Betting the Bad Boy (3 page)

The nurse looked away from the chart she was staring at and over to him as if she could feel his gaze on her. She froze, her eyes wide and now that he could see her face fully, it was like being zapped back to the time when he was looking at the beautiful girl with huge green eyes who’d loved him despite his rough ways and difficult past. He knew that face too well. Thirteen years and a long prison sentence hadn’t changed the fact that her face was permanently burned into his memory. But it couldn’t be her. Not here. Not back in the town that had ended it all for them. He took a step toward her, but a code blue was called and she was gone. Just like she had disappeared into thin air.

The elevator doors opened then and Duke got on, not sure if he had really seen Grace or if she was a figment of his imagination.

Chapter 3

Lolly King was awake even though it was well past midnight. She was sitting up in her hospital bed, engrossed in one of those romance novels with a bare-chested man on the cover. She had a bag of cheese curls in her lap and giant cup of soda sitting on her nightstand. Duke had been expecting the worst. He had been expecting to see a frail, elderly woman barely hanging on to life.

What he got was the old battle-ax he remembered. His chest loosened slightly. He hadn’t realized that he could barely breathe until that moment.

“What are you up to, old woman?”

“Well, well, well,” she said, giving him a once-over. “If it isn’t the original badass come to pay his old aunt a visit. How are you, convict?”

“I drove ten hours with two pains in the ass to get here. How do you think I am, Lolly?”

“Still jolly as Santa Claus, I see.” His chest loosened more. Sassy intelligence danced in her eyes. Lolly was the kind of person who seemed to be in on a joke that no one else knew the punch line to. It was something about her that drove him crazy, but he liked it, too.

“You’re the healthiest-looking sick person I’ve ever seen. What are you playing at?”

“Excuse me, boy, but do you think I would be in the intensive care unit of this hospital unless I was really sick? This ain’t no hotel. There is no free HBO or vibrating beds, and I don’t appreciate you walking in here and accusing an old, sick woman of playing games.”

She still had a sharp tongue. He had been a tiny bit afraid of her as a kid. Maybe he still was. But he admired the hell out of her. She had come to see him every week when he was away, without fail. He’d tried to get her to come live in Vegas with the rest of them, but Lolly refused. She’d told him that her place was in her little beauty salon in Destiny.

“Come here, Duke.” He obeyed her order and took the seat beside the bed. He looked into her face, studying her closely. She was paler than he was used to seeing her. She held her body a little more stiffly. Her eyes weren’t as bright as they were when he was last with her. Maybe she really was sick.

“What’s wrong, Lolly?”

“Give me your hand, convict.”

“You aren’t going to slap my knuckles with a comb, are you?” he asked her as he took her hand. He noticed that it was cold, that her fingers felt bony. “You used to do that when I got fresh with you at the salon.”

“Only if you put your grubby paws on my stuff.” She looked at him for a long moment. “You’re my favorite, you know.”

Duke laughed. “I very much doubt that.”

“Shut up, damn it! I said you’re my favorite and if you call me a liar again, I’ll kick you square in your man parts.”

“Okay.” He winced, not putting it past her. “Go on.”

“You’re my favorite. You took care of those boys for a long time after your no-good, deadbeat, dumb-ass father left and before I pulled my head out of my ass and came around. You’re honorable. You always do what’s right, no matter the cost. There are few men in this world that I can say I’m proud to know, and you are one of them.”

He didn’t know how to respond to that. Lolly wasn’t one for sentimental moments and sweet words. And the fact that she was saying them now really worried him. “What did the doctors tell you?”

“My kidneys have gone to shit and I have done too much partying and drinking in my day to qualify for new ones. Plus I’m old as hell.”

“You expect me to believe what some doctors in this little shitty town have to say? We’ll take you to Vegas for a second opinion. In fact, I’ll fly a specialist out here to see you.”

“Hold up there, big spender. I didn’t ask you to come here so that you can try to save me. I asked you to come here so you could get some peace for yourself.”

