My Bad- Lani Lynn Vale Read online

  Text copyright ©2018 Lani Lynn Vale

  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 permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Dedication

  This is the first book that was released without going through my mother-in-law, first.

  So this bad boy is going to be for her.

  To one of the greatest women I’ve ever known. Love you, Cheryl. And I miss you already.

  Acknowledgements

  Alex Turner- Model

  Golden Czermak- Photographer

  Danielle Palumbo- My awesome content editor.

  Ellie McLove & Ink It Out Editing- My editors

  Cover Me Darling- Cover Artist

  My mom- Thank you for reading this book eight million two hundred times.

  Cheryl, Kendra, Diane, Sarah, Kathy, Mindy, Barbara & Amanda—I don’t know what I would do without y’all. Thank you, my lovely betas, for loving my books as much as I do.

  Table of 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

  Epilogue

  What’s Next?

  Other titles by Lani Lynn Vale:

  The Freebirds

  Boomtown

  Highway Don’t Care

  Another One Bites the Dust

  Last Day of My Life

  Texas Tornado

  I Don’t Dance

  The Heroes of The Dixie Wardens MC

  Lights To My Siren

  Halligan To My Axe

  Kevlar To My Vest

  Keys To My Cuffs

  Life To My Flight

  Charge To My Line

  Counter To My Intelligence

  Right To My Wrong

  Code 11- KPD SWAT

  Center Mass

  Double Tap

  Bang Switch

  Execution Style

  Charlie Foxtrot

  Kill Shot

  Coup De Grace

  The Uncertain Saints

  Whiskey Neat

  Jack & Coke

  Vodka On The Rocks

  Bad Apple

  Dirty Mother

  Rusty Nail

  The Kilgore Fire Series

  Shock Advised

  Flash Point

  Oxygen Deprived

  Controlled Burn

  Put Out

  I Like Big Dragons Series

  I Like Big Dragons and I Cannot Lie

  Dragons Need Love, Too

  Oh, My Dragon

  The Dixie Warden Rejects

  Beard Mode

  Fear the Beard

  Son of a Beard

  I’m Only Here for the Beard

  The Beard Made Me Do It

  Beard Up

  For the Love of Beard

  Law & Beard

  There’s No Crying in Baseball

  Pitch Please

  Quit Your Pitchin’

  Listen, Pitch (10-16-18)

  The Hail Raisers

  Hail No

  Go to Hail

  Burn in Hail

  What the Hail

  The Hail You Say

  Hail Mary

  The Simple Man Series

  Kinda Don’t Care

  Maybe Don’t Wanna

  Get You Some

  Ain’t Doin’ It

  Too Bad So Sad

  Bear Bottom Guardians MC

  Mess Me Up

  Talkin’ Trash

  How About No

  My Bad

  One Chance, Fancy (1-15-19)

  It Happens (2-12-19)

  Castiel and Turner (3-5-19)

  Liner (4-9-19)

  Slate and Katy (5-14-19)

  Blurb

  Hoax knows two things very well.

  One, he’s not relationship material.

  Two, the nurse that treats him for erectile dysfunction is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, and practically has ‘the marrying type’ stamped on her forehead.

  Does that stop him from wanting her?

  No.

  Unfortunately, he learned a long time ago that the Army Special Forces and long-lasting relationships don’t go hand in hand.

  But beautiful hazel eyes, curly blonde hair, and the prettiest lips he’s ever seen play havoc with his resolve, making him forget his earlier convictions.

  All it takes is one teeny, tiny kiss for every shred of control he has to disappear, along with the problem in his pants. Soon he finds himself doing things that he knows that he shouldn’t.

  He doesn’t know that he’s found the woman that’s meant to be his. Nor does he realize that her father is the man he’s idolized from the moment he joined the Army at the age of eighteen.

  Because, maybe if he had, he would’ve tried a little harder to ignore the pull he felt between them instead of making her his the night before he deployed for six months.

  He also might’ve tried a little harder not to knock her up.

  Chapter 1

  Don’t judge someone just because they sin differently than you do.

  -Life lesson

  Hoax

  Either my dick was broken, or I was about to die. Those were the only two possible explanations.

  I wasn’t actually a hundred percent sure why I had decided to come to the hospital for my current predicament, but something had to give. Something in the form of my erection—or my lack thereof.

  I’d been lying in bed for hours tonight, trying to think about something that would make my dick get hard, but nothing worked.

  Not my usual buxom brunette with tits so big that they slapped her in her face when I fucked her hard. Nor the small Asian chick that had nipples so tight that I wanted nothing more than to suck them into my mouth and hold on tight with my teeth while I went to town.

