Unfinished Hero 04 Deacon

Kristen Ashley

Published by Kristen Ashley

Discover other titles by Kristen Ashley:

Rock Chick Series:

Rock Chick

Rock Chick Rescue

Rock Chick Redemption

Rock Chick Renegade

Rock Chick Revenge

Rock Chick Reckoning

Rock Chick Regret

Rock Chick Revolution

The ‘Burg Series:

For You

At Peace

Golden Trail

Games of the Heart

The Promise

The Chaos Series:

Own the Wind

Fire Inside

The Colorado Mountain Series:

The Gamble

Sweet Dreams

Lady Luck

Breathe

Jagged

Kaleidoscope

Dream Man Series:

Mystery Man

Wild Man

Law Man

Motorcycle Man

The Fantasyland Series:

Wildest Dreams

The Golden Dynasty

Fantastical

Broken Dove

The Magdalene Series:

The Will

The Three Series:

Until the Sun Falls from the Sky

With Everything I Am

The Unfinished Hero Series:

Knight

Creed

Raid

Deacon

Other Titles by Kristen Ashley:

Fairytale Come Alive

Heaven and Hell

Lacybourne Manor

Lucky Stars

Mathilda, SuperWitch

Penmort Castle

Play It Safe

Sommersgate House

Three Wishes

www.kristenashley.net

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S.
Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic
sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the
publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual
property. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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

Copyright © 2014 by Kristen Ashley

First ebook edition: September, 2014

First print edition: September, 2014

WARNING

This book is an ADULT EROTIC romance
featuring an anti-hero. This novel contains explicit erotic scenes
that include light dominance, bondage, as well as anal sex and
beyond. The hero in this novel lives life in a dark world not
inhabited by your everyday person…until he reaches to the light. In
an effort not to spoil it for you, I will not explain further. If
you do not enjoy the above sexual situations or this kind of hero,
I would suggest that this novel is not for you.

*****

Not Reality

“Cassidy, are you fucking kidding me?”

“We need to update the units, Grant.”

“
Eleven microwaves?
”

I stared at my boyfriend, the love of my
life, the man who gave up home in Oklahoma six weeks ago to follow
me to Colorado to live my dream. The dream that was born when I was
thirteen and Mom and Dad took us on a skiing trip. The dream I
nurtured every time they gave in when I begged them to take us
back. The dream of having every day what I felt the minute I hit
the Rockies. The feeling of being precisely where I was meant to
be, in the mountains, living a quiet life constantly in the midst
of sheer beauty.

And, of course, living that dream with the
addition of a lot of snowboarding.

I had found the cabins for sale on the
Internet and talked Grant into coming with me, fixing them up,
caring for them and the patrons who’d use them to have their time
by a river in the middle of rock, pine, aspen, columbine, fireweed,
wild iris, and glacier lily.

We were young and being young, embarking on
such a huge-scale adventure, possibly stupid. I knew that.

My dad knew it too. He was concerned. He
tried to hide it from me but he didn’t quite succeed.

My mom wasn’t concerned. She was silently
terrified that I was sinking my savings, something I’d been
carefully hoarding since I was thirteen, into a broken down bunch
of cabins in the middle of nowhere in the Rocky Mountains. Doing it
practically just out of college. Only twenty-four years old
(though, Grant was twenty-six).

That didn’t mean Mom and Dad didn’t give us
their blessings. They did. With Dad giving me twenty thousand
dollars besides.

“An investment,” he’d said. “You can pay me
back when you make those cabins thrive.”

When you make those cabins thrive.

When. Not if.

That was my dad. He believed in me. He was
worried. He knew it was risky. But he did what he always did. Made
a statement—this time a grand one—that he believed I could do
anything.

Even take on a bunch of ramshackle cabins,
the even more ramshackle house that went with them, and make them
“thrive.”

“Since I’m buying so many, I’m getting a
screaming deal on those microwaves, Grant,” I informed him of
something I’d already informed him of. “Forty percent off and free
delivery.”

“Those units don’t need new microwaves,
Cassidy.”

I stared at him again since he knew they did.
The ones that were working (and in the eleven cabins we owned, only
eight microwaves were working) were old, crusty, and gross. I
wouldn’t even pop popcorn in one of them.

“Three of them don’t work,” I reminded
him.

“Folks can get along without microwaves,” he
retorted.

I shook my head. “Babe, seriously, we went
over this.
All
of it. I wrote out that business plan, you
read it, and—”

“Jesus, fuck,” he interrupted me in
exasperation and lifted up his hands to do air quotation marks.
“Your fuckin’
business plan.
If I hear about that fuckin’
thing one more fuckin’ time, I’m gonna shoot myself.” He’d dropped
his hands but threw one out. “Fuck, Cassidy, you don’t need a
business degree from some Podunk university in Oklahoma to write
some stupid document that tells us to make a go of this fuckin’
place, we don’t need microwaves.” He leaned in to me. “
We need
to rent cabins
.”

I stared at him yet again, seeing as he’d
never spoken to me like that. We’d started arguing these past few
weeks but he’d never said anything that mean.

And as I stared at him, I tried to stop the
hurt his words sent piercing through me. Hurt he hadn’t inflicted
when we were back in Oklahoma and he was a good boyfriend. The kind
who was up for adventure. The kind that listened to me in the night
after he made love to me as I whispered my dreams to him. The kind
who told me he was all in. He was there for me. He, too, believed
in me and wanted to live the dream.

