Annoyed At First Sight (Gator Bait MC Book 4) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Annoyed at First Sight

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other titles by Lani Lynn Vale

  Blurb

  Prologue

  Prologue II

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  Cassius & Alice

  Annoyed At First Sight

  By Lani Lynn Vale ™

  Text copyright © 2022 Lani Lynn Vale ™

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Yesterday I yelled at my husband because he pissed me off. He bought me a cookie and found Jupiter for me in the night sky. I think I’ll keep him. And I guess this one will be dedicated to him.

  Acknowledgments

  Golden Czermak - Photographer

  My Brother’s Editor & Ink It Out Editing - My editors

  Alyssa Garcia - Cover Artist & PA

  My mom - Thank you for reading this book eight million four hundred and seventeen times.

  My betas - I don’t know what I would do without y’all. Thank you, my lovely betas, for loving my books as much as I do.

  Other titles by Lani Lynn Vale

  The Freebirds

  Boomtown

  Highway Don’t Care

  Another One Bites the Dust

  Last Day of My Life

  Texas Tornado

  I Don’t Dance

  The Heroes of The Dixie Wardens MC

  Lights To My Siren

  Halligan To My Axe

  Kevlar To My Vest

  Keys To My Cuffs

  Life To My Flight

  Charge To My Line

  Counter To My Intelligence

  Right To My Wrong

  Code 11- KPD SWAT

  Center Mass

  Double Tap

  Bang Switch

  Execution Style

  Charlie Foxtrot

  Kill Shot

  Coup De Grace

  The Uncertain Saints

  Whiskey Neat

  Jack & Coke

  Vodka On The Rocks

  Bad Apple

  Dirty Mother

  Rusty Nail

  The Kilgore Fire Series

  Shock Advised

  Flash Point

  Oxygen Deprived

  Controlled Burn

  Put Out

  I Like Big Dragons Series

  I Like Big Dragons and I Cannot Lie

  Dragons Need Love, Too

  Oh, My Dragon

  The Dixie Warden Rejects

  Beard Mode

  Fear the Beard

  Son of a Beard

  I’m Only Here for the Beard

  The Beard Made Me Do It

  Beard Up

  For the Love of Beard

  Law & Beard

  There’s No Crying in Baseball

  Pitch Please

  Quit Your Pitchin’

  Listen, Pitch

  The Hail Raisers

  Hail No

  Go to Hail

  Burn in Hail

  What the Hail

  The Hail You Say

  Hail Mary

  The Simple Man Series

  Kinda Don’t Care

  Maybe Don’t Wanna

  Get You Some

  Ain’t Doin’ It

  Too Bad So Sad

  Bear Bottom Guardians MC

  Mess Me Up

  Talkin’ Trash

  How About No

  My Bad

  One Chance, Fancy

  It Happens

  Keep It Classy

  Snitches Get Stitches

  F-Bomb

  The Southern Gentleman Series

  Hissy Fit

  Lord Have Mercy

  KPD Motorcycle Patrol

  Hide Your Crazy

  It Wasn’t Me

  I’d Rather Not

  Make Me

  Sinners are Winners

  If You Say So

  SWAT 2.0

  Just Kidding

  Fries Before Guys

  Maybe Swearing Will Help

  Ask Me If I Care

  May Contain Wine

  Joke’s on You

  Join the Club

  Any Day Now

  Say it Ain’t So

  Officially Over It

  Nobody Knows

  Depends Who’s Asking

  Valentine Boys

  Herd That

  Crazy Heifer

  Chute Yeah

  Get Bucked

  Souls Chapel Revenants

  Repeat Offender

  Conjugal Visits

  Jailbait

  Doin’ A Dime

  Kitty, Kitty

  Gen Pop

  Inmate of the Month

  Madd CrossFit Series

  No Rep

  Jerk It

  Chalk Dirty to Me

  Battle Crows MC

  Always Someone’s Monster

  Make Me Your Villain

  Rattle Some Cages

  Not A Role Model

  Get Tragic

  Strange and Unusual

  Never Trust The Living

  Gator Bait MC

  Nobody Cares Unless You’re Pretty

  Good Trouble

  Cute But Psycho

  Annoyed At First Sight

  The Voices Are Back

  Special Kind of Twisted

  I’ll Just Date Myself

  Blurb

  The first time Cassius Ulysses Costas met Alice Paradis, she was in a string bikini and filling up a long line of boats that were there just to see her. She was eighteen and every man’s wet dream.

  Even his.

  For the longest time, he went out of his way to stay as far away from her as he could get without actually taking his eyes off of her. For years, he was the better person. He played his hand close, and not a single person would know just how obsessed he was with her.

  Then he goes to prison and comes out a man that couldn’t care less about anyone or anything, least of all what someone thought of him and his actions. But not one second while he was behind bars did he forget about Alice.

