Wicked Need (The Wicked Horse Series Book 3)(2)

I tap gently on the window, knowing I’m going to startle her but not being able to help it. She jerks upright, looking at me with frightened eyes. When she recognizes me, I can see her give a sigh of relief. She raises the seat up and rolls the window down. It’s then that I notice her car is running.

“Hey,” she says, her eyes darting around the parking lot.

“What are you doing?” I ask, completely perplexed to find her sleeping in her car. I know she’s not drunk because Catherine doesn’t drink.

At all.

That’s because she does some crazy shit in the club, and she doesn’t want anyone to ever think it’s not of her own free will. She owns her kinky f*ckery… and owns it good. I don’t think she does drugs, so it’s very confusing to find her here like this.

“Um… I just…” Her voice trails off and her gaze falls down to her delicate fingers, which are intertwined tightly with one another.

“Catherine… were you going to spend the night out here?”

She lets out a huff of frustrated air. Looking back up to me with resignation in her eyes, she admits, “Yes.”

Nothing more.

I cock an eyebrow at her. Catherine and her late husband reside in Vegas permanently, but he has a luxury cabin just outside of Jackson that they spent a lot of time at since he got her a membership at The Silo.

“Is your car broken down or something?”

She shakes her head and looks back down at her lap.

“Then what the f*ck?” I ask, exasperated and also damn worn out from the night’s activities. I want to get home and get some shut-eye. Work comes early and I cannot miss it. I have to open the tattoo shop I work for at ten in the morning, and I need the few hours of sleep I can squeeze in.

She’s silent and I think she may refuse to answer me, but then her small voice reaches my ears and it stuns me. “I don’t have anywhere else to stay.”

“What do mean? You have a seven-thousand-square-foot home not thirty minutes away.”

She shakes her head, that dark hair falling in a veil to hide her face. It’s a gorgeous face, too. High cheekbones, with an exotic slant to her liquid brown eyes. It’s a face that should be in movies or on magazines. A face beautiful enough that it landed her a wealthy husband on death’s door and should have left her swimming in riches.

“Catherine,” I prompt, pulling on the handle to her door. It’s still locked so I reach my hand inside, find the lock, flip it, and then pull the door open. I step in, squat down, and place my hand on her thigh. “What’s going on?”

She pulls in a shaky breath, lifts a hand to tuck her hair behind her ear, which exposes her face again, and then turns to look at me with bleak eyes. “He didn’t leave me with anything. Just this car, which he had titled in my name.”

“Excuse me?”

“Samuel left everything to his two children. Of course, I knew he would leave them with something. But he always promised me he’d take care of me. I’d always have a place to live. An attorney showed up at the Jackson house two days ago telling me that I had to vacate. I was allowed to pack up my clothes, and that was it.”

My breath hisses out from between my teeth, and I wish that creepy f*cker was still alive so I could pound his withered, crippled ass into the ground. That goddamn motherf*cker.

I stand straight after giving a quick pat on her thigh. “You can crash at my place tonight. I’ll help you figure something out.”

“Seriously?” she asks, her eyes wide and her lips trembling. “I mean… we don’t really know each other.”

“I’ve been balls deep inside you a time or two, Catherine. I think I know you a little bit,” I say with a teasing smile.

She blushes, and f*ck… that’s pretty. I’ve never seen Catherine blush, and she’s done some things to make even the kinkiest of motherf*ckers go red in the face.

“Are you sure?” she hesitantly asks.

“Positive. You can follow me to my place.”

“I’ll be glad to pay you,” she says earnestly. “You know… in sex or something. I’ve only got about fifty dollars in cash left to my name.”

My cock leaps at the thought, because yeah… although I’m tired, I would not say no to f*cking her tonight. But instead, I decide to be a gentleman. “You don’t owe me anything. Let’s get you to my place so you can get a good night’s sleep. We’ll talk about it more tomorrow and try to figure out how to take care of you.”

She blushes again as I put my hand on the door to close it for her. Just before I do though, she whispers, “Thank you, Rand. You’re a lifesaver.”

Hmmmm… I like the sound of that.





Chapter 1


Rand



I try to be as quiet as possible as I creep past the couch where Catherine’s sleeping. My tiny apartment can be walked from end to end in about five seconds. Roughly 475 square feet of efficient living. I’ve been renting this apartment from my buddy, Jake Gearhart. It’s situated over the garage of his modest ranch house in the town of Jackson, Wyoming.

It’s nothing but a large square that has a semi private foyer/mudroom as soon as you enter. When you round the corner, you have the kitchen and living room to the left, and my bedroom to the right. The bathroom sits adjacent to the foyer.