One Condition (The Lust List: Kaidan Stone #1) (3 page)

I park in my spot, and I’m opening my door when the black SUV pulls up behind me and stops, blocking me in. A massive Latino guy dressed in a crisp white shirt, dark suit, and reflective sunglasses gets out.

Fear flickers alive within me, and I try to pull my driver’s side door shut again, but I’m too late. Beefy Latino dude moves fast, and he’s got his hand on my door. He grunts, “Get out of the car.”

Pepper spray. I have some, but I’m an idiot, and it’s in boxes being shipped here from Boston. I try to pull the door shut again, and the guy pulls it open.

“Out of the car,” he says with a thick Spanish accent. “Or I can make you.”

My heart’s thumping fast enough to give me a heart attack as I get out of my car. The guy reaches in to grab my purse and shoves it at me. I clutch it to my chest as I stumble away a few steps to put distance between us, but now I’m headed away from the safety of the foyer and elevators and toward the SUV. This is bad. Really bad. I don’t know this guy. Am I being kidnapped?

I back up right into someone else. I whirl around and come face to face with another Latino guy, dressed like the first, but this one is short, my height, and he’s built, but slimmer than the guy blocking my escape to the elevators. I take a step back. I think I’m gonna puke, and I’m too freaked to say a word.

He pulls off his glasses. “Miss Wade,” he says in an accent like his henchman, “pleased to finally meet you. I’m Luis.” He holds out a hand like he expects me to actually shake it.

“What do you want?” My voice cracks. I’m not going near his outstretched hand. I’ve never felt as vulnerable as I do in this moment.

He drops his hand. “We just want to talk,” he says.

“Good,” I say, my voice shaking. “There are cameras in here. This is a secure building.”

Luis offers me a false smile, and a chill runs down my spine. “Yes, there are cameras, but they aren’t recording us right now.”

I lick my lips, but I don’t know what to say to that. Is he lying? He sounds extremely confident about it.

“We have many friends, in many places, you see,” Luis says. “Your father was one of our friends, but unfortunately, he did not pay his debts.”

“For what?” But I already know. I know because I’ve seen guys like these show up at my dad’s mansion during my visits. Drug dealers. “He’s dead. I can’t—”

“Then is good he has family to pay us back, no?”

I back up another step, but I can feel beefy guy at my back, and the last thing I want to do is make physical contact with him. “I had nothing to do with my father’s debts.”

“Where I come from, when you promise payment, you pay. Even after death.”

A drop of sweat trickles down my back, and I try to keep my breathing even. “I could call the cops—”

Luis laughs, and I just know he’s got a gun hidden somewhere under that suit jacket. “What? You think we have this business without friends in the police, too?
Chica
, as I say before—we have friends everywhere. Calling the police would not be wise.”

The guy behind me grunts in apparent agreement.

Hot rage spreads through my chest, warring with my need to vomit. Who the hell do these guys think they are? They provided drugs to my dad. Probably the very drugs that killed him. I stand up straighter, even though I feel like I’m going to pass out. “You can’t threaten me. Maybe you shouldn’t sell shit that kills your customers.”

The friendly expression fades from Luis’s face, and he gestures to his henchman. “Carlos. Miss Wade does not want to pay us.”

I twist around in time to see Beefy—Carlos—taking a tire iron to my driver’s side window. He hits it twice, and I gasp, covering my mouth, as the glass cracks into a thousand pieces. My window disintegrates, and the shards fall into my seat and hit the garage floor.

“We supplied all your father’s many parties,” Luis is right next to me, and I feel his hot breath on my neck.

I can’t move. My heart’s in my throat. I can’t breathe. I can’t respond.

“He owed us over $80,000 dollars,” Luis continued. “We expect all of it, in full, the next time we meet. Which will be soon.”

Carlos moves out of my way, clearing my path to the elevators, and somehow I make my legs move. I dart past him, flinching as I do, and as I type in my code, hand shaking, to get through to the elevators, I take one glance back at them. They’re still standing next to my Mercedes and its shattered window, and they’re staring at me.

