Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 90085 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 450(@200wpm)___ 360(@250wpm)___ 300(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 90085 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 450(@200wpm)___ 360(@250wpm)___ 300(@300wpm)
Momma hadn’t been gone from the world for twenty-four hours before the first letter showed up. Blue paper, folded into an origami heart, left where the writer knew I’d find it. Dealing with my grief, I was able to put it out of my mind until the next one came, then the next. Each one more disturbing than the last. Until I woke up to find one beside me.
He’d watched me sleep.
Only desperation could drive me to ask the man who had fertilized my momma’s egg for help. I preferred to forget him and his existence, just like he had us… me. But with Momma gone, I had no one, and I needed a safe place to escape—out of this town and away from the stranger who was stalking me.
To say I was shocked that he turned me down would be a lie. I’d expected as much. He’d left me with no choice but to threaten to expose his sins to the God-fearing people of Mississippi who placed him in office. The nineteen-year-old daughter of a stripper he’d knocked up and deserted would know a lot about his transgressions.
However, the two men he sent to get me weren’t what I’d been expecting, but I didn’t really have much of a choice. It was trust the devil I knew or stay and live in fear of the one I didn’t.
Than
Waking up hung over and naked on the sofa of a friend’s house wasn’t out of character for me. Being woken up and told I was being ordered to babysit the Governor’s accidental offspring was another. It wasn’t fair that I’d been handed this task. Why me? I didn’t want to watch some stripper’s daughter who had decided to blackmail the governor. Why didn’t we have the philandering bastard hand over hush money, and then we could put enough fear in her that she kept her mouth shut?
When I didn’t believe it could get any worse, the stripper’s daughter opened the cheap ass motel room door she had been staying in and knocked the wind out of my chest
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Playlist
Pretty Little Devil
Shaya Zamora
Do it Like a Girl
Morgan St. Jean
I’m Gonna Show You Crazy
Bebe Rexha
Lose Control
Teddy Swims
Call Me Devil
Friends in Tokyo
Power Over Me
Dermont Kennedy
Shadows
Sabrina Carpenter
Pretty Little Poison
Warren Zeiders
Ain’t Nothing ‘Bout You
Brooks & Dunn
Never Say Never
Cole Swindell and Lainey Wilson
Sin So Sweet
Warren Zeiders
The Champion
Carrie Underwood and Ludacris
Devil I Know
Allie X
No Mercy
Austin Giorgio
Shoot Me Dead
Cameron Whitcomb
Prologue
Montana
The scent was one I’d grown up with. It was likely I had even smelled it in the womb. There were folks who stuck their noses up at it and complained about it, and those who craved it and couldn’t walk away from it, no matter the cost.
My momma had once been the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I’d wanted to be just like her—that was, until I understood her. We were an odd pair. While my friends believed she was the coolest mom around, I knew better. As much as I loved her, I wished she were different.
Even now, as I sat in her bedroom, watching her shrivel up as the disease took more and more of her every passing second. She was only thirty-eight, and just like her momma, she would die too young, leaving her daughter behind to figure out life. I’d never met my grandmother. She had been taken by the same thing that was taking Momma. Some got to smoke for decades and not face the consequences, but not the Carrigan women.
When I’d been old enough to understand how my grandmother had died, I had begged my momma to stop smoking.
But she’d just smile at me with her red-painted lips. “Tana, baby, it’s my meal. You like living in this house and having nice things? Well, I can’t gain a pound. It’s a miracle you didn’t ruin me with stretch marks.”
Momma had been a stripper from the age of eighteen until she turned thirty-three. When she turned thirty-three, the smoking and years had started showing on her. She took over the job of managing the dancers until two years later, when the coughing started. Then the diagnosis. It had all changed after that.
Thankfully, I’d managed to stay in school and work a job to help pay the bills. But we’d used every last penny of Momma’s savings. Especially the last four months, when she’d gotten so bad that she couldn’t even sit at the computer and handle the office tasks that Peg—the owner of the club where she worked—would give her so that she still got a paycheck.
In less than three months, I would graduate high school…and I knew my momma wouldn’t be there to see it. She’d never gotten her high school diploma or even a GED. She’d dropped out at eighteen and started working at Diamond Club when her momma died. I didn’t want that. I was so close though. I wasn’t like Momma. The idea of dancing in nothing but a sparkly G-string and stilettos in front of men was something I knew I could never do. Momma had come into this world oozing confidence—or at least, that was what she’d told me her mother used to say—but I hadn’t.
For the past two months, as Momma faded, I’d lie in bed at night, wondering how I’d feel about that smell of nicotine when she was gone. Would I hate it? Despise it for what it had taken from me? Or would I think of her and wish more than anything for her arms to wrap around me one more time? But the real question burning in the back of my head that I was afraid to acknowledge was, what would I do? How would I survive? I couldn’t pay the bills and the mortgage without her income and still go to school. The house would have to be sold. We were already a month behind on mortgage payments. We should have put it up for sale months ago.
“You go make him help you,” Momma wheezed.
I shook my head. We’d had this conversation before.
“I want nothing to do with him,” I replied.
She knew that, but she kept insisting that I go to Mississippi and demand the man who had knocked her up at nineteen help me until I could graduate and work full-time.
“He owes you. He—” She stopped, struggling to inhale, and I winced.
“Please, Momma. Don’t talk. Just relax.”
The effort it took for her to pick up her arm and move it toward me so she could hold out her hand in my direction was another ache in my heart. I’d painted her nails her favorite color of OPI Big Apple Red just two days ago. I moved closer and encased her frail hand in both of mine.
“He owes me,” she rasped, then coughed weakly.
“We never needed him, and I’ll be damned if I go ask him to help me now,” I told her. “I’ll be fine. You don’t worry about that. I’m a badass, like my momma.”