Playboy For Hire

Sneak Peek of Wild Heart

Chapter 1

Mal

I have what you might call a boyfriend-picking problem.

In that I’m terrible at it, and pretty much only pick guys who should not, under any circumstances, be anybody’s boyfriend.

Really. It’s uncanny. Bees communicate through dance, bats use fucking sonar to get around, dolphins can be taught to do calculus and honestly, none of that is as impressive as my ability to consistently, unerringly, pick the absolute worst possible guys to date.

You could blindfold me, plug my ears, stick eucalyptus-soaked cotton balls up my nostrils to prevent me from inhaling any pheromones, and set me loose in a room full of two-hundred and fifty perfectly acceptable men, and I guarantee you I’d find my way, zombie-like in my determination, to the two-hundred fifty-first, who would be a terrible choice.

It’s not just boyfriends, actually. No, my talent is far too impressive to be confined to such a limited scope. It applies to any guy I’ve ever slept with. Any guy I’ve ever so much as looked twice at. If I’m attracted to him at all, there’s something wrong with him. And I don’t just mean ‘never tips his baristas’ or ‘farts in an elevator and doesn’t apologize’ wrong. I mean like, actually wrong.

And I never fucking see it coming.

Every time, I tell myself that this guy is different. This guy sees the real me. Likes the real me. Respects, admires, loves the real me—not just my body, and not just my low self-esteem that makes me fall for unsuitable men with an alacrity usually reserved for younger sisters in Jane Austen novels.

Every time, I tell myself that I’ve learned from the past, that I’ve grown, that I’m different now, and this thing, this time, this guy is for real.

It never is.

Case in point, Stephen, the current boyfriend. Well, ex-boyfriend.

Because let’s be clear, I broke up with him—twice. I ended things, politely, and told him in no uncertain terms that we were done. I left the fucking state. But evidently, that wasn’t enough to get my message across. I sure know how to pick ‘em.

If I’d had any sense—wishful thinking, apparently—I would have known something was off about Stephen the first night I met him, when he came into the kitchen at Nourriture, the restaurant where I’d been working as a sous-chef, and said he wanted to meet me. What I’d taken for confidence, and a flattering interest in me, my friend Nolan, the manager at Nourriture, had called arrogance, and ‘next level creepiness.’

Guess which one of us turned out to be right?

If I could go back and take past-Mal by the scruff of the neck and shake him, I would—except I know it wouldn’t do any good. Past-Mal wouldn’t have listened. He never did. And honestly, who was to say that present-Mal or future-Mal was going to be any better at making responsible decisions?

The best thing I could do for myself was to stop dating anyone. Stop sleeping with anyone. Remove myself from the dating-and-fucking pool entirely. At 27 years old, I had a decade’s worth of experience telling me that I was never going to get any better at picking guys who didn’t turn out to be assholes.

It was time to call it quits.

And if I made it through tonight, I would.

***

“Mal, get the fuck out here right now, you ungrateful slut!”

I stared at the door of my motel room, heart in my throat. How the hell had Stephen found me?

“Jesus Christ, is that him?” Nolan asked, his shocked voice coming through the phone.

I took a shaky breath, then another, as Stephen continued to pound on the door. Fuck, this was bad. Bad enough that my psycho ex had tracked me across state lines after I’d ended things, but if he kept up like this, he was going to wake up the whole motel. I didn’t need a bunch of irate travelers yelling at me in their pajamas on top of the shit Stephen was screaming at me now.

“I don’t know how he found me,” I said, my voice wavering.

I wished it sounded stronger, wished I could pretend to Nolan, if not to myself, that I wasn’t completely fucking terrified. But who was I kidding? I’ve never been strong. That’s the whole problem.

“I know you’re in there, Mal,” Stephen shouted again. “You’re pathetic, but I’m not going to let you get away with hiding from me. Now stop running from your problems and come out here and talk.”

I shuddered. I’d left Washington, D.C. desperate to get away from Stephen. After my first attempt at breaking up with him had only led to more disaster, I’d known I had to leave town if I were ever going to truly get away from him. But he’d been watching me like a hawk since then, effectively keeping me prisoner in his apartment.

