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  Text copyright ©2020 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

  If you’re reading this, I want to thank you for picking up this book. I wouldn’t be able to do it without you.

  Acknowledgments

  Chase Ketron - Model

  Golden Czermak - Photographer

  My Brother’s Editor & Ink It Out Editing- My editors

  Cover Me Darling - Cover Artist

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

  Kendra, Laura, Lisa, Penney, 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

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note:

  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

  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

  It Happens

  Castiel and Turner

  Snitches Get Stitches

  F-Bomb

  The Southern Gentleman Series

  Kinda Don’t Care

  Maybe Don’t Wanna

  Get You Some

  Ain’t Doin’ It

  Too Bad So Sad

  KPD Motorcycle Patrol

  Hide Your Crazy

  It Wasn’t Me

  I’d Rather Not

  Make Me

  Sinners are Winners

  If You Say So

  SWAT 2.0

  Just Kidding

  Fries Before Guys

  Maybe Swearing Will Help

  Ask Me If I Care

  May Contain Wine (5-12-20)

  Joke’s on You (6-9-20)

  Join the Club (7-14-20)

  Any Day Now (8-11-20)

  Say it Ain’t So (9-8-20)

  Officially Over It (10-13-20)

  Nobody Knows (11-3-20)

  Depends Who’s Asking (12-8-20)

  Valentine Boys

  Herd That

  Crazy Heifer

  Chute Yeah

  Get Bucked

  Blurb

  Don’t ever trust a bullfighter.

  Those five words were words that Waylynn Molly Jennings lived by from the moment that her daddy, a bullfighter himself, said them to her to the moment one caught her eye.

  From then on, she’s tried her best to stay away from them. In fact, she’s done even better. She’s stayed away from rodeos of all kinds.

  But then she graduates college, can’t find a job, and has nowhere else to go but her dad’s RV camper following him around on the rodeo circuit.

  Surely a couple of weeks while she finds a job won’t hurt anything… right?

  Wrong.

  She forgot about the one person that her dad had warned her about in the first place—Darby Valentine.

  ***

  Darby Valentine is a bad boy. Darby Valentine is trouble. Darby Valentine is a god with his…

  Okay. So there are a lot of things said about Darby Valentine, and most of it isn’t good.

  Granted, he did a lot of crap in his younger days to warrant his bad reputation. However, he’d grown up a lot in the ten years that it’d been since he’d stepped back onto the straight and narrow.

  He doesn’t deserve the bad rap anymore.

  He also doesn’t deserve the crap that Waylynn Molly Jennings gives him each time she sees him.

  The more crap she gives, the more appealing she seems.

  And it doesn’t take long for Darby Valentine to prove to her he is exactly what she thinks he is—a cowboy with a bad attitude and a pension for getting exactly what he wants.

  Chapter 1

  Women will never know the dread of when your dick touches the inside of a toilet bowl.

  -Text from Darby to Waylynn

  Darby

  “I’m not going to give you shit.”

  I would’ve rolled my eyes had I not known it would just piss the woman off in front of me.

  “Listen, Linda,” I said.

  “My name isn’t Linda, jerk wad,” Not-Linda said. “It’s Kasey.”

  I knew what her name was, but I couldn’t stop myself from saying things to piss her off. Seriously, doing it was just too much fun.

  “Kasey,” I corrected myself, trying not to put too much sarcasm into my words. “I’m here to make the bank drop for you.”

  “You’re going to have to allow me to check w
ith Candy or Desi, then,” Kasey snarled. “I don’t want you stealing it.”

  I sighed.

  “I’ve been a good boy for years now, Kasey,” I said. “You’re being much too dramatic.”

  Kasey stiffened and turned away from me as if I’d just pissed in her cornflakes.

  Then again, maybe I had at one point.

  I’d been a dick in my younger years.

  In fact, I was still a dick.

  I just wasn’t a prick that did shit just to piss people off and fuck up peoples’ lives anymore.

  Now, I just did what I wanted, tried not to piss people off in the process, and kept my nose clean.

  Kasey had been a mistake.

