TORN: A Dark Romance Read online

  TORN

  MIA FORD

  Contents

  Copyright

  Torn

  Billionaire Steamy Romance Series

  Alpha Male Billionaire Series

  COWBOY ROMANCE SERIES

  Mia’s Hot Seller - Fair Play (Complete Story)

  Exclusive Bonus Story - Hired By The Billionaire

  Copyright © 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on life experiences and conclusions drawn from research, all names, characters, places and specific instances are products of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously. No actual reference to any real person, living or dead, is intended or inferred.

  Personal Note

  Hey,

  I am Mia Ford, author of steamy contemporary romance. I would like to thank you for downloading my book and also want to let you know that I have included a few bonus stories for your reading pleasure.

  Don’t forget to read my HOT SELLER - “FAIR PLAY” (COMPLETE STORY) which is a Bad Boy Sports Romance. Also, included in this book is another HOT “n” STEAMY STORY - “HIRED BY THE BILLIONAIRE”, which I will not be publishing anywhere else and is exclusive to this book.

  You can read this super steamy and explosive content via the TOC.

  So sit back, relax, grab a glass of wine and let’s get this party started!

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  Also, receive a Free copy of my book - HIS FOREVER

  Click here to join Mia’s VIP Readers Club

  Torn

  Blurb

  The day my fiancé was brutally gunned down before my eyes, my entire life changed forever. Gone was the sweet and innocent bride-to-be who wanted nothing more than to get married and have babies. She was replaced by a tattooed biker bitch hell bent on revenge. I’m going to make The Wright Brothers pay for what they’ve done. I’ll see them all dead if it’s the last thing I do…

  I strolled into that dive bar with the intention of killing Rick Wright, the gang leader responsible for the death of my fiancé. He might not have pulled the trigger, but he was the man in charge, so I was holding him personally responsible. I had it all planned. I would seduce him, get him alone, then put a bullet in his head.

  The one thing I hadn’t counted on was him being so charming, not to mention smoking hot. He had a smile that he used like a weapon. All he had to do was point it my way and I melted in my panties.

  Once I got him naked and in my bed, would I be able to put a bullet in his head, or would the site of his naked body and the surge of my own desires wash away my need for revenge forever?

  PROLOG: SANDY DUVAL

  I met the love of my life on Tuesday, January 26th.

  He asked me to marry him on Saturday, May 3rd.

  The wedding was scheduled for Saturday, October 15th.

  He died in my arms on Sunday, July 24th.

  I decided to kill the man responsible for his death at the exact moment the last breath slipped from my lover’s body.

  Now, it’s all I think about.

  Killing Rick Wright.

  A man I’ve never even met, but can’t wait to kill.

  SANDY

  I missed those long nights when I’d lie awake thinking about my wedding day. I thought about how best to wear my hair, how I’d do my makeup, who would help me get ready, what song we’d dance to for our first dance and a thousand other things.

  I already had my dress, which, as wedding dresses go, was a pretty simple design.

  On a hairdresser’s pay, I couldn’t afford anything fancy with a long train and a veil, not that I wanted anything like that. I was a simple girl with simple tastes, and I was marrying a simple man.

  Brent worked in the service department at the local Ford dealership. I cut hair at Cost Clippers. Together, we’d make enough to have a nice, simple life, like our parents.

  Funny, how I keep using that word: simple.

  Sad, because nothing is simple anymore.

  I bought my wedding dress off Craig’s List for two hundred dollars from a bride whose marriage had lasted less than a year. It was a lacy white dress that was bought off the discount rack at David’s Bridal; floor length, with a high neckline and long sleeves. The girl kept calling it “antique looking”, which I think meant that is was purposefully made to look old.

  I remembered trying it on in the girl’s bedroom, staring at myself in the full-length mirror she had mounted to the back of the closet door. It fit like it was made especially for me. I’m tall for a girl, like 5’8 in bare feet, but I’m also curvy. My sister, April, always said that I got my big boobs and wide hips from my mom and my short temper from my dad.

  I bought the dress and rushed home to show it to April and my mom. I was so proud of that dress. I couldn’t wait to try it on and show it off to them. I couldn’t wait for Brent to see me in it as I walked down the aisle. I thought he was just gonna die when he saw me.

  Fuck.

  What did I say that…?

  I rolled over and balled up the covers in my hands and tucked them under my chin.

  I tried to sob quietly, so April didn’t hear me.

  I’d moved back home, out of the apartment Brent and I had rented less than a month before he was killed. I couldn’t afford to live there on my own.

  I was back in the same room April and I shared growing up. April was just eighteen, six years younger than me, and just starting junior college. She needed her space and her sleep, but she welcomed me home with open arms. They all did; April, mom, dad. They tried to make me feel like it was all going to be all right, that one day I’d wake up to find that I hadn’t cried myself to sleep the night before.

  “Time heals all wounds,” my mom kept saying as if it was a mantra for driving away the spirit and memory of my dead lover.

  That was bullshit.

