Sexy Little Liar

Genres: African American Urban; African American Romance

Synopsis

"Urban erotica has never been hotter!" --Nikki Turner

She seduced Texas's richest oil family out of a fortune. But now petty thief and ex-stripper Mink LaRue has a rival for the ultimate temptation. . .

It didn't take long for Mink to blow all the money she conned pretending to be missing oil heiress Sable Dominion. And now that a sweet chunk of the huge Dominion family trust fund is up for grabs, nothing can stop her from going for even more. Trouble is, her drug-dealing ex-boyfriend and the Dominion's irresistible eldest son, Barron, as well as his scheming fiancée, want to take Mink down in as many ways as possible. But her most dangerous opposition is the new pretender who's come to town. . .and she looks--and lies--exactly like Mink!

Now, if the sexy little liar is going to come out on top, she'll have to make friends out of enemies and click up with a few very powerful haters. And knowing the insatiable Mink, she'll gamble everything to keep her conniving house of cards from tumbling all the way down. . .

"This is top-of-the-line street lit." --Library Journal on Natural Born Liar (starred review)

Release date: August 5, 2014

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 256

Sample

New York City was my shit! Our plane had just landed at JFK, and after lying our way through a wild and crazy misadventure down in D-Town, me and Bunni Baines, my partner-in-grime, were hyped as hell to be back in the Big Apple!

We had dipped outta Manhattan with nothing up our sleeves except mad dreams and devious schemes, and after working our ghetto grind and flipping the state of Texas upside down, we were rolling back in town with more dough than we had ever baked before.

“Taxi!” My best friend hollered as an airport worker wheeled our luggage outta the crowded terminal. Bunni was posted up in a bright pink catsuit and a matching pair of silver-buckle gladiator sandals. I was rocking a platinum-white Glama-Glo wig with bright orange streaks down the bangs, and an orange and white striped tank top that I’d tucked into a skimpy white tennis skirt that barely covered my apple ass.

For two hood-bound Harlem chicks me and Bunni had crazy suitcases everywhere, and every last one of them was busting at the seams with mad jewelry, crazy shoes, and the hottest designer gear that stolen money could buy.

I had recently become an official member of the Dominion oil family of Texas, and using my new status as the once-missing and now-found oil heiress Sable Dominion, me and Bunni had hit the rich folks’ mall in Dallas and killed every store in sight. I mean we ransacked that joint like a pair of greedy cat burglars, oohing and aahing as we touched and admired and scooped up damn near every stitch of gear that had a hot label on it. We shopped like fiends for hours and hours, and we didn’t come up for air until we were broke-down tired and every corn on our toes was crackin’.

“Now see there, Mink.” Bunni rolled her eyes and sucked her teeth as she struck a funky pose on the sidewalk outside the baggage terminal. Bowlegged Bunni had a real stank shape and she always dressed to show that shit. Almost every dude who zipped into the terminal stole a quick peek at her round titties and bouncy ass as he passed by. “We gon’ hafta splurge on us a fly whip or something, baby! We packin’ mad ends now, ya heard? How in the hell we gonna look pulling up around the way in some beat-up yellow cab?”

Bunni had that shit right. Image was everything in our hood, and I was damn sure tryna elevate mine. I was not the same con-mami Mink LaRue from the ’jects who had skied up outta New York just a few weeks ago. After chilling in a huge Texas mansion and ballin’ around town in half-a-million-dollar whips, I had the head and it was sho’nuff big too.

“Don’t worry,” I told Bunni. “We gotta roll with this setup for right now,” I said and grabbed her arm as I pulled her toward a waiting cab. “But trust and believe, this is gonna be our last time slumming around the city in a whooptie, okay? We’s paid now, mami! Our pockets are swole! As soon as we hit Harlem I’ma lease us a limo and a driver too, bet?”

We climbed our booties in the back of the cab and left the driver and the baggage dude standing outside tryna figure out how to cram all our shit in the trunk. It seemed like just yesterday that me and Bunni had climbed in a cab at the Dallas International Airport and headed toward the Dominion Estate where we were on a mission to pull off the biggest con caper of our grimy little lives.

Our crazy misadventure had kicked off when Bunni went shopping at the Food Land up the block from her crib and saw my picture on the back of a carton of milk. The National Center for Missing Children had just started a new campaign aimed at solving some of their biggest cold cases, and a three-year-old girl named Sable Dominion—a rich little oil heiress who had been kidnapped from a midtown drugstore—was one of the missing kids they were featuring. Dollar signs had started cha-chinging in Bunni’s greedy little eyes, and she swore all out the missing chick was me.

“Hey now! We gots’ta go to Texas and get up on that loot!” Bunni insisted as we checked out Sable’s age-progressed photos on the Internet. “For real, Mink! You look just like that chick! Your own mama couldn’t tell y’all apart!”