I managed to do this as I managed to reply
quietly and with forced calm. “Yes, Grant, but to rent them at the
prices where we need them to be in order to make a decent living,
we need to
fix them up
.”

“We can fix them up when we got some fuckin’
money in the bank.”

It was then I knew where he was coming
from.

Because
I
bought the cabins.
I
had the mortgage.
I
had the rest of the money I’d saved and
didn’t invest in buying the property and Dad’s money besides.

Grant didn’t have much of anything except
experience as a journeyman electrician and a fabulous body I’d
hoped he’d use to help me paint walls and refinish floors.

In the six weeks we’d been there, he’d
painted walls. Three of them. Then he’d spent a lot of time
“getting to know the locals” in order to “get referrals.”

This translated into locating drinking,
hunting, and fishing buddies.

“You aren’t gettin’ those microwaves,” he
informed me.

“I am,” I returned. “And you’re gonna install
them. After, of course, I refinish the cabinets and you install the
new countertops.”

His face twisted in a way I’d never seen
before. It was also a way I didn’t much like.

“I’m not doin’
shit
with somethin’ I
didn’t agree to buyin’.”

“Since it’s not your money, it isn’t for you
to agree or disagree,” I shot back nastily.

His face twisted further and I
so
didn’t like the way it twisted that I leaned away from him.

“You fuckin’ bitch,” he clipped, his voice
rising.

I felt my eyes widen as my heart twisted at
his words. Words no one in my life had ever said to me, especially
not Grant.

There was no way I could stop the hurt that
sent through me. Hurt so bad, I only had it in me to whisper,
“Grant.”

“I knew you’d fuckin’ throw that in my face
eventually and you didn’t waste time. We been here weeks, you’re
throwin’ that shit in my face.”

“I don’t think you’re listening to me,” I
pointed out carefully, because he was right. What I said was a low
blow. I knew he didn’t have a load of money. He’d been up front
about that.

Then again, he’d been up front about it but
told me he’d contribute by helping with the cabins.

Still, I shouldn’t have said what I said. And
now I needed to calm us both down and fight my way back to the high
road.

“I’m listenin’ to you,” he shot back, his
voice still raised. “Seems all I do is fuckin’ listen to you.
Hotshot college grad whose daddy thinks she shits roses. Babe, you
got another thing comin’, you think I’m gonna crawl up your ass and
treat you like a fuckin’ princess like that fuckin’ father of
yours.”

I did more staring at my handsome,
thoughtful, supportive boyfriend thinking
where on earth did
that come from
?

I didn’t get the chance to ask. There was a
knock on the door, and as we were fighting in the foyer, Grant
close to the door with his back to it, he turned, grabbed the knob,
and yanked it open.

“What?” he barked, angrily and
unwelcomingly.

But I saw the man standing in the doorway and
I took an automatic step back.

I didn’t do this because he was handsome and
handsome men freaked me way the heck out.

Good-looking guys like Grant, no. Grant could
turn heads. Even though he wasn’t tall, with his lean, defined
body, shock of messy dark blond hair and clear blue eyes, he got
more than his share of attention.

But Grant wasn’t like the guy at the
door.

The guy at the door wasn’t good-looking. The
guy at the door was
handsome
. Amazingly. Tall. Dark-haired.
Rugged-featured. His large frame built tough and solid.

He looked like the model a cologne company
would choose when they decided to break in to the difficult market
of trying to convince hardcore bikers they should smell good.

But I didn’t take a step back because of
that.

I did it because he was terrifying.

Utterly.

Huge. Dark. His face a cold, emotionlessness
mask. His chill swept through the foyer, causing a shiver to glide
over my skin even though it was a sunny day in August, warm, and we
had no air conditioning.

Further, I knew in a glance he was gone.
There was nothing there. He was standing. His blood was coursing
through his veins. He was breathing.

But that was it.

He existed.

He did not live. He did not feel. He did not
smile. He did not laugh.

In other words, he was the guy a cologne
company would approach when they decided to break in to the
difficult market of trying to convince hardcore bikers they should
smell good. He was also the guy who would listen to this then rip
the head off the person who suggested such absurdity.

I got this all from a look, and as I kept
looking, I knew with complete certainty I was right.

And it scared the heck out of me.

He
scared the heck out of me.

But this was only part of the reason he
scared the heck out of me.

The other part, the bigger part, was even
feeling all that, I had a near-overwhelming urge to go to him and
wrap my arms around him.

Tight.

And maybe never let go.

For eternity.

Yes, standing in my foyer with my boyfriend,
staring at that man, and thinking these thoughts, he scared the
ever-living
crap
out of me.

His deep voice rumbled through the hall, and
as deep as it was, there was no warmth to it. It wasn’t even
benign. Even saying everyday words, it was ominous and wintry.

“You got a unit open?”

“We got eleven units open,” Grant replied,
tossing out a hand toward the door to indicate the cabins down the
lane. “Take your pick, man.”

“Unit eleven,” the man stated instantly and I
was not surprised by his choice, though I was unnerved that he knew
which cabin to pick. He’d either been there before or he’d checked
out the lay of the land before he approached us.