I’d never had a woman look at me with such disdain before. I didn’t consider myself perfect—far from it, in fact—but I was well aware of my effect on women, and to say her reaction to me just then was surprising was an understatement.

Her mouth opened and closed like a goldfish. “I’m… you… I can’t… are you…,” she stammered. “Do you know me?” she asked in bewilderment. “Do. You. Know. Me?”

Hearing her repeat the question, slowly, like she was speaking to a five-year-old, didn’t make me understand what was happening any better.

I nodded, racking my brain to try and remember where it was I knew her from. “I swear to god I know you from somewhere. You look so familiar.”

She did that open-close thing again with her mouth before barking, “You asshole!” Then she turned on her heels and stormed off.

Minutes ago I’d been in the sound booth with Grayson and the two guys who ran the behind-the-scenes part of the radio show, watching the blonde with the killer rack and a set of legs that went for miles. Now I was standing in an empty hallway with my mouth hanging open like an idiot. “What the hell just happened?” I asked myself.

“Seems to me you just got blown off by the insanely hot Daphne King.” I whipped around at the unexpected voice and saw the pimply faced kid who’d been in the booth with us earlier. “What’d you do, bang her and forget to call her the next day or something?”

“What? Of course not! I’d remember someone like h—” Visions of a stunning blonde with a body made for sin and no gag reflex suddenly filled my head. “Oh fuck,” I groaned. It had been more than two months since that night, but it was definitely her.

“Holy shit,” the kid breathed. “You totally forgot her, didn’t you? You forgot having sex with Daphne King? Jeez, man, are you crazy? That woman’s like God’s gift to the universe!”

She’d rocked my entire fucking world that night. I remembered thinking that I was going to do everything in my power to track her ass down after she left. Then my mother had called in hysterics. She and my father had gotten into one of their epic fights once again and I had to clean up the mess. Unfortunately, after weeks of dealing with their bullshit, the best sex of my life had become a distant memory.

“Wow,” the kid kept going. “I mean just… wow. I can’t—”

“All right!” I snapped, not needing this video-game-playing, basement-dwelling virgin making me feel worse than I already did. “I get it, I get it.”

He held his hands out. “Sorry, sorry. It’s just… Daphne King. I’d give my mint-condition copy of the Batman #7 comic for a night with her, and that’s saying a lot. I mean, it has one of the earliest appearances of the Joker.” He snorted, like I had the first fucking clue what he was talking about.

“I said I got it! I fucked up.”

“Uh, yeah you did.” He started laughing uncontrollably as he wandered off, leaving me feeling like an even bigger ass.

I took the elevator back to my floor and headed for my office, racking my brain for a way to fix what I’d done. Sure, blowing off women wasn’t something new for me. I made myself perfectly clear that I wasn’t looking for more than a couple hours of fun before ever taking a woman to bed, but that didn’t mean they always listened. I took what I wanted and left without a backward glance, sometimes upsetting the fairer sex in the process. The way I saw it, it wasn’t my fault that women chose not to listen when a man spelled it out for them.

But Daphne had been different. She hadn’t wanted any more from me than I’d wanted from her. She was like a sexy, feminine version of myself. And she was smokin’ fucking hot in bed. I hated myself for not remembering. If I didn’t make it right, there’d be no chance of me getting her back into bed, and now that I knew she was only a few floors away, every single fiber of my body cried out to go caveman on her ass and drag her back to my cave for a repeat performance.

But there wasn’t a chance in hell of that happening if she hated me.

I got to my desk and sat down with a heavy sigh. I needed to formulate a plan, something to get back in that woman’s good graces, but before I could start the intercom on my phone buzzed.

“Mr. McMannus,” my assistant, Stacy, called through the speaker. “There’s a call for you on line one.”

“Thanks, Stacy. Put them through.”

She did as asked and I hit the button to answer the call. “This is Caleb McMannus.”

“Hey, dipshit. You sound so professional over the phone. I almost couldn’t tell you were a raging asshole.”

I rolled my eyes at the sound of Deacon Lockhart’s voice. He was my buddy Grayson’s little brother, and I’d grown up around both of them. He was a good guy for the most part, but he loved to give me shit for my reputation as a man-whore just like his brother did.

“Well if that’s not the pot calling the kettle black,” I returned. “Have you spoken to your big bro lately, or are you still avoiding him for reasons unknown?” It was a touchy subject between the Lockharts, who I considered to be my second family. The three of us had all grown up close, but sometime after college, Deacon and Gray’s relationship turned sour. No one really knew why except for Deac, and he wasn’t talking about it. It got so bad that he refused to come work for Bandwidth, his father’s company, choosing to use his trust fund to open a bar instead of joining the family business.