Me and Bunni were a slick pair of part-time pole twirlers and full-time con artists, and for the past few years we had been using our scheming wit and banging bodies to pull off ganks and rack-up bank in every borough in the city of New York.

We had jumped on the computer and did a few Google searches, and both of us damn near flipped out when we found out that not only was Miss Sable about to come into a hundred grand inheritance on her twenty-first birthday, but if Bunni pretended like she’d found me, she could get a crack at the twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward money that the Dominions were offering too.

Well, desperate times called for a sho’nuff desperate hustle, and me and Bunni almost burnt the house down tryna cook up a scheme to get our hands on that Dominion cheese. We were broke as hell and we needed that loot. Not only was Bunni and her brother Peaches about to get booted outta their tenement apartment and have their shit tossed on the curb, but a throwed-off drug dealer named Punchie Collins was tryna slump me for ganking him outta some ends, and I had a shitload of court-ordered fines to pay up real quick, or else a warrant was gonna be issued for my arrest.

And if that wasn’t enough to light a firecracker under my ass, my gangsta boo Gutta was finishing a lil bid upstate and he was about to be back on the streets in a minute, and I do mean on the streets too. See, when Gutta went to jail he left me sitting on his stash of twenty-five g’s and he warned me not to touch that shit. He was planning on using that money to rebuild his drug empire as soon as he hit the bricks. But a cheese-chasing rat like me just couldn’t help nibbling. A grand here, five grand there, shoes, wigs, chronic, Krug, jewels, and wild parties. . . shiiit . . . me and Bunni had burned through Gutta’s cash so fast that before his bid was even halfway over his laid-out crib was a wrap and so was all his paper!

So I had been stuck between nothing and nothing, and pulling off a hustle to steal Sable’s hundred grand was my last crapshoot, my final shot at street redemption. I was a con-mami, a grifter, a fraud master to the highest degree, and me and Bunni had used every flimflam in the book to convince those super-rich black folks down in Dallas that I was really the kidnapped daughter that they had lost so long ago. We had busted up in their mansion in the middle of their Fourth of July barbeque, and trust me when I tell you we popped off a New York-sized explosion up in that joint!

Shiiit. Them Texas folks didn’t know what to do with me as I laid my slick Harlem flow on their asses. In no time at all I had Sable’s mother, Selah, eating outta the palm of my hand, and my fine-ass play-uncle Suge Dominion had done a damn good job of eating out the rest of me!

Bunni had played her role like a champ too. She’d scammed her way up on a freaky pain slut named Kelvin Merchant who worked at the DNA lab, and in return for whipping his ass and pinching his balls, Kelvin had hooked us up with a fake DNA report that guaranteed me a slice of the Dominion family pie.

With the DNA results on the table, I had rolled outta Dallas with a hundred grand in my bank account, and Bunni made out like a street bandit with twenty-five large in reward money for all her hard work too. All in all, it was the biggest hustle of our guttersnipe lives, and we were amped up and feelin’ ourselves for pulling off a gank so lovely. And now, all I had to do was pay my fines to the city of New York, tear off some ends to crazy Punchie Collins, and stash twenty-five grand in Gutta’s safe to keep that fool from murking me when he came home from jail.

After that, life was gonna be one big freaky-ass party, and as long as I handled my bizz I could get as wild and loose as I wanted to! Hell yeah. My blood surged with hood excitement as our rickety taxi pulled up outside of Bunni’s building and the hater-bitches on the front stoop got to peeping all in the windows. Handle ya bizz, Miss Mink LaRue! That’s all a paid-out-the-ass hood chick like me had to do!

Barron Dominion hopped out of his white-on-white 2012 Maybach and slammed the door behind him. He had dropped his so-called sister Mink off at the airport earlier in the day, and he had been damn glad to get rid of her ass too. But even before Mink’s New York–bound plane could take to the skies, Barron had gotten a phone call hipping him to her shiesty game and bringing him back to the same DNA lab that had fucked him around in the first place.

Striding boldly across the street, Barron eyed the front door of Exclusively DNA and frowned. Them bastards up in there didn’t know who they were fucking with today. As the oldest son in the Dominion dynasty and a cutthroat young corporate attorney, Barron was holding the reins as the acting CEO of Dominion Oil, a highly prosperous empire that his slick, self-made millionaire father, Viceroy Dominion, had built from the ground up.

For the past few months Viceroy had been drifting in and out of a coma after sustaining serious head trauma in an oil rig explosion, and the task of keeping his clan together and protecting their vast, multi-million-dollar fortune had fallen directly into Barron’s lap.

