Playing for Keeps (Hope Valley Book 10) Read online

  Playing for Keeps

  a Hope Valley novel

  Jessica Prince

  Copyright © 2021 by Jessica Prince

  www.authorjessicaprince.com

  Published by Jessica Prince Books LLC

  All rights reserved.

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

  Contents

  Discover Other Books by Jessica

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  More from Hope Valley

  Enjoy an Excerpt from Sweet Sunshine

  Discover Other Books by Jessica

  About Jessica

  Discover Other Books by Jessica

  HOPE VALLEY SERIES:

  Out of My League

  Come Back Home Again

  The Best of Me

  Wrong Side of the Tracks

  Stay With Me

  Out of the Darkness

  The Second Time Around

  Waiting for Forever

  Love to Hate You

  Playing for Keeps

  REDEMPTION SERIES

  Bad Alibi

  Crazy Beautiful

  Bittersweet

  Guilty Pleasure

  THE PICKING UP THE PIECES SERIES:

  Picking up the Pieces

  Rising from the Ashes

  Pushing the Boundaries

  Worth the Wait

  THE COLORS NOVELS:

  Scattered Colors

  Shrinking Violet

  Love Hate Relationship

  Wildflower

  THE LOCKLAINE BOYS (a LOVE HATE RELATIONSHIP spinoff):

  Fire & Ice

  Opposites Attract

  Almost Perfect

  The Locklaine Boys: The Complete Series Boxset

  THE PEMBROOKE SERIES (a WILDFLOWER spinoff):

  Sweet Sunshine

  Coming Full Circle

  A Broken Soul

  Welcome to Pembrooke: The Complete Pembrooke Series

  CIVIL CORRUPTION SERIES

  Corrupt

  Defile

  Consume

  Ravage

  GIRL TALK SERIES:

  Seducing Lola

  Tempting Sophia

  Enticing Daphne

  Charming Fiona

  STANDALONE TITLES:

  One Knight Stand

  Chance Encounters

  Nightmares from Within

  DEADLY LOVE SERIES:

  Destructive

  Addictive

  Chapter One

  Charlotte

  Sunlight shone through the open blinds of my window, illuminating my figure in a warm, golden glow as I stood in front of the full-length mirror and stared at my reflection.

  Happiness and sunshine were a contradiction to the emotions swirling inside of me as I took stock of the litany of scars that peppered my face and body. Wounds that had healed but left reminders behind in the form of physical imperfections. Most specifically, the pink puckered scar on my abdomen a couple inches above and to the right of my belly button. There was another that cut right through the arch of my left eyebrow that I could fortunately cover up whenever I filled my brows in, and another that slashed across my right cheekbone. Then there was the thin silvery line that angled across the bridge of my nose—a bridge that was no longer straight as an arrow thanks to having been broken.

  The scars might have been months old, but if I paid them close enough attention like I was doing right then, I could still feel the burn of the skin opening up when each of the wounds had been created.

  As it usually did whenever I started to really study myself, my vision began to grow fuzzy, and I found myself getting lost inside my own head.

  There were some people in the world who led charmed lives. Most others were happy to live ordinary lives, filled with ups and downs, happy times and sad.

  Then there are those like me.

  I wasn’t one of the fortunate few who led a charmed life. Hell, I wasn’t even lucky enough to be one of the majority. More times than not, I’d have given anything to be blissfully ordinary.

  The downs I lived through were nearly constant. Each day felt like a tumble even lower than the one before. Ugliness followed me around like a putrid black cloud everywhere I went. For every good day I experienced, there were countless bad ones that followed. For every happy moment, guaranteed sadness would follow in its wake.

  It was a crushing weight I couldn’t get out from under no matter how hard I tried, but I must have been a glutton for punishment because no matter how many times I got knocked down, I always forced myself back up. No matter how many bad days I experienced, I couldn’t let go of that microscopic glimmer of hope that things might get better. Even though they never did.

  Most people would have learned their lesson and given up hope for a turnaround, accepting the bad and learning to live with it, letting it taint them and turn them into something or someone else altogether. But despite my hard exterior, at my center I was still a soft, gooey optimist.

  And it was that optimism that had gotten me into so much damn trouble.

  In my attempt to pull myself out of the gutter, I’d blinded myself to the wolf in sheep’s clothing. I’d hitched my wagon to a man I thought was a knight in shining armor. Turned out, just like every single man who’d come in and out of my life, he was a monster.

  Malachi Black had the looks and the smooth charm that made me believe he was something he wasn’t: namely, a good and moral person. I was far from the first woman he’d fooled, but I should have known better. I’d had more than my fair share of scumbags and users and criminals filter in and out of my life; I should have been able to spot the threat he was from miles away. But I’d been seduced by a set of dimples, an easy smile, and firm, hot muscles.

