Deep Trouble: A MacKenzie Family Novella (The MacKenzie Family) Read online

  Deep Trouble

  By Kimberly Kincaid

  A MacKenzie Family Novella

  Introduction by Liliana Hart

  Deep Trouble

  A MacKenzie Family Novella

  Copyright 2016 Kimberly Kincaid

  ISBN: 978-1-942299-36-3

  Introduction copyright 2016 Liliana Hart

  Published by Evil Eye Concepts, Incorporated

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

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

  Book Description

  Deep Trouble

  by Kimberly Kincaid

  From Liliana Hart’s New York Times bestselling MacKenzie family comes a new story by bestselling author Kimberly Kincaid…

  Bartender Kylie Walker went into the basement of The Corner Tavern for a box of cocktail napkins, but what she got was an eyeful of murder. Now she’s on the run from a killer with connections, and one wrong step could be her last. Desperate to stay safe, Kylie calls the only person she trusts—her ex-Army Ranger brother. The only problem? He’s two thousand miles away, and trouble is right outside her door.

  Security specialist Devon Randolph might be rough and gruff, but he’ll never turn down a friend in need, especially when that friend is the fellow Ranger who once saved his life. Devon may have secrets, but he’s nearby, and he’s got the skills to keep his buddy’s sister safe…even if one look at brash, beautiful, Kylie makes him want to break all the rules.

  Forced on the run, Kylie and Devon dodge bullets and bad guys, but they cannot fight the attraction burning between them. Yet the closer they grow, the higher the stakes become. Will they be able to outrun a brutal killer? Or will Devon’s secrets tear them apart first?

  About Kimberly Kincaid

  Kimberly Kincaid writes contemporary romance novels that split the difference between sexy and sweet. When she’s not sitting cross-legged in an ancient desk chair known as “The Pleather Bomber”, she can be found practicing obscene amounts of yoga, whipping up anything from enchiladas to eclairs in her kitchen, or curled up with her nose in a book. Kimberly is a USA Today bestselling author and a 2015 RWA RITA finalist who lives (and writes!) by the mantra that food is love. She is the author of over a dozen books, and she resides in Virginia with her wildly patient husband and their three daughters.

  Want the scoop on the sizzling heroes and sassy heroines of Station Seventeen, plus the chance to win five free books every month? Sign up for Kimberly Kincaid’s newsletter, and check out these other sexy titles, available at your favorite retailers!

  And for hot news and even hotter Man Candy, don’t forget to come find Kimberly on Facebook, join her street team The Taste Testers, and follow her on Twitter and Pinterest!

  Also by Kimberly Kincaid

  The Line series:

  Love On The Line

  Drawing The Line

  Outside The Lines

  Pushing The Line

  The Pine Mountain Series:

  The Sugar Cookie Sweetheart Swap, with Donna Kauffman and Kate Angell

  Turn Up The Heat

  Gimme Some Sugar

  Stirring Up Trouble

  Fire Me Up

  Just One Taste

  All Wrapped Up

  Rescue Squad:

  Reckless

  Fearless

  Author Acknowledgments

  I often say that writing a book is a team effort, but it’s never been more true than with this project. First and foremost, I’ve got to thank Liliana Hart for letting me come play in the MacKenzie world. Liz Berry, M.J. Rose, and Jillian Stein, you made the project not only a breeze, but crazy fun. To Alyssa Alexander, Tracy Brogan, and Jennifer McQuiston, for being my cheekas, I love you guys. Robin Covington, Avery Flynn, Cristin Harber, and Christopher Rice, I cannot think of more talented and or more fun people with whom to share this wild, wild ride. And to my daughters and husband, thank you for once again understanding when I jumped up from the dinner table yelling, “Wait, just let me write this idea down!”

  Lastly, to my readers. I am so very excited to be starting this sexy new Station Seventeen series, and I’m thrilled to have you on the first leg of the journey with me. Buckle up, y’all! It’s gonna get hot in here…

  An Introduction to the MacKenzie Family World

  Dear Readers,

  I’m thrilled to be able to introduce the MacKenzie Family World to you. I asked five of my favorite authors to create their own characters and put them into the world you all know and love. These amazing authors revisited Surrender, Montana, and through their imagination you’ll get to meet new characters, while reuniting with some of your favorites.

  These stories are hot, hot, hot—exactly what you’d expect from a MacKenzie story—and it was pure pleasure for me to read each and every one of them and see my world through someone else’s eyes. They definitely did the series justice, and I hope you discover five new authors to put on your auto-buy list.

  Make sure you check out Troublemaker, a brand new, full-length MacKenzie novel written by me. And yes, you’ll get to see more glimpses of Shane before his book comes out next year.

  So grab a glass of wine, pour a bubble bath, and prepare to Surrender.

  Love Always,

  Liliana Hart

  Available now! Click to purchase.

