Just Between Us

Book 3: Kings

by Lena Hendrix

Genres: Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

After anonymously flirting online, sparks fly IRL between a tattooed playboy and a no-nonsense business manager in bestselling author Lena Hendrix’s spicy, emotional, deeply romantic standalone Kings novel set in small town, coastal Michigan. Perfect for fans of Lucy Score, Elsie Silver, Carley Fortune, and B.K. Borrison!

Royal King is pure mischief wrapped in a cocky smirk and a heated stare.

Five minutes in his small town and I knew he was going to be nothing but trouble. He’s an arrogant, tattooed playboy with a secret, and I’m the woman tasked with quietly cleaning up his family’s mess.

I never dreamed he could be the mysterious stranger behind my hidden, late-night messages.

It doesn’t matter what he says or how hard he tries to get under my skin. I won’t break. Not for him. Not for anyone. But when our secrets are exposed, all bets are off.

He knows the rules—just a little fun exploration. Nothing more. But one lesson leads to another . . . and another . . . and soon I realize that he’s set out to break every rule I’ve ever put into place.

I refuse to find myself melting under his gaze or swooning at the way he makes the noise around us quieter.

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 416

Sample

“So who are we creeping on?”

I startled and screamed in a high-pitched decibel that had no right exiting my body.

Then she screamed.

I locked eyes with Luna Gray, the piercer at my tattoo shop, and we both dissolved into fits of laughter.

I planted my hand across my chest as it heaved. “Shit. You scared me.”

Luna grinned and flipped a lock of bleached, white-blond hair over her shoulder. “You scream like a girl.” The diamond studs that served as her dimples winked under the fluorescent lighting of my tattoo parlor. “If you stop being the town Peeping Tom, I wouldn’t have to scare you.”

I frowned. “I’m not being a Peeping Tom. I’m observing.” I gestured toward the large storefront window with my chin. It was a bit too early for King Tattoo to be open, but my small coastal town of Outtatowner, Michigan, was already bustling with energy.

Shop owners were placing A-frame boards outside each storefront, and signs were turned to Open while tourists were lining up at the Sugar Bowl to get hot coffee and Western Michigan’s best pastries. Getting a tattoo at 7:00 a.m. was a rarity, so I typically used the quiet mornings to catch up on administrative work, deep clean, or sketch new designs.

But that morning I had a date with chaos.

Parked across the street on Main was Beckett Miller’s sleek new black Range Rover.

I noted the hue of Luna’s brown eyes was unnervingly dark given her pale complexion. Her skeptical gaze called my attention to Beckett’s car. I watched my employee as she scanned the streets of our small town.

Luna had been working with me for over a year now and had become an honorary little sister of sorts. On an unusually quiet Saturday night last year, Luna had come into the shop requesting a tattoo revision. She was heavily inked, so I wasn’t surprised when it seemed as though she’d be adding to her artwork. What shocked me was when she went into my booth, hiked up her skirt, and showed me her ass without an ounce of shame.

Scrawled in a Gothic font were the words Drake’s bitch. From a strictly artistic perspective, the line work was okay. The font was only an outline with some technically strong shading at the base. I’d learned early on there were all kinds of people in the world, and I never judged what people chose to tattoo on their bodies, so I didn’t give the choice of phrase a second thought.

Hell, I was covered from neck to knuckles and down my thighs with a variety of styles. Half of the tattoos were from artist friends I knew and trusted, and the other half were designs for which I used myself to practice.

Tattoos that people eventually regretted were common, though I didn’t have any of those myself.

At the time, Luna had flashed her ass and looked at me over her shoulder. “So can you fix it?”

In my rolling chair I had pulled myself closer to get a better look. “Covered?” I had asked, assuming she’d want a design to hide the entire thing.

A hearty laugh had burst from her throat. “No. I was hoping you could find a way to stick a little a in between the words.”

I had lowered her skirt and looked at her. “You want it to read Drake’s a bitch?”

Her grin had carried an evil glint. “Damn right.”

