Have you read Fool’s Gold: A Kisses and Crimes novel?

You haven’t…?

You might want to start. Kisses and Crimes TWO is coming up next…

PROLOGUE (Raw and unedited)

EIGHT WEEKS AGO

Jackson Reed

There were very few things in life I hated more than myself at the moment.

Peas. Peas used to be number one.

I hated them since I was kid, and when my mother tried to make me eat them, I tried to sneak them under the table to the dog.

Didn’t work much, though. He hated them, too.

I hated cats. Abhorred the fuck out of them, actually, and when my high school girlfriend had once left me alone with her cat, Katie, while she made a store run, I’d been this close to launching the scratching bitch out of the window.

Katie the cat, of course. Not, you know… my high school girlfriend. In fact, the girlfriend was the one who launched me in the end.

But still… there used to be things I hated. Things that ticked high up on the “Fuck-you-meter,” and currently?

I was sitting at number one. I was one big fucking mash of peas-cat-Katie-ness.

 All because I couldn’t stop looking at her. Touching her.

And it wasn’t that she wasn’t great as hell to look at…because she was. It was because every time I looked at her, I saw him. I saw the man whose life we ruined.

I saw the face of the man we’d murdered.

In all actuality, I’d seen him often. At the grocery store. On the street. At the local bookshop and at the corner café.

He had the face of the “everyman,” immortalized by what we had done to him. His presence was sprinkled across my daily life, seared into the fabric of every interaction I had with the one woman who I truly blamed for all of this.

The one woman who I’d thought I’d never have to see again.

Up until now.

And now, at this very second, the only thing I can see… is her.

Her bare legs. Her long neck. Her peach-colored hair and even peachier skin.

Nothing has changed in the four years since I’ve seen her. Nothing. She’s just as fucking gorgeous as she was when I’d last left her, and if I hadn’t just smelled her, touched her… kissed her, I’d think that it was all a dream.

I’d think that she was a dream. Or a nightmare come back to haunt me just one last time.

She was always pure sin. Swathed in innocence. Decadent and guileless all at the same time. Somewhere, somehow, I knew it had to be illegal to look the way she does, talk the way she does, feel the way she does.

There had to be something in the law against it. Not that I’d ever been good with the law. Not even when I was enforcing it…

I didn’t like carrying a badge, following rules wasn’t exactly second nature to me, and the only place I liked using handcuffs was in the bedroom.

I had the scratches on my bedposts to prove it.

There were certain things you couldn’t do with a badge. Handcuffing innocent people was supposed to be one of them. But I’d handcuffed her anyway.

I’d made her mine for five days. But she will only remain mine for the next five minutes…

And though I’ll never see her again, though I’ll never run my fingers through that red hair and tug that flippant mouth of hers to mine one last time, I have no regrets.

I’ll keep what we had in this No-Tell Motel a secret because when you really think about it…

Isn’t that exactly what you’re supposed to do?