Copyright © 2023 by Abbi Glines

  All rights reserved.

  Visit my website at www.abbiglinesbooks.com

  Cover Designer: www.Damonza.com

  Editor: Jovana Shirley, Unforeseen Editing, www.unforeseenediting.com

  Formatting: Melissa Stevens, The Illustrated Author, www.theillustratedauthor.com

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  II Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  The Ultrasound

  Burn Teaser... (Coming October 15, 2023)

  Excerpt from Prologue

  One

  Acknowledgments

  To my daughter, Annabelle. You finally got your Saxon story.

  I

  “Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.”

  —Jane Austen

  One

  Saxon

  This wasn’t me. I pressed against my temples with my thumbs and groaned. How had I become this? Hungover with a naked woman asleep in my hotel bed. Where had I even met her? Fuck, last night was all scrambled up in my head.

  My phone started ringing, and I winced, reaching for it beside my pillow. Squinting, I looked at the screen. It was Gage. When had we split up from him last night, and why had I decided going off with freaking Kye and Mattia was a good idea?

  “Yeah,” I said into the phone. Even the sound of my own voice was painful.

  Gage’s chuckle made me scowl. “Sounds like Kye made sure to break you in good.”

  I grunted.

  “We are meeting with Liam and Micah in two hours at Devil’s. Be ready.”

  Fuck, my head hurt.

  “Okay,” I replied.

  Another amused laugh from Gage, and then the line went dead.

  The woman in the bed made some noises, and I glanced back at her to see she was stretching. Her tits were the biggest I’d ever seen in person, and there was no way those were real. They reminded me of two basketballs, just sitting there perfectly on her chest. I shook my head, disgusted with myself, and stood up.

  “You leaving me?” she asked.

  I paused and tried to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do with her now. Hell, I didn’t even know her name. Had I asked? I barely remembered bringing her back here. The three used condoms on the floor were a fucking relief. At least I had been careful.

  “I got work,” I said, hoping that sent her away.

  “Yeah, at the club. You’re taking me back with you,” she said.

  What the fuck had I told her about the club? Shit!

  I turned around and looked at her. Long dark brown hair with purple tips hung over her shoulders. Fake lashes, plump lips, and more makeup than was necessary. Was she a stripper?

  I needed to call Kye. He’d gotten me into this. I should go bang on his hotel room door and hand her over to him. I would if I knew which room he was in. We weren’t even an hour from home. I should have gone back with Gage.

  She moved to get off the bed, smiling at me like she thought we were about to go another round. Nope, sorry. I was sober now. I also felt like shit.

  “What time do we need to leave?” she asked, walking over to me and sliding her hand over my bare chest.

  “I need to leave soon. You should, uh … I’ll get you an Uber.” That was nice enough.

  She frowned. “An Uber? Why? We are going to the same place.”

  I was confused. Why did she think she was going to a meeting at Devil’s? Did she work there?

  “What?” I asked, wincing as the throbbing pain in my head got worse.

  Her long, sharp, pointy nails, which had rhinestones on them, ran down my chest until her fingers wrapped around my cock. Even though my head felt like it was going to explode, my damn dick didn’t seem to mind. He wasn’t against the attention. She saw it harden from her touch, and her eyes lifted back to mine before she dropped down to her knees in front of me.

  I watched her, battling with telling her to leave or letting her suck me off. When her lips wrapped around my cock, I decided I was going to let her finish this. Closing my eyes, I let my head fall back as she began to suck me like a pro. No girl I’d ever been with gave head like this. It was porn-worthy. When I hit the back of her throat and she didn’t even gag, I opened my eyes and stared down at her.

  My dick wasn’t small. Fully erect, it was a solid ten inches. Yet her eyes didn’t even water. She swirled her tongue around it as she took me deep again and began making little moans of pleasure, as if she wanted this more than I did. She was going to get a mouthful if she kept this up. I’d give it to Kye—he knew how to pick up women.

  I grabbed a handful of her hair and slammed her down hard on my dick to see if she could take it. She did—well. Her eyes lifted to mine, and she smiled before sucking me harder. Her nails bit into the front of my thighs as her cheeks hollowed out.

  Closing my eyes again, I felt the pressure building in my balls.

  “Fuck, that’s it,” I moaned. “Suck it hard.”

  She was still making those hungry sounds, like she was starved for it. This was a fucking epic blow. My headache was forgotten. I shouted out as I began to shoot my release down her throat. She swallowed all of it, then began licking me clean.

  Jesus Christ, she gave head like it was her fucking job.

  That thought made me pause. Was it her job? Did I care? No, I didn’t care. That had been excellent.

  Licking her lips, she stood up, slowly rubbing her tits against me as she did so. “You taste good,” she told me.

