Three Bad Dads and a Desperate Girl by Chloe Kent
Chapter One
Dakota Turner had one freaking job. Wear a sleek black evening gown and heels, a lace mask to conceal her eyes, red lipstick, and perfume, then stand next to an insanely large diamond, sitting on a plush velvet cushion encased in a glass dome.
Oh, and when the time came, she had to open the casing, extract the diamond, place it into a box, and hand it over to her boss.
That was all fine... Except she also had to secretly exchange the genuine diamond for a fake one buried in a pouch underneath the table where the glass dome was to be placed and then present that one to her boss instead.
Someone once told her assumption was the mother of all fuckups.
They were wrong.
Distraction was the boss’s boss of the mother of all fuckups.
And boy, had she been distracted.
Living paycheck to paycheck, when there were paychecks to speak of, had not been her ideal life situation, but no matter how hard she tried to crawl out from under the mountain of debt and general misfortune, the more she remained stuck.
She took more after her father than she cared to admit. They shared a similar proclivity for bad luck, which explained how, after his death, she'd inherited the debt he'd accumulated, traipsing from one failed undertaking to the next.
Legitimate institutions refused to entertain his whimsical business plans, so he turned to other means to finance himself. The kind of other means where unpaid debts were recouped with broken legs. Yes. He took money from those kinds of people.
Now, if she didn’t pay up what her father owed, it would be over for her, as in, she would cease breathing.
To say her life was a bit of a mess would be understating things.
She had a half-finished degree in business and not enough work experience to carry her forward. Her first job as a low-paid assistant’s assistant came to an abrupt end when she was fired after just five days of employment.
Well, she had completely botched the job when she had to step in and drive the big boss to the airport for a crucial, very profitable meeting.
It would have helped if she had driven said boss to the correct airport.
To cut a long story short, flights were missed, screaming sessions were endured, and jobs were lost.
After that, she worked part-time as a waitress, a cashier, and a dog walker.
But then she landed the perfect job at a bakery. She handled all kinds of administrative and financial tasks for the little bakery's married owners, with the perk of free donuts for life.
Until the wife won the lottery and they decided to close up shop, pack up all their belongings, and see the world.
Such had been her luck.
The very generous bonus the bakers had given Dakota made a significant dent in her debt, but that meant she was back to looking for a new job while she still had one abominable debt collector breathing fire her way.
The longer she remained unemployed, the more her bills began to pile up again, and the more fiendish the shark she owed money to became.
No one had been more astonished than Dakota when her neighbor, whose glare could kill on sight, knocked on her door one random day about a month ago and told her about a possible job.
The blue-haired, full-body tattooed Raven Smith had gruffly said she knew about Dakota’s money troubles—obvious from the undesirable characters who kept popping up at her door—and she knew about a short-term gig at a casino that might help Dakota out of her mess.
She still wondered how on earth she and Raven had become friends after that, but stranger things had happened, she supposed.
Dakota tried not to laugh her ass off when she read the details about the job.
The specifications on their own were... unusual.
The right candidate was about average height, slim, with a small waist and big breasts. D-cups were highly preferable, but a full C-cup would be okay if the candidate met more than 80% of the other criteria.
She had to have a soft voice, big eyes, no pimples, no facial hair, small feet, and smell good all day, every day. In other words, while she need not have won any beauty pageants in the past, the candidate should be able to meet the criteria to participate in such competitions. Long red hair was not a negotiable prerequisite.
She was also forbidden from using the words "juxtaposition" or "onion" in her future boss’s company. Ever.
Okay then.
That wasn’t weird at all.
Yes, that had been written as the job prerequisite verbatim.
Dakota had told her new friend that if she wanted to work as a high-class hooker, she would be her own boss and not have to share the majority of her earnings with a pimp.
Besides, she didn't think she checked off enough boxes—her boobs were only a C-cup and nothing more, and no beauty pageant would have her on account of her two left feet, but at least they were small, so she had that going for her. But more importantly, she wasn't a redhead.
Raven smacked her over the head with a pillow and called her attripicious. According to her, Dakota met all the specs, and her boobs would be a D-cup if she stopped stuffing them into C-cups.
Well, bras were ridiculously expensive, and she couldn't afford new ones after her breasts suddenly plumped up out of nowhere last year.
She also looked up the word "attripicious" and found, according to the Urban Dictionary, that it was just a harder way to say "modest."
As for her chocolate-colored tresses, Raven had asked her if she'd ever heard about hair dye and then offered to color her hair for her.
Raven had also assured her it was nothing like that. She wasn't going to have to sell her body. Her sister and another friend had worked for Albert Moses Jones and could confirm he paid them on time, and while they kept their clothes on, sometimes lines were a bit blurred on the legal side of things.
Yes, apparently Albert Moses Jones wasn’t the most incorruptible individual around, meaning he was totally 100% shady, but if the girls minded their own business and adhered to his rules, they were easily twenty to thirty thousand dollars richer after the duration of their three-month contract. The reassuring thing was that no one was ever killed in the process. He wasn’t that kind of immoral.
Unless they snitched, that is.
All Jones wanted was a group of beautiful redheads he could show off at his casino while he kept his money through shady means.
For all Dakota's wisecracks about the job, desperation, carrying a slogan that read "beggars can't be choosers," came knocking loud and clear. That, and a henchman named Python.
He showed up at her door in the middle of the night with a message about what was going to happen to her lovely neck if she didn't pay up.
