King's Promise

King’s Promise

Adrianne Byrd

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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To Alice: Forever my inspiration

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

To my family and friends, thanks for all the support

and love that you’ve given me.

To my editor, Evette Porter, for helping me

through one crazy year. To my wonderful fans

and readers, thank you for allowing me to do

what I do. It’s always a pleasure to entertain you.

I wish you all the best of love.

The House of Kings series

Many of you have followed the Unforgettable series, which morphed into the Hinton Brothers series. Now I’m introducing you to the Hintons’ playboy bachelor cousins—the Kings.

Eamon, Xavier and Jeremy, along with their infamous cousin Quentin Hinton, are business partners in a gentlemen’s club franchise called The Dollhouse. One of their most popular and lucrative specialties is their bachelor party services. With clubs in Atlanta, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, the brothers are determined to make sure their clients’ last night of bachelorhood is one they’ll never forget. And the brothers are prepared for anything…except when love comes knocking on their door.

In King’s Promise, love is the last thing on Xavier King’s mind. In fact, he’s renewed his vow to remain a player for life. But no matter how much he parties, it’s getting harder to hide the feeling that there’s something missing in his life. Enter Cheryl Shepherd, the sexy new bartender at the Atlanta club. But Cheryl has a few secrets of her own.

Next month, look for the final book in the House of Kings series, King’s Pleasure, featuring Jeremy King. If you missed the first book in the series, look for King’s Passion, featuring the eldest brother, Eamon, which was published in June 2011.

Remember, in love, never bet against a King….

Adrianne

Contents

Prologue

The Loyal King

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

The Bigger They Are…the Harder They Fall

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

The Devil You Don’t Know

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Let’s Make a Deal

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

The Queen of Lies

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Then There Were Two

Chapter 32

Prologue

Lying in a king-size dark oak paneled bed, Quentin Hinton huffed and growled among a set of tangled black silk sheets as orgasmic tremors shook him to the core. Eyes closed, he braced his chiseled body with his two muscular arms planted on opposite sides of tonight’s passionate beauty.

“Mmm. That was wonderful, honey,” the woman’s angelic voice praised as she linked her slender arms around his sweat-slicked neck.

“You were wonderful,” he said, returning the compliment before leaning over to the side and plopping down on the pile of fluffy pillows. Exhausted, Q glanced over at the digital clock next to the bed and puffed out his chest with a sense of pride, having calculated that he and this evening’s dessert had been going at it for two solid hours straight. With that kind of performance, he estimated that his partner would be asleep in exactly four…three…two…

“Zzzzzzz.”

Quentin smiled at the sound of soft snoring coming from the woman lying on his left. He turned his head. Her hair was so mussed up that he could barely make out her face and was only fairly certain that her name was…

“Christina.” Another woman’s voice drifted into his head.

Quentin’s neck whipped around to see Alyssa Hinton, or at least his imaginary version of her, sitting in the window seat of his bedroom, in the wedding dress she wore to marry his brother Sterling. “What are you doing here?” he hissed.

She shrugged. “You tell me. Since you’re the one seeing things.”

Quentin shook his head as he started to peel off the covers. “This is just going too far.”

Alyssa quickly covered her eyes with her hand when he jumped out of bed. “Oh, my God! Hurry up and put something on.”

Q frowned as he reached down and snatched his robe from the floor and pulled it on. “You’re in my bedroom, remember?” He stopped and then looked over at the bed and then back at his sister-in-law. “Just how long have you been here, anyway?”

Alyssa peeked through her fingers and saw that Quentin was decent, so she lowered her hand. “I’d rather not answer that question.”

Embarrassment heated Quentin’s face—and he was not a man who easily got embarrassed. “You can’t keep doing this!”

“Hmm?” The sheets ruffled behind him.

When he turned around, Christina lifted her head. “What did you say, baby?”

“Nothing,” he lied to reassure her. “Go back to sleep.”

