Deadly Games Read online

  Deadly Games

  Kylie Hatfield Series: Book Three

  Mary Stone

  Bella Cross

  Copyright © 2019 by Mary Stone and Bella Cross

  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 written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Mary Stone

  To my husband.

  Thank you for taking care of our home and its many inhabitants while I follow this silly dream of mine.

  Bella Cross

  To my family. Thank you for your unending support, love, and patience while I navigate this exciting new world of publishing.

  Contents

  Description

  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

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Kylie Hatfield Series

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Description

  Digging up the past can be deadly...

  Adam Hatfield disappeared from Kylie and her mother’s lives when she was only four days old. Had he only been playing games when he made a family? Or was there something more sinister at play?

  Kylie Hatfield, assistant private investigator extraordinaire, has it made. Mostly. But something is missing. A born digger, Kylie isn’t one to let a mystery stay a mystery, and her father’s disappearance is quickly becoming the most important case she’s ever tried to solve.

  She needs closure before she can fully commit to Linc Coulter, the former Army MP and search and rescue hero whose new mission is to protect Kylie from herself. But you can’t protect what you can’t find. And Kylie has, once again, chased a mystery into dangerous territory.

  When she finds her father, Adam Hatfield may seem like a successful billionaire on the surface, but something lurks beneath. Something dangerous and deadly that soon makes Kylie wish she hadn’t learned the awful truth.

  Turns out, digging up the past is not a game at all.

  If you like quirky characters and faithful dogs along with your goose bumps, Deadly Games, the third book in the Kylie Hatfield Series, will pull you in and make you rethink ever opening your closet doors.

  1

  Kylie Hatfield sat back in her office chair and stretched her aching back. She felt like she was eighty instead of twenty-four. It wasn’t even six o’clock yet, but the light outside was waning as the shorter days of October took their toll on downtown Asheville. She still had an hour of official daylight, but the dimness made her yawn. She’d driven into work when the sun was just popping up over the mountains, skipped lunch, and now, it felt like she’d been huddled over her computer for a thousand years.

  Such was the life of a private investigator.

  Sure, she’d had her exciting moments out in the field. But the cheating lover’s attempted murder by rattlesnake, the run-in with the serial killer, and the brush with the embezzling murdering art thief notwithstanding, most of her time was spent butt-in-chair, trying to slog through a bunch of dull-as-dishwater research.

  Actually, this was better than what she’d been hired for back in the spring. Filing. That was a fate worse than death. Luckily, she’d managed to add other things to her resume, but since it was a two-person office, it was still part of her job description.

  She leaned forward and typed some more search terms into the keyboard. At least Greg, her boss, had finally gotten into the century by outfitting the office with two new computers. Actually, Kylie wasn’t sure that they were new, exactly. Her boss was notoriously thrifty when it came to provisioning the office the two of them shared. These particular computers ran on Windows 98 and had probably been rescued from a dumpster somewhere, but she wasn’t going to bite the hand that fed her. She was happy to have something with a screen, and not that infernal typewriter that she’d grown to detest during her first months at Starr Investigations.

  After about five minutes of chugging, grinding, and buffering, the computer finally spat out the results of her search. Kylie lifted her notepad and took some notes. The little mystery she’d been hired to conquer was slowly inching its way toward a solution.

  Her client, Barbara Davidson, had found out late in her fifties that she’d been adopted by using one of those at-home ancestry kits that were all the rage these days. She’d wanted Kylie to see if she could compile any data that could help her to track down her real parents.

  Easy-peasy. But not exactly exciting, or even compelling.

  Not exactly the kind of stuff that made Kylie love being an almost private investigator. She didn’t even have to look back at her own broken home. She’d seen enough illegitimate births and jilted lovers to make her question whether love really existed, oh, about a thousand times in the past year.

  Kylie had been working as Greg’s right-hand-girl but was quickly rising in the ranks from his filing clerk to assistant private investigator. In between almost getting herself killed a couple of times, she’d handled plenty of cases that involved a lot of research, and at least five that involved tracking down parents like Barbara’s, so this was old hat. There was always a cheating, two-timing lowlife at the bottom of things like this.

  Barbara’s dad likely had an affair, and she was the product of it. He’d been married, unable or unwilling to part with his wife, and the other woman was shut out and hadn’t been able to raise the baby on her own.

  Kylie yawned. That was probably the thing she’d come to hate most about her job. All the cheating scumbags out there. It made her wonder if it was possible for anyone to be honestly in love with anyone else, or if lust, desire, greed, or simple boredom always got in the way. These cases were seriously a dime a dozen.

  It was the things that happened rarely…the serial killers, the murderers, the bad guys who put her heart in her throat that she loved. She loved different.

