Wallflowers: Double Trouble Read online

  Table of Contents

  Wallflowers: Double Trouble

  Copyright

  Titles by CP Smith

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2017 by cp smith

  All rights reserved

  Published by CP Smith

  Wallflowers: Double Trouble is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are all products of the author’s ridiculous imagination, and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Except as permitted under the US Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.

  First Edition: July 2017

  Editor Julia Goda

  Formatting: CP Smith

  Cover design: Dark Waters Covers

  Cover Photograph Depositphoto @inarik

  Information address: [email protected]

  Titles by CP Smith

  a reason to breathe

  a reason to kill

  a reason to live

  Restoring Hope

  Property Of

  FRAMED

  Wallflowers: Three of a Kind

  Wallflowers: Double Trouble

  Acknowledgments

  To my family. All of this is for you. Thank you for putting up with me!

  Julia Goda and Mayra Statham. I love you both, to the moon and back. You ladies keep me sane!

  Deb Hawblitzel Schultz, I love you like a sister. Thank you for always having my back.

  Nichole Hart, Gi Paar, Jane S Wells, Angela Shue, Kelly Marshall-White, Sallie Brown Davis, Michelle Reed, Joanne Thompson, Karen Hrdlicka, and Allison Michaels. Thank you for taking time out of your busy day to find my errors. It means a lot to me that you care as much as I do about these characters I bring to life.

  Julia Goda, you’re the best damn editor out there. Thank you!

  Tracie Douglas-Rabas, thank you for always understanding my vision. Your covers make me happy!

  And to my original Dream Team. I love you more than you know! ‘Thank you’ isn’t a big enough word.

  Dedication

  For Julia and Mayra

  Prologue

  NOT HAPPENIN’

  Three days earlier . . .

  RACING THROUGH TRAFFIC AT A high rate of speed, dodging cars as his siren blared, Bo Strawn tried to rein in his temper as he headed for Tybee Island in pursuit of Gayla Brown, a psychopath who’d kidnapped his friend’s woman. What hold he had on his temper, after three nights with little to no sleep, was slipping. His lack of control was due in part to two infuriating Wallflowers. Or, more to the point, the one behind the wheel who wouldn’t pull the fuck over.

  He was five minutes behind Devin Hawthorne when he should have been in the lead because he couldn’t get Calla’s friends to pull over. Since he was losing valuable time arguing with the two irrational women, he’d asked for Poppy’s phone number and called them back from his cell as he headed for his truck. But no matter what he said, the stubborn woman behind the wheel wouldn’t listen.

  “Swear to Christ, Sienna. I will lock you up and throw away the key if you don’t stand down. NOW!” Bo roared into the phone.

  Law and order were paramount to Bo, so when Poppy Gentry scoffed in his ear, then relayed his message to Sienna Miller, whose only reply was a sexy chuckle, he gritted his teeth and slammed his hand against the steering wheel.

  Don’t lose control.

  Drawing a deep breath in through his nose, he counted to ten before trying again to talk some sense into two of the most infuriating women he’d ever encountered. No. Scratch that. Two of the three most infuriating women he’d ever encountered. Their cohort and ringleader, Calla Armstrong, who was currently in the hands of a madwoman, was equally infuriating. None of them listened to reason. None of them followed the rules he held sacred.

  “Poppy!” he barked into the phone. “You’ll only get yourselves killed. Leave this to Devin and me, and pull over.”

  “Is he still yappin’ his jaw?” Sienna shouted. “Tell him to save his breath. Wallflowers do not leave a woman behind.”

  His eye twitched, and his hand followed suit. He didn’t know if he wanted to strangle Sienna or put her over his knee until she listened to reason.

  “I’m done playin’ this game,” Bo growled low. “Pull over now or face the consequences.”

  “We aren’t pullin’ over, so you can save your breath. Besides, Gayla stopped,” Poppy whispered. “They pulled in front of a cottage facing the ocean. We’ll get out and see what she’s up to when they go inside.”

  “For fuck’s sake, stay in your—” The report of a gun being fired stopped Bo mid-sentence, and his heart dropped. “Talk to me. What’s happening?” he shouted.

  No response.

  “Poppy, did you hear me? Stay where you are. Devin will be there any minute.”

  He was still met with dead air.

  Bo’s blood ran cold, and he jammed the pedal to the floor.

  Now all three Wallflowers were at the mercy of a madwoman. A woman who had stalked Devin with the intent to kill him for ruining her life. The same woman who had killed a man to keep her identity a secret.

  Eight minutes later, he came to a screeching halt next to a police cruiser and Devin’s hog. Barreling out of his truck, Bo took off toward the beach with his heart in his throat. As he stepped off a berm into the soft white sand, his heart stopped then started again. Fifty feet in front of him, Sienna stood next to a prone Gayla Brown, whose arms were cuffed behind her back, and Sienna’s hands were waving wildly as she spoke to an officer.