The glass doors slide open, and I back into the foyer. Luis says something to Carlos in Spanish, and I watch them get into their SUV as I jab frantically at the elevator button. The doors open, and I get inside. As they slide shut, my legs give out, and I crumple to the floor.

Tears spring up in my eyes. Drug dealers after me? Drug dealers who have friends in my building and in the LAPD? I’m so screwed. I could easily pay them back without even making a dent in my inheritance, but I can’t get my inheritance until I fulfill the one condition in my father’s will. As it stands, I barely have enough money left to pay the rent on the penthouse this month.

But Luis won’t care about that. That much is clear. They just want what my father owed them. As the elevator reaches my floor, I pull my phone from my purse. My hands are shaking so bad, I nearly drop it.

I dial Rowan’s number, but of course he doesn’t answer.

“You have reached Rowan Wade,” an automated female voice says. “Please leave a message after the tone.”

“Rowan, please. Please call me back. It’s really important.”

As I hang up the phone, I have no faith Rowan’s going to actually call me back. Will Luis visit him next?

How am I gonna fix this?

I’m curled up on my father’s suede couch, three days worth of TV dinners and junk food strewn across the coffee table, and I’m watching an old movie for the fiftieth time.

Jareth’s in his tight pants. He’s threatening Sarah with his magic balls again, and she’s determined to get to the castle beyond the Goblin City. I feel just like her. Alone, lost, with no hope of finding my way out.

Where’s my Hoggle? My brother never did call me back, and the only real friend I have in LA, Charlotte, is calling and texting me non-stop, but I can’t deal with her right now. I ignored all her messages, and when a bunch of strange numbers started calling, I finally just let my phone die. Reporters, no doubt. I need to change my number yet again.

Goblins have been the only thing distracting me from all the blond anchors reading details of my father’s “tragic early death” over and over. But I can’t leave my house. The thugs are waiting for me.

“It’s not fair,” I mumble. I make myself get up, brush crumbs off my pajama pants, and wander across the wooden floors to pull open the heavy curtains across the windows. I squint against the sudden brightness and check the road in front of the building. The black SUV is parked outside again. They’ve been here every day, waiting for me to leave my penthouse. I don’t know if it’s the same car, but it shows up every morning and leaves at night. They’ll be gone within an hour, when the sun sets. I let out a shaky breath and pull the curtains shut.

The kitchen is as dirty as the coffee table, plates piled high on the granite counters, overflowing in the porcelain sink. I need to call a maid in. I’ve always had a maid. I let out a strangled laugh. How will I pay a maid?

The intercom next to my door buzzes, and I freeze. Are the thugs trying to come inside?

Why the hell would they buzz, Hayley? Idiot.

I answer.

“It’s Char. I was worried!” a high-pitched voice exclaims over the intercom. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I come up?”

I sigh and wince as I glance around my disgusting house. “Fine.” I buzz her in so she can park.

I half-heartedly start moving the mess from my coffee table to the kitchen. Char’s my only true friend—the only one who stuck by me past middle school, the only one I ever called during my summers here. We got caught stealing when we were thirteen, and that’s when my dad shipped me off to the East Coast. He never liked Char after that, which made me hang on to our friendship even more. That was the beginning of my habit.

After I got arrested last year, I had to go to therapy to avoid jail time. I’m addicted to the thrill of it. I steal for control. That’s what the therapist says, anyway. But she’s full of shit. An addict would still be stealing. It was easy to stop once I got caught.

A knock sounds on my door, and I open it. Charlotte’s dressed like she’s ready to go clubbing. She strides into my house like she owns it and wraps me in a hug. Even in heels, she’s all of five foot two, but she’s intense enough that she somehow takes over every room she enters. Her adoptive mom’s the famous one, but Char’ll be famous in her own right, someday. I’m sure of it.