“Excuse me?”

“Grace is back in town.”

His head spun slightly at the news. His eyes hadn’t deceived him. It was her. That sleepy-looking little nurse in the baggy scrubs was the same girl he had fallen head-over-ass in love with nearly fifteen years ago.

“She’s a nurse in this hospital?” he asked already knowing the truth.

“Only part-time, when she needs the cash.”

“What?” The richest girl in town needed extra cash. “Why?”

“I don’t know, but you are going to find out and you are going to make peace with that girl.”

“I don’t need to make peace with her.”

“She is the reason you went to prison, Duke!”

“No, the fucking Andersens and her father are the reason I ended up in prison.”

“We both know that it all had to do with Grace. And we all know that once you got locked up she ran out of here like her hair was on fire.”

That was true, but he knew her father had a lot to do with her disappearance from town the day after he was arrested. He was mad as hell at her, but he didn’t blame her for what happened. It was his fault, too. His fault for falling in love with the last girl he should have. “That part of my life is over.”

“It’s not. You still care about what went down here, because if you didn’t you would have come back here. You wouldn’t have spent the last seven years hiding away from the world.”

“I’m not hiding away. My name is all over auto parts and car shops.”

“Then why Levi is hosting the show that features all your hard work while you stand in the background?”

“The TV show was Colt’s idea. I never wanted to be in the spotlight.”

“No, but I want you to show her who you are now. What you’ve become. I don’t want you hiding from this town. I want you to come back and stick it in their faces and I want to be alive while you do it.”

“My work speaks for itself. I’ve got nothing to prove.”

She squeezed his hand. “I’ve never asked for you for a damn thing. Not a penny, not even a birthday card. But now I’m calling in a favor. Now I want you to show that girl, and this town, what kind of man you made yourself into. I want them eating every bad thing they said about you boys. You think you can manage that for me?”

He exhaled slowly and then nodded. When she put it that way, he really didn’t have any other choice.

*   *   *

Grace Truman rushed inside her house the next morning and leaned against the door as if to bar anyone else from coming in. Her chest was heaving, her breaths not coming easily. It had been hours since she’d seen him. She was positive that Duke wasn’t after her, but when she saw him, she still felt the urge to flee.

It had been thirteen years since she had last seen him in person. Thirteen long, hard years for both of them. She was surprised that exchanging just one look with him could cause such a rush of feelings to return to her. She had been brought up to like clean-cut men, to want highly educated ones, with influence and power. Her father had set her up on dates with the young men his friends were related to. The daughter of the judge and granddaughter of a congressman had an image to uphold. Grace wanted to go along with it. She wanted to like those perfectly nice boys her family wanted her to see, but she never felt anything toward them.

The only man she had ever felt anything for was Duke. He was the poor kid who had spent most of his life living in a trailer on the outskirts of town. Raised wild, her father liked to say. The only thing wild about him was how beautiful he was when he was younger. He was big, brutish even, but he had the most gorgeous, soulful brown eyes and a gaze that shot straight through her every time he looked her way. He had made her heart pump. And seeing him today at thirty-five, seeing that he was bigger, harder looking, and knowing that he’d taken the hand dealt to him and made himself into a man anyone could be proud of made her heart nearly explode out of her chest.

But he hated her. He never said the words. He didn’t have to. His silence said it all. She wanted to blame him for his lack of communication, for the dozens of letters that went unanswered. But she tried to put herself in his shoes. She would have blamed her, too. He may have thrown the brutal punches that landed him in jail. But she was the reason he’d had to. She had gone out with a guy he hated, just to get back at him for breaking her heart. She had gone out with a guy she knew was a little too fast, a little too cocky. A guy who was the exact opposite of the man she fell in love with. Her plan was to make him jealous, but her plan ended up sending him to prison.

