Alpha Billionaire Taboo Prison Break: A Contemporary Romance (9 page)

16.

Eli sent a stack of cash and an anonymous note
to the couple
who
had “loaned” us their farm truck the
night after his prison escape. A second stack of money went to the trucking
company who had provided our big rig.

Maurice, however, was not compensated for the
damage to his SUV.

Eli and I remain fugitives from the law in the
United States. The Cuban government refused the United States’ request to
extradite us, as Eli predicted. We are safe, but it also means we can never go
home.

Sometimes, early in the morning, I think of my
old home in Virginia. I wonder how our lives would have been different if Mama
had not killed herself out of spite, and Eli had not been convicted of her
murder. I like to think that Eli would have eventually married me
anyway—that true love would find a way.

But I don’t know that. No one really knows for
sure. A close-minded society has a way of constricting people, of obscuring
their innermost feelings for one other.

I’ve been thinking some. And maybe this nothing
more than a way for me to assuage my own guilt for the mistakes I made when I
was younger, but maybe the awful things that happened to Eli were blessings in
disguise. After all, they brought us to a foreign country where no one seems to
realize that Eli was once my stepfather, and I was once his stepdaughter. If
anyone knows about our past, they don’t seem to care. Or they don’t care to
find themselves on Eli’s bad side.

It’s true that money can’t buy happiness. But
money does have a way of solving those kinds of problems.

Nearly nine months after we arrived in Cuba, I gave
Eli a little girl.
And then a boy a year later.
And then another girl.

The girls favor me, but the boy is a spitting
image of Eli. When I look at my beautiful boy and my precious little
girls—whenever I look at Eli, the man I always wanted and who is mine
forever—I am so grateful my life turned out the way it did.

And maybe someday, when our children are older,
Eli and I will sit them down and tell them a story. The ocean breeze will cool
us, and the parrots will chatter as we explain to our children how they came to
live on the highest mountain on the island of Cuba, raised by a man and woman
who love each other so much, not even prison walls could keep them apart.

* * * *

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Alpha Billionaire Taboo Prison Break
by Veronica Vaughn! I hope you
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And now … a
sneak peak at a modern-day classic … quick, turn the page before the suspense
kills you …

My Forbidden Military Man

An excerpt

By Veronica Vaughn

I.

The instant
I saw the Army helicopter on the horizon, I knew my stepfather was flying home
to me. Somehow I just knew. It swooped over the brown hills of Fort Hood,
drawing closer by the second.

Jumbled
feelings of excitement, anticipation and a creeping sense of dread raced
through my mind, competing for control of my emotions as the chopper descended
toward the landing pad. A small welcome party of friends, family and fellows
soldiers had gathered around the landing pad, and men grabbed their hats as the
spinning rotor blades kicked up a storm of dust that swirled around us.

One by one,
the uniformed military men disembarked from the chopper, their thick-soled
boots landing on Texas soil for the first time in months. Then I saw him.
Patton, my stepdad, in head-to-toe
camo
.
He climbed from the helicopter a little more slowly than the others, then
stopped and squinted in the harsh glare of the midday sun, looking around like
he was almost surprised to be home again.

Overcome
with excitement, I started to drop everything and run into his arms. I felt
like a little girl again, and I wanted nothing more than to throw my arms
around my stepdad’s brawny neck and let him give me one of those bear hugs I
had missed so much since while he was gone.

I took a
step forward, but something held me back. Something completely stupid and
all my
fault.

My
stepdad’s gaze found mine. His blue eyes flashed with excitement, but to my
horror, the warmth in his expression immediately turned cold and formal. The
stern disapproval on his face twisted my tummy into knots. I wished I could
sink into the ground, disappearing forever.

This
reunion was going to be awkward.

Hesitating
for just a moment, he reached into his pocket and found a pair of dark
sunglasses to shield those blue eyes that had always killed me, ever since I
was a little girl and he and my mom got married.

Patton had
always been in great shape, and my friends had been voting him the most
handsome dad at sleepovers since junior high. But this was different. War had
chiseled him into even more of a man. With his wide shoulders and tapered waist
Patton’s body perfectly filled his desert fatigues.