  Hell, even my oldest daydream—the one of Mrs. Oliver from ninth grade science class—didn’t even do the trick anymore, and I’d been using that particular one for years.

  Before I could think, I’d gotten on my bike and ridden to the hospital. Then, before I could get embarrassed that I, a thirty-two-year-old man who was in the prime of his life, couldn’t get it up, I marched straight into the ER—emergency room—and stopped.

  I shouldn’t be there. Technically, I wasn’t actually experiencing an emergency.

  I’d never hear the end of it, either. Not from my family and not from my friends. It was probably best that nobody saw me.

  Though, technically, the one single nurse that I knew that worked in the ER, Conleigh, had assured me that what happened in the ER stayed in the ER. And not because they had some weird pact kind of like fight club where you didn’t talk about your patients. No, because there were laws that required them not to.

 
; Which, I supposed, wasn’t really going to keep them from talking about me. It just meant they couldn’t talk about me to other people—not amongst themselves.

  Honestly, I was about to turn around and leave when I saw her.

  She wasn’t very tall. A little over five foot three or four, she was a good foot shorter than me. She was wearing navy blue scrubs that fit her body like a glove.

  Since when did hospital scrubs become so fitted?

  But goddamn. The scrubs she was wearing hugged her supple ass, belly, and thighs. And those tits…yeah, they would fit perfectly in the palm of my hand.

  She took my breath away.

  Oh, and made my dick hard.

  She’d cured me, and what better way to thank her than to give her a very thorough thank you present. One that involved my tongue, cock, and fingers.

  Chapter 2

  This message is invisible. Only people that masturbate can see it.

  Pru

  I scratched my head and nearly groaned when I found the pen that I’d been searching in every drawer and counter for the last three and a half minutes. Three and a half minutes that I should’ve been using to pee and shove some food in my mouth instead of looking for a pen.

  But, it was a special pen. I’d gotten it from a patient two weeks ago that had been all of six years old, and informed me that the pen was special and boys liked it.

  Pulling it out, I stared at the mermaid pen with its glittery, shiny gold, teal, and purple scales, and felt myself smiling.

  “Anyway,” I sighed, tucking the pen into the palm of my hand and curling my fingers around it. “If you want to go ahead and take that potty break, go ahead. I’ll wait here and take over until you get back.”

  The paramedic that ran the triage desk looked at me with gratefulness. “Thanks, Pru. You’re the best.”

  Then, before either one of us could argue, or I could rescind my offer, she bolted for the breakroom.

  I, on the other hand, bounced on the balls of my feet as I tried to think about anything but the fullness of my bladder.

  A throat cleared behind me, and I turned, coming face to face with a broad chest.

  I blinked and stepped back.

  “Is this where I would need to go to get seen?” a deep, rough voice, belonging to that chest, rumbled.

  I took another step back, completely forgetting about my full bladder, and stared at the chest in surprise before allowing my eyes to travel up.

  “Ma’am?”

  I didn’t respond to his words. Instead, I took every delicious inch of the man in. Starting with his chest, which was covered with a black Van Halen t-shirt, I moved my way up to the breadth of his shoulders. Very wide shoulders that looked like they could support a lot of weight—possibly my ankles—for hours.

  Then I moved from those beautiful shoulders to his strong, muscular neck. I stopped at the bearded jaw. A bearded, square jaw that screamed for me to run my fingers over it.

  I wasn’t sure if it was the beard or the jaw that got me—probably both. I’d always been a beard whore, but shit. This man’s beard? It was amazing. Trim and tight against that perfect jaw that probably made women clench just seeing those angles.

  And oh, God. Those lips.

  “Ma’am?”

  I finally looked past the man’s mouth to his nose and felt a twinge of amusement when I saw the crookedness of it.

  It’d been broken. Many times before, based on the angle.

  A sigh fell from his lips, momentarily bringing my attention back to their perfectness, and I blinked before finally meeting the man’s eyes.

  They were a steely gray/blue that made me think of Travis Fimmel’s eyes from the TV show, The Vikings. But only when he was actually on the TV show and dirty. His eyes—Travis’s, not the man standing in front of me—always seemed to go a wintery gray the dirtier he got.

  I swallowed and said, “I’m sorry. What did you ask me?”

  He didn’t smile. Didn’t even crack one.

  Instead, he stared at me steadily and repeated. “Are you who I need to speak with if I’m here to be seen?”

  I tried to shake my thoughts into some semblance of coherency, but I couldn’t quite make it work.

  Why, you ask?

  Because he’d lifted his arm and leaned one strong hand against the doorframe, and I saw his muscular, defined bicep slip free of the too-taut fabric of his t-shirt. A defined bicep that had a tattoo running along the inner, sensitive flesh from armpit to elbow.

