Wildcard (Stacked Deck Book 1) Read online

  WILDCARD

  STACKED DECK BOOK ONE

  EMILIA FINN

  WILDCARD

  By: Emilia Finn

  Copyright © 2020. Emilia Finn

  Publisher: Beelieve Publishing, Pty Ltd.

  Cover Design: Amy Queue

  Editing: Bird’s Eye Books

  Cover model: Chase Ketron

  Cover Photography: Eric McKinney/612 Photography

  ISBN: 979 861 745 594 8

  This Book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This Book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return and purchase your own copy.

  To obtain permission to excerpt portions of the text, please contact the author at [email protected]

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of Emilia Finn’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale, or organizations is entirely coincidental.

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  Contents

  Also by EMILIA FINN

  Looking To Connect?

  WILDCARD

  1. Ben

  2. Evie

  3. Ben

  4. Evie

  5. Ben

  6. Evie

  7. Ben

  8. Evie

  9. Ben

  10. Evie

  11. Ben

  12. Evie

  13. Ben

  14. Evie

  15. Aiden

  16. Evie

  17. Ben

  18. Evie

  19. Ben

  20. Evie

  21. Ben

  22. Ben

  23. Evie

  24. Ben

  25. Evie

  26. Evie

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Also by EMILIA FINN

  Looking To Connect?

  Family…

  Can’t live with them.

  Can’t bury them in the woods.

  Also by EMILIA FINN

  (in reading order)

  The Rollin On Series

  Finding Home

  Finding Victory

  Finding Forever

  Finding Peace

  Finding Redemption

  Finding Hope

  The Survivor Series

  Because of You

  Surviving You

  Without You

  Rewriting You

  Always You

  Take A Chance On Me

  The Checkmate Series

  Pawns In The Bishop’s Game

  Till The Sun Dies

  Castling The Rook

  Playing For Keeps

  Rise Of The King

  Sacrifice The Knight

  Winner Takes All

  Checkmate

  Stacked Deck - Rollin On Next Gen

  Wildcard

  Reshuffle

  Game of Hearts

  Full House

  Rollin On Novellas

  (Do not read before finishing the Rollin On Series)

  Begin Again – A Short Story

  Written in the Stars – A Short Story

  Full Circle – A Short Story

  Worth Fighting For – A Bobby & Kit Novella

  Looking To Connect?

  Website: www.emiliafinn.com

  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EmiliaBFinn/

  Newsletter: https://bit.ly/2YB5Gmw

  Email: [email protected]

  The Crew: https://www.facebook.com/groups/therollincrew/

  Did you know you can get a FREE book? Click here for Bry and Nelly’s story: BookHip.com/DPMMQM

  WILDCARD

  STACKED DECK BOOK ONE

  EMILIA FINN

  Ben

  Sixteen Years Old

  “Come on, Sasquatch.” Evelyn – Evie – Kincaid bounces on her toes and taunts me with jabs to the ribs with knuckles that aren’t strangers to full-contact fighting. She’s already a champion fighter, and she’s not scared of being the most obnoxious person in the room. “Come out with us,” she pleads. “It’ll be fun.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  She’s already turning away – she expects my compliance without question – so I pull her back around and stop her diabolical plans before they end with her incarceration.

  Evie is fifteen, a whole foot shorter than me, and knows how to fuck with my brain in ways nobody else can. She’s my weakness, when on the outside, I pretend I have none.

  “Have you not noticed yet that every time you get a genius idea to do dumb shit, it all goes to hell, and Mac ends up in the emergency room?” I turn to my best friend and look the poor guy up and down. Mac still walks with a limp from the last time we snuck out. “He can’t sustain any more Evie-ness.”

  She recoils. “Evie-ness? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Evie and evil are kinda the same word, no? Tell me I’m wrong.”

  She scrunches her button nose and jabs me once more. “You’re wrong. And you’re an ass, too.”

  “They’re the same words in my mind.” I reach around and give her ringlet ponytail a gentle tug until her gaze comes up to mine. Her eyes are the brightest blue, like ocean water on the most exotic island, and surrounded by thick lashes that contradict her platinum blonde hair. “Let’s watch a movie instead. That way, Mac won’t get hurt. It can be girl’s choice, us boys won’t bitch about it.”

  “You promise?” Her grin creeps up. Evil. How does no one else associate Evie and evil? “No bitching at all?”

  I grin and step closer so her shoulder touches my chest. “Pinky promise. Anything you want.”

  “Princess Bride.” She flashes the widest, most beautiful smile that shows off a perfect set of pearly white teeth. Her smile makes me smile. It always has, because when she’s happy, everyone is happy. “No negotiations.”

