Page 1 of Wild Ride

PROLOGUE

DAKOTA – 22 YEARS OLD

EIGHT YEARS AGO

“Promise me,” my mother whispers.

I press my lips together and roll them a few times as I stare into her eyes. I’m trying not to cry, but the tears are lingering just behind my eyes, threatening to slide down my cheeks. She wouldn’t like that, so I make as much of an effort as possible to keep them at bay, at least until I can slip out of the room.

“Promise you?” I ask when she doesn’t continue.

Her frail, trembling hand reaches out, wrapping around my wrist as she squeezes. “Promise me,” she repeats, her voice as shaky as her hand. “You will not contact him. You will not look for him. You will not find him.”

Him.

She won’t say his name.

She never has.

The only reason I know his name is because I found my birth certificate in the filing cabinet in a folder while I was working in the office of Willamette Haven. My job was to file, and that’s where I saw a folder with my name on it.

Curiosity got the absolute best of me when I came across my name scrawled on that cream-colored folder. Opening it changed a part of my life, changed part of my DNA. Seeing his name next to the wordFather. It caused a physical reaction.

I didn’t think I even had a father before that. Fourteen years old, I assumed my mother didn’t know him. That he was one of the many men I walked past every day. Or maybe a grifter. Growing up in a commune, at least ours, love was always free.

My mother would float from bed to bed, from man to man, and I thought one of the men who treated me like a daughter was indeed my father. I called the leader of the communePapa, although every child did, so I wasn’t special there.

Nathan Vaughn wasn’t a name that I recognized. In fact, it was like none I had ever seen before. It wasn’t any of the men who lived here and not the name of any grifter I’d met in my life. And judging by my mother’s reaction to that name when I asked her about it, it was one she had tried to forget.

She wouldn’t say it out loud, only in a whisper, and told me never to go looking for him. He was dangerous. So threatening that she was afraid he was going to find us and hurt us. He was a monster that I had never even laid eyes on.

The bogeyman.

A creature that would somehow materialize and drag us into the darkness if we so much as said his name above a whispered breath. So when my mother asked me, on her deathbed, not to go looking for him, I promised.

Mostly out of fear more than anything else.

Then she died.

Leaving me all alone in the world.

BULLET – 35 YEARS OLD

ONE YEAR LATER

Shade jerks his chin in my direction, silently telling me to move forward. With my gun firmly grasped in my hand, I take one step, then another. Sucking in a breath, I move farther into the building—Shade at my back.

A noise to the left alerts me to the fact that there is someone here who should not be. Turning sharply, I head toward the noise. It’s toward the side of the shop where we receive deliveries.

That’s when I see two men loading up merchandise into the back of a truck.

What the fuck?

What the absolute fuck?

I open my mouth to ask just that, my gun pointed directly at the man on the ground who is handing shit up to the one in the truck.

“What the fuck?”

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