  A mistake I’d made when I was ‘asshole Darby’ and not ‘has his shit together Darby.’

  Kasey and I had dated in high school. It’d gone south when I’d left, trying to leave my shitty past behind. And Kasey still hated that I’d let her go when I’d left.

  Meaning, now that she worked for my sister-in-laws, Candy and Desi, I had to see her and deal with her crap a lot more often than I wanted to.

  The woman who’d entered the store behind me, who’d been listening to the entire thing since she’d walked in, finally broke the silence of Kasey leaving.

  “Is that your superpower?”

  I turned and looked at the woman.

  It wasn’t really a surprise to find Waylynn Jennings standing there.

  I’d, of course, seen her enter the store.

  What I hadn’t expected her to do was to actually talk to me.

  “What?” I asked, confusion lacing my features.

  “Pissing people off,” she said. “Is that your superpower?”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “You’re hilarious,” I found myself saying. “Why are you talking to me?”

  I’d met Waylynn Jennings when I’d started working for the rodeo circuit as a bullfighter.

  A bullfighter was the crazy man that chased the bulls around the rodeo ring when the bull riders either fell off the bull, or jumped off when they had completed their ride.

  To keep the bull rider safe, the bullfighter would then catch the bull’s attention to ensure that the bull rider could make it out of the ring without harm.

  That was where Waylynn’s father, Jude, came in.

  Jude was a six-foot-four powerhouse that could run like the wind.

  He’d taken me under his wing and shown me the ropes when I was just a kid looking to make a buck. And, after eight years of being a bullfighter, I finally could see the end on the horizon.

  Originally, I’d taken the job as a bullfighter because it paid a pretty decent chunk of change.

  Then I’d kept the job because it gave me money, worked well with my schedule at the Valentine Ranch, and I could pick and choose where I wanted to go and when I wanted to work. Which was a necessity when it came to going to college full-time.

  Which led to how I’d first met Waylynn.

  Jude Jennings had brought his daughter, Waylynn, with him to the first rodeo.

  At the time, Waylynn hadn’t liked being there.

  Her mother and Jude had recently divorced, and she’d been a bitter little bitch to anyone that showed her any kindness.

  And me, who hadn’t really cared who she was at all, hadn’t shown her even the least bit of attention when she was around.

  Which, in turn, pissed her off even more.

  Now, eight years later, she still had a hard-on when it came to causing me trouble.

  To make matters worse, she’d even started going to the same damn school as me. Attending the same damn classes.

  Honestly, I wasn’t sure if she’d started the classes because of me, and wanted to piss me off even more, or because she genuinely wanted to be an architectural engineer.

  Whatever the reason, to this day she still disliked every bone in my body.

  And I thought she was the hottest thing I’d ever seen.

  Even though I’d never act on the feelings she invoked in me.

  “I’m talking to you because I know it annoys you,” she said.

  I frowned.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  Kasey came out of the back room, phone to her ear, and the bank bag in her hands.

  She looked like she’d swallowed a lemon.

  “Sure, fine,” Kasey said, holding out the bank bag to me. “Here.”

  I took it, offered Kasey a smile, then turned around to walk out of the coffee store.

  Kasey grumbled something under her breath as we left that sounded suspiciously like ‘fucking asshole,’ but I didn’t turn around to make sure.

  “She’s sweet,” Waylynn said. “What did you do to her to piss her off?”

  I grumbled something underneath my breath and took a left onto Main Street, the road that the bank was on, and started walking quickly.

  It was a vain attempt at getting Waylynn to stop following me.

  It didn’t work.

  She just sped up.

  “What was that?” she repeated, easily keeping pace at my side.

  Thinking that it couldn’t hurt for her to know, I decided to tell her.

  “We met when I first got back to Kilgore,” I said. “I was in a bad place. Did some bad shit. Fucked around. Kasey was with me for most of that time. When I finally got my ass back on the straight and narrow, Kasey had to go. I broke up with her, then left for college shortly after that.”

  Waylynn hummed in understanding.

