CHAPTER 1

Asher

SOMETIMES IN LIFE, YOU MAKE a mistake so big there's no coming back from it, not ever, not even if you get down on your knees and beg.

You want to try. You might anyway, being that desperate. But you can't.

Even if you're used to getting what you want 99.99 percent of the time, it turns out there is such a thing as too late.

I found that out today.

"Ash," Charis slurred against my chest, "there's something important I need to tell you."

And there it was. That moment.

Right then, with my best friend in the world slumped against my arm, her sweet, warm body trying to mesh into mine—that's when I finally saw the scale of my incredibly stupid, epically epic mistake.

I don't make a lot of them. Seriously, I'm kind of a charmed devil. When I do occasionally screw up—say, time traffic wrong so I'm late for a dinner date—it's no biggie. Win some, lose some.

But this one…it's not your common little misstep. No, my current goof was a fucking ginormous error of judgment that assured me I was about to be severely punished—smoked like Erysichthon, that poor bastard doomed to suffer endless hunger for disrespecting a holy tree.

Swear to God, I'd rather not know shit like that. I've got bucketfuls of pointless trivia stored in my brain. Greek myths, Latin roots, Archimedes's messy bathing habits, you name it, it's Charis's fault. Char's always getting into obscure topics and sharing irrelevant facts with me. She's kind of adorable to listen to.

And to hang with.

And to watch.

And….

Aaaaand, back to the mistake. The mistake for which I was about to be punished. Punished to the pain, like the foul-assed Count Rugen in The Princess Bride.

And the worst part?

I did it to myself.

I'll just say that again. To. Myself.

I'm not talking about one of my older sibs getting one over on me. No, turns out I was the asinine individual who took a big old dull-headed screwdriver branded Norrell and stabbed myself in the gut—the heart—and twisted. Screwing myself.

Most people will tell you I'm usually not quite that idiotic. You know, what with my full-ride scholarship and dual major in Earth Sciences and Electrical Engineering. Listen, I'm building devices that can monitor weather patterns in light of planting and harvest sequences. Not only that, they automate the tracking of agricultural prices in areas as diverse as production, distribution, and investment, providing useful, one-stop relational data to everyone involved in agriculture worldwide from the farmers to the—

Wait, okay, I know. Not relevant. The point is, I have a 3.86 overall college GPA , three patents plus two pending, and my own LLC that's already turning a dizzying profit—the kind of profit that makes it a tossup as to whether I should actually bother to graduate this year.

I'm the guy who sees what he wants and goes after it. Everyone told me to sit on my inventions as some kind of cagey investment strategy. But why sit when I could invest the profit from selling off the games I'd co-written with my brother Doug to Funiverce Systems right back into my business?

That's what I did. And in the process, made farming a more efficient industry. Saving farmers money. Saving you, the consumer, money. If you eat wheat, lentils, canola oil, potatoes, garbanzos, or onions, you've benefited from my tracker.

Meaning?

Meaning I managed to turn my brain power into financial power before I even hit 23.

Not an idiot so far, right?

But forget all that fancy shit. You might chalk my success down to luck and working my connections. I'd dispute that, I'd say I work hard, but whatever.

From way back, I've got street savvy. Comes from spending my early years in Detroit, before my parents packed us all up to move closer to Dad's family in greater New Highland, Washington. You're probably thinking, New Highland, posh tech city, right? Nah. Out here on the east side of the state, whatever's not urban is rolling farmland. Where I live now isn't rough, but you learn a thing or two when you grow to manhood with two brothers, three sisters and a pack of exuberant cousins from the sticks.

You might say I'm blessed with the four big advantages we Norrells like to pride ourselves on: Brain smarts. People smarts. Street sense. Common sense.

So I damn well have no excuse for Charis.

Wait, let me back up and revise that. We guys always have the perfect excuse for everything.

Our cocks.

My cock did it.

That's my excuse. My brutally stubborn cock took one look at Aura Renaldi, the most breathtaking freshman on the MCU campus, and said, that, that's what I need.

It turns out I did need it…but not the way I thought.

And because of that, because of my big, stupid lie, i.e., self-deception, i.e., the willful ignoring of my cock and my heart, I will always remember for the rest of my life Charis Sloane blurting out "I'm getting married" and passing out on my lap.

Oblivious to the fact that she'd just fucked my world.