Chapter One
Ross woke with a start, sitting straight up in bed so fast if felt as if his brain had whammed against the front of his skull before settling back into place again. Sunlight streamed through the windows, piercing him in the eyeballs, not helping the dizzy, unfocused, mushy sensation.
“Ow,” he muttered as he swung his feet around to the side of the bed. When his mind registered that he couldn’t do that, that something warm was blocking his way, the something made a noise, rolled and exposed a perky pink nipple to his befuddled gaze. At that same moment, someone else touched his shoulder, making him flinch as he stared at the nipple, trying to get his bearings.
Ross licked his lips as the memories rushed back in on him, bombarding his battered, hung-over system with the force of an invading army. The hand on his shoulder became two and together, they slid down his bare torso. As he watched, the lovely nipple disappeared, then materialized as one of a matched set, on a gorgeous set of breasts, suddenly at his eye level.
“Wait,” he said. But waiting wasn’t on the agenda. The hands behind him tugged him onto his back and into the soft nest of stark white sheets and soft cotton blankets. Ross let his mind fuzz back over and his body take the lead as he reached out and his hands landed on hair. Hair on the head of the woman who had his dick down her throat. He arched his back and let her do her thing while some other chick kissed him, then sat on his face.
Ross wondered for about a half second who these women were, where he’d found them, what he’d said to convince them to engage in his favorite position for a threesome. But the half-second passed, and he no longer cared what the answer to any of those hypotheticals was.
The woman on his face came, then slid off him and onto the bed, purring with satisfaction. Ross swiped the back of his hand across his wet lips and focused on the stellar blow job he was receiving. As he groaned into the sun-struck room and pumped his hips at his climax, something about his life felt one hundred percent wrong. Something important was missing.
And he knew damn well what it was.
“All right, you ladies had your fun. Time to vamoose. I gotta get to work.” Ross sat up and sniffed the air, frowning at the aura of pot and spilled booze. “Jesus, this place is a fucking pigsty,” he said as he lurched up and stumbled into the bathroom, forcing all thoughts of what was missing from his life out of his head. He couldn’t afford to think about it—about her—ever again.
He nearly scalded his skin off in a thirty-minute shower, blessing the gods of tankless hot water systems and his own luck for finding this palatial mansion to rent while its owner was on sabbatical from the University. Once he emerged, he saw that the bed had been made, the crap picked up off the floor and the women, thankfully, were absent. Rubbing his hair with the thick white towel—these owners were obsessed with the whole tabula rasa thing—he stood naked at the bank of windows overlooking the mountain view.
Stunning, really. Wish Evelyn could see it.
No, stop. Not going there.
“Hey, sweet buns, you want some coffee?”
He whirled around, heart in his throat. One of the women stood at the large kitchen island dressed in one of his brewery T-shirts, flapping her eyelashes at him.
“Thought you’d left,” he half-said, half-grumbled to himself as he headed back to the bedroom for clothes. As he zipped and buttoned his jeans, he forced the anger down and out of his head. It would do no good to come across as an asshole. Who knew when he’d like to have this woman over for another round?
Frowning at himself in the mirror, he made a mental note to get to the barber. Both his hair and his beard needed some professional help. He’d let them both grow out since bolting from Michigan and they were wild-looking, unkempt. Very much unlike him.
Even as he tied his hair back with a bit of leather string, he could hear her voice. “I like your hair long and your beard short,” Evelyn would say. Ross blinked at the memory, attempting to banish her yet again from his brain.
His skin tingled, though, and all he could hear was her voice, all he could feel was her soft curves under his hands.
“Ross,” she’d whisper in his ear. “Make me come…”
“Shit!” he yelped when someone pressed up against him from behind. “Cut it out.” He peeled the woman off him and stomped into the large living room, dining room, kitchen combo room. The space was huge—almost a thousand square feet of open living—fronted by a whole wall of the glass. Smells of coffee hit his nose, calming in that Pavlovian way it always had. He filled one of the professor’s stainless steel travel mugs and grabbed his keys off the magnetic rack on the wall next to the fridge.
He could sense his temper lurking, somewhere down deep in his gut. While he didn’t want to be a dick to the woman still prowling around in his space, he had no interest in being anywhere near her either. She needed to get the fuck out. But in lieu of telling her that, he left instead, absenting himself from the area she was making proprietary little circles around, like women tended to do on his mornings after.
He shook his head as he climbed behind the wheel of the late-model truck—another perk of renting this house. Something about a night in the playground of his bed always seemed to bring out the clinginess in women. Especially lately. Maybe it was the rarified air up here. Maybe it was his own air. Did he come off as desperate somehow, desperate for love versus seeking to get laid? He needed to work on that, ASAP.
As the truck took the hairpin turns and inclines on his way into town and toward the brewery, Ross had to open all the windows wide to let the cold air clear his head, lest he give in, grab his phone and call her. Hell, to call Austin for that matter.
He’d pulled a classic dick move, and he knew it. And refusing to talk to either of them beyond the basics of, ‘Yes, I’m alive. I’m fine. I needed to get out of the way of your happily ever after or I was gonna go nuts’ wasn’t helping his cause.
“I don’t care,” he insisted to himself, sipping and driving the truck with one hand, not caring one bit whether or not he made it or if the fucking thing slid off the ever-loving mountain, which would, he figured, put him out of his misery once and for all.