Her Secret Savior

By Stephanie Summers

JET
Bastard.
That's what I am.
I walked away,
Left her high and dry,
Alone and shattered.
It was for the best.
Her life was on the line.
I did it for her.
For love.

 

Or so I thought...

 

But now, looking into her eyes,
Years later,
I still see the pain,
The passion,
Everything.

 

I should've stayed,
Should've fought harder.
For her,
For me,
For us.

 

But how do I fight against the man,
The one who raised me,
Who controls me,
Who can end it all?

 

EVIE
Bastard.
That's what he is.
He walked away from me,
Shattering my heart to pieces.
With a painful revelation
And a broken heart,
I tried to move on.
I wrote Jet off long ago.

 

Or so I thought...

 

But now,
looking into his eyes,
Years later,
I hate myself for still wanting him.
Hate myself for recognizing the same pain in his eyes
That has burrowed itself so deep into my soul.
I hate myself for still loving him.

 

He says I'm in danger.
I should leave,
Run away,
Never look back.

 

But how can I fight against what my heart wants,
Especially when I've finally learned the truth?

 

Her Secret Savior is a steamy second chance contemporary romance that contains adult themes, adult language, and steamy situations. If you like second chance romances with tons of angst and a heaping helping of danger and intrigue, then Her Secret Savior is for you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wicked Dragon Publishing
• Release date: Mar 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393342663

Stephanie Summers

Stephanie Summers has written several paranormal and contemporary romance books including The Willow Creek Vampires Series, Vampires of Velum Mortis Series, and The Take Me Duet, with several more books in the works. When she isn't busy running Casa de Summers, you can usually find her in her pajamas working on her next book or binge-watching her favorite shows on Netflix. Newsletter Signup: authorstephaniesummers.com/newsletter-sign-up.html Website: authorstephaniesummers.com Facebook page: facebook.com/authorstephaniesummers TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@stephaniesummerswrites Instagram: instagram.com/authorsasummers

Book preview

Her Secret Savior

JET

Bastard.

That's what I am.

I walked away,

Left her high and dry,

Alone and shattered.

It was for the best.

Her life was on the line.

I did it for her.

For love.

---

Or so I thought...

---

But now, looking into her eyes,

Years later,

I still see the pain,

The passion,

Everything.

---

I should've stayed,

Should've fought harder.

For her,

For me,

For us.

---

But how do I fight against the man,

The one who raised me,

Who controls me,

Who can end it all?

---

EVIE

Bastard.

That’s what he is.

He walked away from me,

Shattering my heart to pieces.

With a painful revelation

And a broken heart,

I tried to move on.

I wrote Jet off long ago.

---

Or so I thought...

---

But now,

looking into his eyes,

Years later,

I hate myself for still wanting him.

Hate myself for recognizing the same pain in his eyes

That has burrowed itself so deep into my soul.

I hate myself for still loving him.

---

He says I’m in danger.

I should leave,

Run away,

Never look back.

---

But how can I fight against what my heart wants,

Especially when I’ve finally learned the truth?

---

Her Secret Savior is a steamy second chance contemporary romance that contains adult themes, adult language, and steamy situations.

1

Jet

I’d seen her again.

She had come for one of her night-time visits like she was prone to do every so often. She’d haunted my dreams less and less over the years, but there she was, just as fresh, just as real, just as beautiful as if she were standing right in front of me. I could almost taste her lips, almost feel her soft flesh against the palms of my hands, could almost smell the sweet scent of black raspberry and vanilla lingering on my skin.

Almost…

And in an instant, she had been ripped from my arms, no matter how hard I tried to hang on to her. The nightmare had left me unsettled, as usual. My jaw clenched as I thought about the way her eyes looked at me, pleading for me to save her as I stood by helplessly and unable to move. I’d found myself in some sort of dream quicksand, where I knew if I could just reach her, it’d all be over, and we’d be free of him. She’d be safe, and he’d be dead. But the more I struggled to get to her, the harder it became to move at all. I’d endured watching him kill her over and over more times than I could count, and as much as I regretted the day I had to leave her behind, every time I dreamt of her, it reminded me exactly why I had done what I did.