He thrashed her apartment as well, just so she would remember what would happen next, all for a sum of twenty thousand dollars.
She could mind her own business for three months, couldn’t she? If it meant getting Python off her back, she’d become totally blind if need be.
And then a fresh start. She had to keep envisioning her life once she paid off her father’s last debt and could forever be free of the goons haunting her.
Her interview took place in Jones’ rather dank downtown office. The jingle of the numerous layers of jewelry he wore punctuated every question he asked.
She may have had to squint a little to lessen the glare of his sparkly orange silk shirt, but at the end of the day, she cried on the inside when he offered her the job.
Who cared that she had to sign a very suspicious NDA, which was basically a death threat if she said anything to anyone?
Compared to having her neck broken, the NDA seemed like a walk in the park. She could totally look the other way while he robbed people blind. At the very least, no one was being killed—except possibly her if she opened her mouth to the wrong people.
Three months. Ten thousand dollars a month. Nights only.
She planned to continue scouring the whole of New York for something a lot more proper in terms of employment during the day.
After two months of working at Dominoes Casino, she could confirm that Jones wasn’t that bad a guy. If she didn’t count the ways he cheated his patrons, ensuring the house won more often than not but not so much as to make it suspicious. He was a con artist. A very good one at that since he hadn’t been caught yet.
His unsavory practices had kept her awake at night, but she’d known upfront that he wasn’t a saint. It helped that she remembered Python was still out to get her and expected to be handed the remaining ten thousand dollars, which would close the debt for good in exactly one day.
Fresh start. Fresh start… Fresh start.
She kept repeating those words as her mantra.
Jones treated the girls well, paid them on time, and made sure his security looked after them as well.
To maintain his Jupiter-sized ego, he came to his casino surrounded by bodyguards and his three girls, Shirley, Zoe, and Dakota herself, all dressed in tight body-hugging gowns and high heels. They really were all just for show.
Everything seemed to be going well until it was again her turn to make an appearance at a high-stakes private poker game he hosted and participated in as well.
She knew the drill. She knew his modus operandi. He had a lot of trickery up his sleeve or on his fingers. She didn’t understand the game or how he cheated, but that was all right.
He tailored his game according to who he was playing. Sometimes he made sure to lose when he thought his opponents were too smart. Other times, he swept the floor with his winnings. But then sometimes, when his ego got the better of him, he brought out the big guns.
When Jones started to lose all his money because he believed his opponents were smarter than him and would be on him if he cheated, he resorted to putting up a different kind of ante.
She knew what to do if he started to lose. He’d click his fingers, and surrounded by three burly bodyguards, it was Dakota’s job to present a real, honest-to-goodness diamond with the regality of a princess.
He called the glittering gem a family heirloom.
It wasn’t.
She had no interest in knowing how it came to be in his possession either, but it was real.
Very real.
But Jones had been off his game—an extremely rare occurrence—the instant he glanced at his opponents.
He had ordered her, rather frazzled, to wait in a small back room, whereas, for these kinds of games, she would usually stand behind him with her hand on his shoulder. He'd call her his lucky charm, and all she had to do was smile.
Bored, Dakota had taken out her phone and continued to read a self-help book about changing her luck.
But then she had been summoned. The first conclusion she drew was that Jones had met his match if he hadn’t used his cheating skills, had then proceeded to lose all his money, and was now going to try and win it back by putting up his prized diamond as an ante. This had never happened before.
For the occasion, Dakota was dressed in a glittering black floor-length gown that molded her curves, showcased her cleavage, and exposed her back almost right down to her ass. Jones thought a black lace mask that concealed not only her eyes but the upper half of her face as well was enough to distract his opponents as they tried to determine if she were as beautiful as her jawline and lips suggested.
She entered the room confidently, the glass dome in both her hands, playing the part she had been hired to do.
That's when she saw them. And her whole universe caught fire and exploded.
She barely had time to date, mostly because her current situation embarrassed her. Who'd want to date a loser? She didn't even acknowledge the opposite sex romantically. But a brief glance at the three men in the room elicited a tumultuous wave of something uniquely foreign that hit her right in the center of her soul and traveled all the way down to between her thighs.
She had never seen men of this caliber before in Jones' company.
They were dressed in pristine, immaculate suits, the kind only billionaires could afford. The watches on their wrists were Patek Philippe. She knew the brand because Zoe was obsessed with fashion and was never without a magazine to browse, which she generously offered to Dakota to pass the time when they waited for Jones in his office.
Seated around the table, they seemed to loom over her boss, who wasn't small or short by any means.
Her fleeting peek encompassed everything about all three of them. Dark-haired, structured jaw lines impeccably groomed. Their broad shoulders were clearly defined by the superb tailoring of their suits, accentuating their sheer male perfection.
Because they were perfect in every way.
Tall. Dark. Mysterious. Mind-blowingly gorgeous. Panty-destroying sexy.
One of them had gray eyes. One of them had blue eyes. Another had hazel eyes. And not one of them glanced her way as she walked into the room, unlike every other man who'd sat around Jones' poker table.
Her entire brain stopped functioning. All she registered were lightning bolts that stung her skin at the sight of them, making her nipples peak through the fabric of the expensive dress she wore and soaking her cheap white cotton panties.
She had remained flustered. Flushed. Displaced. Curious, wet, and confused. Distracted.
So distracted that when Jones lost even the ante he had put up, she handed them the real diamond.