Tall, dark, and dangerous, Reny Stark is from the wrong side of the tracks. A criminal, a thug, and a brawler, he’s the best at making bad choices, until one such choice landed him in prison for five years. Now Reny is out and has a great big chip on his shoulder. Having lost everything, he has no future. He’s unemployable, and the only place he can afford to live is in a cheap rundown room in the plague pit of New York City called Gangland. At one time he didn’t care what he had to do to stay alive, but now he’s trying to stay clean -- but the gangs won’t let him. Since he’s not a member of any gang, they’ve fingered him as their assassin, and one night he is forced to honor a contract on someone’s life, or die. Having little choice, he haunts the city streets until he finds his target, and hates him on sight. He’s everything Reny is not. He’s young, ambitious, good looking, and with a great future ahead of him. This man is so clean he squeaks while Reny is covered in the dirt of the ghetto, stuck with a prison record, and no hope of ever getting out. Because his target has had an easy life, Reny expected a soft, prissy guy that wouldn’t put up much of a fight, but instead he looms hard and tough, and refuses to go down. Ric Ferrand may be young, but he knows all about living a hard life and the tough choices that come with it. Although he’s always had kind of a yen for the wild side of life he’s tried not to let the evil of the city pull him down. But now the streets are fighting back in the person of Reny Stark, the scariest, sexiest, and most complicated ex-con this big city has ever produced -- and this tough guy wants to kill him. Then something happens that Ric didn’t count on. He slowly gets so know and understand the brute whose next stop is Death Row, and begins to have feelings for him. Taking a big chance, he invites him home where the contract killing gets lost between the sheets making Ric realize some guys are just better when they’re bad.

Walk on the Wild Side

“I had to dig for some of it, but yeah, it was there.”


“Then you must be in love with every chef in New York.”


“Where the hell did you learn to do all this?”


“I don’t know. It just kind of comes natural. Anyone can cook, can’t they?”


“Nope, I don’t think so,” Ric said as he chomped down on the most delicious French toast and bacon he’d ever tasted. “I mean, do you have recipes…that sort of thing?”


“It’s all up here,” Reny said, tapping on his forehead.


Reny smiled as Ric continued to dig in. “I have to admit, I love to see people enjoying the food I cook.”


“The food you cook? You mean…what are you some kind of short order cook, or chef of some kind?”


“No. The closest I’ve ever come to cooking was when I cooked in a diner one time, but that didn’t last long. Later I got implicated in a crime that went down, and…”


Chapter 11