Jet, the muffled, rage-filled voice of my father bellowed from somewhere outside of my room, pulling me from my thoughts.

Alright, I’m comin’, I yelled back.

Scrubbing my face with my hands, I tried to erase the images of Evie from my mind, but I knew she would linger for a few days. She always did.

I sighed the word fuck to myself because sometimes that’s the only word that’ll do and forced myself out of bed.

The brightness of the midday sun radiated throughout the room. Its reflection in the mirror sent a spattering of tiny, rainbow-colored drops here and there on the off-white walls. Had I not been so deep into my own shit life, I might have stopped to appreciate the beauty in the small things, but I couldn’t recognize it anymore. I couldn’t even escape into my dreams like normal people could. They were mostly worse than reality.

The door burst open, and my father, Niall Flanagan, barged into my bedroom. He wore a dark designer suit, like he was headed to some high-profile office as a big-time executive. Too bad he never held a real job for any significant amount of time in his entire life. He was definitely a big shot and a businessman, but not in the traditional sense. He was the head of an empire that consisted of heroine, pussy, and blow, with an occasional investment here and there that afforded him the ability to explain the money he had coming in without it being so obvious that he was a criminal kingpin.

He wore his dirty-blond hair slicked back; very rarely ever had a hair out of place, unlike mine. I sometimes had the urge to grab it and just mess the fuck out of it, but I’d learned early on in life not to piss him off. He looked at me with icy blue eyes that had never looked at me with an ounce of warmth in them. I didn’t look a thing like him, and since I’d never even seen a picture of my mother and could barely remember what she looked like, I could only assume I resembled her.

The only thing I had left of my mother was a vague memory of her and someone I think must have been her boyfriend or maybe a husband. I recall another kid being around, too, but who he was I was usure of. The details of her disappearance were fuzzy to me, and Niall had never bothered to answer me when I asked what happened to her.

Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. He answered me plenty of times with a hard jab to the ribs or a swift kick in the ass, even when I was too small to know better than to question him. He would scream so loud it hurt my ears that she didn’t love me and had left me behind for him to raise. I was forced to learn to leave the subject alone. I wanted to be pissed at her for the abandonment and leaving me in the care of such a wretched human being, but then I couldn’t be sure she’d had any other choice. My father was the sort of man to make people disappear permanently, and I couldn’t completely rule that possibility out.

It’s about goddamn time, he said with a faded Irish accent, slapping me on the back of the head. Meet me in my office. We’ve got some planning to do, son.

Yeah, I said, grabbing some clean clothes from the closet to change into.

He slammed the door behind him as he left, and I wished I could just get on my Harley and ride as far away as I could without ever looking back, but I couldn’t. There was no other way of life for me. I’m not sure I ever had the chance to be happy… Or normal… Or a good man…

I slipped on the clothes I had grabbed before heading to the bathroom for a quick piss. It’d likely be the only time I’d have to myself all day, so I took a moment to enjoy the silence… As silent as it can be when one takes a morning piss, anyway.

I glanced in the mirror after washing my hands and ran my wet fingers through my hair, trying to tame it the best I could, but it didn’t really help. It would have to do because that was all the effort I could muster, and my hair was kind of known for not giving a fuck most days. Yet, somehow it worked most of the time.

Who the miserable bastard I’d be dealing with was this time, I didn’t know. Didn’t really care either. It was better that way. If I kept them anonymous and only judged them based on their affiliation with my old man, then a little part of me could hold onto being a decent human being, even though deep down, I knew I wasn’t. Reality was no matter how much I tried to marginalize my actions, I wasn’t a good person and probably never would be. At some point in my life, if I didn’t end up dead first, I was destined to take over Niall’s empire when he was ready to give it up, whether I liked it or not. In the meantime, I played the role as his enforcer. He handed down the sentence, and I carried it out. Violence had been my occupation since I was little more than eighteen, and as much as I wanted to convince myself that I would walk away if I could, I got a rush when I faced my opponents down at the warehouse. Maybe in a different life, I could’ve been a professional boxer or a mixed martial arts fighter, but in this one, I was a straight-up ass beater.

