Lowdown Dirty Read online

  LOWDOWN DIRTY

  Wealthy luxury boat maker Tim Dowd had all but given up on dating. He’s far too picky and his darker cravings don’t exactly qualify him as husband material in his conservative community.

  When an unforgettable newcomer arrives with a short-term aim of developing a new subdivision, Tim can’t help but wonder “What if?” Valerie Lawson has the full package. She’s stunning, smart, has a wicked sense of humor, and possesses lustful urges that rival his own. But the ambitious architect is a rising star and had never planned to stay. Her next big job is thousands of miles away, and Tim can’t follow.

  Valerie doesn’t think a woman like her can have it all. Tim might need to recruit some help from unexpected places to convince her that she can.

  CHAPTER ONE

  As her friend’s low-riding Miata hit every bump and hole on the narrow dirt road, Valerie Lawson did her valorous best to focus on her yellow ticket stub’s tiny print. She’d never been susceptible to motion sickness—not even in vehicles built so close to the ground that she could feel Satan’s snores rumbling from deep within the Earth—but in a half-hour drive, Carine had yet to pick her foot up off the accelerator pedal.

  Carine seemed to get a perverse thrill every time the little toy car hit a natural dirt ramp that sent them vaulting through the air for several yards.

  Valerie’s feeling of unease, which had settled in early that morning due to escalating deadlines on her job site, wasn’t helped much by the rural darkness. Though they were at the end of summer, at eight o’clock, the country path was nearly dark. Mature pine trees lining the road blocked what little bit of light there might have filtered down.

  “You know,” Valerie said and swallowed hard. “I didn’t think this event was going to be so far out in the sticks. I thought this was going to be a short outing.”

  In and out and back to work.

  She needed to find a competent plumber for Monday morning or the timeline on the new home build she was acting as project manager on was going to be well and truly fucked. The delay hadn’t at all been her blame, but of course, she’d be blamed for the work not getting done. That was the way her luck had always been.

  Sighing, she gave up on reading the supposed ticket and yanked her seatbelt strap away from her torso.

  So nauseated.

  Carine made a little “hmm” sound and flashed the headlights at some sort of dog-sized critter scurrying across the long path.

  It could have been a little bear or a fawn—Valerie really didn’t want to know. She’d lost count of how many bears and deer she’d nearly collided with while driving around Eastern North Carolina in the past six months. They’d frolic onto the road, and then stand there staring as if she wasn’t barreling toward them in a big murder machine. She thought they did it on purpose. She saw those sadistic glints in their eyes as she swerved toward the ditch. More than once, she’d had nightmares about them, so no, she didn’t want to know what was scampering across the dirt road. She needed to be able to walk to her car at that construction site without worrying she was going to get jumped by one of what the locals called “good eatin’.”

  She groaned when Carine flashed those lights again. “For heaven’s sake, are we almost there? Why is this place so far?”

  “You’re not used to the long drives yet?” Carine asked, wearing her patented smirk of condescension. “You’ve been here six months.”

  Valerie harrumphed.

  Six months was exactly how long she’d known Carine. They were coworkers at a new mixed-development community in the Inner Banks called Shora. Carine had been a local real estate agent brought onto the team to sell parcels and model homes, and Valerie was the architectural project manager. Their company, Lipton Properties, had sent her down from the home office to oversee the construction of the six model homes and to keep phase one of the development rolling smoothly.

  Four houses down, two to go.

  It’d been a busy-as-hell summer, and—unexpected plumber disappearance or not—Carine had made an executive decision to get Valerie out for a little R&R. That’s why they were in the car, heading ever deeper into the goddamned boonies.

  Valerie wasn’t having fun yet. Fun would have been slouching on her sofa in front of the television, assured that a guy was going to show up on Monday to install the hot water heater in the “Sandpiper” model home.

  Shouldn’t have left the office without following up.

  She wanted to kick herself.