Barron stepped up to the front door of the lab and yanked at the door handle. The last time he had to come down here shit had gotten real ugly. Half-drunk and zooted up on some damn good ’dro, he had gone in hard on a lab technician and broken his fuckin’ nose. And it was all because of that chick Mink LaRue, the hot-ghetto scam artist from New York City who had tried to run a game on his family and con them out of a hundred grand and a share of the Dominion trust fund.

Mink had connived her way into their inner circle by pretending to be his kidnapped sister Sable, and somehow her DNA had come back a perfect match for the missing little girl too. But Barron had been two steps ahead of the shiesty Harlem diva, and he’d slipped a lab tech named Kelvin Merchant fifteen big ones to not only make that matching lab report disappear, but to slide him a bogus report showing Mink as a negative match for Sable instead.

But somehow the dumb-ass clerk had fucked around and let the truth leak out. Barron had been on a big one as he sat at the dinner table with the rest of his family and listened to his mother read from a DNA report and announce that Mink LaRue was definitely Sable Dominion, the long-missing member of their family. Barron had jumped straight up and disputed that shit as hard as he could, but no matter how many suspicions he cast on Mink and the report, his mother had been holding all the evidence she needed right in her hands.

So Barron had tossed back some Hen dog and wilded straight out. The next morning he had busted up in the lab head-butting niggas and throwing killer blows, and by the time it was all over he had beaten the dog shit outta the incompetent lab technician whose stupid mistake had cost Barron a hundred yards.

But karma really was the muthafucka everybody said it was, and today, just minutes after dropping Mink and her ghetto sidekick off at the airport, Barron’s cell phone had buzzed and Kelvin Merchant had been on the line. And the crazy-ass story that rolled outta the lab tech’s mouth had jabbed Barron hard in the gut and completely blown his mind.

We had another specimen come in this week from a young lady from Philadelphia. I was asked to run tests on her sample and compare the results to your sister Sable’s DNA . . . I know you probably don’t wanna hear this but . . . umm . . . we’ve got another match.

Mink, Barron’s eyes had immediately narrowed. That scheming little bitch! His collar got real tight as a hot image of her sexy body and conniving eyes flashed through his mind. That chick was nothing but a hood leech. She would suck your pockets dry if you let her. Her and that skank sidekick she rolled with had gotten away with over a hundred grand of Dominion cash, and Mink’s slick game of trickery was so on point that she had fooled almost everybody she met.

Almost everybody, Barron reminded himself as he strode across the threshold of Exclusively DNA and slammed the door shut behind him. Because no matter how many smooth lies flew out of that gutter chick’s mouth, and no matter what the fuck some doctored-up DNA report said, Barron hadn’t been fooled by the crookedness of Mink’s tongue or by that little-girl-lost act she had put on for his family. Yeah, he mighta lusted after those ripe, perfect titties she had on her, and yep, his nose was open on those wide, swinging hips the girl rocked, and hell yeah he had beat his shit off and fantasized about that lusciously plump booty perched above Mink’s perfectly shaped butterscotch thighs, but he hadn’t been fooled by her scheming ass at all. Nope. Not at all.

“Really, Madame Mink?” Bunni’s brother Peaches fussed at me as he peered into the mirror and plucked a few stray hairs off his muscled-up chest. Peaches was six feet five and his chocolately body was rock hard and buff as shit. He was sitting at the kitchen table looking real special in his lacy pink half-slip and sexy lime-green stilettos, and the boosted nine-hundred-dollar diamond ring glistening on his finger was definitely to go to jail for.

Me and Bunni had lit through a whole lotta money while we were down in Dallas, and we’d splurged on a bunch of fly gear for Peaches too. We’d hit a huge drag queen store and racked up on the kind of frilly, nonsensical shit that a prissy dude like Peaches loved to style, but there was no way me and Bunni could get our big brother the two things he was feening for the most: a pair of lumped up titties and a nice fluffy ass.

“I mean, really!” He side-eyed me and smirked as I repeated my request into the phone. “Who does that?”

“Who does what?” I sucked my teeth and cradled the phone against my shoulder. The last thing I wanted was Peaches and his common sense bringing me down to earth when I was so feeling myself up in the sky! I had dialed up one of the biggest limo services in the city and I was waiting on hold as they checked to see if they could scramble around and find me exactly what I wanted.

“Mink.” Peaches frowned. “Be for real now, baby girl. You really want them people to send you a stretch Hummer and a thugged-out driver who can rap? Ere damn day? For a whole goddamn month?” Peaches pursed his glistening lips and then made little popping sounds as he worked his shiny lip-gloss around. “That damn money is burning a hole in your push-up bra, girl. I don’t see why you and Bunni can’t just catch a cab or take the train like you been doing.” He frowned at me, then rolled his eyes. “That’s a whole lotta good money you about to toss off, if you ask me. And after all the drama and hard knocks you done been through, please don’t tell me you ain’t learned your lesson yet.”