Christina gave him a lazy smile. “What are you doing up? Come back to bed.” She stretched out her arm to pat the empty space beside her for emphasis. “It’s getting lonely over here.”

“I’ll be back in a minute. I’m just going to the bath room.”

“Mmm,” she moaned, and then plopped her head back down onto the bed. “Hurry up. I’m missing you, big daddy.”

“You got it.” He waited a few seconds.

“Zzzzzzz.”

Quentin turned his angry gaze back toward Alyssa.

She just frowned. “Big daddy?”

“Drop it.”

“Hmm?” Christina asked.

“Nothing,” he hissed, and then stormed toward the bathroom. “I’m not going crazy. I’m not going crazy,” he repeated under his breath.

“You might want to get a second opinion on that,” Alyssa said, following behind him. “Like maybe go back and see that nice Dr. Turner you were talking to last month.”

Quentin groaned. “I don’t need a shrink. Thank you very much.”

“And yet here I am,” she volleyed back.

When they reached the bathroom door, Quentin stopped abruptly and looked back at her. “Do you mind? Can a guy get a little privacy?”

“Sorry.” Alyssa folded her arms and leaned against the door frame. “A few minutes ago you were all too willing to show me big daddy.”

Quentin slammed the door in her face, but he could still hear her laughing on the other side. “Women! Even the imaginary ones were impossible to live with.” He shook his head as he relieved himself and even took a quick shower. By the time he had wiped away the steam from the mirror, he was reasonably sure that he’d pulled himself together.

That is, until Alyssa leaned over his right shoulder.

“Aaaaah!” He took his towel and covered the front of his chest like a damsel in distress.

Alyssa jumped and screamed, too.

Knock. Knock.

“Quentin? Are you all right in there?” Christina asked, twisting the doorknob.

Q finally clamped his mouth shut when he realized what the whole thing must have sounded like on the other side of the door. “Uh, yes! Never better.”

There was a brief pause before Christina asked. “Why were you screaming?”

“What? Uh…”

Alyssa snickered and then immediately launched into a game of charades to help him out.

“I saw…someone? No. Something?”

Alyssa nodded.

“Like what?” Christina asked.

“I, uh…” He looked to Alyssa, who was running around the bathroom with her fingers in the shape of a V over her head.”

“I don’t know. It looks like a rabbit—no? A what? What the hell is that?” he whispered to Alyssa.

“A cockroach,” she answered, offended that he didn’t get it. “A cockroach!” he thundered. “That looked nothing like—”

“You have roaches?” Christina asked, sounding disgusted.

“No!” he snapped at the door.

“You said—”

“Forget what I said.” He glared back at Alyssa. “I, uh, just thought I saw a gray hair.”

“Oh,” Christina said dubiously from the other side of the door.

“A gray hair?” Alyssa challenged, frowning. “You’d freak out like that over a gray hair?”

“Maybe.” Q rolled his eyes. “By the way, what happened to my privacy?”

Alyssa shrugged. “I waited until you had finished showering.”

“I don’t get this. How in the hell am I being haunted by someone who is still alive?” He headed toward the door.

“Maybe that’s why you need to go back and see Dr. Turner.”

“No! I’m not crazy!” Quentin snatched open the door.

Christina, clutching the top silk sheet to her chest, asked suspiciously, “Who are you talking to in there?”

“No one,” he answered too quickly.

Christina peered over his shoulder and looked into the empty bathroom. “You know, uh, I really should be going. I, uh, have a very full day tomorrow.” She turned and started grabbing her clothes.

“Wait. You don’t have to leave,” he said.

“Don’t worry. I’ll call you later,” she said, moving like someone had struck a match to her behind. Less than two minutes later, she was dressed and racing out of the house with Q trying to catch up so that he could at least walk her to her car. But just as he reached the front door, it slammed in his face.

At the top of the stairs, Alyssa folded her arms. “That went well.”

