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Saint View Murder Squad, #1
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Blurb
One minute I’m cleaning toilets for minimum wage.
The next, I’m waking up from a drug-induced nap with a monster staring down at me.
Kidnapped and seconds from death, I think I’m done for…
Until masked men burst in, murder my attacker, and turn my world upside down.
They call themselves Murder Squad.
A secret brotherhood of broken men who only kill the worst of the worst.
And one of them thinks I’m his wife.
X is unhinged, obsessed, and deadly. A psychopath who hides behind bad jokes and bloodstained fingers.
Whip’s older, grumpy, and used to women paying him to worship them. But when he finds out I’m a virgin, he can’t keep his hands off my plus-size curves.
And Levi? One year of handwritten letters was all it took to fall in love with a man I’d never met. My prison pen pal turned killer, fighting his darkness for a second chance.
But they aren’t the only psychopaths in Saint View.
Someone’s playing a twisted game, leaving rhyming threats and promising to end us all if we don’t stop them first.
With every lie we uncover, every secret we expose, the danger mounts.
Until there’s only one thing we know for sure.
There’s a killer out there.
And this time, he’s hunting us.
X’s and O’s is a dark rom com. It’s an adult, why choose romance, meaning the main character has more than one love interest. You can expect a plus size, tall heroine, psycho heroes, a murder mystery, and a spicy club. This book contains romantic suspense and triggering themes. It is the first book in an ongoing trilogy.
Triggers - This list is extensive and the degree of severity for each trigger will vary from minor to major. Triggers may not relate to this book, but to later books in the series.
Sexual assault, slut shaming, gay slurs, gangs, graphic violence, sexually explicit scenes, claustrophobia, suffocation, fat shaming
Here's a taste of what's inside!
I smoothed my sweaty palms down my too-tight pants and stepped out of the shadow, right as she walked out of the building.
“Hello, Violet.”
She took one look at me, opened her mouth, and screamed.
Ah, dammit. Why did she keep doing that? “No, no. Don’t scream. Please. I brought you flowers.” I thrust them at her with a wide smile.
She stumbled back, catching herself at the last minute before she hit the cement sidewalk. “Get away from me. Help! Somebody help me!”
There was nobody on the street to hear her shouts. The curtain in a nearby apartment twitched, but nobody came out.
“You don’t like the flowers? I thought you would. Violets for Violet.” I smiled and held them out to her again.
She ran with choppy, awkward strides, her ankles twisting from the cracked, uneven sidewalk. Her chest heaved, and she fumbled through her purse, searching for something while she limped away.
I stepped forward, jogging alongside her, and reached for her purse. “Here, let me help you. What do you need?”
Her eyes were wild, her breath a sputtering gasp. “My Mace spray, you lunatic! Get away from me!”
I’d been called worse. The insult rolled right off me.
We tussled for the purse, her trying to be all independent. Me just wanting to show her I could take care of her. My brother always carried his wife’s bag for her. It was the gentlemanly thing to do, so I’d been told when I’d given him shit for his pretty glittered Hello Kitty bag.
I got it now. I didn’t want Violet to ever have to carry anything for herself ever again. I could do that for her.
Violet shoved the open purse at me, and half the contents spilled out onto the ground. Makeup, a hairbrush, a book…it all scattered at our feet.
“Don’t worry, I’ve got it.” I knelt to the ground, gathering up the contents and trying to shove them back in.
When I glanced up, she was halfway down the street, running at full pace, delicious ass swaying.
“Ugh,” I groaned. “Tonight is not the night for cardio! I can’t run after you in this suit, Violet!” It was way too freaking tight. Goddamn Hendrix and his chicken legs. “You left your purse!”
I glanced down at the book clutched in my fingers and did a double take at the cover.
A masked man glowered back at me; the rest of his face covered in a skeleton mask. The title and author, Arran’s Obsession by Jolie Vines, covered his chest in hot-pink letters.
Curious, I flicked through the pages. Skimmed across a few lines. My head snapped up again, just in time to see Violet approaching the end of the street.
“This is a sex book!” I shouted after her, a grin spreading across my face as I read some more. Holy shit, it was hot sex too. About a group of masked guys, chasing down women in a club game where the winner got to keep them.
The book was well-read, the passages that had caught my eye highlighted with little sticky tabs marking the place.
So she could read them often?
I groaned at the thought of her tucked up in her bed, reading these scenes over and over, her breath quickening with each line, her fingers skimming down her body to relieve the ache between her thighs.
She was barely visible now, at the end of the street. “Is this what you want?” I shouted, cupping my hand around my mouth to try to make my voice go farther. “You want a masked man who will chase you down and claim you?”
She didn’t answer. Just disappeared around the corner.
I shrugged, giving up, and going back to the book for further research.
If she wanted a masked man, I could give her that.