I had scoffed but gotten to work. It had been only after we’d finished up that she’d revealed her ex-boyfriend was also a tattoo artist and had inked the phrase without her consent. I had been fucking livid for her and had happily told her the simple revision was on the house.

As I looked at her now, she was sporting significantly more tackle and ink than the day we met. Her arms were nearly as covered as mine, and each ear was lined in silver hoops and diamond studs.

After the night I fixed her tattoo, she’d asked to stick around. I’d needed help answering phones, greeting customers as they came in, and managing my other artists’ schedules, so it all worked out in the end.

Come to think of it, I don’t recall if I ever actually hired her.

“So what are we waiting for?” Luna whispered.

I peered over her shoulder at the car. “Just delivering Beckett a little good morning breakfast.”

Luna’s eyebrows bunched in question.

“I paid some kids to egg his windshield. When he gets in and turns on the wipers, the egg smears all over. That shit is impossible to get off.” A childish giggle tickled the back of my throat.

“Is that why there are two kids hiding in the alley over there?” Luna pointed to the preteen boys I’d paid two hundred bucks to execute the prank.

I lifted a shoulder. “It’s a two-part plan.”

Luna sighed and shook her head. “I thought the Sullivan-King rivalry was all but dead?”

I straightened. “First of all, it’s the King-Sullivan rivalry.” I shrugged. “Just because my sister married Duke Sullivan doesn’t mean we can’t still have a little fun.”

Luna’s lips pursed. She knew my sister Sylvie and how I’d likely get an ass-chewing once she found out, but I didn’t care. At least not enough to stop me.

“Besides,” I continued, “Beckett Miller isn’t technically a Sullivan.” I stood, proudly crossing my arms and smiling to myself. Skirting the rules was an innate talent I prided myself on.

“He married Kate Sullivan. It counts,” Luna argued as we watched and waited.

I grumbled but let it go. I fucking hated it when my sisters were pissed at me, but the look on Beckett’s face when the prank was executed would definitely be worth it.

I checked my watch and felt the familiar buzz of impatience. Finding his car parked on Main Street was a stroke of luck, but he should have gotten his day started already.

“So it is true . . . ,” Luna said, and I glanced at her as she continued: “Men equate the size of their cars with the size of their dicks.” Her eyes scraped down my front and back up before she lifted a brow. “That lift kit get installed on your truck yet?”

“Fuck off.” I gestured toward myself. “I’m a tall guy.”

“Mm-hmm.” Luna rolled her shoulders and cracked her neck. “Funny . . . I don’t remember Beckett still having Illinois license plates.”

My body went rigid.

My eyes flicked down to the back bumper of the black Range Rover, confirming the car’s plates were, in fact, from Illinois. Beckett had lived in Outtatowner long enough to have registered his car with the state of Michigan.

Shit.

I watched with wide-eyed horror as a woman in heels, with impossibly long legs, approached the Range Rover. She paused by the vehicle, something catching her eye.

My gaze soaked up her long, smooth legs. She was wearing tall, shiny black heels and a matching skirt that hugged the luscious flare of her hips. Her cream blouse was loose and tucked into the high waist of her tight knee-length skirt.

Inky-black hair tumbled down her back in delicate waves. I was struck by how out of place her beauty was. Her look seemed better suited for an office or courtroom than the streets of our sleepy town as the morning yawned awake.

The woman stopped by the hood of her car, looking at what I assumed were the broken eggshells. Her dark eyebrows lowered as she lifted a shell with two fingers to examine it. With a frown, she flicked the egg to the ground and stomped it under her high heel.

“Oh . . . ,” Luna remarked, stifling a laugh. “You fucked up.”

Luna and I watched in slow-motion horror as the young boys sneaked out of their hiding place. To my horror, even though the young boys had been given explicit instructions to execute the harmless prank on Beckett, they forged ahead. I cringed as, from across the roadway, we could hear them shout, “Have some milk with those eggs!”

Without a second thought, the boys each tossed an opened carton of milk—which I had supplied from the general store, by the way—onto her chest.

I groaned. She gasped. They ran.