  Trouble Maker by Liliana Hart

  Rush by Robin Covington

  Bullet Proof by Avery Flynn

  Delta Rescue by Cristin Harber

  Deep Trouble by Kimberly Kincaid

  Desire & Ice by Christopher Rice

  Table Of Contents

  Book Description

  About Kimberly Kincaid

  Also by Kimberly Kincaid

  Author Acknowledgments

  An introduction to the MacKenzie Family World by Liliana Hart

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Discover the Liliana Hart MacKenzie Family Collection

  Discover the World of 1001 Dark Nights

  Special Thanks

  Chapter One

  Kylie Walker had seen a lot of bad days in her twenty-five years, some of them more foul than others. But the chest-twisting sight of two bullets being fired into her boss’s head at point-blank range?

  Yeah, that officially made today the most terrifying day of her life.

  Kylie dropped the box of cocktail napkins in her grasp, her heart going ballistic against every last one of her ribs. Fear cemented her in front of the dry storage shelves outside the open door to The Corner Tavern’s basement office, her limbs locking barely ten feet from whoever had just shot her boss as if her joints had been filled with high-powered Epoxy.

  Even as her brain screamed at her to run.

  Kylie’s legs got the message on a five-second delay, and she spun on her boot heels. But in her desperate attempt to launch herself at the stairs leading back to the kitchen, she kicked the box of spilled napkins with a dull thump, and shit—shitshitshittyshit! She needed to get out of here before the guy wi
th the gun saw her, or worse yet, found her.

  Two seconds later, the rough palm on her shoulder and the cold, unforgiving press of a gun to her ribs told her she was too late.

  “Let’s see those hands, little girl. Nice and slow.”

  Kylie’s breath turned to dust in her lungs as the man pulled her in from behind with a molar-rattling yank. His free hand slid from her shoulder, knotting hard enough at the base of her ponytail to make her scalp sting and her eyes water, and he pressed the gun against her body with steady, horrific pressure.

  “Oh! What… I don’t…” Oh God. Oh God, oh God. Kylie’s words crashed together in her throat, tangling in razor-sharp fear. Adrenaline punched through her veins, freezing her boots to the musty concrete floor. But the man poked the gun harder against the flimsy Corner Tavern T-shirt that doubled as her work uniform, and she raised her hands to shoulder level like a puppet on sloppy strings.

  “Bartender Kylie. You’re quite a surprise,” the man said, his voice spilling like ice water over Kylie’s spine, and—wait, she knew that voice. “I thought that moron Vince had sent your pretty ass home already. Could’ve sworn he and I were conducting business in private.”

  And didn’t that just make perfect sense? Her boss had closed the bar twenty minutes ago, and on a Tuesday night? They’d been dead for hours.

  So to speak.

  “I…I’ve been doing inventory in the walk-in upstairs,” Kylie managed, her knees beginning to shake beneath her jeans. The surprise was mutual—she’d had no clue anyone was here other than her and Vince, and he always locked the deadbolt right at closing time.

  Oh God. Vince.

  “Yeah, well not anymore,” the man bit out, yanking her back to the harsh glare of the here and now, and God, she wished she hadn’t been so frozen in fear that she hadn’t gotten a good look at him before she’d tried to run. “Now start walking toward the office. And unless you’re bulletproof, I’d shut up if I were you.”

  Without waiting for her to comply—not that her legs were on board with anything other than going on lockdown—the guy swung Kylie away from the stairs leading back up to the bar and forced her farther into the dingy basement.

  Stop. You have to be tough and make him stop. “I just…I don’t want any trouble,” she blurted, stabbing her feet into the floor beneath her. “I only came down here to get some cocktail napkins out of the storage pantry before I clocked out to go home.”

  Of course, she’d had the spectacularly bad timing of hitting up the dry storage at the exact moment the man had been putting two rapid-fire bullets into her boss’s skull. Oh God, this lunatic was going to kill her. She had to stop all of this idiot shaking, get tough, and think.

  The man’s grip tightened hard enough to force a cry past Kylie’s lips. “Figures I’d have to deal with the one bitch in all of bum fuck Montana who doesn’t know the meaning of the words ‘start walking’ and ‘shut up.’ Maybe you need a lesson.”

  Kylie’s heart beat so fast she grew dizzy. Pressing her lips into a hard seal, she shook her head…or at least, she tried to, but his fingers were like titanium digging into her hair.

  Thank God, the man eased up a fraction at her compliance. “That’s a good girl. Now get in the office so I can figure out what the fuck I’m going to do with you.”

  Although every last one of her hard-as-nails instincts screamed at her not to trade the narrow hallway for the deeper belly of the basement, she knew she didn’t have any choice. The man clearly out-gunned and out-muscled her, and he just as clearly knew she’d seen him shoot Vince. Kylie had known when she’d taken the job that The Corner Tavern was more shady than squeaky clean and that her boss had a lot to do with the place’s reputation, but he’d always been decent to her, and she needed the money. Just because he’d told her on day one to keep her eyes on the liquor and her nose out of the office didn’t necessarily make him a bad guy.

  Her boots clattered to a stop on the threshold of the office where Vince’s body lay slumped over a growing puddle of blood, and Kylie’s gag reflex kicked her in the windpipe.

