Angels & Assassins: BWWM Romance Read online

  Jessica Watkins Presents

  Angels

  and

  Assassins

  K. Alex Walker

  Copyright © 2015 by K. Alex Walker

  Published by Jessica Watkins Presents Publishing

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Without limiting the right under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form by any means without the expressed written consent of the copyright owner.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  Acknowledgements

  As always, I want to acknowledge my publisher and literary “siblings” for their unwavering support and dedication, as well as the readers who email me, message me on Twitter (Hey Cristene!), Facebook, Goodreads, etc. to let me know how much they enjoyed being a part of my characters’ lives.

  I’ve deviated slightly from the RVP premise, mainly because this was the way Gage and Tayler’s story came together, but I put an immense amount of work into creating it and hope that it is an enjoyable rollercoaster read that’s virtually impossible to put down. Looking back at the Game of Love, I can see how much growth I’ve accumulated thanks to the constructive feedback that I’ve received from everyone (looking at you, Perri!). I can only hope to continue to grow and develop, maybe even one day making it to that USA Today Bestseller’s List ::wink::

  Thank you for everything.

  Alex

  Dedication

  For my sisters.

  Prologue

  Tampa, FL

  May 16th 2011

  12:35 AM

  She would never make national news.

  From where he was standing, he could see her smooth, brown leg extending from the driver’s side of the car. Her body was twisted, her head was down near the region of the glove compartment, and the cabin light casted a dim reflection off of her silky, jet black hair. The air was crisp and perfect. The moon so bright that it nearly looked blue. Houses lined the street in suburban monotony, each with their two-car garages and similar color palettes, virtually indistinguishable from the next no matter how many times he’d ventured into the neighborhood.

  They were houses that masked the realities of life that played out behind glaringly red front doors—abusive husbands two doors down, licentious fathers on the cul-de-sac at the end of the street, cheating stay-at-home wives, swinging couples...the outer rim of society.

  In the woman’s lap sat his one year-old daughter. He’d left the toddler in front of the woman’s door with a Barbie doll to keep her quiet and to prevent her from following him when he walked away. Then, he’d waited until she’d noticed his disappearance and started wailing. As expected, the sound of her cries drew the woman outside.

  Earlier, he’d sneaked into the house while she was in the shower and stolen her cell phone. Like most people these days, she didn’t have a landline, which had made his job that much easier. When she’d appeared outside to check her car for the cell, the planets had aligned. Never did he think everything would come together in such a simple fashion. He could only imagine how many women had done the same thing: misplaced their phones and walked out of their homes in the dead of night without giving it a second thought.

  Women never thought. This one hadn’t. Unfortunately, she would never have a chance to change that.

  Her head popped up in frustration over the missing device, putting her features on full display. She was sweet and beautiful with thick, lustrous hair, deep set brown eyes, and full lips. Gorgeous. Ethnic.

  She cradled his daughter and brushed her hair back with her fingers. Her lips moved in song, but months ago he’d learned that his daughter wouldn’t ever be able to hear words and melodies. Something as simple as a dog’s bark or the sound of a car’s horn would forever be foreign to her. So would the inflection of her mother’s voice, as the woman hadn’t wasted time leaving them in the dead of night because she hadn’t envisioned herself being the mother to a disabled child.

  But this woman? This woman was different. This woman had a nurturing, maternal instinct that when it kicked in, made everything else about her environment go to shit. She had a heart and caring soul. It was only momentarily sad that he would exploit her because of it.

  He jogged down the street calling his daughter’s name. His voice held notes of a parent’s agony, his eyes a misty shade of blue. When the woman heard him, she emerged from the car with his daughter on her hip. He dragged his fingers through his hair as though his world was crumbling. She waved. When their eyes met, she started toward him.

  Behind his back, he clenched a chloroform saturated rag.

  -1-

  It was supposed to be the last day of his descent into fuckery. What was it that people always said? Man made plans and God laughed? If that was the case then God had been laughing at him for the better part of a decade. God had been watching him from his perch in the nether regions of the sky, shaking his head and recalling his guardian angels seconds before they decided to put in their letters of resignation.

  Gage rolled onto his back. One eye flitted open, but it was forced back shut by a stab of sunlight. He was still alive. Empty bottles of beer and drained red plastic cups previously filled with cheap wine were unusually, not classically strewn about. Yet, his mouth still tasted like acid and his head pounded with fury.

  At the very least, there was fresh air blasting into the space through a broken window of wherever the hell it was he’d ended up this time. The air was frigid and unrelenting, its motion freckling specks of dirt onto his face. In the middle of his stumble into a small town that he would have probably skipped over if he’d been sober, he’d ended up in a shitty, rotten old house. The inside was peeling and needed dozens of slabs of drywall. The boards covering what looked like an old fireplace were beginning to pull apart, and a banister leading up to a second floor didn’t look even stable enough to support an infant’s arm. The house looked as though it was being held together by nails, glue, and prayer.