  “So you pissed her off because she was in love with you and you broke up with her,” she guessed. “And now, you have to see her every day, and she’s still in love with you.”

  I had no idea if that was the case or not.

  I did know that she disliked me immensely, though.

  “No idea,” I said as I made my way to the bank door. “But I don’t see her every day.”

  When I opened it, I was unsurprised to find her still at my side.

  She came to a stop beside me as I started to fill out a deposit receipt and then started counting the money that I would be depositing for Desi and Candy.

  “That’s a lot of money,” Waylynn said. “I…”

  “Hands in the air!”

  I felt my heartbeat slow to an almost crawl and looked over my shoulder at the man that’d just entered through the bank’s front doors.

  I felt like a fucking moron for not carrying today.

  Normally I did.

  I’d been doing it since I was old enough to hold a license to carry concealed.

  And now, the one fucking time that I needed it, I didn’t have it on me.

  I looked over at Waylynn as I raised my hands into the air, feeling helpless.

  She didn’t have her hands in the air. She had one in her purse and the other one at the small of her back.

  “Here,” she said, slapping a piece of cold metal onto the table I was standing in front of. “You can hold my purse gun.”

  Then she pulled the biggest goddamn gun I’d ever seen right out of the waistband of her pants.

  Knowing that she was about to engage the robber, I dropped my arms and picked up the ‘purse gun’ she’d handed me.

  Then turned around just in time for the man to come stalking toward us.

  “I said hands in the air!” the robber bellowed.

  In answer, Waylynn flipped off the safety.

  It was the loudest thing I’d ever heard in my life.

  “Do you really want to see whose gun is bigger?” she asked. “Because mine is a 500 Win Mag. It’ll blow a hole in your chest the size of a watermelon.”

  The man was stunned to stillness.

  He gaped at Waylynn.

  As did everyone else, me included.

  “I’ll give you to the count of ten to get onto the floor before I shoot,” she said. “One. Two. Three…”

  The robber threw his gun a
t Waylynn, which was when I realized that it was plastic.

  It hit Waylynn in the face, then clattered to the floor and shattered into a million, tiny plastic pieces.

  Waylynn didn’t bother shooting the moron, though.

  Before anybody, even me, could react, she was tackling the man before he could make his escape.

  She took him down in one well-placed tackle, doing better than eighty percent of the professional linemen for the Dallas Cowboys could’ve done.

  “Holy shit,” I breathed, watching it all go down in a sort of distant surprise.

  I bent down and picked up her gun that’d fallen to the floor, stuffed it in the back of my pants, then stepped on the man’s arm that he was about to use to nail a blow to the side of Waylynn’s head.

  When he went to hit her with the other arm, I stepped down hard, feeling the audible crack of the man’s arm breaking.

  He screamed bloody murder and Waylynn scrambled off of him.

  I offered her my hand, which she promptly pushed away.

  Standing on her own two feet, she smoothed her hands down her pants and stared at the now-crying robber.

  A scattered and winded teller made her way over with a phone to her ear.

  “The police are on their way,” she said breathlessly.

  I nodded once and handed Waylynn back her hand cannon.

  She took it, replaced it in the holster against her right kidney, then threw her shirt back over it.

  When she was done with that, I handed her back her ‘purse gun,’ too.

  With both safely stowed, I couldn’t help myself.

  I had to see how I’d not seen the gun beforehand. I knew for a fact that I’d snuck a peek at her ass at one point during our walk to the bank.

  I leaned backward, catching the attention of a man now standing and brushing his neatly-pressed pants off, and took a look at her ass.

  I could see the barrel of the gun—now.

  “How the hell…” I said. “I should’ve been able to see that.”

  Waylynn snorted.

  “Would you like to go out to dinner with me?” the nicely-dressed man asked.

  Waylynn turned to study the man that’d just asked that.

  Just about that time, the man on the ground pulled a knife and lunged at Waylynn.

  I reacted first and kicked the knife out of his hand just about the same time that Waylynn pulled her gun back out.

  The little spitfire aimed it at the bank robber’s face and said, “Don’t touch that knife!”