  If only all criminals were as ugly on the outside as they were on the inside. However, that wasn’t the case with Malachi. He had the sexy looks that belonged on the cover of a magazine.

  By the time I realized the man didn’t have a single decent bone in his body, it was too late. I wasn’t just stuck, I was trapped, held prisoner in a life I’d willingly walked into with rose-colored glasses affixed to my face.

  He might have been arrested a while back and locked up for a very long time, but the black mark he’d left on my soul remained, and by letting him into my life, I’d let in another monster as well. One that was arguably worse because he hid his evil behind a shiny badge and a uniform.

  If Malachi Black was a blight on humanity, Officer Greg Cormack had been the devil incarnate.

  In a long line of mistakes, getting tied up with those two men was the one I regretted the most. The penance I tried to pay in an attempt and make things right had nearly cost me my life—literally. Yet it still didn’t feel like enough. The mess I’d tangled myself in had cost one good man his
life and put countless others in danger, and I wasn’t sure if there was enough atonement in the world to fix the damage I’d been a party to.

  I was ripped from my depressing thoughts by the ding of my cellphone. I dropped my T-shirt, covering the scar left behind from that unforgiving bullet that tore through my abdomen and moved to grab my phone off the bedside table and check the text that had just come through.

  Hayden: Just a warning, Micah said if you try to cancel on dinner tonight, he’ll come over there and drag you here by your hair. Don’t forget to bring wine. Love you!

  If you had told me a year ago, or hell, even six months ago, that I would be best friends with a woman like Hayden Young, I’d have laughed in your face. Given what we’d both lived through, I was certain she’d want nothing to do with me, that I would have been a reminder of a nightmare she wanted to forget. But the strange bond that resulted from a shared trauma was something Hayden had insisted on cultivating, not running from.

  Before we met, I’d been working as an informant for a detective by the name of Micah Langford. I’d wanted to help him and his partner, Leo Drake, take down Cormack and the other dirty cops and criminals he had working for him after he’d stepped in to take over Malachi Black’s drug operation when Malachi had gone to prison. Hayden and Micah had been dating at the time, and to say our first meeting had been an unfortunate one would have been putting it mildly.

  Hayden was one of the good people who’d gotten hurt in my tangled mess. Cormack had abducted her as a way to get back at Micah for coming after him, and I’d been shot trying to save her.

  She’d been forced to kill him while I’d lain bleeding on that dirty floor in a desolate cabin in the middle of nowhere, and I worried constantly that having to do that was going to scar her in a very profound way.

  I’d tried pushing both her and Micah away after everything was said and done, thinking they were better off without me around, but no matter how much I fought it, they refused to let me slip away quietly, all but forcing me into the fold of their lives. I’d gone from having no one to being an extension of their family.

  I had dinner at their house once a week, saw Hayden and my ever-widening circle of friends for lunch or coffee at least twice a month, and she’d even asked me to be a bridesmaid in her wedding when Micah popped the question a couple months ago.

  I shot off a quick reply, letting her know I was just about to head her way and started across my studio apartment toward the front door.

  The place was the size of a matchbox but the whitewashed brick walls and view of the foothills and mountains that surrounded the valley from pretty much every window made the lack of space totally worth it.

  I grabbed my purse from the kitchen counter and headed out. Just as I shoved my key into the lock, the door across the hall from mine opened, and my neighbor’s curler-bedecked head popped out.

  Deloris Weatherby was at least eighty years old—and that was being generous—cantankerous as hell, nosey, and a bit—a lot—dramatic. Most of the other tenants in the building found her salty and suspicious nature annoying, but I saw a lonely old lady who was just trying to connect with people the only way she really knew how.

  “Hey, Ms. Weatherby,” I said with a wave of my hand.

  Her eyes were cartoonishly small behind her Coke-bottle glasses as she looked right then left down the hallway. “Oh good. It’s just you. I heard a door and worried it might be a burglar.”

  “No burglar. Just me,” I assured her.

  “I thought they’d finally come for my Precious Moments figurines. I have one of the biggest collections in the state, you know. It tends to make people jealous.”

  Oh, I did know. She’d told me about her extensive collection countless times. She’d even invited me over for lemonade once and spent two hours showing them off, giving me a very detailed history of when and where she’d gotten every tiny statue.

  “Don’t worry, Ms. Weatherby, your collection is safe. No burglars in sight.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.” With her knickknacks no longer under threat, she let out a relieved sigh and pulled the door open farther, revealing her brightly colored muumuu and fuzzy house slippers. “I just made a fresh pitcher of lemonade if you want to come in for a glass.”

