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Chapter 1
Max
I woke up on the strangest day of my life with a hell of a hangover. I don’t usually drink—I got out of the habit when I was on the meds—but for some reason I’d tied one on the night before. Whiskey. Consumed while sitting home alone on my sofa. Just another Monday night in Max Reilly’s rundown apartment, in the chilly fog of San Francisco.
My head fucking hurt. I didn’t have a shift today, at least. I worked construction for cash under the table, usually across the bridge in Oakland. You’d think I wouldn’t be prime material for a construction worker—my leg sees to that—but you’d be wrong. I had no problem getting on crews. Today was a day off, though, and I rolled out of bed, cursing Last Night Max’s idiocy, put on my leg, and made my way into the kitchen, wearing only boxer shorts.
Coffee and toast didn’t help much, so I cleared out the rest of my hangover by going to the gym. The rain had cleared out and I could see the dark clouds rolling off over the bay as I drove the short distance through the south end of the city to Sporty’s, the gym which was practically my second home. It was cheap, and a hole in the wall, and it smelled like unwashed balls and dirty socks, but no one asked me questions there. I’d never seen a woman there, ever—a woman would have to be nuts to go to Sporty’s—and the guys were all as silent and surly as me. It was the kind of place where you could lift weights at three o’clock in the morning on the nights you couldn’t sleep, and you wouldn’t be the only one there.
By the time I finished at the gym, the whiskey had mostly sweated its way out of my system, and my head was only throbbing at the temples. I put down the weight I’d been lifting and lay on the weight bench for a minute, staring at the water stains on the ceiling.
This was my life: my shitty apartment, my gym, my shifts in the dirt on construction sites. Drinking alone at night and trying to pay off my medical bills and my dead father’s debts. I liked it this way—no complications, no women, no one bothering me. All I’d wanted since the day I got home from Afghanistan was to be left alone. So, yeah, this was my life.
Except it wasn’t.
I had five million fucking dollars in my bank account.
Damn Devon Wilder, my best friend. He’d inherited big time from the grandfather he’d never known, and the next thing we knew, the friend I’d grown up dirty on the streets of LA with was a billionaire. He’d also met a woman he was flat out crazy about and would probably marry, if I knew him at all. And because he was Devon, and because he knew I was drowning in the debts I owed, he’d wiped all of them away with one big deposit into my bank account.
It was the best, most generous thing anyone I knew had ever done. It changed everything. I owed him my life.
I felt like I was falling.
I made myself take a breath as sweat broke out on the back of my neck. My chest felt tight. Shit, shit. Keep it together, Reilly. I closed my eyes as the world spun and my stomach clenched. This wasn’t the aftereffects of the whiskey. No sir, this was pure, one hundred per cent crazy-as-fuck Max Reilly and his shitty brain.
I waited. I took breaths. I pictured a path in the woods, crisp air, fall leaves. I went to that place and stayed there for a while. Then, when the attack had passed, I got up and went home.
It was nuts to have a panic attack over what most people would see as a dream come true. But it was the change that my messed-up psyche couldn’t handle. My entire life, such as it was, had been upended with one bank deposit, dumped out like laundry tossed on the floor. I had no idea what the hell to do. It made my thoughts scramble when I tried to think about it, because I’d already been through a lot of crazy shit in my life. So I kept doing the same old things to make myself feel sane—and sometimes, when I wanted to stop thinking, I apparently drank whiskey like an idiot.
I showered for nearly thirty minutes, holding the handle I’d installed in the shower stall, letting the hot water run off my body. My spine felt tight and weird, and my leg ached. I put on jeans and an old t-shirt and my leg again, then I made a sandwich in my kitchen and forced it down into my screwed-up stomach. The anxiety had receded, but it had left me clammy and shaky, like I’d just had the flu. So I did the thing that usually worked for me—I grabbed a book from my bookshelf and sat down to read.
My bookshelf was overflowing, one of the biggest things in my tiny apartment. I liked to cruise used bookstores—there were a few left in San Francisco—and add to my collection, the stranger the better. I hadn’t always been a reader; I’d grown up running wild on the streets, my mother barely home, my father usually drunk. It was only after I’d enlisted that I really discovered how reading made everything bearable. Long plane rides. Endless nights deployed. Long, dead stretches of time in the desert. And, later, the time I’d done in hospital after hospital, the time stuck waiting rooms and in bed recovering from surgeries. I may be crazy as fuck, but I could guarantee I’d be even crazier if I hadn’t found the outlet of reading.
The book I had now was The Call of the Wild, a yellowed old copy with a screwy gr
een cover that didn’t even have a wolf on it, even though the book was about wolves. It had cost me two bucks, and it was very fucking good. I absently massaged my leg and sat on the sofa, letting the book take me away.
I was so engrossed that I almost didn’t answer the knock at my door.
The first thing I thought was to ignore it. Who the hell knocks on a guy’s door at three o’clock in the afternoon? No one good. Someone selling something—no thanks. Nosy neighbor, wanting to bitch about something—no thanks. Cops—no thanks. The landlord—no thanks. I didn’t owe any back rent, thanks to Devon Wilder.
But the knock came again, and I put the book down. Now I was distracted. I stood up and limped across the room, reluctantly opening the door.
Holy shit.
It was a woman. Not just any woman—a fucking gorgeous woman. She had light blond hair, and blue eyes in a sweetly heart-shaped face that also featured a soft, sexy mouth. She had makeup on—dark eyelids, dark lashes, lip gloss. She had perfect skin and elegant hoop earrings that brushed against her flawless neck. She was smiling at me, but her mouth naturally had a fuck-you attitude to it, an I-don’t-give-a-shit twist that made you think of sex. Just like that. One look at her face, and you thought about fucking. Fucking her. Fucking anybody at all.
I dropped my gaze. She was posed deliberately, her weight on one hip, her long legs displayed. She had a handbag over her shoulder and a coat on. A trench coat-type thing, belted at the waist. It only went to mid-thigh, and beneath it was nothing but miles and miles of bare leg, as if she wasn’t wearing a single thing underneath it, finishing in heels that were inches high.
“Daniel Parker?” she asked.
I was dumbfounded, so completely shocked that a single word tripped out of my mouth. “What?”
She brushed past me and walked into my apartment, and I realized that she’d taken the word as agreement. I turned and stared at her as she put her bag down on a side table like she owned the place, and then she dug through it. She pulled out a little square and put an iPhone on it, fiddled with a button.
“This is from Andrew,” she said. “Happy birthday!”
The music started. Pulsing, sexy music. The blonde stepped forward, and her hands went to the belt of her trench coat.
And that was when I realized she was going to strip.
Chapter 2
Max
There isn’t much you can do when a woman walks into your apartment and starts stripping, except stand there and watch.
She tossed her hair and sashayed toward me, her fingers toying with the belt of her coat as I stood there, staring. I could have opened my mouth, told her that I wasn’t the guy she thought I was, that it was all a misunderstanding, but then she put a hand to the middle of my chest and gently pushed me backward, aiming me for the sofa. Her hand shot a bolt of fire through me, woke up parts of my body I hadn’t even known were asleep. My blood pulsed hot. I moved back like I was hypnotized, going wherever she wanted me to go.
When the backs of my legs bumped the sofa, I sat down. She stood just past my knees and played with the belt again, and the unreality of the situation washed over me. Holy shit. She’s going to take that thing off. She’s actually going to do it.
I shouldn’t let her. But I couldn’t stop it. And suddenly I really, really didn’t want to. Vaguely, the last of my moral dignity reminded me that that made me an asshole. Then she undid the belt and dropped the coat, and my moral dignity shut up.
