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But falling in love with these men was meant to be. This was her happily ever after. Now she knew the real meaning of family. The meaning of truth and safety. It was all here in this bed. Their arms wrapped around her as Brooke drifted to sleep.
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My Two Cops
by
Katerina Cole
My Playboy Crush
A Brother’s Best Friend Romance
Copyright © 2017 by Katerina Cole
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
One
Bruin
The taste of salt in the South Floridian air mixed with the taste of top-shelf whisky on my tongue as I leaned back against the bar, surveying the scene. No matter how often I visited or how long I stayed, the smell of the sea and the sound of the waters lapping up against the wooden boardwalk under my feet never got old, whether the sun was glaring down and browning my skin or the moon was lighting up a shining path across the waters, like it was tonight.
It was a dockside bar, one I’d been to more than a few times on my business trips to Ft. Lauderdale. If I were local, I’d be a regular, and the bartender knew me as well as she could know anyone without knowing their name. I preferred it that way. It was important to have places like this bar—places where a man could slip out of the high-stakes world of business and lose himself in a world of rum, whisky, music, and women. Most men either let the stress of this life eat them alive, or they got lost in all the pleasures it brought them.
Not me. I was stronger.
“Another, sir?” I heard to my right from behind the bar.
The bartender had appeared the moment I set my empty glass down, and I saw she already had another Old Fashioned ready for me, the cherry and orange looking like they’d fallen straight out of the grove. She’d been waiting on me hand and foot since I walked in, because she knew that I treated my servers right.
She’d also had her eyes on me for another reason, but I didn’t like to mix that kind of pleasure with business.
I gave her the slightest nod and a crack of a smile, and she returned one twice as wide as she walked away, her hips swaying just enough to make me think about her a little longer.
To her credit, she was subtle. More subtle than most of the women here. She waited until she thought I wasn’t looking to let her eyes drift to my thick calves that my tight-fitting shorts exposed. When I had my back to her, I could feel her eyes on my ass, traveling up to the rippling muscles of my back that were just barely hidden by my white button-down. It was unbuttoned to the bottom of my pecs, and its sleeves were rolled up to my elbows.
Every part of me that I showed off was measured.
I didn’t need to tell anyone how much time I spent in the gym, working my body to perfection. When I did something as simple as picking up the new drink and giving her a subtle nod, I did so with total control over my body, every move of my thick muscles measured. It had an effect on people.
I wasn’t so vain that I’d ask, but I thought that it had something to do with my gaze. Nobody had to tell me that I had a natural, commanding air about me. I knew it by everyone’s demeanor.
And in a bar like this, people showed it in ways that were as subtle as a fireworks display.
A table at the far end of the bar had about five young women at it, and the moment my gaze went to them, all but one of them looked away, hiding smiles and chatting to each other as if they hadn’t been sizing me up a moment ago. They wore designer swimwear, a couple of them wearing bikinis from brands that I knew to be more valuable than some of the top-shelf liquor here. Perfect hair, perfect makeup, designer shoes, and a couple of them in short shorts that hugged impeccably toned asses.
But they were young—probably freshmen college students at Nova out on their first night, still riding that first high of having their way with their daddies’ credit cards away from their hometowns. I was impressed that one of them was still looking at me, making eye contact. She had dark skin and short hair, and her dark eyes told me she knew exactly what she wanted out of life.
Part of my job was to recognize potential, and she was brimming with it. I could tell.
But she was too young for me. I was thirty, and I always thought that men my age going after women that age were playing in a shallow pond they were too big for.
Our eye contact lasted about half a second before I smiled and looked elsewhere, shutting her down subtly. I could tell she was going places in life, but my bedroom wasn’t going to be one of them. There were plenty of local young men who could oblige her.