I’d ended up as CFO, the position Nolan Lockhart had been grooming his youngest son for, when Deacon informed his dad he wasn’t coming on board, and it was still a bone of contention between the family to this day.

“As much fun as delving into my family’s drama is for you, that’s not why I’m calling. I need you to get down to the bar.”

My back shot straight. “Why? What’s going on?” I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that I knew what he was going to say before he even said it.

“It’s your mom, man. I hate to have to call you with this, but she’s in a bad way. Figured you’d want to be the first person I called to handle it.”

Fuck. I knew it.

“I’ll be right there.” I disconnected the call before he could say anything else and rushed out of the office, ignoring all the strange looks I was getting from the employees as I passed.

It only took fifteen minutes to get from my office to Deacon’s bar, but past experience had already taught me that my mother didn’t need even that long to get into trouble. I’d been taking care of her for most of my life.

She’d always been an extremely sensitive woman with a fragile disposition. I’d grown up walking on eggshells, always mindful not to do anything that could send her into one of her alcohol-induced crying jags.

Most of the time it had been all for nothing, considering she’d fallen in love with, and tied herself—for better and for worse—to a coldhearted bastard without an empathetic bone in his body.

My father was an asshole who cheated and manipulated to get his way, not taking into consideration the people he stepped on along the way. He broke my mother’s heart over and over, and I was the one left to clean up the mess. I’d spent years trying to convince her to leave his sorry ass, but she always refused, claiming Dad was the love of her life, that she’d be lost without him.

Their dysfunctional shit show of a relationship was why I wouldn’t allow myself to be tied down by a woman. I’d seen firsthand what love could do to a person, and I wanted nothing to do with it.

I shoved through the thick wooden doors of Deacon’s bar, The Black Sheep. It was a name so incredibly telling it was almost laughable. I never said it out loud, choosing to let the Lockharts bury their heads in the sand the way I did about my own flesh and blood, but I often wondered if it would have been subtler for Deacon to name his bar My Parents Loved My Older Brother More Than Me.

I guessed every family had their own dirty little secrets. And mine was currently sitting on a barstool in a dimly lit bar in the middle of the goddamn day sucking back martinis like she was worried there was about to be a global shortage of gin.

Sidling up to the bar, I took a stool next to her. I tilted my chin up at Deacon, getting a similar gesture in return, then looked over at my mom to see she was already good and liquored up.

I placed my hand on her back to get her attention. “Hey, Mom.”

Her glassy eyes trailed a few seconds slower than her head as she turned to look at me. “Oh, Caleb,” she slurred, rocking precariously on the stool. “Darling, I think your father’s having an affair.”

I tried my hardest not to roll my eyes as she sniffled and wiped at the lone tear that broke free and trickled down her cheek. It was the exact same song and dance we’d been doing since I was old enough to speak. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why she kept doing this to herself. This wasn’t my father’s first affair. Hell, it wasn’t even his third. He’d delved right into double digits before I graduated college, for Christ’s sake. For all intents and purposes, my mother had been his trophy wife, the young, beautiful woman he’d flaunt at events and parties. She was the pretty thing he stored on a shelf while he ran around with his mistresses, pulling her down only when the occasion called for it. And she’d allowed it for as long as I could remember, diving deeper and deeper into the bottle and prescription pills to soothe the ache instead of doing anything about it.

I was sick and fucking tired of having to be the mature one in my relationship with my mother. Most of my life it felt like I was the parent, and I resented the hell out of her for putting me in that position. I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t stand up for herself, why she didn’t demand better. She’d settled for the life my father provided because the money was too good to pass up, and had willingly thrown me into a position no child should’ve had to endure.

But the fact remained that she was my mother and I loved her, so I did what I had to do. It was because of situations like this that I hadn’t had room in my brain to remember something as outstanding as my night with Daphne.

McMannus skeletons were to remain firmly in the closet, never to come out and risk tarnishing the family name and its legacy. If I wasn’t running interference with my parents, drying out my gin-soaked mother after another bender, or being her shoulder to lean on, I was doing damage control to keep her nasty little secret out of the press. That was my life. As far as my father was concerned—and had plainly stated on many occasions—it was the only thing I was good for.

“Come on.” I stood, taking her thin elbow in my hand and guiding her from the stool. “Let’s get you home.”

Just another day in the life of the McMannus family, I thought gloomily as I guided her out of the bar and into a cab.

And people speculated why I was the womanizing playboy depicted in the rags all over the country.

The answer was simple.

Because after spending night after night sobering my mother up and talking her off the ledge, I needed to bury myself inside a nameless, faceless woman so I could forget about my shitty life.