Free Dare To Love Series: Daring Ink (Kindle Worlds Novella) by Avery Flynn Page A

set her mind to figuring out who it was.
    But now she was crying. For him. For a man she barely knew.
    According to logic, Sawyer’s betrayal should have hurt the least. The fact that she was fully dressed, laying in bed with a pillow over her head to muffle her tears didn’t make one bit of sense, so she did what she always did at times like these: She went to work.
    By the time the lunchtime lookie-lous started coming into Daring Ink, the tattoo studio was blindingly clean. The metal sparkled. The leather gleamed. The glass appeared nonexistent.
    “Oh my God, did you have to cover up a murder? This place reeks of bleach.” Staci ambled into the studio and tossed her purse down on the formerly pristine display case. “And you look like hell. Do we have Mr. Tall, Blonde and Buff to thank or to punch for this?”
    “Punch.” At least then they’d be even because she felt like shit after no sleep, a bucket full of tears and a gallon of Clorox.
    Staci looked at the three men wandering around the studio looking at the flash. They all had on expensive shoes and cheap, ill-fitting pants. They were the kind that window-shopped but never bought.
    “You three.” She pointed a long canary yellow fingernail at them. “Vamoose. Come back when you have balls enough to get decorated properly.”
    As soon as they crossed the threshold she flipped over the Open sign and locked the door. “No one else comes in for another hour. Tell me everything and leave nothing out.”
    So she did. She poured it all out, including the screaming orgasms and the weird but sweet way he’d told her goodnight through the wall last night. By the time she got done, Staci was on her second soda and her third piece of gum.
    “I see two options.” Staci held up two fingers in a V. “You can kill him or I can. I know people, and this is Miami, so there are a ton of ways to dispose of the body without anyone knowing a thing.”
    “I don’t want to kill him.” She may have thought about it, but she didn’t actually want to off him and Staci really did know people.
    “I have a cousin who’d break his leg, a compound fracture at the very least.”
    Penny shook her head, a smile tugging at the corner of her lips. “I’m not going to jail because my heart’s broken.”
    As soon as she said the words she realized they were the truth. Somehow, between slipping shut-up-already notes under Sawyer’s door and right up until that elevator ride from hell last night, she’d let him in. Was it love? Not yet, but it was something that would have grown into it. She knew it as well as she knew that anyone who got a lover’s name tattooed on their forehead had exponentially upped their chances of breakup in the near future.
    “Look.” Staci sat down next to Penny on one of the tattoo tables and put her arm around her shoulders. “You’re my best friend and I love you, but twenty-five is plenty old enough to learn that a fuck is a fuck and a great fuck is totally amazing, but neither is love.”
    “Tell that to my heart.” The one so broken that shards of it were poking into her lungs and making it hard to breathe.
    Staci cocked her head to the side and gave her a considering look. She brushed a stringy strand of hair out of Penny’s face, which, Penny knew after she’d made the mistake of looking in a mirror earlier, gave Staci an unencumbered view of the dark circles under her eyes and the bright red coloring on the tip of her nose.
    “Oh hell.” Staci leaned her head against Penny’s. “You got it fast and hard—and I’m not talking about the banging.”
    Penny let out a chuckle that turned into a sniffle that morphed into a quiet wail. “What do I do now?”
    Her best friend—the woman who could fix a busted pipe, balance a ledger and call in muscle to rough someone up—shrugged her shoulders. “That is something only you can figure out for you. But if you decide to go with the leg-breaking thing, let me know and I’ll get you the family