  For me, time makes all wounds grow deeper.

  Time makes them fester and grow, like cancer that eats at your heart and soul, until it consumes you, leaving nothing but an empty shell and the desire to simply lay down and die.

  April rolled over and sighed. I buried my face in the pillow to stifle my tears. After a moment, I could hear her snoring softly. I found some comfort in the sound of my sister’s breathing. It was so calm, so peaceful. It was the breathing of a girl whose greatest worry in the world was which pair of cute jeans she should wear to the mall on Friday night to make the boys notice her.

  I remembered those days.

  For me, they were gone for good.

  I wiped my eyes on the blanket and forced the tears away.

  I used to lie awake nights thinking about my wedding.

  Now I lie awake and wonder how many good people are killed every year just because they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  I knew of at least one.

  And he died before he could see me in my wedding dress.

  For some reason, that was the saddest thing of all.

  RICK WRIGHT

  I pulled the black Lincoln Navigator into a spot in the parking lot in front of Crown Jewelers and slid the gear into park. I parked far enough away so no one would notice us watching the place.

  I left the motor running so the co
ol air would keep pumping out of the vents in the dash. It was the middle of September and hot as fuck in the city.

  The black t-shirt I wore clung to my sweaty back like a second skin. My next truck would have those built-in seat coolers like I saw advertised on TV. After this job, I’d go check out the new Navigators. If everything went as planned I’d be able to buy a fucking fleet of them in a couple of weeks.

  I was a Lincoln man way before that fuck Matthew McConoughey started doing their commercials. I was still a Lincoln man despite him. Fuck their commercials and Matthew McConoughey. I just loved Lincolns; always had, always will.

  Eddie, my little brother, best friend, and second in command, was slumped in the passenger seat with a black baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. I shook my head at him. He didn’t seem to comprehend that the heavily-tinted windows prevented anyone from seeing inside the truck. Even the upper part of the windshield had a heavy tent, obstructing our faces from traffic cams.

  Funny, during a job, Eddie was the one I always worried about not being careful enough or flying off the handle and doing something stupid, but when we were casing our next job, like the hit on Crown Jewelers, he was a paranoid bundle of nerves.

  “That’s it,” I said, nodding at the strip of stores in front of us. “Crown Jewelers, next to the Men’s Warehouse.”

  “Don’t look like much,” Eddie said, pushing the cap back from his forehead with his thumb. He leaned in toward the windshield and took off the dark sunglasses he was wearing.

  “Looks can be deceiving,” I said.

  He slid the sunglasses back on his nose and pulled the cap low again. Sitting back, he asked, “So, what’s the setup? What do they have in the way of security?”

  “The setup is one small showroom lined with jewelry cases,” I said, describing the place from memory. I’d gone into Crown’s two weeks earlier to buy the vintage Rolex Mariner that was strapped to my left wrist. I loved old Rolex’s about as much as I loved Lincolns. I’d paid cash for the watch, nearly nine-thousand dollars, part of my cut from selling a semi-truck load of stolen cigarettes to a gang of goons from upstate somewhere.

  Buying the watch was just part of the reason I was there. The main reason was to case the place to determine if it should be the target of my gang’s next hit.

  I rested a hand on the steering wheel and aimed a finger at the storefront. “There is a fat fuck of a security guard who sits right inside the door. He has a pistol in a holster that he’s probably never even fired. He can be taken out before he knows what hit him. When I was there, he had his nose stuck in a newspaper and wasn’t paying too much attention to what was going on around him. There is one door at the back of the showroom that leads to an office, and a room where they do jewelry repair.”

  Eddie nodded as he listened. “So, you’re thinking smash and grab?”

  Eddie and I had been doing smash and grabs since we were kids. Basically, you run into a place, smash the fuck out of the glass display cases with a hammer or the butt of a gun, and grab whatever the fuck you can and get the fuck out. Smash and grabs worked fine if you didn’t care what you got away with. The Crown hit would not be a smash and grab because I didn’t care about the shit in the display cases. I wanted what was kept in the safe in the office.

  “Not a smash and grab,” I said.

  Eddie dug a cigarette pack from his shirt pocket and held it out to me. I shook my head and said I was trying to quit. I rolled his window down a couple of inches. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke toward the window, then gave me a sideways frown. “Not a smash and grab. Okay, what then?”

  “There is a safe in the office,” I said. “A source I have on the inside tells me that Mr. Crown stores a couple of million dollars’ worth of loose diamonds there at any given time. That’s our target.”

  Eddie grinned and poked me with his elbow. “Who’s your inside source? Let me guess, that fat girl you’ve been banging? What’s her name? Doris, Doreen…”

  “Dottie,” I said. “And she’s not fat. She’s pleasantly plump.”

  “What you call pleasantly plump I call fat, my brother,” Eddie said. “I knew there had to be a reason you were dipping your stick into that one. Not exactly your usual type. So, what’s her connection to the jewelry store?”