  Not that any of those things helped restore her tarnished faith in humanity. No, Kylie sometimes went home and understood very well why Greg, her boss, was the biggest grouch on earth. Even Kylie the Optimist had seen her outlook made slightly stormier by the job.

  And different hardly ever happened, at least that was what Greg told her repeatedly, although he also told her that she appeared to be a magnet for trouble. That the murdering embezzler slash art thief of Kylie’s last different case was a one-off, he’d said. As was the serial killer she’d dealt with previously. And the snakebite couple. According to Greg, Kylie had seen more action in the past few months than he’d seen over his entire PI career.

  Now, in the past few days since she’d returned to work after almost dying…again…the most exciting thing that could even possibly qualify as different was when an old lady had come in and wanted her to find her dentures, which she’d lost somewhere in her house.

  Different, yes. Not exactly som
ething that would get her heart racing again.

  She was embarrassed to admit that she’d been so bored she’d actually accepted that case. But the old lady was so distraught and looked like she needed an understanding ear, so Kylie had walked her home, taken her inside, and found the dentures two minutes later in her medicine cabinet. She hadn’t accepted any payment except a freshly baked lemon cake. Greg still wouldn’t let her live that one down.

  Once, when she brought down the Spotlight Killer, a case that had gotten her national attention and her own special on Dateline, she’d thought she was on her way up.

  She sighed, wondering if those last few cases were just dumb luck. After all, very little ever happened in Asheville, North Carolina, the quiet little city nestled in the Appalachians. Even Linc, her boyfriend, hadn’t been called out on a search and rescue in at least a week, and his best friend and local detective, Jacob, had remarked that the place had lost whatever pulse it’d had over the summer.

  They weren’t complaining, though. Only Kylie minded. The men liked boredom, liked tooling around and going out for coffee and donuts and twiddling their thumbs, shooting the shit even as Kylie felt like a noose was tightening around her neck. Too much sitting made her antsy. Was it too much to ask for a little excitement every now and then?

  As she prowled around online, running a search of birth announcements around the time Barbara Davidson was born, or any criminal activity that might have been reported around the date of her birth, she yawned even louder. Kylie understood the need to know where a person was from. She did. Sometimes, she wondered it about her own self.

  Actually, more than sometimes. Especially in her line of work.

  Kylie’s mother, Rhonda, was the only parent that she’d known from a very young age. And as she’d convinced herself, time and time again, all that she needed. Rhonda had been the age Kylie was now, with a new baby, when her husband simply decided not to come home. Kylie remembered her mother shedding many a tear when she was younger, and she’d always attributed those tears to her father, who was nothing but an image on a faded photograph.

  The bastard had probably traded her mom in for a better model. At least that’s what Rhonda Hatfield said on the few times Adam Hatfield was brought up.

  The very few times.

  Rhonda Hatfield had managed quite well without him, so why ruin things by talking about the past?

  But truth be told, whenever Kylie got into an investigation like this, her fingers itched. It’d be so easy to simply pop the name Adam Hatfield into the search database and see what came up, especially since another Hatfield had been recently making the news.

  It seemed that anytime she saw a man with the last name of Hatfield, she automatically wondered if he was her father. And when she realized he wasn’t, she was let down.

  Not just let down. Profoundly disappointed.

  She was a curious person by nature, which had gotten her into more than enough trouble. But what good could come of digging up the life of a man who clearly didn’t want to know her? None. Absolutely none. So, she’d always resisted.

  Until now.

  The more she thought about it, the more that little itching became a full-on rash, one that she needed to scratch.

  “Don’t,” she said aloud, balling her hands into fists so her fingers wouldn’t work the keyboard and type in his name. “Bad idea.”

  She looked down at Vader, the giant Newfoundland mix she’d rescued from the side of the road. Vader whimpered as if to echo her sentiments. They were the only two left in the office, since Greg had gone off on “surveillance,” which he seemed to do more often on nice days like this.

  Kylie often found herself talking to her dog. Of course, she often found herself talking aloud to no one in particular. Kylie was just chatty. Sometimes she couldn’t keep her mouth shut. She knew it drove a lot of people—her boyfriend especially—nuts, but she still couldn’t manage to stop herself.

  Impulsive. That’s what people called her.

  A fact that was so evident now as her hands shook in front of her.

  She studied the screen, the search bar, waiting for her to input whatever she wished to know more about. The cursor blinked, taunting her. Go ahead. Do it. It’s not a big deal.

  “Oh, yes, it is,” she muttered, clicking the X to get out of the program. She looked at Vader, who wagged his tail at the attention. “What does it matter what he’s up to? Really! He doesn’t care about me. Why should I give a rat’s ass what he’s up to these days?”

