall, beefy man with the most porn-star moustache I’ve ever seen standing on the other side.

  Our stares collected. A slow smirk split his face. My brain registered he was holding a gun in one hand, a gun suddenly now pointed at me.

  “I knew one of you would fuck up eventually,” the man declared, smug triumph in his concrete-and-gravel voice, a split second before he lunged at me.

  Which also happened to be the same split second I slammed the door.

  Except he stopped it. His shoulder slammed into the heavy panel as I was swinging it shut.

  Slammed into it and shoved it backward.

  Before I could react, he was charging me.

  I screamed. Not out of fear, well, not mainly, but shock and indignant rage. It took me a quarter of a second to process the fact he was coming at me, another quarter to remember I had a freaking great big butchers knife in my hand, and barely a quarter after that to swing it at him.

  As far as defense moves go, it was laughable.

  My new friend thought so as well, given the way he sneered at me even as he was ducking my wild swing and smashing the edge of his hand into my wrist.

  Sharp pain detonated at the point of contact and sheared up my arm. I almost released the knife.

  Almost.

  Staggering back a step, I fought the nerve-tingling pain in my wrist and swung the knife at him again.

  I had no fucking clue who he was, but he was clearly not here to try and tell me about the word of God, or to see if I’d sign up for HBO Now.

  He ducked my swing with a snide chuckle. Talk about bruising my ego.

  He continued to come at me. For a sickening moment, I felt like a mouse being played with by a cat.

  It felt like forever, and at the same time, everything was moving so fast it was a blur. My heart roared in my ears. He kept chuckling at me. I kept swinging the knife at him, backing away from him as I did so.

  Unfortunately, three backward staggers and a lot of knife swinging had my butt ramming against what felt like a solid hunk of rock. My memory of the room
told my frantic brain it was the white-granite console table positioned in the entry foyer.

  Shit.

  He lunged at me. Shamefully, I squealed.

  His cruel fingers snared my wrist and suddenly, I was being crushed by his arms. I squirmed, kicking and bucking, my arms trapped to my side, my back mashing against his front.

  Fuck, so much for kicking ass.

  “Stop it, cunt, or I’ll fucking kill you now.”

  I froze at his hot breath in my ear.

  My mouth filled with the coppery taste of terror. My blood ran hot with fury. “That would be a mistake,” I declared, forcing my voice to stay steady. “Unless you want to be a walking corpse.”

  He laughed, his lips a hot slug against my ear. “You think Lucas is going to save you?”

  A numbing chill swept through me. “What have you done to him?”

  Once again, he laughed. It was a sleazy, creepy sound, part smug gloat, part depraved lust. “Nothing. Yet. But now I have you, anything I fucking want.”

  My stomach rolled. Was this Officer Dewey, the corrupt police officer who wanted to have sex with Lucas?

  “Drop the knife, pussy cat,” he ordered, one hand circling my throat as the other clamped tighter around my wrist. He shook my hand, obviously in an attempt to encourage me to let the butcher’s knife go.

  “Fuck you,” I snarled back, gripping the knife tighter and resuming my bucking struggles.

  With another chuckle, he hauled me off my feet, spun around and slammed me—tummy first—against the edge of the console table.

  White-hot pain shot through me in excruciating shards. I cried out, arching back as I slammed my palms to the wall. The knife didn’t make it to the wall, clattering instead to the tiled floor under my feet.

  Holy fuck, it felt like a fire had erupted in my stomach and hipbones.

  Pinning me to the table with his grinding groin, Dewey—if that’s who he was—pressed his lips to my ear. “After I’m done with your Lucas, I might give you a go, Veronica. I don’t normally go for cunts, but for you I’ll make an exception.”

  It was Dewey. Oh God, he was vile.

  “Do you always talk in clichés?” I ground out, tears stinging my eyes as I struggled between his gross weight and the granite console table.

  Before he could answer, I reached behind me and clawed at as much of his face as I could.

  He swore and smashed me harder against the console table’s edge.

  Fresh pain detonated across my stomach. I cried out again, my head swimming with black smudges, my tummy on fire.

  “Keep fighting, pussy cat,” Dewey snarled in my ear, “and I’ll show you how clichéd I can be.”

  For a second, I did just that. I bucked and writhed and clawed at him as much as I could. His surprised and pained grunt filled me with a sense of fierce triumph, and I fought harder. Hard enough to dislodge myself from between him and the console.

  Hot relief flooded through me, followed instantly by cold determination.

  I ran. Sprinted, in fact.

  The panic room. I had to get to the panic room.

  Now.

  “You’re only making this worse for yourself, Veronica,” my new friend shouted after me. The solid thud-thud told me loud and clear he was chasing me.

  I increased my speed.

  It wasn’t enough.

  He grabbed a handful of my hair and yanked me off my feet.

  I let out a yelp, scrambled to regain my balance and spun around to face him.

  The sudden move took him by surprise and, eyes wide, he gaped at me as I barged into him, shoulder first.

  It was his turn to stumble backward.

  The second I felt his balance fail him, the second his fingers raked over my back, I threw myself away from him and ran for the stairs leading down to the bottom floor.

  “Cunt,” he roared after me. “Get back here.”

  I flipped him the bird just as I hooked the fingers of my other hand around the stair banister, flung myself around the corner and sprinted down the stairs.

  He came after me, thundering down the stairs. I thought I heard what sounded like a gun clicking, but I didn’t turn around or look over my shoulder to see. I couldn’t risk tripping.

  The panic room. That was my sole focus. The panic—

  A deafening crack destroyed the air just as dry wall burst from the wall directly above my head.