  “She’s the one who sold me the watch,” I said, wiggling my wrist at him. “Turns out, Dottie is a very lonely, very horny lady. After a couple of hours of banging the shit out of her at the No Tell Motel, she was more than happy to answer all my questions about her place of employment.”

  Eddie scratched his chin, which was covered with a scraggly beard he’d been trying to grow since high school. “What’s gonna happen when the cops question Dottie after we hit the store?”

  “Won’t be a problem,” I said, shaking my head.

  He gave me a sideways glance, then a smirk. “You gonna kill her?”

  “I don’t kill people, Eddie,” I said, giving him a hard look that made him turn away. I was a criminal, but I wasn’t a killer. Eddie had killed people. Sometimes, people who didn’t deserve to die, like that poor schmuck at the convenience store a couple of months back. Eddie’s temper got away from him sometimes and people got hurt. Sometimes, I thought he might even like it; hurting people. But he’s my little brother. I love him. I try not to think about it too much.

  “So, what’s your plan for her then?”

  “I wore a disguise whenever I was with her,” I said. “Dottie knows me as a traveling salesman from Reno named Carl Douglass who wears glasses and a bad toupee. Carl is going to take Dottie on a little trip a couple of days before the job. She’ll be heavily sedated in a motel while we do the job. I have a guy who is going to babysit her for me. When I give him the all-clear, he’ll let her wake up the next day to find a note from dear old Carl telling her he’s gone back to his wife and she should take the bus home.”

  “I hope you at least have the decency to give her one more good fucking before you give her a good fucking over,” Eddie said, chuckling at himself. That was another flaw Eddie had: he wasn’t nearly as funny as he thought he was, but I didn’t need Eddie to be funny. I needed him to watch my back, which he’d been doing his entire life.

  SANDY

  I met Brent Griffin on a chilly January day when I came into the Ford dealership to have my car serviced. My fifteen-year-old Taurus was a total piece of shit, but it was all I could afford, so I had to keep it running.

  I’d gotten a coupon in the mail a few days before letting me know that Tuesday was Ladies’ Day at the dealership. I could have my oil changed, fluids topped off, tires pumped up, and filters checked for just $29. I scraped together my spare change and used the tips I’d made from cutting hair all weekend to have the work done.

  I pulled up to the large bay door around the side of the dealership. I was number three in line at the service center. I sat in my car with the heater going and watched as a cute service advisor with shaggy brown hair and clipboard in hand leaned in to chat with the drivers seated inside their nice warm cars. When he got to me, he asked my name and did a double take when he glanced into my eyes. It was so cute.

  “My name?” I stuttered because he was staring at me, smiling.

  His eyes narrowed when he smiled. He had these adorable little dimples in his cheeks. “Yes, ma’am, I need your name,” he said, tapping the pen to the clipboard.

  “Oh, um, Sandy Duval,” I said.

  “Hi, Sandy,” he said, writing. “I’m Brent. What can we do for your today?”

  “Hi, Brent. Um, I want that Tuesday Ladies Special thingy.” God, I must have sounded like an idiot because he grinned at me. He had such a nice smile.

  He asked, “You mean the oil change service?”

  “Yes, that’s it,” I said, nodding like a bobble-head. I forced my head to stop bobbing when he gazed into my eyes again.

  “Can I get your phone number, Sandy?” he asked.

  I gave him my cell number. I bit my lip as I watched
him jot it down on the form.

  Without looking up, he asked, “Would it be okay if I called you some time, Sandy?”

  “You mean about my car?” I asked, confused.

  “No, about dinner.” His eyes widened. They were so brown I could see myself in them. “Maybe Red Lobster or Olive Garden.”

  I felt my cheeks flush. I said, “Yes, I’d like that.”

  “Good,” he said with a happy nod. He stuck the pen behind his ear and reached for the door handle. “We’ll get you in and out as quickly as possible. If you’d like to wait in the lounge, there’s coffee and donuts.”

  I watched him walk away. He had a cute, tight ass beneath the blue uniform pants. He glanced back over his shoulder at me and smiled again as if he knew I was checking him out.

  He called me the next day and we went to Red Lobster for dinner the following Friday night. We quickly became inseparable, at least until he went somewhere that I could not go.

  * * *

  Brent and I met on Tuesday, January 24th.

  We always did silly little anniversaries every month; the anniversary of our first date, the anniversary of our first kiss, the anniversary of the first time we made love in the little apartment he shared with his best friend, Wesley. The anniversary of the night he asked me to marry him.

  Sunday, July 24th was the six-month anniversary of the day we met. I came up with the brilliant idea of recreating our first date. We went back to Red Lobster for dinner. I had grilled scampi and Brent had popcorn shrimp. I drank a margarita and Brent drank two glasses of sweet tea. The bill was the same and Brent left the exact same tip. The only difference between then and now was that I was desperately, hopelessly in love. I had met the man of my dreams. We were to be married on Saturday, October 15th in the little Baptist Church where Brent’s dad was an elder. Our families were thrilled. I already had my dress.