  Vader gave her a hey, I never knew my dad either look in return.

  “Right. Not knowing your dad doesn’t make you any less worthwhile,” she said to him, slipping her foot out of her shoe and running it through his thick fur. “You’re still my favorite little drooly morsel.”

  She linked her fingers behind her head, thinking. It was true. A lot of people lived perfectly happy lives not knowing one or both of their parents. And there were people like Linc, who knew his dad, but barely got along with him.

  She’d gotten along better with Jonathan Coulter the last time they’d met, but she still thought Linc’s father was a grade A douche, nothing like his yummy son. Linc still dreaded going to family dinners at his parents’, and she wasn’t much better. Knowing how rare a perfect family was, Kylie knew she had nothing to complain about.

  Still, that itch was there.

  Growing stronger by the minute.

  She clenched her teeth together so hard, willing her fingers to be good, until she could stand it no more. She let out a loud, “GAAAAAAH!” before throwing herself over the keyboard. She needed a nap.

  Just then, the bell over the door jangled. She peered up to see Linc through the veil of her hair. He looked worried. “Your day’s going that good? Wow.”

  Linc Coulter, dog trainer extraordinaire. Right in the nick of time, as usual.

  Still, she stiffened. It wasn’t that she didn’t love him. But he’d been acting weird around her lately, covering up his phone whenever she came into the room. She didn’t think he’d be the type to two-time her, but she wasn’t sure. After all, as her father and line of work had shown, it was all too common.

  There was another possibility too. Maybe he’d been thinking about getting her a ring? They never talked about marriage, but he’d told her he wanted a family, and he was thirty, and he’d been semi-pressuring her to move in with him. Every time he showed up out of the blue, she wondered if he was going to drop to one knee and propose.

  She wasn’t sure what would make her more nervous—two-timing or proposing. Because both of them were scary, scary stuff.

  She sighed with relief when she saw that he held a couple of Panera bags in his hands. Not a velvet-lined case. And he didn’t have lipstick on his collar or anything, either.

  So, neither. Neither was good.

  His German Shepherd, Storm, obediently trailed in behind him and greeted Vader with a nonchalant sniff. Vader’s tail went wild, but he’d gotten much more controlled lately. Just a couple months ago, he’d have knocked down a brick wall at the chance to sniff another dog.

  Kylie jumped out of her chair and ran for Linc, grabbing the bags and giving him a peck on the cheek. “My day’s definitely getting better…you brought me lunch?” She looked inside the bag and pumped her fist. He knew her so well. “Yes! Bacon Turkey Bravo! To what do I owe such a surprise?”

  He gave her an odd look and followed her into the office that was a converted vacuum showroom. “Can’t I just surprise you without a reason?”

  I suppose you could, she thought. But I’ve been spending all my time thinking about two-timing scumbags, so I’m suspicious that you did it because you feel guilty about something.

  “I guess.” She pushed her computer keyboard aside and pulled the cartons out. “That’s very nice. Thank you.”

  He shrugged, but still seemed to watch her closely. “I was in town, picking up the stuff I needed at the hardware store. And you were…” He scratched at
his chin. “Exactly what were you doing that got you so frustrated?”

  The last time she’d mentioned the possibility of looking up her dad to Linc, he’d told her that if she wanted to, she should. She knew that’s what he’d say again, and then she’d do it. His warm, chocolate brown eyes always convinced her to take that extra step. And as much as she really wanted to . . .

  She really didn’t want to, either.

  It was just too scary to think of, what might come up the second she punched in his name.

  She gave him a sheepish look. “Oh, nothing. Same old work woes.”

  He nodded. That, he wouldn’t question. After dozens of false career starts, Kylie finally felt like working as a PI was her dream job, but it still had its problems, and Kylie wasn’t one to keep things in. She complained about the boredom almost every chance she got. He had to have seen her getting antsy for a real case—for the past few days, she’d been practically exuding frustration out of every pore and bouncing around the house like a jumping bean.

  He sat down across from her and dug into his salad. “Well, relax. Something’ll come along.”

  Not that you want it to, Kylie thought, putting a straw in her iced tea. If Linc had gotten his way, he’d have wrapped her in numerous layers of bubble wrap by now. He was constantly worrying about her. Of course, he had his reasons.

  He’d seen enough terrible things during his time in the war and had been struggling for the past few months with PTSD. He always gave her her freedom, but not without a hell of a lot of overthinking and what ifs. Whenever he got overprotective, she always tried to remind herself that his caution was good for her. She did have a tendency to go off without thinking, again and again, and it did get her in trouble.