  “I’m used to everything taking a long-ass time,” Carine said cheerfully. “The area is getting built up more and more with each passing year, but it still takes Momma twenty minutes to get to the grocery store. I’m lucky to live in town.”

  Town, Carine called it. Valerie scoffed. Carine lived in Elizabeth City, a full hour from Shora. Carine made that drive every day, five days per week, and didn’t complain—probably because she’d be moving into one of the Shora model townhouses as soon as the block was completed. The end was in sight for both of them. Valerie was due to be recalled back to the main office after the sixth model home was habitable.

  Fortunately, the end was also in sight for that damned driveway.

  At the clearing, a large plantation-style home with white paint bright enough to compete with the stars in the night sky loomed. From a quarter mile away, Valerie could see the huge crowd of vehicles already parked on the estate. The congestion didn’t make sense for a private residence.

  “What the hell is this place?”

  “It’s a good time, that’s what it is.” Carine giggled.

  That giggle was always some kind of harbinger of doom, and Carine had been way too mysterious about where they were going. She’d handed Valerie a ticket stub and had said in a sultry purr, “You’re going to be thanking me for weeks for this, I promise.”

  Grinding her teeth as Carine sought a wide enough parking spot, Valerie pulled down the sun visor flap and used its weak lights to finally study the ticket.

  Printed on the pale purple cardstock were the raffle entry price, the address and date of the event, and some fine print on the bottom: 21+ only.

  “What kind of raffle drawing is twenty-one and older?” Valerie asked.

  Carine wedged her car between a pickup truck and one of those SUVs that was long enough to haul a casket even without putting the back seats down. Her smile quivers. “Uh. The event has alcohol?”

  “You wanna try again and make that sound less like a question? When you gave me the ticket back in Shora, I figured it’d be some sort of barbecue fundraiser thing with maybe a little music.” Valerie sure as shit couldn’t hear any music, so if the event was happening outdoors, it was the quietest gathering she’d ever attended.

  Carine twined a length of her long red hair around her fingers. Her mouth scrunched at one side and eyes narrowed in consideration.

  No, that’s not suspicious.

  Valerie narrowed hers right back. “You’re thinking too hard. Tell me what’s going on. You don’t have to be twenty-one to enter a raffle.”

  Carine snatched her keys from the ignition and unfastened her seatbelt, breathing out a grunt of frustration. “Oh, just go with the flow, will you?”

  Valerie scoffed. “No, I absolutely will not. I’m an architect. Going with the flow is in direct opposition to my nature. I need plans. I need to know what’s happening, so tell me now, or I’m flinging you out of that seat and driving myself home to watch television. You and the country critters can fellowship until dawn, for all I care.”

  Carine gave the steering wheel a little thump and growled. “Ugh, you’re so unbending. Let’s put it this way, okay? It’s like what your sister always does with her pictures on Facebook. You know—the ones where she’s sticking out her ass
and doing that duck-face thing with her lips? When people ask what she was doing, she writes back that she was at a grown and sexy event.” Carine wriggled her red eyebrows and pulled her most treacherous grin. It was her closing grin—the one she used to sell so much money pit real estate.

  “Grown, sexy, and country, right?” Valerie sneered and pointed to the mud-splattered pickup truck beside them. “Don’t tell me you’ve brought me to some kind of honky-tonk juke joint.”

  “Nothing like that. It’s really classy.” Carine giggled.

  Valerie stared at the redhead until Carine’s grin started to tremble and her color-change lipstick appeared to darken to what Valerie had decided was the Liar-Liar-Pants-on-Fire shade.

  The passenger-side door of the pickup truck swung open and a woman hopped down, yanking her tube dress up over her naked tits before tottering toward the house on four-inch Lucite stripper heels.

  Valerie fixed her I dare you glare on Carine, who kept right on smiling.

  Clearing her throat, Valerie brought her phone up to eye level and tapped out a text message for her sister, Leah.

  Carine has me caught up in some sort of “grown and sexy” scheme involving raffle tickets and rednecks. If you don’t hear from me in an hour, contact the Bertie County authorities. Tell them I was wearing a black dress and sensible shoes.