I know that sounds absurd—I’m 27 years old, and in theory, all I had to do was just walk out the door. But the past year had been… not great.

I’d thought I was too smart to fall for someone as manipulative as Stephen. Too smart to give someone else control of my life. As it turns out, I wasn’t. And by the time I’d realized how fucked up things were, I had no job, no money, and practically no friends left. Stephen had even taken my set of keys to the apartment, so I couldn’t leave the building without him. Not if I wanted to come back.

“Call 911,” Nolan said. “Call them and tell them there’s a psychopath trying to break into your motel room.”

“911?” I cringed at the thought. Calling 911 meant explaining how I’d gotten into this situation. How I’d let myself get so dependent, how I’d been stupid enough to let it go so far. “You’re only supposed to call them for emergencies. I don’t want to waste their time.”

The fact of the matter was, Stephen’s words made my gut roil because they were true. I was pathetic, and I’d made a complete mess of my life. Sure, Stephen was the cause of the problem, but I was the one who’d let him do this to me. It was my fault.

Yesterday, he’d finally decided he trusted me enough to leave me alone in the apartment as he took a meeting for work downtown. I knew I only had a few hours, and that I needed to make the most of them. I’d grabbed my phone, wallet, and a small duffel bag with some clothes and run to Union Station. The first bus leaving the city was bound for Savannah, Georgia and I’d gotten on it without looking back.

I’d gotten a room at a shitty roadside motel on the outskirts of the city. It was all I could afford. I shouldn’t have bothered, really—it’s not like I’d been able to sleep at all last night, or even breathe normally. It wasn’t until this afternoon that it finally sank in that I was free. I’d called Nolan to let him know where I’d ended up.

And then Stephen had found me.

“Mal, your possessive, rage-filled, and frankly terrifying ex-boyfriend has now refused—twice—to accept that you wanted to break up with him. He’s chased you across state lines, God knows how. And now he’s standing outside your motel room yelling obscenities at you? He’s threatening you. This is an emergency, and it’s exactly what 911 is here for.”

“He hasn’t actually threatened me, technically,” I said, though I knew I was just searching for the flimsiest of excuses for my gut-level certainty that getting the cops involved would only make me more humiliated. “Not physically, anyway.”

“Mal, I’m giving you 'til the count of ten, and if you don’t open this door, you’re going to regret it,” Stephen bellowed. “I’ve been gentle so far. You know you don’t want me to get angry.”

Shit, there was no way my neighbors in the rooms next door hadn’t heard that.

“You were saying?” Nolan said, clearly having heard Stephen himself. “Besides, what do you call that time he broke your fingers. Or the time he made you—”

“Okay, okay, I get it,” I interrupted. I didn’t like to think about those incidents.

Stephen had always been possessive, and demanding, even from the beginning. I hadn’t liked those qualities, exactly, but I’d looked past them because it was so damn unlikely that someone like him would want me. Stephen worked for a huge international consulting firm, made crazy amounts of money, was well-read, well-spoken, charming, and hot as hell.

Maybe he was a little intense sometimes, I’d figured, but no one was perfect, right? He told me he loved me after only a month of dating. No one had ever said they loved me before. So I’d told myself that maybe this was just what love was like.

“One.” Stephen’s voice came through the door as clearly as if he were in the room with me. “Two. Three.”

I should have known Stephen wouldn’t give up easily. He never did, when he wanted something. He said that was what made him so good at his job. I’d just never thought I’d be the thing he decided he had to have.

“I’ll call you back,” I told Nolan, taking a step towards the door.

“What? No. Mal, what are you doing?” Nolan said, agitated. “Do not go outside. Do not go talk to him. You can’t—”

A crash interrupted both of us, and the windows of my motel room shook. I’d drawn the curtains shut as soon as I’d checked in, but I was positive that if I opened them now, I’d see that the glass had been cracked.

“If I stay in here, it’s only going to get worse.”

I swallowed hard. I had no idea how to get out of this, but I knew I had to stop it, somehow.

