Convict: A Bad Boy Romance Read Online Free PDF

totally catches me off guard, and I just stand there with my mouth open. Technically, it is now , but for a second I just think how does she know?
    “I mean, your parents named you that? It’s not a nickname?”
    “No,” I say, recovering. “Old family name.”
    She just nods, then holds out her hand again. We shake, her grip warm and firm and, I swear to God, just a little tingly.
    “Thanks, Stone,” she says.
    She reaches into her pocket and comes out with a business card.
    “Call me if you think of anything else,” she says. “My cell number is on there.”
    DETECTIVE L. RIVERS, it reads.
    “Come on, Detective,” I say. “What’s the L stand for?”
    She just smiles.
    “Lucille,” I guess. “Loretta. Lacy.”
    Detective Rivers turns, walks for the door, and stops with one hand on the frame.
    “Lauren. Lula-Mae.”
    She looks at me over her shoulder, almost the same position as this morning, when she was watching the waves over her shoulder.
    “Tell me,” I say, and my voice comes out a low, rough rumble.
    Detective Rivers gives me a long, slow once-over that makes every hair on my body stand on end. If a woman looked at me like that in a bar, twenty minutes later we’d be in a cheap motel, but that’s not in the cards right now.
    “Luna,” she says, and steps out the door into the sunlight.

    * * *
    I spend the day sweeping glass, putting tools back where they belong, ordering replacement car windows, and thinking about two things.
    One is Detective Rivers. Detective Rivers in the back seat of the Land Rover, my face between her thighs. Detective Rivers bent over the hood of the Volkswagen, moaning with my cock buried inside her. Detective Rivers on her knees, lips around my shaft as I lean against a tool bench, looking up at me.
    Even Detective Rivers, standing in front of me fully clothed, tapping her pen against her notepad.
    The other thing is the Syndicate’s symbol, spray painted on the corner of the garage gate. I know what it means.
    They want me to think they’ve found me. They want me to run, to try to hide somewhere else.
    But seven or eight years ago, I was the guy going out at one in the morning and spray painting that symbol on warehouses in Atlanta. I know how this works.
    We were looking for someone named Ernest. An accountant or something who’d ratted, then gone into Witness Protection. The Syndicate heard that he might be in Atlanta somewhere, so we did what my boss called shaking the trees . So we could see what flew out.
    It started with us tagging shit all over the city and smashing some windows. Nothing happened. We torched a car and left the symbol nearby. Nothing, but the Syndicate swore he was somewhere in the city, so we torched a whole building, an old Taco Bell that had shut down.
    He still didn’t run. We started to think he wasn’t in Atlanta, that the Syndicate had been wrong, but they insisted. The string of arsons was all over the news, so we gave it one more shot and set fire to an abandoned warehouse near the river.
    That did it. Ernest got himself a fake ID, withdrew a lot of money from the bank, and got on an Amtrak train — exactly what the Syndicate was watching for. We shook the trees, and he flew.
    He didn’t make it out of Georgia.
    Here’s the thing, though: if Ernest hadn’t run, we’d have given up. We were this close to deciding he wasn’t in Atlanta. Plus, there were people doing the same thing in Houston and Chicago, and they didn’t turn up anything.
    They want me to run. They want me scared, they want me to think they’re close to finding me, but I know better.
    I ran once. I went into witness protection in the first place.
    I’m not fucking running again.

    * * *
    W hen I leave work I drive straight from Tortuga to San Luis Obispo, the nearest real city. It’s not a big city, but it’s big enough for what I need.
    I head straight for the basement bar on the outskirts of town. I don’t think the place has a name, or at least if it