  She pressed her seatbelt release, then read Leah’s quick response: Oh, you’re wearing sensible shoes, huh? Flats, I bet. Or maybe Crocs today? Well, no need to worry about “grown and sexy,” then, since you only meet half the requirements, ya freakin’ bore.

  “You little wretch,” Valerie said under her breath and closed the message screen.

  It was a good thing Valerie’s little sister didn’t have a job where being buttoned up was a requirement. Her church had already “excused” her from Sunday school teaching duties for being what they artfully called “too spirited.” Being a little wild was sort of a requirement for being an R&B backup singer.

  Valerie wished Leah would cut her some slack. She wasn’t as uptight as Leah seemed to believe. Valerie was only trying to be a role model for her sister. The sisters didn’t have anyone else, except their elderly grandmother, and someone needed to set a good example for the wild child.

  Not that Valerie wasn’t wild herself. She was just better at keeping that shit on the down-low. She didn’t have a choice. Her career was riding on her being flawless, or at least trying damn hard to be.

  “Let’s go,” Carine said. “I don’t want to miss the giveaways. People donate some great stuff. I’m going to be super pissed if they have those little bottles of Scotch and I’ve missed them again.”

  Sighing, Valerie pushed open her door and said bye-bye to the air conditioning. It’d been a blistering, hundred-degree July day, and the sun hadn’t taken too many degrees with it on its way down.

  She and Carine made their way between the tightly parked cars—three rows with six or seven vehicles each—toward the house’s stately wrap-around porch. It was a gorgeous structure, from what she could see in the dim light. The columns appeared to be original and great care had been taken in modernizing the steps.

  A few men leaned onto the railing smoking cigars, and squinting, Valerie made out the familiar features of a couple of them.

  “Frank and Hal?”

  “Uh huh,” Carine said. “They’re here all the time.”

  “Obviously, you’d know that because you’re here all the time, too, huh?”

  “I hate how you jump to conclusions.”

  “Why, because I’m always right?”

  Carine gave her hair a defiant flick and muttered something under her breath about an “uptight goody two shoes.”

  Ignoring her, Valerie waved to the contractors Frank Penn and Hal Neilson as she and Carine started up the magnificent porch’s steps. “Happy to see a couple of familiar faces,” she said, eying the pretty flower-shaped cutouts in the stair risers. She didn’t do much work in existing homes, but would have loved to sink her teeth into a big project one day…assuming it wasn’t located halfway between the middle of nowhere and hell.

  “Shit, you let Carine drag you way out here to the mosquito mansion?” Hal asked. The mason blew out a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke, which Carine made a sour face at.

  “She promised me a good time,” Valerie said in a flat tone.

  Frank chuckled and ground out his cigar in the nearby ashtray. “Oh, you’ll get that, all right.”

  Valerie gave him a look of warning. “Did you, by chance, find me a plumber?”

  “Nah. Told you I would by Monday. Give me some credit.”

  “We’re cutting it close.”

  “Hey!” he balked, indignant. “You do your job and let me do mine.”

  “My job is to make you do yours.” She’d be the one getting flak from the guys at Lipton for not being on top of things—not Frank. She was the employee. He was just local contracted talent.

  Frank waved a hand in concession. “Okay, you got me there. Still. I’ll get someone. Stop frettin’. Hey, I know—let me get you a drink. You’ll probably need it once your brain makes sense of what your eyes are seeing.” He started for the door but stopped and turned to her. “Did Valerie tell you what you’d be seeing?”

  “Nope. I’m totally in the dark.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, you’re gonna need that drink, then. Give me your ticket, and I’ll take you inside and tell you what’s what.”

  Valerie cast a glance over her shoulder at Carine whose smile had gone from quivering and untrustworthy to downright predatory. “Do you get a special bonus for delivering me in one piece or something?” Valerie asked her. “Are they going to harvest my skin and sell off my organs on the black market?”

