Blurb
Wanted: someone to hand feed me Doritos so my hands don’t get orange. No weirdos.
Belle Pena was an editor. Not a writer.
When her brothers challenge her to create a dating profile, she makes up the most random biography she can think of. She never, not ever, thought she’d find anybody to respond. But she was sorely mistaken.
Sadly, she finds that she has way more interest than she ever could’ve imagined.
But only one profile catches her eye.
Bruno never meant to take the dating app seriously. Being the last single man in his band of misfits, he’s happy being the odd man out. Women spelled trouble, and he had enough trouble in his life to last him through the next decade.
Only his newfound family doesn’t feel the same. One innocent ‘sure’ has the women of the Souls Chapel Revenants MC creating him a dating profile that is too spot on to be comfortable. And just when he decides to delete the app entirely, a particular face catches his eye.
One innocent question of ‘Belle is that you? Do you remember punching me in the throat in high school?’ has him stepping into trouble neck deep, and he doesn’t even realize it until it’s too late.
CHAPTER 1
Pennywise isn’t special. I swallow kids, too.
-Text from Belle to her brothers
BELLE
“You won’t,” Bourne challenged, his eyes gleaming with mischief.
I sighed. “I will.”
“You won’t.” He shook his head. “I know you, Belle. You talk a good game, but you’re weak. You’ll overthink it when you leave, and then you’ll stop yourself before you can fully pull the trigger.”
I sighed. “Fine. I’ll do it before we even leave our parents’ house today. Happy?”
Booth, my other brother, snickered.
Like a little bitch.
“Yes, I’m happy,” Bourne said. “I have a great life. Meanwhile, you’re practically Old Maid status, and you’re not even trying to get out there and find someone.”
I narrowed my eyes.
“Boys,” my father warned.
But the ‘boys’ didn’t listen.
My oldest brothers, who also happened to be twins, had taken it upon themselves to make my life a living hell recently, and I didn’t know why.
Every time that I came home there were always comments from the peanut gallery about how I’d ‘not gotten out’ or I continuously tried to ‘wiggle out of dates.’
Well, when the dates that I was wiggling out of were duds, I didn’t see the problem.
It wasn’t my fault that I had an IQ of one hundred and forty-three.
I was, by all accounts, a genius.
I wasn’t in the top tier of IQs or anything, but I was definitely better than above average.
Though, my father likes to tell me the only reason I had an IQ of 143 was because I’d ‘gotten bored’ with the line of questioning.
Which, technically, I had.
I’d gotten extremely bored with it, and instead of answering the last few questions, I’d kind of… guessed.
Though, just sayin’, I didn’t need some test to tell me that I was smart.
“Dad,” Booth tried to explain away his ‘teasing’ as he liked to call it. “She literally made her date cry.”
Okay, so I had done that.
But the guy had been so freakin’ full of himself.
“I didn’t make him cry.” I rolled my eyes. “I made him emotional. And it was only because he kept trying to talk about himself, his cat, and his mother. So I told him that the statistics of men finding their soul mates when they lived with their mother was very low.”
“I heard that you told him that men who owned cats generally had an estrogen imbalance.” Booth reached for a roll and buttered it before continuing. “You also told him that using a heated laptop on your thighs all day could cause infertility. And this was after the guy told you how much he wanted kids.”
“He told me that he lived out of his mother’s basement, she cooked and cleaned for him, and he had no reason to leave it.” I paused. “And the laptop thing was serious. It can cause infertility.”
My father started to chuckle. “Just leave her be. The guy sounded like a loser.”
“Last week, she told her date, who also happened to be a man that I set her up with, that fifty percent of all women murdered are offed by their ex-husbands or ex-boyfriends,” Booth added.
“They are,” I said defensively.
“He lost his last wife by murder,” Booth said. “You basically accused him of murdering his own wife.”
I sighed. I had not, but there really was no reason in telling these two jerk-offs anything. They’d think what they wanted.
My phone buzzed, and I thankfully pulled it out of my pocket to read the text that flashed across the screen.
It was a one-word text from my best client.
Hastings: Mayday!
I sighed and replied.
Belle: What’s up?
Hastings: I lost my entire book. It’s just gone. G.O.N.E. Can you send it to me again? I can’t access my email.
I’d do absolutely anything to get out of this particular family dinner.
Belle: Yes. I’ll get it to you as soon as I can get home. You saved me from my brothers. Again.
Hastings: Glad that one of my lowest moments could be beneficial to you.
I kind of felt bad, but kind of didn’t.
She should know better.
You always, always, always used two forms of backup when you were writing.
Always.
Most people found out the hard way, like she was doing now, to do that.
Because usually, when authors were first starting out, they’d think that it could never happen to them.
They would think wrong.
It happened to everyone that ever used a computer eventually.
The only thing was, most people didn’t lose what an author lost—hours and hours of hard work.
“I gotta go,” I said to my dad. “Hastings lost her entire book and she needs me to send it to her again.”
Bourne started to make chicken noises. However, I was able to ignore him.
Mostly.
After giving my dad a kiss on his cheek, and my brothers the finger, I walked outside and headed in the direction of my car.
It was raining, and like always, the two assholes inside had ridden in with each other.
Grinning like the loon I was, I walked over to their left front tire and pulled a set of needle-nose pliers out of my purse.
Removing the valve out of the stem, I watched with glee as the massive truck tire dwindled until the rim was sitting on the concrete.
That’s about when the bottom started to drop out of the sky.
I laughed and started to run to my car, not caring in the least about the rain.
I loved rain.
Even more, I loved when the rain turned into a torrential downpour.
I loved it even more when lightning flashed and thunder rumbled.
It took me ten minutes to drive home, five to get dry, and two to send over Hastings’ file, leaving me with almost an entire night to do what I wanted most: read.
Most people wouldn’t like reading if it was their job, but I loved it.
I loved even more that the book I was reading was about murderers.