She didn’t know what they would say to each other if they ever did cross paths. She had tried not to think about it. Because it hurt too much. She had been alone for so long, struggling for so long, and she wanted to blame Duke for rejecting her for his own stupid noble reasons. And her father for sending her out of town the day after the fight and trying to force her into a life she didn’t want to live. But blaming them was useless. In the end she had made her own choices. That’s all she had ever wanted to do.

And when she was alone, in pain and more scared than she had ever been in that hospital in Boston all those years ago, she swore she would never be dependent on another man for as long as she lived.

She had sworn she would never come back to Destiny.

But her mother had gotten sick. Her mother who’d loved her but was no match for her bullheaded husband, so Grace had watched helplessly as the two people she loved the most went to battle. Grace had come back to Destiny to be with her in her final days. And it was then Grace made the promise that was probably going to be impossible to keep.

Take care of your father. Try to love him again. He did what he thought was best for you.

So she made the move back here, back to the place that held so many hard-to-handle memories, to do what her mother asked.

But she honestly never thought she would see Duke here. Destiny had never been good to him. This town was the thing that almost broke him. Somehow he had returned and come to the hospital, but it wasn’t because he knew she was there. He was too surprised when he saw her. As if she were a ghost. All night she kept seeing the way he looked as he stepped toward her—almost like he wanted to capture her. It made her wonder if he’d thought of her at all in the past thirteen years.

Even if he had, he couldn’t possibly think of her as much as she thought of him. She was reminded of Duke every time she stepped foot in her door.

She had never been more glad for a code to be called in her life. She wondered what he would have said to her if he had reached her. If he would have explained why he’d completely shut her out of his life. She could accept it if he was mad at her for causing him to get into that fight that sent him to prison.

But she was afraid of him telling her he’d never really loved her in the first place. That everything she had done in the name of love had been for no reason at all.

Grace hadn’t been scared of much these past few years, but she had been scared of that.

His aunt was in the hospital, she remembered when her brain stopped spinning so fast. That’s why he was here. To see the aunt who’d rescued him from poverty. The same woman who got him out of jail when he was fifteen and was caught stealing food from the market to feed his brothers. Hopefully it was just a quick visit. Hopefully he would be gone in a couple of days and she could avoid all the drama that came with a King.

Until then, she was going to stay the hell away from him. How could one person be the last man she wanted to see and yet the only man she ever wanted to be with?

“What’s wrong with you?” her thirteen-year-old son, Ryder, asked as he walked down their creaky stairs.

“What are you doing here?” She stepped away from the door and marched toward him. “I dropped you off at your grandfather’s house before I went to work last night. You’re supposed to be there. He’s taking you to summer school.”

“I hate it there. I hate him,” Ryder said with his usual hostility.

Grace didn’t know what was happening with her son. He was always mad, at her, at the world. But he really hated his grandfather and she wasn’t sure why. Grace tried really hard to keep things pleasant between herself and her father. She’d never let Ryder know all the things that had gone down between them. Plus her mother was gone. He was the only family they had left, and yet Ryder’s dislike for him had grown over the years.

“I’m sorry, baby.” She touched his cheek and her heart squeezed painfully. The way he looked up at her with that surliness combined with that leftover little-boy innocence reminded her so much of his father. “I can’t leave you here by yourself all night. It’s against the law and even if it weren’t, I would be such a worried wreck that I wouldn’t be able to get anything done.”

“Why do you have to work this summer? Why can’t you stay home?”

She was a school nurse at the local elementary school just so she could be home when Ryder was, but in the summer when school was closed she had to pick up shifts at the hospital to make ends meet. She worked a lot of overnights and double shifts. She couldn’t leave him alone all that time, even if his child care situation was less than desirable. “We need the money. The house is falling down around us. And you insist on being fed and clothed.”

“Grandpa has money. Why don’t you just ask him for some?”

“I’m not taking anything from Grandpa.” She’d beg on the streets before she went to her father for money. When he found out she was pregnant, she had no idea that he had arranged a marriage for her. It was to one of his friend’s sons. A wealthy lawyer nearly twenty years her senior.