  I started to say something when a knock on the door stopped me. I grabbed the sheet off the bed and wrapped it around me to go see if it was Kye here to take away the unknown female who had just sucked me dry. I swung open the door, and the words I was going to say to Kye froze, along with my entire body.

  It wasn’t Kye.

  It was Haisley fucking Slate.

  It had been two months since I’d last seen her. Haisley had been with me when I got the call that her brother had abducted Levi’s girl, Aspen, from the hospital, where she volunteered. Haisley was the reason they found her so quickly—because she used her phone to track her brother. And then, after all that shit, she’d still ghosted me. Blown me the fuck off.

  She should have been at the hospital to volunteer that day instead of not showing up so she could be with me. I had admitted to Levi that I’d asked her to skip and spend the day with me. If she had been at the hospital, then Aspen wouldn’t have been taken. I accepted all the blame. Still, she’d shut me out with one simple text.

  This was a mistake. I don’t want to see you anymore. Please leave me alone.

  I’d texted her, called her, even gone by her trailer. Nothing.

  I opened my mouth to ask her what the fuck she wanted when I noticed what she was wearing and the cart full of cleaning supplies, clean towels, and linens beside her. What the hell? Why was she working in a hotel in Gainesville? She didn’t have a car to drive this far.

  “Are you coming back?” the woman in my room called out.

  I’d forgotten about her and the sheet around my waist.

  “What are you doing here?” I blurted out, my headache now back with a vengeance.

  Haisley’s almond-shaped violet eyes, which had owned me, dropped to the floor. “I’ll come back later,” she mumbled and started to push the cart.

  Let her go, Saxon, I told myself.

  Then, I stepped out and grabbed her arm. “What are you doing here, Haisley?” I snapped at her.

  I hated that she was here. That she was making me look at her. Reminding me how fucking gorgeous she was. How she’d made me feel shit I’d never felt before, then just dropped me. Reminding me how easy I was to walk away from.

  She turned back to me. “Working. I didn’t know.” She swallowed hard. “I wasn’t expecting to see you. Here. In there. I mean …”

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, which caused her tits to move, drawing my attention to them stretching the cheap fabric of he
r uniform. Had they gotten bigger, or was it just that her clothes didn’t fit right?

  “This is where I work.”

  I lifted my gaze from her chest and back to her eyes, and it felt like someone had kicked me in the gut. Dammit, her eyes were powerful. And I knew exactly how sweet she tasted. It still haunted my dreams.

  “Sax, what is taking so long?” the woman from inside my room asked.

  The way Haisley’s face paled as she looked past me, I knew the pro cocksucker was at the door behind me. Probably still naked. Fuck. Whatever. It didn’t matter. Haisley was the one who had hurt me. Not the other way around. I’d been in love with her. Admitting it sucked because it’d happened so fast, but it was true.

  “I’m coming,” I said, tearing my eyes off the one girl I wished I’d never met, but couldn’t get out of my damn head.

  Turning around, I walked back inside, shutting the door hard behind me.

  “You know her?” she asked me.

  “Not anymore,” I replied.

  Two

  Haisley

  Breathe. In and out. In and out.

  I focused on the small spot staining the wall as I tried to calm myself. It wasn’t as if I’d thought I’d never see him again. At some point, I was going to have to seek him out. But I had thought it would be on my time. When I was mentally ready … prepared.

  Not with him wrapped in a sheet with a gorgeous, naked woman in his room while I stood there in my uniform with my cleaning cart.

  More breathing … more breathing. That was what I needed.

  But why was he in a hotel so close to home? I had never imagined seeing Saxon here. In all the many ways I had planned on what I would say to him and how I would say it, this hadn’t been one of them.

  If I had only known the future, would I have let myself be charmed by Saxon Houston? Would I have gotten in that truck? Probably not. The day he’d pulled up behind me as I was walking home from my volunteer work at the hospital to offer me a ride had sent my world spinning off its axis. My life would never be the same.

  Now, I was here. Basically homeless. Working this awful job. And pregnant.

  Two Months and Two Weeks Ago

  My older brother, AJ, had forgotten to pick me up. Jerk. Why was he even home? He never stayed this long. He also didn’t help with the bills, and he ate our food. He was the one who had offered to come get me. If I had known he wasn’t coming, I could have gotten a ride from someone. Maybe even Aspen and her ride … no. That dude made me nervous. He was too intense, and he looked ready to murder anyone who got too close to her. Must be nice. I’d never had any kind of protection in my life.

  With guys, I was always having to protect myself. They seemed to want one thing from me, and I wasn’t willing to give them that. When you were the second out of nine children, you didn’t need birth control. Your daily life was birth control.

  My mother worked twelve-hour shifts at Walmart six days a week, and on the seventh day, she cleaned houses. Five, to be exact.

