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Chapter One
Dakota Turner had one freaking job. Wear a sleek black evening gown and heels, a lace mask to conceal her eyes, red lipstick, and perfume, then stand next to an insanely large diamond, sitting on a plush velvet cushion encased in a glass dome.
Oh, and when the time came, she had to open the casing, extract the diamond, place it into a box, and hand it over to her boss.
That was all fine... Except she also had to secretly exchange the genuine diamond for a fake one buried in a pouch underneath the table where the glass dome was to be placed and then present that one to her boss instead.
Someone once told her assumption was the mother of all fuckups.
They were wrong.
Distraction was the boss’s boss of the mother of all fuckups.
And boy, had she been distracted.
Living paycheck to paycheck, when there were paychecks to speak of, had not been her ideal life situation, but no matter how hard she tried to crawl out from under the mountain of debt and general misfortune, the more she remained stuck.
She took more after her father than she cared to admit. They shared a similar proclivity for bad luck, which explained how, after his death, she'd inherited the debt he'd accumulated, traipsing from one failed undertaking to the next.
Legitimate institutions refused to entertain his whimsical business plans, so he turned to other means to finance himself. The kind of other means where unpaid debts were recouped with broken legs.
Yes. He took money from those kinds of people.
Now, if she didn’t pay up what her father owed, it would be over for her, as in, she would cease breathing.
To say her life was a bit of a mess would be understating things.
She had a half-finished degree in business and not enough work experience to carry her forward. Her first job as a low-paid assistant’s assistant came to an abrupt end when she was fired after just five days of employment.
Well, she had completely botched the job when she had to step in and drive the big boss to the airport for a crucial, very profitable meeting.
It would have helped if she had driven said boss to the correct airport.
To cut a long story short, flights were missed, screaming sessions were endured, and jobs were lost.
After that, she worked part-time as a waitress, a cashier, and a dog walker.
But then she landed the perfect job at a bakery. She handled all kinds of administrative and financial tasks for the little bakery's married owners, with the perk of free donuts for life.
Until the wife won the lottery and they decided to close up shop, pack up all their belongings, and see the world.
Such had been her luck.
The very generous bonus the bakers had given Dakota made a significant dent in her debt, but that meant she was back to looking for a new job while she still had one abominable debt collector breathing fire her way.
The longer she remained unemployed, the more her bills began to pile up again, and the more fiendish the shark she owed money to became.
No one had been more astonished than Dakota when her neighbor, whose glare could kill on sight, knocked on her door one random day about a month ago and told her about a possible job.
The blue-haired, full-body tattooed Raven Smith had gruffly said she knew about Dakota’s money troubles—obvious from the undesirable characters who kept popping up at her door—and she knew about a short-term gig at a casino that might help Dakota out of her mess.
She still wondered how on earth she and Raven had become friends after that, but stranger things had happened, she supposed.
Dakota tried not to laugh her ass off when she read the details about the job.
The specifications on their own were... unusual.
The right candidate was about average height, slim, with a small waist and big breasts. D-cups were highly preferable, but a full C-cup would be okay if the candidate met more than 80% of the other criteria.