  Groaning, he lifted his body from the floor planks and trudged over to what appeared to be the kitchen. He turned the pearly handle of the faucet over the kitchen sink in hopes that even a spritz of leftover nineteenth-century water would come trickling out. His throat felt lined with sandpaper and with every turn of his head, the room failed to catch up with his line of vision. That part would be gone in a few minutes, however. At this point, his blood had become so accustomed to his binges that it no longer bothered to fully succumb to hangovers.

  The knob gave way in his hand and the tarnished spout released bursts of dirt in evil cackles. It was as if the damned thing was laughing at him. Gage Wolfe had turned into a piece of shit who definitely smelled of booze, probably smelled of piss, and had eyes like the surface of Jupiter.

  He tossed the handle behind him and moved to the window. The old house sat on a slight hill, and from his view he could make out the bustling town beneath. It was what his mother would have called quaint and maybe even endearing with its picturesque houses, multi-colored landscape, and manicured appeal.

  Cars made their way down two-lane roads. Other residents biked or walked. The damp smell hanging in the air alerted him to the large lake sitting behind the house. At least two acres of greenery spanned the sides and the front, and the grass acted as a line of demarcation between the lake and its brief, sandy shore.

  Compared to the activ
ity down below, his current residence seemed obscurely detached. The road leading up to it was jagged and unlined. Tenacious blades of grass had grown across and up through the asphalt, making it difficult to tell where the road ended, and where the hard earth began. It was a road that had been obviously weather-beaten from years of nonuse, so he was surprised to hear the low hum of a car’s engine drawing near.

  He waited to see if a car would show, or if his alcohol use had finally dumped him off into the psychotic realm, but the nose of a newer-model red Honda Civic presented itself and settled several feet away from the front porch where a driveway should have been.

  He’d been expecting to see a suit get out of the vehicle, someone from the city who’d come to inspect the house for demolition. Instead, a woman in a pair of green scrubs stepped out. A damned beautiful woman, at least from what he could see.

  She was holding a paper in her hands and looking up at the house. Her hand shielded her eyes from the sun each time she looked up, and she glanced from the paper to the house in such a rapid fashion that it almost reawakened his dizziness from earlier.

  Slim locs were pinned away from her face and drizzled down her back. The boxy, medical uniform hid her shape, but by the time she’d walked up to the front steps, he’d already had his own idea of the treasures that hid underneath.

  There was a screen door separating the old wooden front door and the front porch. As she reached for the handle on the screened door, he pulled open the wooden one. He’d expected the movement to startle her and possibly even a scream, but what he didn’t expect was for her to stumble backwards towards the steps at the front of the porch.

  Her hand shot out in an attempt to grasp one of the wooden beams attached to the railing, but the wood turned to crumbs in her palm. Before she met a certain concussion on the ground below, he reached out and grabbed her, giving her some time to realize that she wasn’t going to fall before pulling her into his body.

  She defied his expectations a second time: instead of hitting at his chest and pushing him away, she cradled his biceps and looked back at the rock her head would have hit had he not caught her.

  He released her, but not before checking to see if his mental calculations had been correct. He’d been expecting an hourglass shape, but she was definitely more pear. Pear, he preferred.

  “You alright there, love?” he asked, leaning against the door frame. “Quite the spill you nearly took there.”

  She looked up at him. Damned beautiful had been an understatement. Her eyes reminded him of the color of the skyline just before hard droplets of rain slapped against the plate glass windows encircling his house in California. They were also eerily familiar.

  “Yeah,” she answered. “Thank you.”

  He was still hung up on her up close. She was so damn gorgeous that it was the first time, in a long time, he cared that he was standing in front of anyone looking like shit.

  “I hope you don’t mind me dropping in on you like this,” she apologized. “I just wanted to check on you. See how you were feeling.”

  She spoke as if they’d met before, which would explain the mystery of her familiar eyes.

  “Come again?” he asked.

  “Are you feeling okay?”

  “We’ve met before?”

  “Last night. Don’t worry, it makes sense that you don’t remember me. I was leaving work really late and I bumped into you. Well, let me be honest, you were on the ground in the parking garage and I nearly ran you over.”

  He’d been found in worse situations, but knowing that she’d seen him like that made this instance feel like the worst.

  “You brought me up here,” he realized.

  “Yes. A couple of coworkers and I got you into the medical center for fluids and to pump your stomach. Then, before the new shift came in, they helped me move you up here which, as of last week, is my new property.”

  It didn’t make any sense. Why would she help him if she had no idea who he was? He’d been pretty sure that he’d resigned to having last night be his final night and had stumbled to the center to make sure that his body didn’t get lost in a ditch somewhere. But that was all he remembered. That, and her eyes. It was a pity that he hadn’t remembered her entire face. It would have been a nice image before death.