  “Nope. I’m sure there are people inside who’ll be very interested in seeing more of your skin, though.”

  Frank laughed and gave Valerie a nudge toward the door. “Skin and probably certain other organs, too, but only if you let them.”

  She pulled away from Frank, put up her hands, and gave her head a hard shake. “Okay, no. Not going any farther. Someone tell me what the hell is going on here or I’m not taking another step unless it’s back to the car. And I swear, Carine, I will hotwire that little piece of shit and burn rubber if I have to.”

  Carine pouted. “Don’t talk about my car like that. It didn’t do anything to you.”

  Valerie could feel her eyes bulge. “Right, right. Nothing at all. It just made my ass black-and-blue and cut runnels into my shoulder with the seatbelt.” Valerie drew in a long, bolstering breath and turned to acknowledge the newcomer at the door.

  He was tall, tan, and had his dark hair pulled back into a ponytail at his nape. In his smoking jacket and cargo shorts, he managed to exude a Hugh Hefner-Crocodile Hunter crossover vibe. His furrowed brow and bare feet disarmed her. He looked so comfortable in his own skin that she couldn’t help but to feel the same.

  “What happened?” he asked. “Did y’all make another pretty lady change her mind before she even got to the door? I can’t say I blame her. I’m trying to keep this shit on the up-and-up, and y’all are bringing down the property value just by standing on my porch.”

  Frank waved a dismissive hand at him. “Pssssh, I think we’ve already paid for your property two, three times over. Matter of fact, I think I’m gonna claim me a little piece of it. Maybe this square right here.” He paced a four-foot by four-foot square around an ancient rocking chair. “Gonna get me a plaque and everything, and it’ll say, ‘Frank paid for this shit’.”

  “I didn’t make you pay. I didn’t fish your wallet out of your pants and take your money. You handed it over because you were hoping to come here and drop your pants.” He showed off a wealth of straight white teeth, but even with the smile, there was nothing easygoing about the newcomer anymore.

  Valerie got a sinking feeling. Either she’d stumbled into the oddest possible location for a proctologist’s office or Carine had dragged Val
erie to a gathering of deviants.

  Valerie knew a little something about the latter because of that whole takes one to know one thing.

  She’d been trying so hard not to be one anymore.

  Turning to Carine, she put her fists on her hips. “Well.”

  Carine cast her gaze heavenward and sighed. “Thought I was doing you a favor, that’s all.”

  “Tell me about the favor, friend.”

  The barefooted stranger leaned against the nearby column and crossed his arms over his chest. “Yeah,” he drawled. “I’d like to hear you explain it, ginger girl.”

  “Fine.” Carine rolled her eyes and scoffed. “The proceeds from the ticket sales go to Clay here to help him offset the cost of renovating this historical woodpile. He’d be better off setting a match to it and starting from scratch if you’d ask me. He’s been fiddling with it for…huh.” She looked to Hal. “How many years, Hal?”

  “All of them,” Hal muttered and relit his cigar. “All of the years.”

  “Fuck all y’all,” Clay said. “Y’all don’t have to show up, but here you are, every other week just itching to see who turned up. Bet you’re itching real good, aren’t you Carine? Want to see who’s inside and whether you like the way they’re hangin’ tonight?”

  Clay could have seduced Satan with that grin of his.

  Valerie could introduce Clay to him because she was fairly sure Carine’s little car was going to stumble right into a hole to hell before the night was over.

  Valerie cleared her throat. “We’re going off track again. The way what’s hanging?”

  “I can think of three different interpretations for that,” he said. “All would be true.” He took Valerie by the elbow. “Come on in, honey.”

  “Nuh-uh.” Valerie squirmed away from him. When he said hangin’, the image conjured in her mind was of a bound and gagged submissive being suspended from a ceiling hook that hadn’t been properly mounted. That scenario she’d witnessed hadn’t ended well, and Valerie got a sneaking suspicion her evening wasn’t going to, either.