Prologue
“Please tell me that you didn’t really tell Judge Peters to go fuck himself,” Ryan said with a forlorn sigh as he leaned back against the other side of the cell’s locked door, acting like this surprised him.
“Fine. I won’t,” Hunter said, trying to get comfortable on the paper-thin mattress before finally giving up on the lost cause and sat up.
“Why do you insist on keeping me on retainer if you’re not going to call me when you get arrested?” Ryan asked, as he flicked an invisible piece of lint off the cuff of his expensively tailored suit.
Hunter shrugged it off as he raked his fingers through his hair. “Because it wasn’t a big deal.”
“It wasn’t a big deal?” Ryan repeated back slowly with a dry chuckle before going into one of his lectures, “You’re facing destruction of property, assault with a deadly weapon-”
Hunter couldn’t help but frown at that. “I didn’t have a weapon.”
“-public endangerment,” Ryan continued as though Hunter hadn’t spoken, “assaulting a police officer, and my personal favorite, resisting arrest.”
“I didn’t have a fucking weapon!” Hunter shouted, pissed that they were trying to fuck him over for something that should have been written off as a simple misdemeanor.
Ryan simply nodded. “They’re classifying your hands as weapons. Of course, if you’d called me, I probably could have fought that,” he drawled before explaining, “They’ve decided that with your extensive military record, and let’s not forget the surveillance video of you beating the shit out of everyone in that bar, that your hands should be considered a dangerous weapon.”
Hunter snorted.
“Thankfully Nancy, you remember Nancy, don’t you? The pretty young thing with great legs that works as a clerk at the courthouse. She gave me a call two hours ago. It seems that she remembered you from last year when you were up on charges for, surprise, surprise, assault. I, being the good friend that I am, left in the middle of my very important meeting to come rescue your sorry ass.”
“Is that what you call fucking your secretary over your desk now? A meeting?” Hunter asked dryly.
Ryan waved it off. “It’s a meeting of the minds. Anyway, I used my charm to get a private meeting with Judge Peters and the Prosecutor that you told to suck your dick this morning and I saved your sorry ass once again,” Ryan announced, sounding a little too smug for Hunter’s liking, but what the hell. If the man managed to get him out of these bullshit charges, then he could dance around in a pink tutu for all Hunter cared.
“What’s my fine and how many hours of community bullshit do I have to complete?” Hunter asked, getting to his feet and biting back a wince when his arms and legs shouted in protest. He was getting too fucking old for this shit, he reminded himself as he walked over to the cell door.
“None,” Ryan said with a sheepish smile that Hunter didn’t like, not one fucking bit.
He narrowed his eyes suspiciously on his oldest friend. “What do you mean by ‘none’?”
“What I mean is that you can’t exactly perform community service seeing how you’re going to be on house arrest for a year,” Ryan explained, as he took a healthy step back and out of reach of the bars while Hunter digested his words.
“You better be fucking joking,” Hunter finally said, wrapping his hands tightly around the bars, wishing that it was Ryan’s neck instead.
“It was either house arrest or staying locked up in a cell.”
Hunter nodded, taking that in as well. “Let’s get back to something for a minute here. You call a year stuck in my house saving my ass?”
“Yes,” Ryan said with absolutely no hesitation whatsoever.
“Uh huh,” Hunter mumbled thoughtfully. “I think there’s just one little problem that you may have overlooked,” he said, only to pause as he pursed his lips up in thought before adding, “Actually, make that two problems.”
“And what’s that?”
“Maybe the fact that I live out of hotels and don’t have a fucking house? Or I don’t know, maybe the fact that I run a fucking company has something to do with it? How the hell do you expect me to run a company that employs twenty thousand people around the world while I’m on house arrest?” he demanded, not liking the smug smile on his friend’s face.
“We already came to a solution for both problems. The first is that you’re required to buy a house in this county,” Ryan explained. “And two, you’ll work from home.”
“First off,” Hunter bit out, “I don’t want to buy a house in Hicksville, Florida-”
“Ah, it’s actually Maryhale,” Ryan pointed out, but Hunter ignored him simply because he didn’t care.
“-and secondly, how am I supposed to run a company from a house?”
“You’ll have to hire an assistant,” Ryan explained in a tone that let Hunter know that the little shit clearly expected him to be in awe of his greatness.
“Fine,” Hunter said, waving dismissively for Ryan to leave, “go to Hooters. Make sure she’s blonde, has double D’s, and doesn’t talk much.”
When Ryan didn’t move to leave, Hunter narrowed his eyes on the little bastard that he should have beaten the shit out of when they were kids.
“What else?” Hunter demanded through clenched teeth, already knowing that he wasn’t going to like what Ryan had to tell him.
“The thing of it is, in order to get this deal for you, I had to negotiate a few things and-”
“Get to the fucking point!”
“Well, the court decided since having a live-in-”
“Live-in? Are you out of your fucking mind?” Hunter demanded, wondering just how badly Ryan had fucked-up this case for him. He couldn’t live with a woman. It was one of the many reasons why he would never get married. He simply couldn’t stand them. As far as he knew they were only good for sex and keeping him company at all the boring dinners that Ryan forced him to attend.
“-could be seen as a benefit, that the D.A.’s office should be allowed to choose the most qualified candidate whom they would trust to make sure that you didn’t abuse the situation.”
Hunter stared at him for a moment.
Finally, he said, “Please tell me that you’re kidding.”
“I’m afraid not, and before you tell me that you’re just going to fire her, I should probably tell you that if you do that then you’ll have to finish your sentence in jail.”
“What if she quits?” he asked slowly, already running ideas through his head on how to get rid of some unwanted pain in the ass.
“Then you go to jail.”
“That’s bullshit!”
Ryan simply shrugged. “That’s the deal.”
“So, I’m going to be stuck with someone who can hold jail over my head?”
“Do you really think I’m that stupid?” Ryan demanded, actually having the balls to sound offended.
“At the moment? Yes.”
“I made it a condition that she didn’t know.”
Hunter shook his head in disgust. “I can’t believe you fucked me over like this.”