Patton
strode forward. I had always liked the way my stepdad walked, and his gait had
not changed one bit during several months of fighting in Iraq. He marched like
a man with purpose, standing upright, his burly chest thrust forward and his
wide shoulders thrown back, like a proud and highly decorated officer of the
National Guard. He was still the most handsome man I had ever laid eyes on.

When he was
just a couple of feet away from he, he removed his dark sunglasses. My heart
nearly stopped beating when my eyes met his cold stare.

“
Evie
,” he said.

“Hi,
Daddy.”

He just
stood there, face to face with me, and I felt incredibly small. Like a deer frozen
in the headlights of those icy blues, I did not dare to move a muscle. He
looked me up and down, his eyes raking over the recently developed body that I
was still getting accustomed to. Finally breaking through the tension, my
stepdad reached in and gave me a quick hug.

I nestled
my cheek against my stepdad’s firm chest and breathed his comforting and
instantly familiar scent. The touch of his hands felt electric as always,
sending tingles from the small of my back that raced up and down my spine.

“Thank you
for coming to get me,” he said. “Let’s get the hell off this base.”

For a
second or two, everything felt right again between us. But then he pulled away
from our embrace, and the feelings of disappointment washed over me. That was
the best greeting I would get from the man who was, for all intents and
purposes, my father? We weren’t biologically related, but Patton felt more like
a dad than my real father ever did. When my mom died a few years ago, Patton
had stepped forward and selflessly raised me like his own.

Then Uncle
Sam called up his detachment and sent them to war, leaving me to fend for
myself during my senior year of high school. Now I was eighteen years old and
all grown up. A little too grown up, it seems.

Oh, well.
All I knew was that Patton was home for two weeks. He hadn’t told me why the
military had given him leave from the war, but that didn’t matter to me. I
would use our brief time together to try to make things right between us.

Patton
marched away from the whirring helicopter and the small crowd that had gathered
around it, and I practically ran to keep up with his long, fast gait. We
rounded the corner of the commissary building, and my stepdad’s mouth dropped,
then spread into a wide, silly grin. It was good to see him smile.

“You
brought my truck,” he said. “You learned to drive a stick? And you drove all
the way from Austin?”

“A small
sacrifice for my war hero,” I teased, tossing him the keys.

Patton
grabbed them in one hand and turned his attention back to the old pickup. He tossed
his duffel bag in the truck bed, then ran his fingers down the rough, rusty
paint, savoring the touch of his prized possession. I didn’t know anything
about cars and trucks, but sometimes I wondered whether Patton loved that old
clunker more than he loved me. The engine was completely rebuilt, although he
had refused to update the aged exterior with slick new paint.

“Talk about
a sight for sore eyes.” Patton clapped his palm against the metal, like a
normal person might pet a good dog. “Good old farm truck. You know, this
belonged to my grandpa when I was a little boy. Grandma gave it to me when I
was sixteen.”

“No! You’re
kidding!” I said with feigned surprise. The truth was I had heard the story a
thousand times, though his grandparents had died long before I entered the
picture.

“Very
funny,” he deadpanned. “Get in the truck, you little brat. Let’s hit the road.”

II.

Patton slid
behind the wheel of the pickup and I hopped in beside him.

Teasing and
joking with him had felt like old times. When I was younger he often seemed
like more of a fun uncle than my parental guardian. Even when Mom died, when
both of us were heartbroken and grieving, he managed to remain upbeat for my
sake.

I hoped the
levity would continue, but Patton grew silent again as we left the military
base and began the hour drive back to Austin. He mostly kept his eyes fixed to
the road. I watched him out of the corner of my eye, admiring his rugged
jawline and close-cropped, golden-brown hair.

I was
studying his features and lost in thought when he turned and caught me looking
at him. He gave me a searching look that seared into me, forcing me to turn
away.

As we rode
in silence, my mind wandered to that moment just a few weeks ago when I had
made the mistake that jeopardized my entire relationship with the most
important man in my life. Like I said, it was
all my
fault. But you could also blame the second-most important man in my life, my
boyfriend Chase.

