Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 78231 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 391(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78231 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 391(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
Ruthless cartel leader.
The last man in the world Hope wanted anything to do with.
Until he was swaggering into her private investigation office.
He needed to find a snake in his organization. And he wanted her to do it.
Falling for him was never part of the plan…
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
CHAPTER ONE
Hope
The blood was soaking through the denim covering my thigh, each step dragging the coarse material against the puncture wound as I tried to remember the last time I had a tetanus booster. The ragged edge of the scaffolding that had snagged me had been rusty as fuck, and I wasn’t excited about the prospect of Lockjaw.
Though, objectively, that condition would make it a hell of a lot easier to keep my mouth shut around my coworkers.
I let out a sigh, seeing their cars parked down the street, knowing I was going to catch endless shit about getting hurt on the job.
As if they never got roughed up.
But it was different to them.
Because I was a woman.
Gritting my teeth, I pulled open the door to the private investigation office I’d been stubbornly working at for years, despite the endless flack the men gave me as they tried to drive me out the door of my own accord since they never had a legitimate reason to fire me.
The office looked different from the wrong side of morning.
My sandpaper eyes didn’t take in the scuffed floors, the nicks out of the desks—five in all, lined up on the sides of the room—or the dust bunnies in the corners.
It wasn’t the most modern or reputable-looking place.
I think, to an extent, I’d been drawn to how rough around the edges it was when I’d walked in to apply for a job.
There were other, more modern offices with their streamlined desks with fancy monitors, all the paperwork neatly tucked away. If it existed at all. Everything was digital with them, I guess.
We didn’t have a snack station, a waiting area with comfortable seating, or tasteful, abstract art on the walls.
No.
Mason Investigations was like something straight out of a noir.
The flooring was original to the building which I was pretty sure was built in the fifties. The walls had been needing a fresh coat of paint since the seventies. And the only art that donned our walls were whiteboards behind each desk and a giant corkboard that had old, faded newspaper clippings of various cases we’d been a part of over the years. Most of them before I’d been brought on. But there was one in particular that pertained to me. The one my current boss had put right in the center, the headline underlined in red permanent marker.
My stomach twisted each time I saw it.
I forced my gaze away as my gaze moved around the office, not seeing any of my coworkers.
Which meant they were in the meeting room in the back.
That made sense.
Since the only reason any of them showed up early in the day was when there was a big client coming in that required “all hands on deck.”
But not my hands.
Never my hands.
Letting out an exhale, trying to tell myself it didn’t matter, I dropped down at my desk.
It was the one closest to the door. I imagined my boss had put me there because, as a woman, I was expected to be the office secretary.
I made it a point never to look up when the door opened on principle.
Was I poking the bear that already seemed all too happy to snap at me for no reason? Sure. But I was strong enough to deal with the repercussions of standing up on my morals.
I refused to have my position be reduced to my sex just because I worked in an all-boys club.
So I didn’t look up when I heard the door squeak, in desperate need of some WD-40, but I wasn’t going to do any extra, unpaid work. I barely made anything as it was. And the more you did for an employer, the more they expected. For free.
Popping the cap of the hydrogen peroxide, I sucked in a deep breath and poured it over the hole in my pants.
I could feel eyes on me, and since the guys were in the back, I figured I did have to greet whoever the potential client was.
My gaze lifted, and there he was.
A.
Short for Andres, but everyone called him A.
Andres Alcazar.
Local drug kingpin.
He’d rolled into town a few years back with a clusterfuck of a situation that had one of my best friends wrapped up in his world for a while.
They’d worked shit out eventually, and A was actually friendly with some of my friends as well as the outlaw biker club my father was a part of.
That didn’t mean, however, that he and I were on good terms. In fact, we were oil and water on the few occasions we’d needed to interact briefly.
As much as I hated it for the aforementioned reasons, A was a good-looking guy.
He was tall and a compact sort of strong, leaning on just the right side of being skinny.
He had black hair that matched the stubble on his face, thick black lashes framing his dark eyes, and a smile that never went any wider than a smirk.