  I screamed. Ducked. Kept running. Even as my brain told me over and over that he’d fired a shot.

  More drywall exploded beside my head.

  I damn near fell down the last two stairs trying to run faster.

  When the next shot fired and chips of slate burst up from the floor just in front of me, I squealed.

  “Next one’s in your leg, pussy cat,” my new friend bellowed behind me.

  Sick with terror, heart wild, breath burning my lungs, I stumbled to a halt.

  “Good girl,” he said, a second before grabbing my wrist and twisting my arm up behind my back until my hand felt like it was drilling into the spot between my shoulder blades.

  I tried to bite back my cry of pain, but it tore from me before I could, sharp and strangled.

  Dewey laughed, once again pressing his lips to my ear. “We’re going to go back upstairs, Veronica. And then you are going to call Lucas and I’m going to cable-tie you to a kitchen chair. Understand?”

  Sick dread rolled through me, settling in my stomach like a ball of molten lead. The sour taste of it filled my mouth. But with it all was that same sense of rage at what Lucas had gone through, had been forced to go through.

  “I don’t have his number,” I snarled, shooting Dewey a look over my shoulder.

  He yanked my wrist higher up between my shoulder blades.

  Hot agony ripped through me. I cried out, arching onto my tiptoes in an instinctual attempt to escape it.

  “Lucky I do,” he sneered into my ear.

  And then he turned us both around and shoved me up the stairs.

  I tripped and stumbled up every rise. He didn’t release my wrist at all. In fact, I think he shoved my wrist higher up my back. My shoulder joint felt like it was going to explode in a fireball of pain.

  I wanted to cry. I wanted to beg him to let me go. I wanted to plead for him not to hurt me.

  But more than anything, I wanted Lucas to be as far away as possible.

  “Have you had his cock in your mouth yet?” he asked, the words like a humid blast against my ear.

  “Fuck you,” I ground out. If I planted my feet and shoved backward, would we both fall? Maybe, if I fell on him as we tumbled, he’d snap his spine or something?

  I planted my foot on the edge of the stair and froze when the cold muzzle of his gun nudged my temple. “Blood is so hard to get out of clothes, pussy cat.” He sniggered. “And I like this shirt I’m wearing a lot.”

  “Shoot me if you want,” I said, even as my stomach lurched and my mouth went dry. “But I won’t help you get Lucas. Ever.”

  Dewey drilled the end of his gun harder to my temple as he tugged my wrist higher still up my back. “All you have to do is let him see you, Veronica. He and I will work out the rest.”

  I closed my eyes and an image I so didn’t want to see filled my head—Lucas, in this prick’s clutches, being at his sexual mercy because of me…

  “You want to fuck me that bad, Dewey?” Lucas’s smooth, deep voice slid through the air, snapping my eyes open.

  He stood at the top of the stairs, barely a few feet away, smiling down at us. His eyes however, were colder than the Artic.

  “Then come on up and fuck me,” he finished. “If you can.”

  Officer Dewey grew motionless behind me. His grip on my wrist turned to a cruel pincer.

  “You shouldn’t have spoken to the cops about me, Lucas,” Dewey admonished.

  A twitching pressure nudged my butt, and I realized he was getting an erection. Oh God. At the sight of Lucas, he was getting an erection. This was�
�this was…

  “But thank God for me you chose Kitchner,” he finished.

  Lucas’s cold stare didn’t sway from Dewey’s face. “Kitchner is dead.”

  The grip on my wrist squeezed tighter. The gun tip pressed harder to my head. I could feel tension leech off Dewey like poisoned sludge. “Bullshit.”

  That slow smile stretched Lucas’s lips again. Once again, it didn’t make it to his eyes. “Do you want to see the pics on my cell?”

  “When?” Dewey snarled

  Lucas laughed. A chill rippled over me at how icy and humorless it was. “Shouldn’t the question you ask be how am I alive? Given you and Kitchner arranged for me to be taken care of two nights ago?”

  Dewey grew still. “You killed him then? Along with the Trinity fuckers?”

  Lucas arched a non-committal eyebrow.

  “Bullshit,” Dewey repeated. “I got a text from him the morning after you were grabbed off the street.”

  “Ahh, the text that said I was almost dead, drugged and promising I would do anything—anything—if he, his fellow corrupt cops and those Trinity fuckers stopped hurting me? You mean that text?”

  “You fucking prick,” Dewey snarled.

  “The text that you responded to with, tell Pratt I’m coming over to fill his ass with my cock until he’s a dead fucking corpse, right?”

  Dewey yanked on my wrist. My stomach lurched with pain and sickened disgust. “I’m going to kill—”

  “I particularly liked the follow-up text,” Lucas cut him off, reaching into the back pocket of his jeans to withdraw a smartphone and held it up for Dewey to see. From where I stood on the stairs, I could see the familiar text bubbles of a text conversation but couldn’t read the words in them.

  Lucas helped out by reading them aloud.

  “Make sure he’s still tied up when I get there. Preferably naked and ass up ready for me.” He grinned down at Dewey. If the Devil had been there right at that point in time, he would have envied that grin. “Obviously I wasn’t still tied up.”

  “You killed Kitchner?”

  Lucas returned what I assumed was Kitchner’s cell to his back pocket. “No. Loco did.”

  I had no idea who Loco was, but by the way Dewey hissed in a breath behind me, he did. By the way he yanked my wrist up higher between my shoulder blades and drove the gun harder to my temple, he wasn’t happy with the news either.