  “No!” Mac throws his hands up. “I swear, we’ve watched that a billion times this year.”

  “No negotiations,” she sing-songs. Turning away and breaking the electrical current that runs between her body and mine, she climbs through the ropes of the boxing ring in the middle of her family’s gym, and leads our group down the long hall and into her stepdad’s office.

  We don’t call the people around here ‘steps.’ Aiden Kincaid is her father in every way that counts, just like her cousin, Lucy – aka Bean – who walks just behind me with Mac, says ‘Daddy’ when she speaks to Jimmy Kincaid, though her biology runs the same as mine.

  Ben Conner the First was an adulterous prick with a mean streak and a tendency to hurt women, and though Lucy and I didn’t grow up in the same home, she is still, as far as blood and protection goes, my biological half-sister. Lucky for her, she grew up with Evie’s family, and not mine. She got out before she was even born, whereas my mom, sister, and I had to take the longer route and collect our licks on the way.

  Ben Sr. is dead now, and has been since I was four. Which is how I’ve n
ow found myself in the Rollin On Gym on a day-to-day basis.

  Thank you, Mom.

  Every person that walks through these gym doors belongs to a family of mishmashed members and steps – stepmoms, stepdads, stepsiblings – but we all eat at the same table. We train in the same gym. We attend the same school. And when we get angry, we fight it out in the same ring, with fists and words rather than sulking and grudges.

  Evie snatches up the TV remote with a fast sweep of her hand as soon as we enter Aiden’s office. Wearing only a sports bra and booty shorts for training, she flicks on the flat screen and changes it to the correct channel.

  Evie has spent almost every single day since she was two years old in this gym. Fighting, training, coaching, or heckling. Oftentimes, she does all four at the same time, which means after more than a decade of disciplined time spent on the canvas, walking around in booty shorts is a non-event for her. It’s her daily uniform, her second skin, and her trained and toned body makes it so she never has to feel self-conscious.

  She moves around her dad’s desk and crouches down to scrounge through the bottom drawer. “Snacks. Soda. My best friends in the whole wide world,” she adds as Bean and Mac follow us in, “and Prince Humperdinck.” Peeking over the desk, her bright eyes meet mine. “Right?”

  “Yeah.” I drop down on the couch Aiden Kincaid has pushed against the wall, and wait for the others to join us. Lucy sits on my right, and Mac drags his feet as he crosses the room and sits beside her. But I save room on my left for Evie.

  Because that’s her spot. It’s always been her spot.

  She takes snacks from her dad’s drawer, loading her arms up until they overflow with bags of chips and candy bars, and dumps it all into my lap when she stops in front of me. Watching movies in her dad’s office is like her happy place. Where some girls want expensive things, or trips to faraway lands, Evie takes the most pleasure in a dark room with a flickering movie, and it only gets better when she’s stocked with enough bad food to choke a three-hundred-pound man.

  She acts like she’s high-maintenance, and God knows she comes from a line of royalty, but she might be the least spoiled person I know. I mean, she always wants to get her way, and she’ll argue until she’s blue in the face, even if she’s wrong. Even if she knows she’s wrong, she’ll argue. But the things she demands in payment are not expensive or exclusive. She just wants to spend time with people. With her mom. With her sisters. With her dad. Best of all, with us.

  The four of us – me, her, Bean, and Mac – make up a group of the best people on this planet. Mac Blair is my best friend, and cousins or not, Bean and Evie are closer than any friends I’ve ever met. They fight like puppies over the last feed, but they love each other fiercely. There isn’t a person on the planet that could come between any of us. So as a group of four, we’re kind of inseparable. And despite the bad attitude I carry around like it’s a fashion accessory, Evie’s happy place is my happy place.

  I love sitting in the dark watching movies with these guys too.

  Dropping down onto the ratty couch beside me, Evie brings her feet up, and lets her bare legs lean a little to the right until they rest on my thigh.

  “I love this movie,” she whispers.

  Her smile is magnetic, and her hair tickles my neck because it’s that big. Blonde curls as far as the eye can see. She draws eyes in every room, because of her beauty, because of her loud mouth, but before you get a glimpse of those, you see her hair. Ringlet curls that, if pulled out straight, would stretch down past her ass. She wears it in a ponytail while sparring, or a braid while grappling, but when she’s not doing either of those, she lets it hang wild and loose.

  It was the first thing I noticed about her when we met as children. I was four, she was three, and though we kind of clashed horns every time we were in the same space, we still made it to where we are today. Then and now, her hair is the first thing I see every time I enter a room that she’s in.