  A sense of panic washed over me. Even with those crazy thick glasses, the woman was still blind as a bat, so she couldn’t tell the difference between salt and sugar. It was something I’d discovered the hard way.

  “I’d love to Ms. W, but I’m actually heading out. Maybe another time?”

  She gave me a suspicious look. “You aren’t going out carousing, are you? Young people these days. Always carousing.” She pointed a gnarled, arthritic finger in my face. “That’ll get you in trouble. You could pick up some good-for-nothing lowlife, and next thing you know, he’s breaking into your building, stealing all the neighbors’ most valuable possessions so he can pawn ’em to pay for his crank! It could happen. I just saw it on Dateline. All her neighbors were robbed blind! And the police never found her body,” she added, almost as an afterthought.

  “I’m not carousing,” I promised. “Just having dinner with some friends.”

  One of her bushy white eyebrows hiked high on her wrinkled forehead. “At a bar?”

  “At their house.”

  “And these friends . . . are they the criminal types?”

  “One owns a flower shop and the other is a cop.”

  That seemed to finally placate her. “Well . . . all right then.” That finger came back into my line of sight. “But if someone offers you a funny-looking cigarette, you say no. Understand? It could be the weed. And you make sure you watch them pour your drinks. I saw a show where a woman was on vacation and someone slipped something in her drink, and she woke up in a bathtub full of ice missing her liver.”

  Sweet Jesus.

  I began backing away slowly toward the elevators, reminding myself to have a talk with my little old neighbor about all those crime shows she watched when I had the time. “You got it, Ms. W. Tell you what, I’ll pour all my own drinks. How’s that sound?”

  “They could still have put something in the bottle, but I guess that’ll just have to do. I’ll keep a lookout. If you don’t come home by morning, I’ll call the police to start a manhunt.”

  “Sounds good. See you later, Ms. Weatherby.”

  After a quick stop at the store—because I had indeed forgotten the wine—I pulled up in front of Hayden and Micah’s house. I made my way through the jungle of plants and flowers that made up their front yard and knocked on the front door.

  It flew open a second later, and I nearly went deaf from the frequency of the high-pitched shriek. Hayden’s daughter from her first marriage, Ivy, began to jump up and down in her little glittery pink biker boots. Her long curly red hair was a wild mess of tangles down her back and shoulders, and her neon pink tutu and skull leggings were covered in dirt, probably from playing in the garden in the backyard.

  “Charlie! You’re here!”

  “Hey there, munchkin. How’s it going?”

  “It was good,” she stated crestfallenly, “but then Mommy told me I couldn’t have five dollars to get ice cream at school tomorrow.” Her cheerful demeanor fell in an instant. Her eyes went big and began to water while her chin began to quiver. “Do you think you could give me five dollars?”

  I gave my head a shake and tried my hardest not to laugh. “Uh-uh, girly. I know what you’re playing at, and it’s not gonna work.”

  Hayden’s voice sounded from inside the house just seconds before she appeared in the entryway. “Ivy Young. What have I told you about using The Look.”

  Ivy dropped her head back and huffed dramatically. “I can only do it to Mike, ’cause he’s a sucker.”

  Hayden beamed, proud as hell of her little girl’s capability to manipulate her soon-to-be stepfather. “That’s right. Now go wash up. We’ll be eating soon.” Ivy went skipping off, the five dollars all but forgotten.
r />   “Look at you, raising your girl right.”

  “Thanks. I think so.” She pulled me into a quick hug before taking the bottle of wine and waving me inside.

  “That Charlie?” Micah called from the kitchen. “I heard the door. Is she here?”

  We turned the corner into the kitchen and I spotted him with his hip propped casually against the counter, an open beer in his hand. He gave me a blank look.

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “Well, would you look at that? She is alive,” he stated sarcastically. “I was starting to wonder since I haven’t heard from you in forever.”

  When it came to me, Micah had a tendency to be a bit overprotective. And by a bit I meant it was so over the top it bordered on downright intrusive at times.

  It had started when I was working with him and Leo to take down Officer Cormack and only got worse after I was hurt. No matter how many times I told him it wasn’t his fault, he still blamed himself for the fact I’d been tortured and shot. As time progressed and I healed, our relationship morphed into one where he began to look at me not as a responsibility but almost as a little sister. It was kind of sweet . . . when he wasn’t being a royal pain in my ass.

  “I just saw you three days ago,” I said with a roll of my eyes. “Don’t be so dramatic.”

  “I’m not being dramatic,” he grumbled. “All I’m saying is you could maybe call once in a while. For all I knew, you could’ve been lyin’ dead in a ditch somewhere.”