The next day Quentin stretched out his six-foot-two frame across the black leather chaise, staring up at the ceiling in Dr. Julianne Turner’s downtown Atlanta office. Truth be told, he’d surprised himself by returning to the doctor’s office for another round of therapy, especially since he didn’t really believe that there was anything wrong with him.

“Oh, there’s plenty wrong with you,” said Alyssa, his hallucinated sister-in-law/fantasy-lost-love from across the room. She wore that damn white wedding gown again today. Their marriage was a scab that everyone had hoped would heal over time, but so far—no dice. He’d been the one who his li’l Alice had a crush on. It was he who had first fallen for the li’l minx when she’d grown up to become a beautiful fashion model. It was Sterling who had discouraged Quentin from pursuing a relationship with her—since according to his brother she was like their younger sister—only to have him turn around and marry Alyssa himself.

“I wish you’d put something else on,” Q mumbled under his breath to his mirage.

“Like I have something to do with what I have on,” Alyssa said, throwing up her hands. “I’m not really here!”

“What was that, Quentin?” Dr. Turner asked, sitting across from him in a straight-backed chair.

“What? Nothing.” He shook his head at the doctor, who took great pains to hide her lush curves under large, unflattering clothes. The fact that she dressed so frumpy bothered him more than it should have. He didn’t understand why beautiful women did things like that. Didn’t they understand their power?

Alyssa smirked. “Are you really sitting there thinking about having sex with your psychiatrist?”

“Who said anything about having sex with my doctor?” Q snapped.

“Excuse me?” Dr. Turner said, looking up from her notepad.

“What? Nothing.” He glared at Alyssa, who shrugged her shoulders.

All right, yes. Quentin knew that it wasn’t exactly normal to be seeing and talking to someone who wasn’t there. But as far as he could tell, it was just a coping mechanism until he could work through his conflicting emotions. So far, it was better than getting drunk and being pulverized in bar fights—which had actually been his first line of defense.

Dr. Turner started scribbling in her yellow notepad. “You think today you’ll tell me who it is that you see and talk to?”

He hesitated as Alyssa raised her eyebrows. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he lied. “I’m here because…I want to understand…”

“Love?” the doctor suggested.

Quentin bobbed his head while Alyssa shook hers.

“That’s a tall order, Mr. Hinton,” Dr. Turner said, crossing her long, chocolate-brown legs, which continued to distract him. A connoisseur of women, Quentin had spent his entire adult life enjoying learning all there was to know about women—sexually, that is, he proudly boasted. He loved nothing more than to lose himself in the curve of a woman’s hip, the valleys between and around a pair of succulent breasts and, of course…other hidden treasures.

“Quentin?” Dr. Turner repeated, breaking his trance from her long limbs.

“I’m sorry. What?”

Alyssa huffed out a frustrated breath and plopped down in an empty chair across the room. “This is a complete waste of time. This isn’t about love. To you this is about winning and losing.”

Quentin frowned, but before he could ask Alyssa what the hell she meant by that, Dr. Turner cleared her throat. “I said that trying to understand love is a tall order. Many people spend their entire lives trying to figure it out, nurture it and even control it.”

“I’ll take control for two hundred, Alex,” Alyssa said, mimicking a Jeopardy! contestant.

“Humph.” A half smile curled Q’s lips.

“I guess I’d be remiss if I didn’t add those who try to run away from love,” she said.

Once again, they had hit his category and the room fell silent.

“Have you given any more thought to calling your brother Sterling?”

I think about it all the time. “No.”

“Do you think that you’ll never be able to forgive him for the wrong you feel that he has done to you?” Dr. Turner asked.

Quentin held Alyssa’s gaze from across the room. “I’m not sure.”

“That’s different from the flat no last week,” the therapist gently reminded him.