  He tries to stay away. For a few long months, he fights his every instinct to make her his. But, as if the universe is conspiring against him, Alice is thrown into his path time after time, instance after instance.

  And his resolve is waning. Fast.

  In one last ditch effort to stay away, he walks away, hoping making her mad enough will force her to do the work for him.

  However, when Alice is attacked, it isn’t Cassius’s harsh words she remembers, but the way he makes her feel safe.

  Soon, the very last thing he’ll do is let her walk away. He did the right thing, and that didn’t work out. Now, it’s time for him to embrace the wrong.

  PROLOGUE

  The blinker isn’t there for decoration. It’s to communicate with other drivers because we can’t read your fucking mind.

  -Cassius’s secret thoughts

  CASSIUS

  The first time I met her, she was all of eighteen, in a string bikini, and pumping gas into the boat I was about to pilot out of the channel.

  She was leaning over the boat and was pouring gas stabilizer into the stream right along with the gas.

  She had a fantastic ass and an even better set of tits.

  The shortest pair of short shorts covered her bathing suit bottoms—barely—that I’d ever had the pleasure to see.

  I, Cassius Ulysses Costas, a thirty-year-old man, was perving on an eighteen-year-old.

  If she was even that.

  Last week when I’d been here, she’d been celebrating a birthday. She’d had the cute little hat on top of her cute little head. She had streamers decorating her workspace. There were fuckin’ cupcakes, for Christ’s sake.

  Damn good cupcakes.

  From what I’d been told during my lurking, Alice had baked them herself.

  Her family owned not only the small marina where we were at today but also the larger one where they fueled up the big ships—the ones I normally piloted.

  However, if I was in need of a break, I’d take the smaller ships in and out instead of the bigger ones. Mostly because, if you were off your game, you sank ships—literally. So if I wasn’t where I needed to be to pilot multi-million-dollar vessels, then I took a break and did the fun ones.

  Such as today.

  I’d already taken out two yachts, worth half a million a piece, and I’d already brought in four fishing charters—and gotten two tunas to show for it.

  “Hey, you okay?
”

  I hadn’t realized that my stillness had been noticed.

  Luckily not by the object of my desire.

  But, sadly, it was almost just as bad.

  “Fine,” I said to Jaycee, Alice’s twin sister. “How about you?”

  Jaycee was almost the exact opposite of Alice.

  Where Alice was sweet, bubbly, and willing to do anything to please anyone, Jaycee wasn’t. Jaycee was rude, selfish, and had the voice of a high-pitched dog toy that you couldn’t help but hate listening to.

  Like those toys that you got kids for Christmas and immediately took the batteries out of to save your sanity.

  She was that kind of annoying.

  “I see you’re doing the fun stuff today.” Jaycee continued to talk to me, unaware of how much her voice annoyed me.

  “Yep,” I said as I took a pull on my water bottle. “You delivering pizza today?”

  Not only did her family own a marina, but they also owned a successful chain of pizzerias. Silvain’s Pizza, a local hot spot, was the best of the best. The family all took turns delivering pizza if they were needed. Including Alice.

  Though, I hadn’t seen Jaycee do it willingly in a long time. She was a vapid, selfish girl that only saw the dollar signs and not the hard work it took to get those dollar signs.

  And her family mostly humored her. Giving her the money, without making her work, unless they were just so super busy that she was forced to.

  But, with her working, came her messing up. And the family saw her getting a paycheck but not working as the better of two evils. At least, that’d been what I’d gathered from their family. Their brother was very vocal about how awful a worker Jaycee was, and how they’d love it if she just never came in and fucked up.

  Truthfully, I wasn’t really sure why she was here today.

  She’d been sitting at the dock bar area with a drink in her hand while Alice filled up every single customer that was in line. Had Jaycee gotten off her ass and helped, Oberon’s goddamn yacht would be filled up and we could get him the fuck out to sea and I could go back home.

  He was my last of the day—even though it was only eleven in the morning.

  I’d been going since late last night and could use a fuckin’ break.

  Though, my mother had begged and pleaded with me to meet her boyfriend, Oberon, for ‘brunch’ at the North Shore Bay, where Silvain’s Pizzeria was located.

  Oberon Kalb. My mother’s newest man.

  My mom wasn’t a person that did well when she was left alone for long. She thrived with someone taking care of her, and the yacht captain, Oberon, was able to do that to her liking most of the time.

  My mom wasn’t a bad person. Honestly, she was great. Though a little shallow at times, Crista Pritchard was sweet as honey and never missed laughing at a good joke. What she failed to do was take care of herself.

  If she didn’t have a man, she was lost.