What would Evie think if she could see me now?

I made my way to the back of the house to the large mahogany double doors. Taking a deep breath, I opened one and stepped into Niall’s office. The room was lit with only two floor lamps, giving it a foreboding feel that was way too appropriate for the things that took place there. He sat like a king at the head of a large table with four chairs on either side and a chair at the other end where I normally sat. A bleached-blonde woman with plumped-up lips and big tits sat to his left, wringing her hands as she looked down at the table. Her eyes rose to meet mine and brightened once she recognized me.

Sit down, he said.

I did as I was told but took a seat to his right instead of at my usual spot. I wasn’t in the mood for his formalities, and the sooner I could get out, the better.

This is Jerney.

I nodded at her like I’d never seen her before in my life. Truth was, I’d fucked her a few months back during a drunken one-night stand, but her name had been Christina then. The last time I’d seen her was at a club called Passion that I had invested in as a silent partner with a buddy of mine. She didn’t have bruises under her eyes or a split lip, and I’m pretty sure she wasn’t working for Niall either because she’d told me she just moved to town to go to school. Thank fuck I always used a condom.

She’s not been with us long, and someone who didn’t know who the fuck she belonged to roughed her up last night. Need you to pick him up, he said, pushing a tablet toward me. A picture of Jerney and a man who looked vaguely familiar stared back at me from the page. I couldn’t quite place where I’d seen him before, but I’d definitely seen him somewhere along the way. I couldn’t tell much about his build from the picture, but I didn’t think he’d be much of a problem for me. They were rarely a threat since I’d been professionally trained to fight and most of them weren’t.

Tell me what he did to you, sweetie.

The bastard’s name is—

No names, Niall snapped, glancing at Jerney before settling his cold eyes on me again. He doesn’t like names.

Her lip trembled for a quick second before she spoke again. He cut my body up and then punched me in the face a couple times, she said with a hitch in her voice. She tried to run her fingers through her tangled hair as she continued, I passed out, and I don’t know what else he did to me. A fat teardrop slid down her cheek. Her hand rose to wipe it away just before it dripped off her chin. When I woke up this morning, he kicked me out of his house and didn’t even have the decency to pay me. Her voice cracked as the tears ran from her eyes.

And this was why I was able to rationalize what I did for my old man. Yeah, she was a prostitute, but it didn’t mean she deserved to be beaten and more than likely raped. These were the types of men I faced when I fought. The kind of men who murdered in cold blood. The kind of men who treated women like they were punching bags or their own personal sex dolls to do with as they pleased with no regard to consent. The kind of men who lived to hurt innocent people.

I trust you’ll grab this one by the end of the day, Niall said as he wrote down an address on a piece of paper and pushed it toward me. "Before he has time to forget what the fuck he did to my property. I’ll get Richie to set the warehouse for tomorrow night if you get him in time. Call Flint when you get an eye on him. He’ll bring the van."

I’m on it, I said, standing up. Walk you out? I asked Jerney as she wiped at her nose with a tissue my old man had tossed at her a few seconds before. I wasn’t sticking around long enough for her to let it slip in front of him that I already knew her.

No one who ever got involved with me was ever truly safe from him, even if it had only been a fling I barely remembered.