Several tourists stopped, their eyes round in stunned horror, fingertips pressed to their lips.

Okay, this was one hundred percent too far.

The errant thought danced across my conscience. It was supposed to be harmless. Funny. I wanted to dampen Beckett’s day and have a good laugh about it, not assault a gorgeous, unsuspecting stranger.

I’d really stepped in it this time. Guilt racked me and my stomach roiled.

From the Sugar Bowl next door to us, my sister Sylvie burst through the glass door with a white towel in her hand. She crossed the street with quick steps and immediately went to work helping the woman clean up. Tourists folded around them as my sister and the mystery woman fussed to get her shirt dry.

The woman’s creamy blouse was plastered to her chest, revealing the perfect shape of her tits and what appeared to be a colored bra beneath the now-soaked fabric. Sylvie eventually handed over her dish towel, and the woman patted her face dry.

The mystery woman’s gaze sliced through the crowd, her expression set on deadly revenge.

She. Was. Pissed.

In the chaos, I couldn’t make out my sister’s frantic words, but her eyes flashed with anger as her head whipped around, searching. Sylvie was smart enough to know one of her idiot brothers was likely behind the prank gone awry.

It didn’t take long for her death stare to pin me into place through my storefront window.

Feeling like a child, my feet rooted to the ground. My lips pressed together, and I offered a half-hearted, sheepish salute through the window.

With a sigh, I stepped toward the door, wholly unprepared but willing to face the angry women.

“No.” Luna stopped me. “I’ll go. You have an artist interview in ten minutes.” She pulled a King Tattoo T-shirt from the merchandise shelf and shook her head at me before rolling her eyes. “Men.”

I swallowed hard. I probably should have sucked it up, admitted that the prank was for Beckett and that I’d fucked up. I always seemed to get the blame, even if I was innocent.

Though, let’s be real, I was rarely innocent.

It would be unlikely Sylvie would want to hear my side of the story, so instead I opted to find solace in my work. Diving into new designs would help me forget that I’d managed to make things impossibly worse by forgetting to take stock of my surroundings before jumping into action . . . again.

After the prank, my day continued to be an absolute clusterfuck.

The artist interview turned out to be a dud, so the shop would still be short-staffed until I could fill the chair. Given the influx of tourists, that undoubtedly meant longer hours for everyone. Sylvie had bent Luna’s ear about me being a man-size child, and Luna had taken it out on me the rest of the afternoon with heavy sighs and eye rolls. She even ordered Momma Faye’s Barbecue for dinner without asking me if I wanted any.

Admittedly, that stung a little.

At the end of the night, I also had to turn away a group of young women celebrating a bachelorette party. They were all visibly intoxicated, and I refused to give them matching finger tattoos of a cartoon penis wearing a top hat.

First of all, finger tattoos fade, and they fade fast—I would know. Secondly, while the design was funny as hell, no one gets inked at King Tattoo drunk or high or otherwise incapacitated.

The decibel of shrill, unhappy screeching that occurred when I broke the news that they’d have to come back sober was deafening. In fact, my head was still throbbing.

All in all, it had been a shitty day.

Karma is such a bitch.

Well into the evening, my thoughts had wandered to the mysterious woman from the morning. I felt like a grade-A asshole for how that whole scene had shaken out. She was the unwitting victim of my childish impulse, and I couldn’t help but let the guilt wash over me in the quiet comfort of my truck as I pulled into my driveway.

I lived on the outskirts of Outtatowner, and my neighborhood was a quaint mix of dated historical houses and newly built luxury summer homes. It was close enough to town that I could pop into the tattoo shop whenever I needed to, but far enough that I could take off on a run and get lost for a while.

I pulled my truck down the long driveway as my house came into view. My smile pulled up at the corner. The cobalt-blue home sat on a bluff that overlooked Lake Michigan. It had a rounded arch-top front door and flower boxes overflowing with blooms beneath the dormered windows. The white picket fence was a detail I’d added after I moved in, and it still made me smile.