  When I wasn’t working, I was cleaning the trailer we were all crammed into, making dinner, washing clothes, yelling at my younger brothers who did nothing to help, and putting out a fight—because when there were that many kids, someone was always fighting. During the school year, I helped with their homework, packed their lunches, did the grocery shopping. It was safe to say, I was never having kids.

  Only Vulcan and Vinn—the twelve-year-old twins—along with Thorn, the baby who was turning ten next week, had regular contact with their father. The rest of us either didn’t know the man whose sperm had brought us into this world or he was in prison. My fifteen-year-old sister, Silver, only visited her dad in prison on his birthday every year. He was in for arson, theft, and attempted murder. He still had another ten years left to go.

  AJ and I had been told we had the same dad, but we’d never met him. We were the results of an affair our mother had begun when she was eighteen. He was a married man, and she worked as a receptionist at his office. After AJ was born, he put her up for a while as his mistress, but when she told him about me, he accused her of getting pregnant on purpose and ended things.

  Mom moved two states away to live with my aunt until she got pregnant with Jamaica—my eighteen-year-old sister—by my aunt’s boyfriend.

  Obviously, we were kicked out of my aunt’s house when the paternity was revealed, and Mom then took up with a man she’d met in a bar where she was waitressing. That was Silver’s dad. Cliff helped out some, but he went to prison when Silver was two.

  After Cliff, Mom got pregnant with Salem, who would have been fourteen this past April. Salem never made it to the age of nine. Leukemia had taken her from us. We didn’t know who her father was, and it still caused my chest to ache when I thought about how badly Salem had wanted to at least know his name before she died. It was something I didn’t think I could ever forgive my mother for.

  DJ, my thirteen-year-old brother, didn’t know his dad either, but every year, he looked more and more like AJ. The resemblances weren’t those that they had gotten from our mother either. Then, of course, there was the fact that he was the only sibling I had with my eye color. Violet eyes weren’t common. Especially our shade. I had started to think that my sperm donor had hooked up with Mom again and left her pregnant. She’d never admit it, but she wasn’t ever going to give us the truth. The lies she fed us were all we would get.

  Vulcan, Vinn, and Thorn were all from my mom’s only marriage. It had lasted five years before Bobby Mills packed his bags and walked out of the door. I’d never been happier to see someone leave in my life. He still paid child support most of the time and came and got the three boys every other weekend. I made sure not to be there when he arrived. My stomach still turned when I thought of the past and the trauma he had caused both me and Jamaica. But especially Jamaica. She’d been younger and timid. His abuse was something that had changed her forever.

  Stopping under a shade, I lifted the bottom of my shirt to wipe the sweat droplets from my face. I should have gotten some water before I started the six-mile walk to our trailer. My mouth felt like cotton. The hot Florida summer sun was relentless. Where was the random rain shower that seemed to come out of nowhere this time of year? I would gladly walk in that over this hellish heat. At least then, I could keep from dehydrating.

  A truck slowed and pulled over behind me. Great, just what I needed. Some man trying to give me a ride. As if I was going to get in a truck with a stranger. Did I look stupid? Hello, sex trafficker.

  I started walking away, taking a few steps, when a smooth, deep voice called out my name. I paused and turned back to the truck.

  Saxon Houston.

  He knew my name. I stared at him as he walked toward me. He was a year older than me, but every girl in town knew who he was. Him and Trev Hughes. They’d gone to the private high school for the elite while I’d gone to the one on the other side of town. Although, even at the public school, those two had been well known.

  When he’d shown up that first day to pick up Aspen from the hospital, I’d never been more envious of another female in my life.

  “You need a ride?” he asked me as he got closer. “It’s fucking hot out here today.”

  Did I need a ride? In his truck? Oh my God. My clothes were sticking to me. I didn’t even want to consider what my hair looked like. I was sure that I stunk.

  “I, uh …” I wanted to get in his truck more than I had wanted anything. Well, maybe not anything, but it was in the top five.

  “I’m Saxon, a friend of Aspen’s. I’ve seen you at the hospital the couple of times I’ve picked her up.”

  I smiled, trying not to laugh. Did he think there was a girl my age in this town that didn’t know who he was? Surely, he was aware of his popularity.

  “I know who you are,” I replied.

  He chuckled and looked kind of shy for a moment. “I wasn’t sure. We definitely didn’t go to school together. I’d know you if we had.”

  Was he flirting? No. He was just stating the obvious. Right? I was a mess. He was Saxon Houston. We were not remotely in the same league. He was also waiting on me to say something.

  “I’m gross,” I finally admitted. “I’m all sweaty and …” I shrugged and smiled, hoping he didn’t think I was being rude.