Chase is
nineteen, but he still lives with his parents. I don’t blame him. They have a
huge house and a swimming pool that’s bigger than my backyard. It was a lazy
June afternoon a few weeks after my high school graduation. Chase’s dad was at
the golf course, and his mom was wherever she went during the day. They had inherited
a Texas oil fortune, and none of them had worked a day in their lives.

Chase was
sleeping off a hangover in one of the lounge chairs beside the pool. He had
wrapped a beach towel around his face, shielding his eyes, as his pale, narrow
frame soaked up rays from the Texas sun. I was swimming in the deep end,
letting the water cool my body, when my phone started ringing. I had left it on
the chair next to Chase.

“Phone!”
Chase moaned through the towel covering his face. “Hey! Phone!”

“Just let
it ring,” I said, my face bobbing above on the water.

“Oh, my
head! God damn it! Answer your fucking phone!”

“You know
I’m in the pool, right?”

The phone
stopped ringing. Then it started again.

“Fuck,” he
screamed.

Still lying
on his back, Chase reached for the lounge chair next to his, fumbling for the
ringing phone. Instead of simply hitting the mute button, I watched as he threw
my phone in my general direction. It hit the water with a splash and sank like
a stone. My jaw dropped and my eyes widened in astonishment, too dumbfounded to
speak. Then I got mad.

“You
asshole! Why would you do that?”

“Should
have answered it,” he muttered.

I sucked in
a deep breath and dove down as far as I could,
scooping
my poor phone off the bottom of the pool. When I came up for air I saw that it
had already been fried. There was no saving it.

“You ruined
my phone!”

Chase sat
up and removed the towel from his head.

“I thought
you were
gonna
catch it,” he
said.

“Yeah
right,” I fumed. “You know what? I’m out of here.”

I swam straight
for the closest metal ladder. I was so angry I had to get out of that pool as
soon as possible. I had to get away from Chase before I really snapped. He
could be such a jerk sometimes.

Chase paced
around the pool and was waiting for me when I reached the top of the ladder.
The hot Texas air felt unbearably chilly on my wet skin as beads of pool water
dripped from my long hair and skin.

“
Evie
, wait,” Chase said, grabbing hold of my hips above my
bikini bottom.

“Let go of
me!”

I tried to
pull away from him, but he was too strong.

“Look, I’m
sorry!” Chase said. “I really thought you were going to catch it. Let me see
that phone.” I handed it to him. “Shit, yeah, that thing is totally dead.
Sorry.”

I tried
again to pull out of his grasp. “Seriously, let me go,” I said. “I just want to
leave.”

Chase made
a pouty face. “Your phone is a piece of crap anyway. But this is your lucky
day.”

“How is
that possible?”

“Just
promise me you’ll wait right here,” Chase said.

He returned
a minute later with a brand-new iPhone 6, which he thrust into my hands.

“Here you
go,” he said. “I had two of them.”

“Two?”

“My dad got
one for the maid,” Chase explained. “But then we caught her with a purse full
of the silverware, and she had to go. Now we have an extra that nobody’s using.
It’s on our family plan, too, so you won’t have a monthly bill or anything.”

“Wow,” I
said, at a loss for words. I had always wanted an
iPhone,
instead of the ancient flip phone that all my classmates made fun of. “Okay,
yeah. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,”
Chase said. “Glad I could do you a favor. I only ask for one thing in return.”

“What’s
that?” I asked.

“Send me
some photos tonight. You know, something sexy for the
ol
’
spank bank.”

“You’re
disgusting.”

“Ah, don’t
be like that,” Chase said, pulling my body against his and giving me a warm
kiss on the mouth. Despite my best efforts I was putty in his hands, and I
submitted to his embrace. He slid his hand down my back and squeezed my round
little butt. Chase grabbed a handful of my boobs when I broke away.

“That’s
enough out of you,” I said. “You need to behave. Anyway, I have to get ready
for work.”

“Okay, see
you later. And
Evie
? I want to see them
titties
tonight.”

I rolled my
eyes. Yeah, right. Not in a million years