I frowned right back at his ass. Peaches could be a real buster sometimes. He was just like somebody’s grandmama. He had practically raised me and Bunni from the time we were thirteen years old, and even though I was hardheaded and couldn’t nobody tell me shit, when Peaches spoke I usually listened.

Usually. But not this time.

“C’mon, now, P,” I whined. “Get wit’ it! Me and Bunni worked like crazy down there in hot-ass Texas! Shiiit, we deserve to floss! Don’t worry, I’ma get straight with everybody I owe, but a bitch just turned twenty-one and it’s my time to shine, ya feel me?”

Peaches smirked. “I feel Punchie’s fist busting you in ya mouth, that’s what I feel. But go ’head witcha grown-ass self. I know one thing, you and Bunni better keep a real tight count on all that money, you hear? Or y’all gonna look up one day and find every single dime of it gone.”

It took about an hour for our limo to show up, and by that time me and Bunni had already fought over the mirror in the tiny bathroom and slid our luscious bodies into our very best gear. We pranced down the pissy staircase and outta that raggedy-ass tenement like we were tipping out of a mansion, and when I peeped the shiny stretch limo at the curb and the bangin’ dude who was pushing it, I just couldn’t keep the grin off my face.

Our driver was tall and fine and looked like a pussy-killer dressed up in a suit. His eyes were popped open just as wide as mine were, and he started drooling the moment he got a good look at the package I was holding.

“Ooh-wee!” he exclaimed as me and Bunni pranced outta the building. “What’s your name, baby?”

“Mink.” I giggled and smoothed the top of my perfect-peach Glama-Glo wig. “Mink Minaj.”

The heat in his eyes burnt up the tassels on my peach and purple go-go skirt as I switched my freaky hips toward his gleaming ride.

“Yeah, you got that Nicki groove on lock,” he growled, eyeballing my cleavage like he was a vampire kitten who wanted to suck my milk. “But your back pockets is even fatter than hers.”

I giggled and made sure he got a good look at my plump yellow thighs as I slid onto the plush leather seat. I was used to turning dudes on, and fucking with their heads was nothing but a big game to me. It was all part of my hustle, and I didn’t care if a man was in high school or strapped down to a bed in a nursing home, if he had swole pockets then his ass was a mark in my book, and I hit him upside the head with my wicked sex appeal every chance I got.

Dude had just slammed the car door when a shiny-black psycho wearing a doo-rag tied over his cornrows bust outta the front door of the building eyeing me like he was an assassin. My heart banged in my chest. It was crazy Punchie Collins. He was a local drug-slanga that I had ganked for about a grand. Word that I was back in town musta gotten back to him, and I could tell by the way he was grilling me that he wanted his cash.

“Yo, whattup!” he hollered, holding his hands up high in the air and shooting me gang signs as he eyeballed our flashy setup. “Yo, I see you got whips and mad jewels and new rags . . . but where the fuck my package at, Mink?”

“I see you, Punchie!” I hollered out the window and fronted him off. “I got you, boo!” I winked and gave his throwed-off ass two thumbs-up. “Be’lee that, papi. I’ma tear you off and treat you right!”

And I was too. I was gonna pay off Punchie Collins, take care of my court costs, pay the bill on Gutta’s storage so they wouldn’t auction all his shit off, and then find me a way to flip the rest of my money and make it last a long, long time. Yeah, all that shit was definitely gonna happen, I told myself as the limo pulled away from the curb and Punchie launched a round of hot bullets outta his eyes, but first I was gonna get my head right and do Mizz Mink Minaj tonight!

Me and Bunni were back on our old stomping grounds! One hundred and twenty-fifth Street was still live as hell and Club Wood was still the place to be! We rode in the whip with the music blastin’ and the sexy driver rappin’ us a hot stripper song by that rowdy Reem Raw.

Lil Mama I can see it in ya eyes we can ride if you ready to roll!

I got the Caddy double-parked outside we can slide if you ready to go!

The way she grind pop it back, make it wind

Got my mind goin’ outta control . . .

Other bitches they don’t wanna see you shine

She get by ’em when she droppin’ it low!

I just wanna see you take it down lowerrr!

Break it down!

Let them haters see you make it roll overrr!

Break it down!

It ain’t nothing these other bitches can show her

She the shit, and she know it, but I’ma show her just how to

Break down!

Our limo pulled up directly outside the front door, and me and Bunni got ready to make our grand entrance at the strip club where we used to trick off customers, swindle squares, and dominate butter bitches on the poles.

“Wait!” I slapped Bunni’s hand as she re. . .