Chapter One

 

Wade rolled to his side, still half asleep, and came face to face with the reality of the night before.

Well, to put it more precisely—he realized as he rolled away from yet another strange woman—the reality of his life.

He sat on the side of the bed, arms braced on either side of him, head hanging low and heavy. His ears made an alarming boom-booming sound in time with his heartbeat while his mouth felt like the inside of a barn on a hot August afternoon—complete with the animal shit.

He heaved himself up to his feet and wobbled a few seconds when the sunlight hit his eyes.

“Gawd, what time is it?” a female voice drawled behind him.

He grunted in lieu of reply and headed for the blessed relief of a scalding hot shower. Thus revived, he emerged, immediately irritated by the smell of coffee. He was pretty sure he’d made it clear the night before—what he remembered of it anyway—that he didn’t do the morning after thing.

Some women refused to take him seriously on that point. This one, apparently, was one of those types.

After checking his phone to make sure he hadn’t been called in—this was his long weekend off, but he had a standing order to consider him available for on-call work in a crisis—he grabbed a pair of clean underwear from the dresser, found jeans, then yanked a Shiner Bock labeled T-shirt over his torso.

He paused before he tucked the phone into his pocket and sniffed the air with a frown. The distinct, admittedly mouth-watering scent of frying bacon filled the house.

Damn women. What was it about their genetic make-up that caused them to go deaf to reality? If Wade Roberts picked you up at a bar and brought you home for a nice hard fuck, you were not supposed to stick around the next morning and play house.

He didn’t play house. He’d done that exactly once in his life, and it had brought him nothing but furious heartache.

He stomped down the vast hall of oak-planked flooring in the house he’d inherited from his uncle where he’d ‘played house’ with a wife for a grand total of five years and where he’d lived alone for the past five. As he was turning the corner into the giant, custom-finished, commercial-grade kitchen, ready to say something rude enough so whatshername from the night before would take a huffy hike, all the spit dried up in his mouth at the sight that greeted him.

Yeah, there was coffee on. He would know his favorite expensive brand of Italian blend java anywhere. And bacon was indeed sizzling away in one of the many two-hundred-dollar frying pans on the eight-burner stove. But instead of finding the woman from the night before—a real hellcat in the sheets, he recalled, when stinging sensation flared along his back and ass from her fingernails at that precise moment—standing there in one of his shirts and a pair of his boxers as he’d found so many of these nameless women—instead, she was as naked as a jaybird.

Her wild tumble of red-gold hair spilled down her back and shoulders. Her lips—swollen nicely from his efforts—were split in a come-hither grin.

“Uh,” he said as his body sprang to immediate attention in a way that forced her gaze downward. “What’re you . . . I mean . . .” He pointed to the pan. As he watched, she turned off the burner and picked up a can of whipped cream—the kind he preferred on the pecan pie his sister made and brought him with pleasant regularity. She shook it, sending her firm tits bouncing oh-so-temptingly.

Wade swallowed hard and shoved aside the fury over the woman’s clinginess that had gripped him since he got out of the shower. The woman—damn, what was her name?—stuck out her tongue and sprayed a dollop of cream on it. His entire body tingled. The distinct, somewhat unpleasant sensation of all the blood in his body rushing to fill his dick forced him to grip the beveled edge of the imported marble counter to keep from keeling over.

She licked her lips, then sprayed a tiny helping of the cream onto each of her nipples and crooked her finger at him. Wade launched himself at her, knocking over a tall chair at the corner of the island in the process. His brain went into shutdown mode, and his heart slammed against the inside of his chest as he dropped to his knees, dragging her down with him.

“I was gonna kick you out,” he said, pinning her arms up over her head and latching onto her pre-sweetened nipples. Wade liked to fuck and preferred it hard—the rougher, the better. That was one area where he and his cheating bitch of an ex-wife had been well-matched, once upon a time.

The woman giggled and pretended to struggle against his grip on her wrists, which revved him up even higher. He sucked one nipple, then the other, going blind with lust while, at the same time, zoning out in a way that had become way too familiar.

A way he knew damn good and well was not great for his mental health—or his attitude about women in general.

“Oooh, baby,” she squealed as he moved down her stomach, landing between her legs and tossing them over his shoulders so he could focus on her pussy. Goddamn but he loved pussy, he mused as he got to work.

With a groan, he sensed her chemistry shift and her odor sharpen as her heels dug deeper into his flesh, aggravating the scratch marks with the sort of pain-slash-pleasure that made his cock leak.

He loved this moment—the one right before he sent a woman straight over the edge into orgasm land. The smells and sounds of a turned-on female had always been something he craved—so much he’d gone out of his way to experience as many of them as he could before he found the one he loved. And who, he’d presumed, would love him back in a formal ’til death part us kind of a way.