Char steps back from me, looking at my pajamas, at the mess in my kitchen. She wrinkles her nose and shakes her head. Her gorgeous jet-black hair sways in its ponytail. “Have you left the house recently?”

She takes off toward my windows, pushing open the curtains, flooding the living room with light.

“Did anyone talk to you outside?” I ask. I’m suddenly afraid, embarrassed even, to tell her or anybody besides Rowan about the situation with my dad’s drug dealers.

“Who, paparazzi? Ha Ha. I don’t exist to them. But you, girl, do.”

“I haven’t—”

“How could you not tell me?” She throws her hands up, stalks over to an armchair, and sits in it. “Why didn’t you call me back?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” A twinge of annoyance runs through me. She’s acting like my dad didn’t just die. She was at his funeral. Why is she being like this?

Char pulls her tablet out of her leather messenger bag. “I’m sorry. I know you’re dealing with a lot. But—what’s up with this?”

She hands me her tablet, and when I see the
ScandalLust
headline on her screen, nausea hits me full-force. I sink into the couch next to her chair.

“Has Rock Star Heiress Hayley Wade Snagged
Lust List
Bachelor Kaidan Stone?”

So Kaidan
is
someone.

I scroll down, taking in all the shots the sharks got of me and Kaidan. A little bolt of longing runs through me, remembering how he looked at me in the parking garage. He looks sexy, even when he’s shoving a pap into a sidewalk.

At the very bottom, there’s an old picture of me next to a picture of another girl.

Kaidan’s got a thing for sexy blondes. Dopplegangers, much? Rock star heiress Hayley Wade (left) and Werewolf Chronicles actress Peyton Mackenzie (right).

My stomach turns. We look a little alike, it’s true. She’s got the same dirty blond hair as me, sun-kissed light skin, big green eyes. She even has a sprinkling of freckles over the bridge of her nose, like I do. But that’s where the similarities end. Her nose is longer, and her cheek bones less prominent than mine. I read the paragraph below it.

KaiPey have been on-again, off-again for two years! Is it time to change KaiPey to KaiHay? Has Hayley Wade finally snagged bachelor Kaidan, or is she just a Peyton knock-off rebound like the rest?

“I know nothing about this guy,” I say weakly. “
Lust List
Bachelor…?”

Char lets out a growl of impatience and grabs the tablet off me. “Seriously? He and his twin just got on the list last week.”

“I don’t know—”

Char shoves the tablet back at me, and I look down and see another article on
ScandalLust
’s site. “You were with one of the Stone brothers! Girl, right now every woman in America is drooling over them. They’re notorious playboys and notoriously gorgeous.”

I look down at the page she’s brought up.

The Lust List

#1 Kaidan Stone - Heir to the Stone Record Label Empire, Kaidan Stone is up against his twin brother for a shot at running privately-owned Stone Records.

Stone Records. That was my
father’s
record label. I read through Kaidan’s short bio. Just graduated law school. His father, Calvin Stone, started as an entertainment lawyer before he founded Stone Records, and he’s a partner at my lawyer’s firm. So I was right about Kaidan’s daddy being a partner. Kind of.

Those paparazzi… maybe they weren’t for me, after all. Oh my God, the stuff I said to him. I’m such an ass.

I shake my head and take in Kaidan’s picture. I’ve felt depressed and lifeless for three days, but my cheeks warm as I stare down at the pic of him on the red carpet. He’s wearing a suit like the last time I saw him, but he’s clean shaven, and his dark brown hair is shorter. His brown eyes are just as intense as I remember. If I didn’t know he was the son of a record label CEO, I’d assume he was some highly paid actor. He’s
that
gorgeous.

I scroll down to check out his twin, Devon. They aren’t identical, but I can see why Devon’s also on the list. I compulsively scroll back up to Kaidan to stare some more.

“So spill it,” Char says, impatient. “What were you doing with Kaidan Stone?”

“I met him at my lawyer’s,” I say, feeling dizzy. I’ve been out of the LA scene for too long. I probably should have recognized him. “I swear, I didn’t even know who he was.”