  Scanning the beach for Devin and Calla, he saw Poppy standing at the water’s edge shouting at the horizon. He searched the waves until he saw Devin swimming toward a leg of the pier. He squinted and made out the figure of a person hanging on, their arms wrapped tightly around the leg.

  Jesus, it’s Calla.

  He began to breathe again.

  Safe. All three were safe.

  Bo heard a commotion over his shoulder and looked back. The press had shown up along with the paramedics. He’d need to deal with the vultures before things got out of hand, but the adrenaline pounding through his veins had turned from fear to anger at how close these women had come to being corpses in his morgue. He needed a target for his anger to calm down before he dealt with them.

  His eyes shot to Sienna, and they narrowed. Two seconds later, he was zeroed in on her location, moving quickly toward her while his hands opened and closed for control.

  Sienna looked up as he approached and actually smiled at him. Her blatant disregard for her safety and the casual way she ignored his anger caused his left eye to twitch again.

  She smiled wider.

  His hands shook with the need to strangle her.

  “We took her out,” Sienna cried out as he approached. “She wasn’t watchin’ her back, so we snuck up and . . . What’s wrong with your eye?”

  “Reckless. Irresponsible. You could have gotten yourself killed,” he thundered.

  Men had cowered in the face of his anger, but not this woman. No, she had the nerve to place her hands on her hips and narrow her eyes.

  “Bite me, lawman. I told you alre
ady; a Wallflower never leaves a woman behind. So you can take your righteous indignation and shove it where the sun don’t shine.”

  The officer standing next to her snorted at the insult.

  Bo shot him a lethal look, and the rookie cleared his throat then took several steps back and turned around.

  “You could have been shot,” he bit out, turning his attention back to the matter at hand.

  “Maybe, but Cali needed our help. What would you have done in the same situation? Sit in your car and do nothin’ while your friend took a bullet?”

  Her dark brown eyes lit with fire as he glared at her. He could read the conviction in their depths, and his anger ebbed by a degree. The fierce defense of her actions left him without a solid argument. She was right, and he knew it, but the thought of Sienna in danger was unacceptable to him.

  He’d, unfortunately and to his extreme disapproval, been highly attracted to her from the first time he’d laid eyes on her. An attraction he’d tried to ignore without success. He wanted her, that much he knew, but he also knew she was completely wrong for a man like him. He needed a woman who could be reasoned with, who listened when he needed her to, one who followed the law without question. But Sienna broke the rules when it suited her, never listened to reason, and had no respect for authority. It was a dangerous combination in his line of work and a trait he didn’t need in his woman. Not after growing up without a mother who put her own needs over those of her family.

  Crowding in closer to Sienna until her head tipped back and she met his eyes, Bo tried to use his size to intimidate her into listening to him once and for all. She might be all wrong for him, but that didn’t negate the fact he wanted her safe, and he would use any means necessary to ensure that.

  “Pull that shit again, and I’ll put you over my knee,” he hissed.

  The quick intake of her breath directed his attention to her mouth. And just like that, he went from angry to hard.

  Her full, pink lips called out to him, begged to be taken. Taken by him so he could kiss some much-needed sense into her.

  Before he knew what he was doing, Bo leaned in closer for a taste of what he knew would be heaven and hell. Heaven because he’d spent more than a few moments thinking about doing just that, and hell because he knew it could never work between them and the taste of her lips would always haunt him.

  Her eyes widened as he moved in to take her mouth. Bo could see flecks of gold dancing in their depths as the light reflected their color. Christ, a man could get lost in her eyes, could drown in those dark pools and never want to come up for air.

  Lost to the world around him, Bo inched closer to Sienna, determined to know what heaven tasted like. But when her hands came up and clutched his shoulders, and her mouth opened slowly in preparation to be kissed, whispering, “Bo?” on a sultry broken breath, it stopped him dead in his tracks.

  Jesus, what am I doing?

  Diverting his descent at the last second, Bo whispered in her ear. “You’re right, I would have done exactly what you did. But the difference is, I’m trained to do it, and you’re not. If you ever disobey a direct order like that again, I promise you I’ll lock you up and throw away the key.”

  She swallowed hard, nodding in quick, jerking motions, but didn’t answer him.

  Bo should have stepped back from temptation immediately, but Sienna’s warm body was pressed close to his, and the soft curves burned a trail of heat through his own, igniting a white-hot desire.

  At that moment, he was helpless to move.

  Lingering a half-second longer than he should have, Bo got a lungful of sweet almonds for his troubles. Sienna’s unique scent was like a drug to his system. He wanted to pull it further into his lungs until he was addicted, but years of disciplined control were on autopilot, and he stepped back.

  When she locked confused eyes with his, eyes that were hooded with lust, he turned toward the pier without a backward glance before he claimed the woman for his own. A woman who’d undoubtedly make his head explode before he turned thirty.

  “Not happenin’,” he hissed as he set his sights on Poppy, Devin, and Calla. But the fuck of it was, he had a bad feeling he was lying to himself.