Wade slammed that particular memory door shut in his head and reached high inside her body with one finger, stroking an area behind her pubic bone. With a loud cry and a full body shudder, the nameless woman from the night before climaxed on his expensive, cork-tiled kitchen floor, smacking her fists on the surface of it.

Eventually, he pulled away, watching her stretch like a satisfied cat. Putting his finger in his mouth, he smiled when she opened her eyes, shot him a look, then lurched up and had him unbuttoned, unzipped, and freed of his underwear in the blink of an eye.

“Suck it,” he demanded, fisting the base of his cock. “Take it down your throat like I know you want to.”

She smiled and slid forward, positioning herself between his legs. Wade braced on the countertop behind her and closed his eyes as she took him exactly the way he’d told her, making him thrust his hips forward, wanting more, needing the release so badly, he ached all over. But even as he approached orgasm, he sensed himself shutting down, pulling away from it, from her, and from this whole sordid, bullshit scene.

The anger surged through him with a vengeance, suffusing every muscle and tendon, every pore and particle of him. He could see his ex-wife as if it had only been yesterday, jeering at him across this very expanse of a room, reminding him he was just a no-account, junior doctor hick who’d never really satisfied her. All this after he’d discovered an illicit series of text messages on her computer tablet between her and some surgeon at the hospital where she worked.

Goddamned lying bitch. With that surprising jolt of bizarre reminiscence, he pushed the woman sucking his cock back and away from him. “Turn around and stay on your hands and knees,” he said, his voice harsh even to his own ears.

Lips glistening, she obeyed him, making him angrier at her, at himself, at his stupid, useless life. Even as he slammed into her, making her cry out, and those sweet, inner muscles clamping down on his dick, and not his fingers this time, he hated himself. Even when he came with a loud roar of primal pleasure, he hated what he was doing. Even as his hips kept thrusting against her ass, their bare skin slap-slapping together as he emptied into her, Wade wanted to die.

Finally, he finished and pulled out of her, rising to his feet fast, the toned muscles in his legs and ass allowing him the smooth escape. He yanked up his jeans, noting with mild disinterest that he hadn’t even taken them all the way off. “You can go now,” he said, reaching for one of the oversized ceramic mugs tucked away in the cabinet over the too-expensive coffee maker.

The woman got to her feet and tried to put her arms around him. He sidestepped her, poured the coffee and walked to the television, ignoring her and hoping to hell she would just get the message and get out, not forcing him to speak the words running through his brain right then. Already headed straight into shutdown mode, with his body sated and his mind blank, he turned once and saw her standing, naked, leaning on his ex-wife’s ten-thousand-dollar kitchen island. She glared at him, her eyes dark.

He sipped his coffee and waited. “What?” he demanded of her. “I made it clear last night. This means nothing other than what it just was. Beat it, already.”

“Kelly was right,” she said. “You’re a colossal asshole.”

“Yeah? You should’ve listened to Kelly. Whoever the hell that is. Go on. Go home. And don’t call me, got it? I don’t do repeats. That’s something else I told you last night before I let you come home with me.” He raised an eyebrow at her. “And don’t cry because I don’t give two shits about women crying.”

She did cry. Wade steeled himself against it. She then got dressed, found her purse, and headed for the large front door in her walk-of-shame get up from the night before. What had I seen in her anyway? he mused as he watched her wobble around on too-high heels in a too-short, cheap, slutty dress.

You saw pussy, Wade, he answered himself. Sweet, nameless, fuckable pussy. The same thing you see every night of your long weekends off.

Oh, right, he agreed with himself, sipping more rich caffeine. That.

The woman turned and favored him with one last glare. He waggled his fingers at her, bidding her farewell.

“You fucked Kelly two weekends ago, dickhead. Remember? She told me to go for you this weekend ’cause you show up at the same sorry-ass bars every other weekend looking to get laid.”

“Well, then, mission accomplished. Good for me. Take a hike, and tell Kelly I said thanks for the recommendation.”

He didn’t know any Kelly, of course.

He never bothered to learn their names.

His phone buzzed in this pocket. After pulling it out and noting that it was a call from the station, he exhaled slowly.

“Beat it, sweet cheeks,” he said, turning away from her. “Gotta go save somebody’s life.”

The door slammed hard. But he barely noticed door slams anymore.

“Yeah,” he barked into the phone as he picked up the business card with the name Samantha Jean Weaver, Realtor and the words Sam Sells with the pound sign in front of it next to her e-mail ([email protected]) and her phone number.

“Hey, Chief. Sorry to bother you on your weekend off,” a voice said. He dropped into an overstuffed, overpriced leather chair with a grunt, Sam Weaver’s card in his hand.