No one expected a man often described as scary or imposing or menacing to live by the lake in a cute blue house with a picket fence—and yet there we were.

I fucking loved that house.

I unlocked the door to let myself inside and allowed my keys to skitter across the shiny white quartz of the kitchen island. The windows had been left open, so the soft lake air wafted in. I sucked in a lungful and listened to the quiet hum of my home.

It was a place where I could shed the stress of the day and take a quiet break from chiseling away at the daily expectations of others. I rolled my shoulders and let out a groan. Tattooing meant long, weird hours hunched over random body parts, contorting to get the angles just right.

If the knot in my lower back was any indication, I’d be sore in the morning. I may only be in my thirties, but damn if I wasn’t starting to feel the effects of a physically demanding job.

I needed a drink, maybe a good lay—anything to dissolve the tension in my body and help me forget the fact that it seemed like the lives of everyone around me were barreling ahead full steam and I was merely treading water.

My eyes flicked to the ring light tucked into the corner of my living room. For the past few years, my personal life had veered into a strange and wonderful direction that shocked even me sometimes.

I swiped my hand across my eyes and opted for a shower before hunkering down on the couch. Too worn out to create any new content, I grabbed my phone to check my messages.

I tapped the Pulse app—a subscription-based social media platform where millions of users bought and created content. You could find anything from fitness programs to musicians sharing exclusive music to any kind of virtual sex work you could imagine.

When I had first downloaded the app, one local offering was people employing “cuddle partners” to fill the intimacy gaps in their relationships. Naturally, as a joke, I had signed up as Lee Sullivan so his email inbox would be flooded with information regarding local cuddlers who were only there to help him reach optimal intimacy.

Trouble was, in order to actually receive the direct messages, users needed to be verified through the app.

To get around it, I roped Lark, the woman who later married Lee’s brother, to vouch for me. When she needed my help out of a jam, she reluctantly agreed to pretend to be a personal reference for me. With her fake referral passing all the checks, I signed up for the site and directed all cuddle DMs straight to Lee’s stolen email address.

I swore Lark to secrecy.

The plan was flawless.

Well, except for the small detail that Lark was still under the impression I was so lonely and motherless that I required a cuddle partner. Her pitying glances and soft smiles were worth knowing Lee wouldn’t be able to escape the incessant flood of direct messages.

To this day I would still get the giggles thinking about the confused look on Lee’s face when hordes of professional cuddlers were offering up their services.

A few sleepless nights later, I doomscrolled my way into discovering that the content from Pulse’s creators was severely lacking in depth and authenticity. After one too many videos of pasty men with warbling voices promising women the best night of their lives, I decided to give it a try.

For the ladies, obviously.

Women didn’t need these men fumbling around and posturing. The comments themselves spoke volumes. In my lived experience, women really didn’t need a man at all. Sometimes they just needed a little confidence boost to fully bloom.

On a whim I recorded myself, shirtless but without revealing my face, intimately role-playing a conversation with a fictional woman and simply asking about her day.

I was direct.

I was confident.

I was flirtatious.

I was me.

It didn’t take long for a few messages to trickle in. Some were compliments stroking my ego, while others were thanking me for speaking the way they wished their partners would. About a year ago, one user in particular slid into my DMs, hell-bent on busting my balls.

She was biting and witty but had piqued my interest.

My content shifted to me talking directly to her in my mind, and that was when things really blew up for me. Every woman on that app felt as if I were speaking directly to them. It was personal. Intimate. I was speaking to a singular woman . . . but I was the only person who knew that.

Once those videos went viral, everything changed.

Initially, making intimate partner content was a fun way to blow off a little steam. My alternate persona, Mr.Right.Now, became a safe space for women, and a few men, to have someone with a calm, deep voice ask about their day or role-play a bit of confident, postsex aftercare. I hadn’t planned on it being the cash cow it turned into. No one knew about the money I made from Pulse and how that money was my ticket out from under my father.

It was fun. Harmless.

Nothing about the prerecorded video clips were overtly explicit, and I never got fully naked.

Nah . . . the spicier content I saved exclusively for the one woman who refused to be impressed by me.