He stopped and weighed his words carefully. “Trust…is still an issue.” He shifted in his chair and ignored the way his beautiful mirage frowned at him. “No matter what has happened in my life, the constant power struggle between me and my father or the insane messes I found myself in, I always thought that I could trust my brothers. Sterling…Jonas. We’re each different. Granted, they are megasuccessful and now happily married with children, and probably a dog and even a white-picket fence. I never questioned their loyalty or intentions. I believed that my brothers, more than anyone, always had my best interest at heart.”

Q shook his head. “How do you learn to trust someone again after they’ve poured gasoline on that bridge and blown it up?”

“Perhaps by reaching out?” Dr. Turner suggested.

“So it’s all on me?” The idea repulsed him. “I wasn’t the one with the gasoline.”

The statement hung in the air as Q struggled to swallow the huge boulder in his throat. He even blinked back a few tears. “It’s not that I don’t miss Sterling. I do. I just don’t know how to go about forgiving him. But then when I think about my cousin Xavier—”

“Xavier King?”

Quentin nodded. “I told you about him and his brothers the last time.”

“Yes, your coveted boys’ club.”

“I believe that boys’ club is your terminology—not mine.”

“But they were who you ran to as a substitute for your real brothers since Sterling and Jonas were no longer available bachelors for you to hang out with.”

“I never said that my cousins were substitutes.”

“Weren’t they?”

Quentin shifted in the chaise at the provocative question. “No, not consciously.”

Dr. Turner removed her black-rimmed glasses from her perky nose. “Do you mind if I disclose some observations that I’ve made about you?”

Quentin turned his tall frame onto his side to meet his doctor’s soft, steady, brown-eyed gaze. “You mean that I actually get to hear a little of what you spend hours jotting down on your little yellow notepad?”

She smiled reflexively as she crossed her arms over her lap. “You’re a creature of habit. You have a hard time adjusting to change. And when things don’t turn out like you expect them to—as eventually happens—you seek out those things that will give you a sense of familiarity.”

“Please.” He gave her a dismissive shake of his head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“No? When your father cut you off financially, didn’t you rely on women to support you in a fashion that you were accustomed to instead of getting out there and making your own way?”

“Wait. I’m a successful businessman in my own right.”

“Now, but not then. And when your brothers were no longer available to pal around with, you sought out the next best thing, which is a family of cousins whose dynamic was much like your own.”

Alyssa waved her finger. “Ooooh. She really is good.”

“You’ve said that before,” Q reminded her.

“It’s still true.”

“I don’t remember us discussing this before,” Dr. Turner said.

“Sorry. Not you. I was talking to someone else,” he said before thinking.

“I see.”

He winced and waited for her to ask the obvious question again, but she surprised him and let the comment go. However, Dr. Turner’s pen went back to scribbling. Great. At this rate, I’ll be in a mental hospital by the end of summer.

“Xavier,” Dr. Turner suddenly said. “You were about to tell me something about your cousin?”

Quentin allowed himself to relax a little. “Um, yeah. I was saying that my cousin Xavier had sort of a similar situation with trust when love came knocking on his door.”

“Ah. Another player bites the dust?”

“Exactly.” Quentin laughed, but continued to nod his head. “Of all the players I thought would ride this bachelorhood thing until the wheels fell off, it was him. I mean, I can tell you some stories that would make your hair stand on end.”

“You two are best friends?”

“Absolutely,” Q said, nodding, but then his smile slowly started to fade. “Of course, after his older brother Eamon married Victoria, I should have seen the handwriting on the wall.”

“Oh? How so?”

“Bad things usually happen in pairs.”

“I always heard they happened in threes,” she corrected thoughtfully.

“That explains a lot,” he grumbled with a roll of his eyes, and then stared back up at the ceiling. “Like I was saying, Xavier had to overcome some major trust issues. But then again, maybe all it takes is for the right woman to come along….”

