Tease Me

By Tara Wyatt

I wasn’t looking to fall for an angel. But the first time I laid eyes on Whitney Vanek, that’s what happened.

Then I found out she’s my boss’s girl’s best friend. Someone I won’t be able to avoid, even though I know I should.

Because a woman like that? Gorgeous and smart and full of life? She’s not for me. She thinks she knows me, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t know the things I’ve done. The people I’ve hurt. What these scarred hands are capable of.

So I’ll do the only thing I can. I’ll watch over her. A guardian devil, built for her protection. Like the thorns that protect the beautiful rose, I’ll be the ugly that makes anything that tries to hurt her bleed.

And if she’s ever in danger, I’ll risk everything for her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bryant Street Publishing
• Release date: Nov 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781094465203

Tara Wyatt

Tara Wyatt is a contemporary romance and romantic suspense author. Known for her humor and steamy love scenes, Tara's writing has won several awards, including the Golden Quill Award and the Booksellers' Best Award. In addition, she was a 2018 RITA® Finalist for her novella, Until the Sun Sets. Tara has been writing since 2013, and her first book, Necessary Risk, was published in 2016. Since then, she's written three more books, three novellas, and has co-written three books, with many more projects in the works. When she's not hanging out with your next book boyfriend, she can be found reading, watching movies, and drinking wine. Tara lives in Hamilton, Ontario with the world's cutest dachshund, as well as her husband and daughter. Visit her online at www.tara-wyatt.com, or find her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tarawyattauthor/

Book preview

1

KILLIAN

Ten years ago

Once, I thought I’d known my place in this fucked up world. I’d known who I was, and where I belonged, and what I stood for. I knew who my friends were, and more importantly, who my enemies were. Even though my entire life had been one big shade of gray, everything else was black and white.

Until three days ago.

Now, I’m on a midnight bus headed for New York City, praying to a God I’m not sure I believe in that a man I’ve never met will help me.

I look down at my hands. Even though I had scrubbed them until they felt raw, I could still see specks of blood on my skin. I shift in my seat, tucking myself into the darkness, hoping no one else has noticed. It’s not exactly easy for me to blend in to begin with. I’m too big, with too many tattoos. Too scarred and menacing to have the luck of being forgettable.

Outside, the lights strobe and flash, and I’m so damn tired that I want to sleep. But I know I can’t. I have to stay awake. Alert. At least until I find Lucian Prescott. And if he won’t help me…fuck. I don’t know. I might as well buy a shovel with the last twenty in my wallet and dig my grave.

At least then I’d be able to rest.

I cross my arms over my chest, hiding my blood-spattered hands, exit signs for Hartford glowing in the night. Halfway there. Halfway between my past and my future, as brief as it might be.

Even though I know I shouldn’t, I close my eyes, just for a second. I’m expecting luxury, but instead all I see are their faces. My dad. My brother. The lifeless eyes of the men I’d killed.

When I was eight years old, I laid out the neighborhood bully who’d been picking on me and my brother, although terrorizing is probably a better word for it. When I hit him, it was as though something had come over me. Not rage, or hatred, or anything like that. As soon as my knuckles had connected with flesh, it was as though a peace had come over me. Serenity.

I’d beaten him bloody, and I’d enjoyed every goddamn second of it. That was the day that my dad, Cillian Byrne, leader of the Southies, the Irish mob controlling most of Boston, told me that I had the devil inside me. He said it with such pride, such admiration, that I spent my adolescence feeding that devil until I didn’t know what parts of me were me, and what parts were that devil I’d allowed to consume me.

I swallow around the painful lump in my throat as the words Southies, Boston, and devil ricochet through my skull like bullets. The Southies were no more. Not after the Charlestown Gang had made their move three days ago. They weren’t happy with the scraps dad had been feeding them for years, throwing pissant things like loansharking and bookmaking their way while keeping anything really worthwhile for us. He’d thought they were too dumb, too lazy, to do anything more.

Underestimating them had been his fatal mistake. Because the Charlestown Gang had staged a bloody coup, and now, Cillian Byrne was dead. So was Colin, my brother. I hadn’t been able to protect him this time. I’d failed, and that knowledge sat on my chest heavier than a lead lined coffin.

Maybe I’d see him soon. Probably. We’d always joked about burning in hell together. Now that he was gone, it wasn’t funny anymore.

Frank Dunleavy had made me watch as he took my family. He’d dug his fingers into my skull and held my eyelids open as one of his men put a bullet in each of them.

There are moments, when the loss and the grief washes over me, that I wish he’d put one in me, too.

What’s wrong, enforcer? he’d asked me as I trembled violently in the wooden chair. I’d almost vomited. I’d think you’d be used to the sight of death by now.

I’d said nothing in response, spitting out a gob of blood at his feet. I’d killed a lot of men ever since swearing my blood oath and becoming an enforcer for the Southies on my eighteenth birthday. But none of those men had been mine the way dad and Colin were.

The last thing I had seen was the butt of the gun coming towards me, and then I woke up in a freezing warehouse where they tortured me for a couple of days, trying to get everything about the Southies out of me. Eventually, they had gotten sick of silence, or maybe they just figured I knew too much. Either way, my time was up, and I knew it. Soon, I’d be with dad and Col again.

But then that devil inside me had woken back up. And I killed them.

All six of them, with my bare fucking hands. No rage. Just serenity. Catharsis.

And with that, my life in Boston was over. I can never go back. Not if I want to survive, and oddly enough, I do. Although that survival instinct is probably the devil inside me, too. But I want to know how this happened. I want to know how the Charlestown Gang were able to pull this off. There must’ve been someone on the inside, tipping them off, giving them information. But who?

I can’t think clearly right now. My insides feel like a tangled up wire, shooting