My jaw clenched in anticipation as I swiped up to open my notifications. My gaze flicked to the most recent private post I had sent directly to her inbox.

Unread.

Damn.

Bummed she hadn’t seen it yet, I scrolled up through the private message history I shared with MsBlackCat. She was the unexpected delight who’d popped into my direct messages to bust my balls.

MsBlackCat: Why?

One word. That was all it took and I had been utterly intrigued.

Mr.Right.Now: Why what?

MsBlackCat: Just why? Why do this? You know that no real man talks like this, right?

Mr.Right.Now: Some of us do. Maybe you’re just dating the wrong men.

Normally I never answered direct messages, but her gruff and dismissive message caught me off guard and actually made me laugh. When I checked her profile, I found that since she’d created her profile, she had never created any content of her own and only ever left one comment.

One.

And it was to me.

Plus, I had always been too playful to let a half-hearted dig go unchecked. That was probably why I had chosen to poke back.

MsBlackCat didn’t respond after my jab. Not until three days later when I posted a new video speaking to her and intentionally referencing a real man. She filled my inbox with her familiar snark.

MsBlackCat: Really? No real man I’ve ever met orders me around and leaves with his balls still attached. You’re ridiculous.

Mr.Right.Now: You’ve got it all wrong. It’s not about him ordering you around. It’s your partner being in control so you don’t have to be. You should try it sometime.

MsBlackCat: Being told by some strange man on the internet how to touch myself? A man who won’t even show his face? Please.

Mr.Right.Now: I like when you say please . . . if you ask nicely I can give you what you need.

MsBlackCat: Let me guess . . . I can pay extra to have “exclusive access” to your private content? As if I don’t know every sad sap viewing it thinks it’s just for her.

I smiled. There was no pulling one over on that one.

Mr.Right.Now: If you wanted a free access code, all you had to do was ask nicely.

What the fuck is up with this town?

First of all, Outtatowner? What the hell kind of person names a town like that? Secondly, yesterday was my first morning there, and it started with an egged car and a chest full of half-warm whole milk.

Let alone the fact I could press charges for aggravated assault, but that blouse was an Adam Lippes in silk charmeuse.

I pouted as irritation rolled over me. I really loved that shirt.

There was probably some gang of misfit youths who roamed the streets like Lord of the Flies or some shit. The boys only laughed harder when I shouted Where are your parents? at their backs, which proved this town was likely full of nothing but rowdy, pint-size thugs.

My toe tapped with impatience as I considered how I was ever going to make this job work.

Is that . . . a man wearing Moon Boots in summertime?

As if it weren’t a bizarre sight, I tracked the elderly man’s movements. He sauntered up the sidewalk, smiling and waving like he was the mayor of this godforsaken town.

Shit. Maybe he was.

As he shuffled past me, he smiled and tipped an imaginary hat in my direction. “Ma’am.”

I only blinked, schooling my face not to contort into its naturally prominent resting bitch face.

That face had served me well in my career but oftentimes made my approachability next to nothing. Sometimes that also worked in my favor. However, if my goal was to fly below the radar and gather information on the town’s most prominent resident, I needed to be careful.

Today I would be meeting with JP King regarding his interest in hiring a business consultant, and I needed to nail it. I was fully prepared and had even stashed a spare outfit in my car . . . just in case.

I headed straight for the offices of JP King at King Equities. The main offices were housed in Chicago, but the local offices in Outtatowner, Michigan, were the hub, since apparently that was where Russell King often spent his time. The mere name Russell King was revered in many circles. Everyone knew him. He was a ruthless businessman, and his bold reputation preceded him.

Color me surprised when his son reached out requesting a private meeting to discuss the future of King Equities—I hadn’t even realized Russell King had a son.

Despite our many conversations and him speaking in veiled terms, I saw JP King’s intent for what it was. He was staging a coup—the unexpected and hostile takeover of his father’s company.

Many in my position might walk away from complicated family dynamics that could leave one side in ruin, but that wasn’t for me to. . .