  “Oh Jesus.” She sent up a prayer of thanks that her grabby captor had been too busy manhandling her into the room to hear the soft murmur that had barged out of her mouth. It was a small miracle that Vince had fallen on his side, his face mostly obscured from her line of sight. Of course, there were parts of him on the floor that she could see, parts never meant for the light of day, and she wrenched her gaze away in a last-ditch effort not to throw up at the sight of the gray matter on the floor.

  “Stand right here and keep your eyes on the wall.”

  The man jerked her to a stop a few feet past the door, mercifully turning her away from Vince’s body altogether. He released his death grip on her hair, giving Kylie the momentary rush of relief she needed to focus. She metered her breathing as best she could, searching for her older, ex-Army Ranger brother Kellan’s voice in her head.

  The first thing you need to do when you get jammed up is get calm and calculate.

  Kylie scraped for another inhale. The guy—who she still hadn’t gotten a good look at even though she was certain she recognized his voice—paced behind her, remaining silent. Although she’d only been in the office once before, she knew the only way out was the way they’d come in. Her eyes searched the grimy, dinged-up wall in front of her, mentally counting off how many steps it would take to make a break for it. But even on the snowball’s chance that she’d get lucky enough to try, she couldn’t outrun a bullet, and her captor had proven his trigger-happy tendencies once already tonight.

  If she wanted to get out of this alive, she was going to have to disable the man first. Tall freaking order, since not only did he, hello, have a gun pointed at her vital bits, but she couldn’t even see him to figure out his weak spots.

  Not that he seemed to have any.

  Growing frantic, Kylie forced herself to keep looking for something, God, anything that would give her an advantage, and her gaze landed on a small mirror propped up against a stack of ledgers on the filing cabinet. Vince’s coke habit might not have done him any favors when he’d been alive, but his penchant for blow—or more specifically, a smooth, flat surface off of which to snort it—might just have saved Kylie’s ass in the here and now.

  She squinted, taking in every detail she could as the man moved into her line of sight in the glass. Recognition slammed into her as she took in the brick-end chin, the barely-there neck, the body like a Sherman tank and the flat, lifeless stare that had always reminded her of a shark, poised to go in for the kill.

  Xavier Fagan. Sweet baby Jesus, the X Man was notorious for being as dirty as he was slick, getting away with every drug-related crime under the sun.

  Including murder, apparently.

  The jagged scar that slashed half the distance between Xavier’s left temple and his stubble-covered cheek twitched as his lips bent in a sneer, and Kylie realized a beat too late that those dead, menacing eyes were locked on hers in the mirror.

  “Just what the fuck do you think you’re looking at?”

  She clutched. There was no way she could pop off with the “nothing” on her tongue and get away with it as the truth, but emphasizing the fact that she’d been doing the polar opposite of what he’d told her to seemed like an epically stupid plan.

  The second thing you need to do when shit goes sideways is find an exit strategy, came Kellan’s voice in her head, and Kylie spoke without hesitation.

  “I really meant what I said,” she told Xavier, lasering her stare back to the wall in front of her. “All I do is tend bar. If you’re here for what’s in the register, go ahead and take it.”

  “The register.” Xavier sneered as if she’d been joking, but she pressed, desperate.

  “You can have all the money, the liquor, whatever you want. I don’t want any trouble.”

  “Yeah, you look like a regular Girl Scout.” The heavy soles of Xavier’s boots echoed as he eliminated the space between them, th
e stench of sweat and something else she didn’t want to contemplate pushing all the way to Kylie’s lungs. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught his slow, slimy gaze as he took in her skintight jeans and the ridiculously low-cut, midriff-baring T-shirt Vince had insisted would double her tips.

  Xavier reached out, the heavily inked tattoos covering his arm from shirtsleeve to wrist rippling with the flex of his muscles. Two meaty fingers hooked around the bright magenta streak in her otherwise black ponytail for another merciless yank. “So what if I take the money and run? You gonna call the cops as soon as I hit the door, Pinky?”

  “N-no,” she stuttered, although it was a lie. There was a huge difference between turning a blind eye to your boss’s drug habit and not blowing the whistle when some thug turned the guy’s brain into finger paint.

  Unfortunately, Xavier saw right through her indiscretion. “Nice try, but it wouldn’t matter if you did. I’ve got half the force in my back pocket anyway. Local, state. Fuck, I buy Feds like Christmas presents. Still…I don’t leave loose ends dangling in the breeze.” He stepped in toward her until the cement wall of his chest brushed her shoulder blades, his breath coming faster against the back of Kylie’s neck. “But before I tie them up, maybe I’ll tie you up.”

  Innuendo dripped from his words, turning her palms cold and slick, and no, no, no. This couldn’t go south. She was tough. She just needed a way out, like Kellan always said.

  “I won’t tell anyone you were here,” Kylie whispered, hating the thread of terror wobbling through the words. “I promise. I swear.”

  Xavier pressed his mouth against her ear, letting her feel his evil smile on her skin. “Believe me, honey. I know you won’t. When I’m done with you, you won’t be able to say a thing.”

  He ran the edge of the gun over her neck, skimming the cool steel against the spot where her shoulder met her throat before replacing it with the clammy press of his tongue. Something loosened, ugly and forceful, in Kylie’s belly, and she gripped her hands into fists at her sides.