  A sword.

  That was it. A broadsword—or at least the hilt of one.

  It was beautiful work and exceptionally done. The scrollwork alone was mesmerizing.

  And, realizing what I was looking at, he dropped his arm, causing me to momentarily get myself back under control.

  “What symptoms are you exhibiting?” I finally forced myself to ask.

  He didn’t look like he was having any problems.

  In fact, other than the cast—that was clearly beaten up and in need of either another re-do or taking it off completely—I couldn’t see anything wrong.

  “It’s something that I’m not exhibiting…or at least I wasn’t.” He paused. “I’m not really sure that I need you any longer.”

  I blinked, unsure where to go with what he’d just told me.

  “Ummm,” I hesitated. “The symptoms disappeared when you came inside? So they’re intermittent?”

  The man snorted, drawing my attention to his Adam’s apple.

  “It was a constant thing for about six weeks until I literally just walked in this door and saw you standing there.” He paused. “Do you want to go out on a date with me?”

  I stared at him with confusion and a little bit of awe.

  He looked like it was the easiest thing in the world, slipping that last part in there about me going out on a date with him.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I don’t date military men.”

  His eyebrows rose. “How do you know I’m military?”

  The expression on his face practically dared me to tell him why.

  So I did.

  “The way you walk. The way your eyes constantly survey your surroundings. The way that you clocked every single exit since you got in here. Your unwillingness to let me study your tattoo. Let me guess, SEAL?” I spouted.

  His brows rose. “Not a SEAL. What makes you think I’m not just a cop?”

  I snorted. “I’m sure, once you’re done doing whatever you’re doing in the military, that’ll be your next career move. But for now, your demeanor practically screams military. You’re rigid.”

  I would know.

  Not only was my father ex-military, but every single man that I called ‘uncle’ was ex-military as well. My twin sister was military. My cousins and friends were military. There was no way in hell that this man wasn’t military.

  What surprised me the most was that he didn’t have any tattoos on him other than the sword. If you were military, you were proud to be military. There were usually tattoos that supported that claim.

  This man, though? He had no Army tattoo on his forearm like my dad or my sister’s army tattoo on the inside of her wrist.

  Just nothing but smooth, tanned skin.

  My eyes studied the man’s face a little harder. His beard was much lighter—and curlier—than his hair. He had straight white teeth and slightly slanted eyes that hinted at some Asian ethnicity way back in his bloodline somewhere.

  His eyes that were currently watching me take him in with a patient glance.

  God, those eyes were fucking amazing.

  They reminded me of the days in the middle of winter when we got our one and only winter storm. The sky was a mottled gray with a small hint of blue around the edges. And goddamn, but those eyelashes of his were so long that any woman would be envious of them.

  His eyebrows rose, and I noticed that those, too, were slightly white as well.


  My mouth tipped up at one corner.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t date patients or military,” I told him, replying to his obviously silent question. “I’m sorry.”

  “Not a patient yet, darlin’,” he said.

  I did notice how he hadn’t denied being military, though.

  “Navy?”

  He made a face.

  “Air Force?”

  The face became even worse.

  “Marines?”

  He gagged.

  “Coast Guard?”

  He snorted loudly.

  “Army.”

  I saved the best for last.

  His eyes lit up with amusement.

  “Army,” I said again. “I should’ve known. You’re all the same.”

  They weren’t all the same. I was teasing him.

  But still.

  He was fun to tease.

  “Why don’t you date military?” he wondered.

  “I’m back!” Shannon cried. “Now, you go pee too before you…oh. Shit. Sorry.”

  My eyes never left the man in front of me.

  “Can I help you?” Shannon asked with a frown.

  Shannon was a sweet girl, and she was afraid of men. Especially big men like the one currently standing in the doorway, his shoulders practically touching each side.

  “No,” the man said. “I’m waiting for her.”

  “Oh, is this the boyfriend you were talking about?” Shannon asked teasingly.

  I winced.

  My sister, Phoebe, who was a nursing student here, and I had been talking about faking boyfriends so our mother would get off our backs. Shannon had walked in during the middle of the conversation and had misunderstood. I hadn’t corrected her seeing as my mother was the nursing director of the ER, and there was no way in hell I would put Shannon in a position where she would have to lie to my mother and her boss.

  “How does your mother like him?” Shannon blinked as she continued. “It’s funny that she was trying to set you up with that marketing director last week and you had someone like him all along. That could’ve been an awkward conversation.” She paused. “Oh! Are you bringing him to the silent auction tomorrow night? You should. I’m bringing my best friend. We could all go out to eat afterward for dinner! You know how the food is at those kinds of things.”

  Did she ever quit talking?