  Hence the reason I was currently on the patio waiting for the douche’s yacht to get fueled up, eating pizza, when what I really wanted was to go to bed.

  Getting Oberon’s yacht out of the inlet would be easy, though. It was so small it could barely be considered a yacht. Hell, Oberon couldn’t even afford his own captain. He had to do it himself. Yet, he felt all special that he could afford a yacht.

  “No, I’m just sitting here, looking pretty.” She grinned, answering my previous question, as if that made her something special.

  Newsflash. It didn’t.

  It made her seem tasteless.

  “You are indeed, sweetheart,” Oberon cooed to her. “How are you?”

  My mother, who wasn’t paying attention to her sixty-five-year-old boyfriend flirting, looked over at me with a smile. “When are you going to settle down, honey?”

  When was I?

  Never.

  At least, that was the plan.

  I’d seen the kind of heartache that my mother had lived through.

  The sheer hell that she’d gone through the day that my family perished in that accident.

  That night, they’d been coming home from one of my college football games. My mom had stayed with me because I’d had a possible hairline fracture in my wrist.

  We’d already been there when my family had been brought into the hospital. All but one of them DOA—dead on arrival.

  My little sister was the only one that had been brought back to life. But she’d succumbed to her injuries eight days later in the ICU.

  The crash was known as one of the deadliest crashes on any Florida stretch of highway. Because, not only had my family died, but nineteen others had died in a deadly eighteen-car pileup.

  We were still getting a stipend from the state due to their negligence.

  Apparently, a state vehicle had pulled out in front of an eighteen-wheeler. That eighteen-wheeler had then swerved to avoid the vehicle and plowed into a guardrail. The guardrail had given—when it wasn’t supposed to do—and had taken out all of the cars before hitting the trees.

  Technically, my mom was rich.

  Richer than Oberon.

  Not that Oberon knew that.

  But it was fun to see him flaunt his money to my mother when my mother could easily do the same right back.

  Turns out, I didn’t have a hairline fracture in my wrist. The fracture happened later, in my heart.

  But it also helped me learn a few things.

  One, you couldn’t be hurt if you didn’t give your heart out to someone to take care of.

  Two, if I stayed away from entanglements, they stayed away from me.

  That’s why I’d never pursue anything that even remotely looked like I could catch feelings for.

  It bothered my mother.

  She wanted grandbabies to love. She wanted a daughter-in-law to shower affection upon.

  She wanted it all, all over again.

  Meanwhile, I wanted to make sure that love never got anywhere near me.

  “Oh, I volunteer!” Jaycee cried in response to my mother’s question to me.

  Her loud, exuberant exclamation causing Alice, who was now on boat two since I’d arrived there and started watching her, to look over.

  Our eyes caught, and it took everything I had to drop my gaze.

  “Sorry to disappoint you, Mom,” I said. “But I’m not settling down for a while.”

  “You just love your job too much. One day, you’ll find someone better than your job.” Mom waved away my words.

  She was wrong.

  The excitement of my job didn’t overpower the need to stay away from anything that might one day hurt me.

  I did love my job, though. And didn’t see a point in not showing it.

  Our small inlet was one of the worst inlets in the world. Mostly because of the topographical terrain, the width of the inlet, and the choppiness of the water where the gulf met the ocean, caused the waters to be turbulent at times.

  I’d traveled all over Florida doing what I love best, but my favorite place was my hometown of Blue Ridge, Florida.

  My mom was born here. My dad was born here. My sisters and brothers were born here, just like me. It was in my blood.

  So there was no wonder that I’d want to work here. To make a home here.

  Though my dad and all of my siblings were gone now, I still loved everything about this place.

  And the view wasn’t half bad, either.

  “Do you want a top off?” I heard the sweet, husky voice of the girl that’d held all my attention every time I came to this damn station say.

  “I do,” Oberon tutted.

  He wasn’t talking about his vessel, though. He was talking about the beer he was about to consume.

  I took a bite of my pizza and ignored Oberon.

  I also ignored my mother who continued to talk about me one day finding love.

  My gaze, however, continued to stray to the girl working her ass off in the hot Florida sun.

  If I could have anyone… it would be her.

  • • •

  “Hello?” I answered the phone before I’d even realized that it was in my hand.

  “Cassius,” my friend with the Coast Guard, Tim, said. “Something’s happened.”

  I was instantly awake.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Your mother,” he said. “She was apparently lost at sea.”

  I felt my stomach clench. “What?”

  Had I heard him correctly?

  “She was on the boat with Oberon, and when he returned to dock, she was gone,” he repeated. “We’re looking for her now, but it’s not looking good. Oberon was too hammered to even notice when she went missing. He’s still hammered. We’re looking, but we’re searching a much wider area than we should be because Oberon can’t pinpoint where she went overboard.”