“It’s going to be a hell of a lot worse if you let him lay hands on you again,” Nolan countered. “Please, Mal, I am begging you, don’t go out there. Don’t—”

There was an even louder noise this time, more of a boom than a crash, and the flimsy wood of the motel door buckled inwards.

“I’ll call you back,” I said, hoping like hell I’d be able to follow through on that promise.

I clicked to end the call, then stepped up to the door, praying that it didn’t fly off its hinges as I stood there.

“Stephen?” I asked, trying to get my voice to stop shaking. “Are you there? I’m coming out.”

The noises stopped and I opened the door. It stuck a little, like the damage it had suffered had warped the latch. When I finally got it open, I stepped out into the humid night and saw Stephen holding a baseball bat in his right hand, peering down at the other end of the bat as he bounced it against his left palm.

It was so odd. The guy looked like a demigod, all tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed grace. Broad shoulders filled out a suit I knew had cost thousands of dollars, a suit that covered a physique he spent hours in the gym maintaining, every day. And he was standing there with a baseball bat. I didn’t even know he’d owned one. In all the time I’d spent with him, I’d never seen him watch a game.

The whole scene was incongruous, to be honest. Stephen insisted on luxury, always. He refused to go to clubs without VIP rooms, restaurants that didn’t take months to get into, establishments that didn’t have valet. I’d never seen him in a place as run-down as this motel, with its broken vending machines, flickering street lamps, and trash-filled parking lot. The warm summer air smelled like diesel fuel and day-old pizza—not a pleasant combination.

As I closed the beat-up door behind me, a woman several doors down stuck her head out of her room. Checking to see if someone was getting murdered, maybe. I wasn’t sure if what she saw convinced her everything was okay, or convinced her it was simply better not to get involved, but she pulled her head back in and closed her door immediately.

Maybe I’d overestimated my fellow travelers’ sense of civic duty. Or maybe violent shouting and baseball bats were regular features at places like this.

Stephen looked up from the bat and smiled. His eyes were cold.

“Come to your senses at last. I knew you couldn’t stay away. You need me too much.”

I took a deep breath. I knew I was shaking, but dammit, I was going to try to sound firm.

“I don’t need you. And I am staying away. I don’t want to be with you anymore. I broke up with you.”

“That’s what you said the last time.” Stephen’s smile grew tighter. “But you still came crawling back.”

“Only because you begged me, and promised to change. But you didn’t. You pushed me down a set of stairs and then you locked me in your apartment.”

“To keep you safe. Especially as you recovered. And to keep you from making more mistakes.” Stephen’s tone grew warmer, but there was a rancid undercurrent to it. It was warm the way rotting trash is warm. “You’re too gullible, Mal. Too weak. You trust your friends, when all they want to do is use you, and then drag you down. You trust anyone who gives you a second glance, and then you let them convince you to cheat on me and you—”

“I never fucking cheated on you,” I shot back, and I was angry enough that my voice stopped shaking. “Never. I don’t know how you got that in your head, but I never did. And Nolan was just trying to help me. Help me. Not control me, like you.”

“Maybe you need to be controlled,” Stephen spit back. “Keep you from being a little slut with anyone who gives you attention.”

“I don’t need anything from you.”

“Then why are you out here talking to me?”

“Because you were trying to break your way into my room with a baseball bat, why do you think?”

“I think you’re in denial.” Stephen’s voice was flat and hard. “About what you really want.”

I looked at him helplessly.

“I broke up with you the first time because I wanted to get away from you. I broke up with you the second time and left the fucking city because I wanted to get away from you. I took a bus across multiple state lines, over five hundred miles to get away from you. I don’t know how much clearer I can get about what I want.”

“And yet you brought your cell phone.” Stephen cocked his head to the side. “Knowing how easy that would make you to track. You’re telling me you really didn’t want me to follow?”

“Fuck no,” I exploded. “You tracked my cell phone? How did you even—I don’t even think that’s legal.”

“It is when I pay for the damn thing.”