She instinctively looked over at Niall before moving an inch. Once he gave her the nod, she stood and made her way over to me. She wore a barely-there black dress that had been torn up, exposing the cuts and scrapes that marked her skin. She was waif thin, and if I had to guess, she had become a user of one of Niall’s other products. She hadn’t been quite so strung out when I’d met her, but even still, if I hadn’t been drunk as fuck the night we’d hooked up, I doubt I would’ve looked twice at her. She wasn’t really my type, but then there was only ever one who had fit the bill for me, and she had been lost to me a long fucking time ago. Still, it wasn’t in my best interest to fuck with one of Niall’s girls or his product, and he’d never buy that I didn’t know who or what she was if he found out what I’d done. Even if she had gone to work for him after I’d been with her, he still couldn’t be trusted to not hurt her or punish me in some other way just to prove a point.

She followed me through the doors and down the hallway to the large, open foyer where I abruptly stopped.

Hold up a sec, I said. Wait right here.

Taking two steps at a time, I headed upstairs and opened the door to my baby sister’s room. Georgia was the reason I couldn’t just up and leave like I’d thought about doing nearly every day of my life. Niall had never laid a hand on her, but it was only because he knew I’d kill him if he did. And at the same time, he knew I’d do whatever he wanted me to do in order to keep her safe from his abuse even one time. I never tried to fool myself into believing he gave a shit about either one of us. If he had to hurt or kill her to keep me in line, he would. No doubt in my mind.

I didn’t want her to ever experience the things I went through during my life. Never wanted her to know exactly what it was I did for our father either. She was far too young to understand or comprehend why I did the things I did, and a part of me knew she’d be terrified if she found out some of the things I’d done. If I thought I could take her and just go, I would have done it in a heartbeat, but he’d have me arrested for kidnapping, or worse, hunt us down and kill me, her, or the both of us for turning on him. Either way, I couldn’t and wouldn’t risk being separated from her. I was the only true father figure she’d ever had, and if fighting his battles kept her safe, then that’s what I would do until the day I or Niall died.

I still remember the day he brought her home. I had just turned eighteen with a bad reputation thanks to the rumors spread about me by my fellow classmates. I worshipped Satan. I was a huge drug addict. I’d killed someone at my old school. None of it true, but in any case, very few ever picked a fight with Jet Flanagan. Except that particular day some dipshit thought it was a good idea to prove himself to his little buddy by saying some shitty things to my then girlfriend, Evie Morgan—the subject of my recurring nightmare. Too bad he didn’t realize I was within earshot, and well, let’s just say his mouth started something his ass couldn’t handle, and I never had another problem from the kid. Neither did she as far as I knew, though I hadn’t known her for much longer after that. My willingness to beat someone’s ass to resolve a problem was why Niall had put me to work the way he did, why he came up with using me to punish those who went against him.

I busted my hand up in that fight and had been sitting at the kitchen table holding a bag of ice on my knuckles, angry at the world because I expected to see Evie smiling at me like I was her savior when I was finished. After all, I’d defended her and had only done what most guys would do to keep those they love safe. What I found instead was fear and confusion and a little bit of disgust.

Niall, holding the hand of a two-year-old little girl with dark curls, chubby cheeks, and the biggest eyes I’d ever seen, came through the back door as I sat there stewing.

He tipped his chin up and asked, You come out on top?

Yeah, I said and took the ice off my hand to look at the damage I’d done. I’d won the fight, but maybe I’d lost the girl in the process, so did that really make me a winner? I didn’t think so.

He said, That’s my boy, and sat down across from me at the table.

I looked at the little girl like she was an alien. Who was she and why in the hell was she with him? Why was she in my house, and when was she leaving? I figured she was the kid of his latest fling, but it was rare for him to take on any kind of responsibility for a kid who didn’t belong to him. Hell, he didn’t even take much responsibility for me and I was his flesh and blood.

This is your sister, Georgia. Her mother’s a junkie. Ended up stealing smack from the wrong person and got a bullet to the back of her head. You’re gonna have to help me take care of her, he said. She’s moving in permanently.

Instead of saying I’d have to help him, what he should have said was that I had to be her sole caretaker. Building his empire and working his way up the local crime lord ladder was far more important than taking care of a child. I knew this firsthand.

I looked at her, wanting to hate her and the responsibility