  Unfortunately for me, it draws every other male’s eyes, too, and fighting them off without drawing attention to my actions has become a full-time job in itself.

  People assume I must hate that her daddy is an overprotective bear. He’s a champion fighter that trains world title contenders, and he absolutely doesn’t play when it comes to his daughter. But in reality, he’s my saving grace. He keeps the sharks away from his baby, and imposes a strict no-touching rule for anyone that is male and isn’t related to her.

  His actions help me sleep better at night.

  I mean, I’m not allowed to touch either, but I can handle that rule so long as it’s enforced for everyone.

  One day, we’re all going to be grownups, and when that time comes, I’ll be able to make my move and tell her that I kinda love her. It’s part of my five-year plan, but until then, I’ll help Aiden with the shark repellent. I’ll keep his baby safe, and switch out the shiny things, things like sneaking out, with something much safer.

  Like watching Princess Bride for the billionth time. I’ll watch that douchebag Westley fight for Buttercup – Who the fuck names their kid ‘Buttercup’? – six trillion times, so long as Evie sits beside me and shares her bag of candy.

  The opening credits begin, and Evie’s hand plunges into the jumbo bag of M&Ms on my lap. Bean and Mac sit together and gossip about whatever they want to gossip about – fighting-related, for sure – and Evie and I do the thing we do. Evie sighs over the love Westley has for the princess, and I watch Evie, because her delight at watching their love story unfold makes me happy.

  Smiling and chewing her chocolate, she leans against me a little way into the movie. “Wanna spar after this?” The other two are focused on each other, talking fight technique, so Evie’s words are merely a whisper, and only for me. “We could go into the octagon and get a few rounds in.” She tosses a ball of candy into her mouth, and when I open mine, she grabs another and tosses it for me to catch. “Five rounds of three minutes.”

  “Five?” I study her china doll face and lift a brow. “That’s a lot of rounds.”

  She shrugs. “I gotta work the sugar off after this, or I won’t be able to settle tonight. Mom will get mad if I come home hyped-up and break another vase.”

  I look into her bright eyes and wonder if they still have capital punishment in this state. Because kissing this girl is surely punishable by death. Her daddy would kill me. Her uncles would kill me. Even my mother would kill me. But when she smiles at me the way she does… it makes it real hard to stay alive.

  “Ben?” she prods on a whisper. “Wanna spar?”

  I nod and give her knee a gentle pat. “Five rounds of three. Me and you.” I flash a wide grin. “As you wish.”

  Evie

  Two Years Later

  “Mom! I don’t want to go. I don’t need to get a degree.”

  “Yes, baby, you do.” Mom – aka Tina Kincaid – stops walking laps into our living room floor, and pauses right in front of me. She looks just like me… or, well, I look just like her. Our only difference is the fact she got perfectly straight hair, while I got my father’s curls. And her face bears scars from a horrible relationship she had forever ago… another gift from my father.

  Sean Frankston is one of the worst of the worst. He’s a bad man who sold people and product as a way to make a living. He’s in prison now, and has been since I was a toddler. He’s nothing to me, and receives no thought except for a spike of anger whenever I see my mom’s scars.

  I mean, they’re right there on her face, so I see them every single day, but they’re so much a part of her, I don’t see them except when my brain wants to screw with me. On those days, Sean Frankston’s name flashes through my mind and sends my heart galloping with adrenaline.

  Sometimes I daydream about seeing him again. I play it over in my mind, and always – always – end up with a knife in my hand in these dreams. I want to hurt him, and I want to make it a permanent mark, just like the kind my mom has to live with.

  The man I ca
ll ‘Biggie’ walks up behind my mom and slides his arms around her stomach to keep her close. His touch calms her. His presence makes her happy.

  Someday, when I marry a man, his touch is going to calm me too. His presence will be the only thing I need to stay grounded and happy.

  It’s impossible for me to settle on some dumbshit in high school, when the love I see at home is this powerful.

  “Babe…” Mom pulls out of Biggie’s arms and slowly moves forward to crouch down in front of me. “I know you’re going to fight. We know you’re going to be a champion. We know this about you, but you need something else.”

  “I don’t want to go away to school,” I whine. “I don’t want to leave this place.”

  “It’s a four-year degree, baby. And you’ll come home every single holiday.”

  “But Bean won’t be there.”

  “She’s two years behind you. She’ll join you soon.”

  “And Mac?”

  “Honey…” Mom’s eyes soften. “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter.”

  “Ben.” My voice cracks and makes me sound like a sissy. “I don’t want to leave Ben.” He’s my best friend. He’s my everything, but at the same time, he’s my nothing.