A cold knot formed in my stomach. Right after I’d moved in, Stephen had pressured me to let him buy me a new phone and join his plan. He’d said it made him sad to see the shitty old phone I was using, and framed joining his plan as something that just made economic sense.

Had he foreseen a situation like this? How long had he been spying on me, using my phone to track where I went? I already knew his thinking was messed up when it came to his belief that I was cheating on him, but this was way beyond the shallow waters of ‘messed up.’ This dove straight into the deep end of paranoia.

“If you think that I’m going to let something as trivial as you running away to Georgia stop me from getting what I want, you have seriously underestimated me.”

The night air, already dark, seemed to blacken around Stephen, and I knew with a sick certainty that he was speaking the simple truth. He was never going to stop until he had me under his thumb again. Not as long as there was any way he could find me. And once he got me back, I didn’t think I’d get a third chance to leave.

I needed to disappear.

“I think you knew that,” Stephen continued quietly. “Just like I think that, deep down, you know how much you want me.”

“I—I’m not—I’m just—” I stammered as I looked up into those wintry blue eyes that burned with a cold fury.

Stephen was never going to let me go, if it were up to him. But if I went back with him this time—no. I couldn’t go back to him this time. It was as simple as that.

But I couldn’t say that. My mind raced, heart thumping in my chest, as I tried to stall, tried to find a way out of this. Fuck, why hadn’t I listened to Nolan? Why did I have to open the door? If I hadn’t, maybe I could have found another way out. Grabbed my bag and—

My eyes went wide. The bathroom window. My room was on the bottom floor, and the screen on the bathroom window was broken. If I could just get back into the room, I could get my stuff and crawl out to the other side of the motel. Go… somewhere. Anywhere. As long as it wasn’t here.

It wasn’t like I’d unpacked. All I needed was thirty seconds. A minute, max, and I could do it. I had to do it. But I had to find some way to get Stephen to let me go back inside, out of his sight.

I licked my lips and tried to smile, make it look like I was softening towards him. I was pretty sure I just looked like I was going to be sick, but it would have to do.

“I just wanted to—”

“Break up with me. I know.” Stephen arched an eyebrow, then took a step towards me. Unable to help myself, I stepped back. “But let me tell you something about how this works, Malachi, since you don’t seem to understand.”

He began tapping the baseball bat in his hand as he took a second step, then a third, and I backed up slowly against the mangled door.

“You don’t get to break up with me. I tell you when we’re over. And I’m telling you, we are not over. You belong to me. And you’re coming home with me, tonight.”

“No, that’s not—I didn’t mean that I wanted to—” I shook my head like I was worried Stephen wouldn’t understand me. Since I didn’t even know what I was trying to say, exactly, I hoped it was working. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?” Stephen took a final step, closing the space between us, and he let the bat fall away from his left hand. “You bet your ass you’re sorry. I’m going to show you how sorry you really are.”

The next thing I knew, his hand was at my neck. He squeezed, and suddenly it was difficult to talk. And breathe.

“What are you going to do to me?” I gasped. I didn’t have to work to sound scared. I was.

“What am I going to do to you?” Stephen laughed a short, ugly laugh. “Well, let’s see. For starters, I’m going to punish you for leaving. And you’re not going to like that. But you have to learn, Mal. You have to learn. You’re nothing more than a cheap whore, but I’ve invested too much time and money into trying to make something of you to throw you out just yet. Though maybe that’s exactly what I’ll use you for. Maybe I’ll start using you like the piece of trash you are. Let my friends use you, too.”

His hand squeezed tighter and breathing got distinctly more difficult. My heart was racing now. I didn’t want to be scared by what Stephen said, but I couldn’t lie—I was. More pressingly, though, I was scared that I was about to pass out, or possibly die, and that seemed like the kind of thing I should deal with first.

“Please,” I said. Or tried to say. I couldn’t do more than make a harsh croaking sound. I mouthed the word again, begging Stephen with my eyes to let me go. “Please.”

“I want you to nod,” Stephen said slowly, “if you understand that you are mine. That I can do whatever I want with you, and that there’s nothing you can do to stop me. And that you’re coming home. Now.”