Chapter 1

“Welcome to The Dollhouse Atlanta,” Xavier King exclaimed, sweeping his huge, muscular biceps toward the newly renovated club. The enormous white stone building looked more like a high-end shopping mall than a gentlemen’s club smack dab in the middle of downtown Atlanta. “So what do you think?”

This latest renovation of the Atlanta club started off as a small-scale repair project, much of which resulted from the damage done by an old-fashioned bar fight involving a patron who had tried his best to permanently rearrange his cousin Q’s face. But once Xavier got started, the project got bigger and bigger, to the point that the once modest-size club now rivaled the infamous Cheetah Lounge in square footage.

A little-known fact was that Atlanta was the strip-club capital of America. So Xavier took the attitude that The Dollhouse needed to go big or go home. He went big. Really big.

Quentin Hinton, Xavier’s best friend and cousin, stepped out of his black Mercedes and cocked his head so that he could get a better view of the exterior. “Hmm.”

Climbing out of the backseat of the car, Xavier’s younger brother Jeremy took one look at the place and declared, “I love it!”

Xavier’s chest swelled with pride as his pearly white smile stretched from ear to ear. “I knew you would. C’mon inside. Let me show you what else I’ve done.” He waved for them to follow him.

Once they entered through the glass doors, they walked across the black marble floors of the lobby.

“Niiiice,” Quentin finally said, bobbing his head as he took in some of the erotic artwork hanging on the walls in gilded frames. “Took it old school, did you?”

“Just a little bit.” Xavier winked and then turned. “Here is where the club’s concierge/hostess will be,” he said, pointing to a matte-gold podium. “This will also be where the limo service will check in or out when bringing in clients from Bachelors Adventures or patrons from any of the surrounding hotels.” He waved them on to follow him through the lobby and through the club’s main arched entryway.

There, both Quentin and Jeremy gave a low whistle of approval. The first thing that caught their eyes was the long U-shaped runway in the middle of the main floor with elevated seating along the side. The next thing that drew their attention was the two forty-five-foot-long bars surrounded by cushioned leather bar stools that flanked two lighted side-by-side dance stages. The rest of the seating on the main floor consisted of stationary counter-height tables with chairs.

“You’re a genius,” Q praised as a smile crept up his face. “If you tell me that you’ve added a loft upstairs, then you’ve just built my fantasy dream house.”

Cocky as ever, Xavier raised his hand to his lips, blew on his nails and then buffed them on his chest. “Well, I don’t like bragging. But—yes, I am a bit of a genius.”

“And the head swells bigger,” Jeremy joked with the appropriate eye roll.

They all laughed as the three continued to tour the redesigned club.

“See, the way I figure it, every evening the girls will descend the staircase leading to the main runway stage. That way, they can fill the room for a showcase revue and a two-for-one dance special. Off to the far right, we have a mini VIP area, which is where the customers can have a more private lap dance. And of course upstairs we have the main VIP room for private parties like Bachelors Adventures.”

Xavier watched the two take it all in. Their opinions were important. Not only because they were family, they were business partners, as well. Until recently, there had been four owners. Quentin, the initial investor, and the three King brothers: Eamon, Xavier and Jeremy.

Eamon jumped ship after falling in love with billionaire heiress Victoria Gregory. It was a love that had almost fell apart after Xavier put his foot in his mouth by mentioning how much Victoria looked like Eamon’s first love, Karen, who’d been killed by a drunk driver. It was definitely the wrong thing to say to a woman. The hardest part for Xavier was having to come clean to his older brother, and telling him what he had done. It was a good thing he had a strong bond with his brothers. Eamon never once blamed him for being dumped by Victoria and hightailing it back to New York. That was when Eamon made the decision that he wanted the rest of them to buy him out of the business.

Ever since then, guilt gnawed at Xavier. He couldn’t shake the idea that somehow he was responsible for his brother tossing in the towel to become a full-time restaurateur…and husband. Turned out that chasing after Victoria was just the thing he needed to do in order to win her back. But the four musketeers were now down to three.