From New York Times bestselling author Eric Jerome Dickey, “one of the most successful Black authors of the last quarter-century”* comes a novel about the how one chance meeting can change everything in this thrilling, sexy tale of star-crossed lust. They say the love of money is the root of all evil, but for Ken Swift, it's the love of a woman. Ken is twenty-one, hurting people for cash to try to pay his way through college, when he lays eyes on Jimi Lee, the woman who will change the course of his entire life. What's meant to be a one-night stand with the Harvard-bound beauty turns into an explosion of sexual chemistry that neither can quit. And when Jimi Lee becomes pregnant, their two very different worlds collide in ways they never could have anticipated. Passion, infidelity, and raw emotion combine in Eric Jerome Dickey's poignant, erotic portrait of a relationship: the rise, the fall, and the scars⁠—and desire⁠—that never fade. * The New York Times Praise for Before We Were Wicked “From wanton to wicked, the love-hate relationship between Dickey's characters burns with rapid-fire dialogue and plenty of steam.”— Kirkus Reviews “The love story Dickey tells...is potent. Readers will want to read Bad Men and Wicked Women again after being immersed in this edgy, emotional adventure.”— Booklist “A passion-filled prequel that puts a new spin on the familiar conflicts that have made him a household name.”— Essence “Nobody currently publishing today writes sex better than Eric Jerome Dickey.”— Electric Review More Praise for Eric Jerome Dickey “Dickey’s fans flock to his readings....He’s perfected an addictive fictional formula."— The New York Times “Dickey has the knack for creating characters who elicit both rage and sympathy.”— Entertainment Weekly “Eric Jerome Dickey’s work is a master class in Black joy....[his] characters—bold, smart women oozing sexuality and vulnerability—navigate interpersonal conflicts using dialogue that crackles with authenticity.”— The Atlantic Eric Jerome Dickey  (1961–2021) was the award-winning and  New York Times  bestselling author of twenty-nine novels, as well as a six-issue miniseries of graphic novels featuring Storm ( X-Men ) and the Black Panther. His novel  Sister, Sister  was honored as one of  Essence ’s “50 Most Impactful Black Books of the Last 50 Years,” and  A Wanted Woman  won the NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Work in 2014. His most recent novels include  The Blackbirds ,  Finding Gideon ,  Bad Men and Wicked Women ,  Before We Were Wicked ,  The Business of Lovers , and  The Son of Mr. Suleman . ***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof*** Copyright © 2018 Eric Jerome Dickey C H A P T E R 1 Los Angeles, 1996 That Friday night we’d been sent to Club Fetish by our employer, San Bernardino. I was a bill collector, a small-time enforcer, and had to talk to a stubborn man about an overdue debt. He was ninety days late with the duckets.That was the night I met her. I was driving; had the top down on my convertible Benz, warm air turning cool as we moved through desert county down unforgiving La Cienega Boulevard . La Cienega was Spanish for “the swamp” and rightfully so, since it was always inundated with traffic. My coworker and I had rolled north from the edges of Culver City to the overcrowded area up into Hollywood, had left the workingmen’s zip codes around ten p.m. and mixed in with the pretenders and tourists rocking BMWs, Lamborghinis, and Maseratis. A couple of DeLorean DMC-12s were on the road with the luxury and sports cars. A Ghanaian who called himself Jake Ellis was at my side. He was my wingman. We were well dressed, fashionable, as I moved us from Leimert Park to the plastic and pretentious side of Los Angeles, the mile-and-a-half stretch of Sunset between Hollywood and Beverly Hills known worldwide as the Sunset Strip. Bright lights, six lanes of snarling traffic. Hundreds of clubs and bars existed on a snaking street that stretched from the bustle of downtown LA’s Garment District and her skid row to the ocean-side mansions of the rich and more-famous-than-rich in Malibu. One end of Sunset was poverty and obscurity, and the opposite end was fame or fortune, or fame and fortune if enough people loved your acting, your directing, or the cocaine you sold. That twenty-two-mile boulevard was a metaphor. It was everyman’s journey. Not many made it from Crackland to Cocaineville. Men like me had started in the middle but still had spent all of their lives trying to make it from one end to the other. Women had done the same. I wasn’t even halfway. Most days felt like I was still at the starting gate. But I was young. I had time. As we crawled past the Comedy Store, Jake Ellis asked, “Bruv, we set?” Checking out droves of foreign women as the club hopped, I nodded. “We set, bro. We set.” “You strapped?” “Yeah. But I’m leaving it in the stash spot. Security’s gonna search us.” J