  “Why?” he asked.

  She twisted her mouth, evidence that she bit the inside corner of her cheek whenever she was uncomfortable, nervous, or anxious. Maybe all three.

  “It was…something you said.”

  He didn’t feel like prodding because she knew what he wanted to know, but he asked anyhow.

  “What did I say?”

  She sighed softly, but the exaggerated rise and fall of her chest made it seem like a massive feat.

  “When I got out of the car to check on you, I realized that you were still breathing, so I pulled my phone out to call my coworkers for help. I realized that you were still cognizant enough to hear me and that’s when you said, ‘just let me die.’”

  Her eyes shadowed and he wondered if she felt sorry for him, a pitiful sight the night before no doubt.

  “I…know you didn’t mean it,” she went on. “Don’t ask me how. And, I wasn’t about to just leave you there. So, I did what I had to do.”

  “So, why am I here and not still at the hospital?” he continued to quiz.

  She pointed to his jeans which had held up pretty well considering. His shirt was another story—a plain, long-sleeved tee covered in dust and dirt that, once upon a time, had been stark white. The floors inside the abandoned house were probably cleaner.

  “Those are pretty expensive jeans for a man to be wearing,” she said. “This is a small town. I figured that it would be best to keep this as discreet as possible. Confidentiality doesn’t work quite as well here as it did when I used to work back in Louisiana.”

  She gave a little smile at that and for some reason, that smile mattered.

  He couldn’t guarantee that he wouldn’t end up, once again, where she’d found him, but it wouldn’t be in this town. She’d gone through too much to help him. It would the biggest insult to do it all over again in the same place, right in front of her face.

  “This probably doesn’t mean anything to you right now, but there’s something about everyone that’s worth saving,” she added. “Even if you can’t see it right now…you matter.”

  Moana “Mo” Jonesboro, his newly appointed CEO who was also such a close family friend that he referred to her as his cousin, had said something similar. She’d called a few days ago to ask his advice about a business matter, although it was obvious she hadn’t really needed it. He knew that she was really calling to check up on him, especially after he’d delegated so many tasks to her that essentially, she would be the head of the company once he was…

  Shit. He’d really been trying to off himself.

  “What’s that?” he asked, motioning to the paper in her hands to change the subject.

  “This is the deed to the house,” she said, glancing down. “See, I’m a pediatric oncologist and a year ago, one of my toughest little patients went into full remission right before his great-grandfather passed away. Apparently, that was all his great-grandfather wanted so he left me something in his will. It turned out to be this house, but from what I’ve heard, no one’s lived up here for quite some time.”

  Gage held out his hand. “Can I see?”

  “Sure.” She eagerly offered over the document. “By all means. I have no plans to do anything with it anyway. I mean, it came in handy for you to crash here, but after you leave, I’m just going to have them bulldoze it and sell the land.”

  It was a will and testament bequeathing her a property on what was listed as Juniper Lake. The numbers etched on the side of the house matched the ones in the paper, and the house did look old enough to have belonged to a man likely born during the First World War.

  “Have you had it appraised?” he asked, looking up. “The property and the land.”


  “No, not yet.”

  “I wouldn’t bulldoze it. Not yet.” He returned the sheet of paper. “Get it appraised and then hire a contractor to give you an estimate for a renovation. You might have a worthy investment opportunity on your hands.”

  “I don’t think so,” she countered. “It’ll probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix this up. I most likely won’t break even.”

  “Then I’ll do it.”

  She paused. “Do…what?”

  “Get the appraisal and estimate for you. It’s definitely a gut job, but not hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth. Not even close. And its size with all of this land would fetch you plenty if you decided to sell.”

  Her thick, well-shaped brows came together. She glanced at his jeans a second time. “What’s your name, by the way?” she asked. “You didn’t have an ID on you.”

  “Gage.”

  Her eyes flickered. “Gage? I like that. I’m Tayler. Tayler Diaz.”

  “Dominican?”

  “My father is Cuban. My mother is African—Ghanaian to be exact. They raised me in Baltimore, so I barely know a lick of either language. The food is a different story though. I’ve been known to throw down in the kitchen.”

  He would have smiled at that. Maybe even laughed, a long time ago. Her personality was interesting. She was very likeable. Plus there was still the fact that in essence, she’d saved his life. Whether it had been worth saving was still up for debate, but he owed her. Big.

  “By the way, Gage,” she continued. “Although I don’t hear too much of it now, you did have a bit of an accent last night. Where are you from?”

  “I was born in Australia but left when I was eighteen and haven’t been back since,” he answered. “I’ve spent time in dozens of countries, so I don’t really think you’re supposed to be able to place it.”