Page 1 of The Wrong Idea (The Kinky Bank Robbers #2)

Chapter One

“John and Franny Tyler,” Thor said to the hotel desk clerk, handing over two driver’s licenses.

I smiled brightly, hoping she wouldn’t notice anything weird about our very fake documents. We’d gotten them together in a mad rush; we hadn’t expected to be on the run today.

On the upside, my awesome curly wig matched the picture perfectly, and Thor was very convincing in his backwards baseball cap, just the thing to match the bro look he had going as John Tyler.

The fakery worked like a charm.

The woman handed over our keycards and pointed us to the elevators.

I let out a breath that I didn’t know I was holding and grinned at my fabulous fake husband.

If somebody was able to go back in time and show young me a video of the future where I was checking into a luxurious hotel with Thor, I would never have believed it.

I was a poor sheep farmer with a part-time bank job, struggling to care for my sisters. So, a fancy, glittering hotel—in Los Angeles of all places?

No way.

And a pretending to be married to a man who looked like Thor?

Please.

Handsome didn’t even begin to describe Thor. With his blond hair and his athletic physique, my Nordic bandit was molten-lava-level hot.

His hotness had the power to melt faces, to topple walls, to change the topology of vast swaths of land.

Just no way.

You couldn’t expand my mind widely enough to contain such a possibility.

And if you’d informed past-me that, yes, it was, in fact, real, and that I’d been whisked out of my monotonous life by three gorgeous, brilliant, kinky bank robbers? And that I’d experience unimaginable thrills with them?

It would’ve seemed like a dream.

In many ways, it was a dream.

Unfortunately, dreams have a way of changing on a dime.

And there was definitely trouble brewing in our little paradise—and not the good kind.

Thor turned to me, pretending to fumble with his bag. “Odin just arrived. He’s in the lobby. See him? Left side by the palm.”

I glanced over and spotted Odin. “Mmm.”

Odin was in disguise, too. He wore a velvet track suit, sunglasses, and a large, unfortunate mole on his left cheekbone. I’d helped him pick out the mole this morning. It had seemed like too much, what with the size of it and the hairs sticking out of it, but Odin was pulling it off.

Odin looked good in anything.

He’d come in a different vehicle, of course. We were being all kinds of careful because my guys’ enemy, ZOX, had likely figured out by now that I was more than a passing acquaintance of the trio.

Even worse: they had a photo of me.

We needed to figure out next steps.

It was bad that they had the photo of me—really, really bad.

They could use the photo to figure out my identity, which would give them a new way to get to my guys—and yes, I was thinking of them as my guys at this point.

My biggest fear was that ZOX would track down my sisters at the farm and threaten them as a way to gain leverage over us. Or once my guys sent me home—an idea that I hated—ZOX could always go after me, too…if they were to learn my identity.

ZOX would do just about anything for leverage over Zeus, Odin, and Thor.

So we had to prevent them from learning who I was.

Thor and I paused at the elevator until Odin caught up to us. I hit the button and the three of us got in and rode up in silence, acting like strangers for the elevator cameras.

Finally, we reached our room. Odin collapsed on the bed.

“Did you get them all?” I asked.

Over the last twenty-four hours, Odin had been hacking into lots of social media accounts belonging to me and other people that I knew, grabbing and subtly altering every photo of me possible, changing my face just enough to confuse the photo recognition software that ZOX was surely using.

“Almost done,” he said. “Facebook and Instagram have been handled. The DMV, of course. The picture on the farm website. I hit your grade school and high school photos, and luckily nobody took many pictures of you at the bank. What worries me is the photos we don’t know about.”

“Right.” That was the big worry. I set my bags in one of the rooms. We’d gotten a huge suite, as usual, with a sweeping view of red roofs and palm trees and mountains in the distance. “I’ll keep thinking and adding to the list.”

“Did Zeus make contact yet?” Thor asked.

Zeus had gone back to my little town in order to protect my sisters from afar, just in case the worst happened—aka if big bad ZOX figured out who I was and went after them.

Things still felt a little weird between Zeus and me, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it would always feel that way.

“He called an hour ago,” Odin said. “He’s been all over that place and lurking around your farm. Nothing’s going on. Well, nothing aside from the expected.”

The expected .

I sighed.

The expected was my sisters being frantic about me having been taken away as a hostage last month during a robbery at the bank where I worked—a takeover robbery , as they say in the biz.

They’d been worried out of their minds, of course, and in constant contact with law enforcement.

They even went on TV to plead for my release.

“How do they seem?” I asked. “Did he say?”

“They’re getting back to work,” Odin said. “The younger one is back in school, and Zeus has been monitoring that.”

“Good,” I said. It was good that she was back. “And nobody suspects him?”

“Zeus is an elite operative who has infiltrated heavily guarded enemy compounds. He can blend into a sleepy little town and keep tabs on some farm girls.”

I nodded. Of course he could do that. I could only imagine how heavily armed he probably was. He’d get my sisters out of there if ZOX showed up.

But long term? I didn’t know what we’d do.

Thor grabbed a ginger-ale from the minibar. He twisted off the cap and tossed it across the room into the garbage, making a clean shot of it.

My bandits were good at everything. It was impressive, but also sad, because they had to be good at everything. You can’t slip up when you’re a fugitive. That’s when you die.

“The good news is that I might have a lead on the photo they got,” Odin said. “We need to see how bad this is.”

“A lead on the photo? From who?” Thor asked.

“From Tabby. We’re meeting her tonight,” Odin said.

“Does Tabby have a copy of the photo, or just a way to get one?” Thor asked.

“It’s Tabby,” Odin said. “Everything has to be a mystery with fucking-g Tabby.”

I smiled. I loved Odin’s accent, the way he pronounced words like fucking with an extra syllable: fucking-g Tabby.

“Riiiiiight,” Thor said.

“Please let it be a shitty security camera photo,” I said, sinking down onto the bed next to Odin. “Please, please, please, please!”

Odin slung an arm around my shoulders. “We got this,” he said. “Whatever it is, we’ll deal with it.”

If the photo ZOX had of me was a good one, that would be trouble.

And if ZOX figured out who I was? It’s not as if we could take my sisters on the run with us. And what about our farm? Our herd of sheep? Our dog?

Hence my fervent hope that it was a blurry security photo. When it came to identifying a person, a blurry photo was as useless as a kid’s crayon drawing.

“Where are we meeting this Tabby?” I asked.

“Guvvey’s,” Odin said. “It’s kind of a nightclub.”

“Guvvey’s?” I asked.

Odin grinned. “You’ll like Guvvey’s.”

“Or hate it,” Thor said.