  One

  YOU CAN’T START CHAPTER ONE OF YOUR

  LIFE IF YOU KEEP RE-READING THE PROLOGUE

  ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON ONCE WROTE in the poem In Memoriam A.H.H “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” Standing on the second floor of Jacobs’ Ladder, stunned to be face-to-face with a man I once thought I loved, I decided that the line of the poem should be rewritten to say, “’Tis better to never have loved and lost than to live with the regret of your stupidity.”

  Since meeting Cali and Poppy, and banding together as Wallflowers, the topic of letting go of past hurts had been in the forefront of my mind. I’d traveled down memory lane this past week, examining my feelings so I could move forward, and what I discovered is, regret for prior behavior clouds the mind until you’re drowning in false memories. That what had once been a clear picture of the events becomes distorted, eroding over time until those memories are a twisted figment of the truth.

  And the truth about my past was now glaringly obvious as I stood less than three feet away from Chase Winters, the man I’d stupidly thought I’d loved for the past five years.

  Looking at him now, it’s no wonder I’d fooled myself into believing I was in love with him. With dark hair and light blue eyes, Chase had reminded me of one of the white knights I read about in romance novels. The kind who swept the heroine off her feet, saving her from whatever perceived threat she was under. And just like those fictional heroines, I needed rescuing.

  Growing up, my life had been less than perfect. My mother had been a straight-A student and a former Miss Georgia State. My father, a former quarterback who got his master’s degree in engineering. They were a golden couple who married and had two golden children. Their life continued to be golden until baby number three came along two years later. I was the odd child out. The one who didn’t make sense in their golden life.

  You see, my parents had breezed through school, and I preferred my daydreams to studying the Civil War. My sister was homecoming queen, and I stayed home on Friday nights with my face buried in a book. My brother was a chip off the old block and high school quarterback, and I was, well, invisible for the most part to both my parents.

  I also didn’t look like my sister or my mother.

  Or my father or brother, for that matter.

  They all had dark hair. I had hair the color of wheat; a fact my father didn’t miss and repeatedly joked about until I turned fifteen. Then one day, he stopped joking and moved out.

  My mother, it turned out, had cheated on him. That’s why I didn’t look or act like the rest of them. I was, according to my mother, the bastard child of a testosterone-filled gym manager. Overnight, I went from being invisible to forgettable for both my parents, and the cause of their separation to my siblings.

  It was the pain from those years of neglect that put me on a collision course with Chase Winters. After years of finding solace from my parents’ divorce between the pages of a book, I began to see myself as a damsel in need of rescuing. I would escape into my head as a shield to block out the pain, praying for a knight of my own to carry me away from the heartache.

  That’s where Chase came in.

  I met Chase my first year in college. My brother and I had just arrived back in Athens, after a long weekend home, when Chase walked up to my brother’s car.

  I was infatuated immediately with his good looks and slow smile; positive he was the man for me. So I proceeded to tie myself into knots for the next two years to no avail, convinced he was the one who would finally rescue me from a lifetime of being invisible.

  But I was invisible to him as well.

  When he graduated and moved to Atlanta without so much as a backward glance, I tried to move on from my foolish dream, but I’d been infatuated with hi
m for so long, it wasn’t easy. Three years after he graduated, on one of the few times I stopped in to visit my mother, an announcement of his engagement came in the mail.

  It hit me harder than I expected.

  Even though I’d seen him from time to time with his girlfriend, some foolish part of me had hoped he’d wake up one day and finally see me, and forget about her. But the wedding announcement shattered those dreams into teeny tiny pieces. In a moment of emotional insanity, I’d grabbed a bottle of Jack from my mother’s liquor cabinet and proceeded to drown my sorrows for all the time I’d lost waiting for a man who didn’t care.

  Unfortunately for me, and my rotten timing, Chase was in town visiting friends. He chose that exact day to hang out with my brother, who’d yet to move out of my mother’s house. I was muddle-brained and sulking when he showed up, and I proceeded to stalk his movements throughout the house like a trained assassin, convinced if I told him how I felt, it would change everything.

  When he excused himself to use the bathroom, I saw my opportunity and barged in on him, throwing myself into his arms, confessing my love like the idiot I was. Fortunately for everyone involved, my brother heard the commotion and stopped me before I made a bigger fool of myself. He told me to pull my head out of my ass, then shoved me into a cold shower—which shocked some much-needed sense into my alcohol-filled brain—then sent me home in a cab with orders to, “Chill the hell out or don’t come back.”

  When I awoke the next morning, I was sicker than a dog—not to mention humiliated, angry, and full of regret for being so foolish—and that’s the moment, when the harsh reality of what I’d done kicked in, that I swore off men completely until I got my head screwed on straight. I knew then I needed to rescue myself from my past, not the other way around. And I’d done that, I realized, as the source of my greatest humiliation stood in front of me.