I nodded frantically. My vision was starting to go funny, sparkly at first, then black around the edges. Fuck, I was nodding for all I was worth, why wouldn’t Stephen let me go? I couldn’t breathe.

After an eternity, Stephen removed his hand from my neck.

I sucked in a huge breath of air and immediately wished I hadn’t. My throat hurt. Even the simple act of inhaling made it feel like it was on fire. My chest heaved, and I desperately wanted to rub at my neck, but Stephen was still only inches away from me, and I knew he hated it when I showed any sign of weakness.

“There,” Stephen said, his voice freakishly mild. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?” He brought his hand to my shoulder and rubbed it gently. “I’ve missed you, Mal. And I know you’ve missed me. I’ve never claimed to be perfect, but I love you, and I’ll do whatever I need to prove that to you. Got it?”

“Yeah,” I said faintly. “Got it.”

Stephen smiled a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

“What do you say?” he prompted.

I stared at him, confused.

“What do you say?” he repeated. “I told you I loved you. What do you say in return?”

“Oh.” I sighed in relief. I didn’t want to say it, but at least I understood. And at that point, all I wanted to do was keep him from hurting me again. And I still had to figure out a way out of this. “I—I love you too.”

If the lie hurt, it was nothing compared to the pain in my throat or the fear gripping my heart.

“Good.” Stephen beamed like a teacher, proud of his star pupil. “Now go get your things. I want you in the car in two minutes. I drove a long way to pick you up, and I have a big day tomorrow.”

I blinked in surprise. Was he handing me the excuse I needed? It seemed too easy, but I wasn’t going to stop and question. I was going to take the opportunity and run with it. Literally.

“Okay.” I hoped my face didn’t betray me. If I looked scared, well, I had a feeling Stephen liked seeing me look nervous. And he’d done plenty tonight to terrify me. “I’ll be right back.”

I turned, my body still trembling, and fumbled with the doorknob. Any second now, he was going to tell me he’d changed his mind and he didn’t want me to get my things. Or he’d decide to come in and keep an eye on me. Any second now, this was going to slip out of my hands and—

The knob turned, I stepped inside the room, and shut the door behind me. I wanted to sink back against it and let my knees sag. Rub at my throat and just breathe. But there was no time for that.

I tore through the room, grabbing the sweatshirt that I’d dropped on a chair and my toothbrush from the edge of the sink. I took about ten seconds to shove everything back into my tiny duffel. Everything save my phone, which I left lying on the bed where I’d dropped it.

Sorry, Nolan.

I’d call him once I got to—well, once I got somewhere safe. Wherever that was.

I zipped the duffel and threw it over my shoulder. All my earthly possessions fit into a bag smaller than an airplane carry-on. In other times, I might have found that sad, but tonight, I was grateful.

With a final rushed glance around the room, I nodded. A terrified look at the door sent me back towards it, slipping the chain lock into place and, at the last second, turning the deadbolt. I hoped Stephen had gone back to the car already and hadn’t heard any of that. But even if he’d heard everything, I felt safer with the lock turned.

The whole mad scramble took less than a minute, which was good, because Stephen insisted on punctuality. If he said two minutes, he meant it. I flew to the bathroom and heaved on the sliding glass of the window, shoving it up and then pushing the remains of the screen out. I had to stand up on the toilet to get my leg over, and I couldn’t stop picturing Stephen coming in to find me straddling the sill, half-in, half-out.

But in less time than I’d thought, I was letting myself down the other side, landing in the overgrown crabgrass on the far side of the motel. The air felt even stickier on this side of the building, away from the intrusion of the parking lot and street lamps, but I supposed that was to be expected. July in Georgia was never going to be anything but sweltering, even at midnight.

The building was one long, low-slung row of rooms backing up against a patchy forest that appeared to be more kudzu than trees. But I could hear the highway on the far side of the woods, and I knew there was a truck stop by the exit. Someone there had to give me a ride, right? It didn’t matter where they were going, as long as it was away from here.

I took a deep breath and ran into the woods.