Beach Reads Box Set

by Madden-Mills, Ilsa

  A touch of the icon brought the TapNext app to life. Realization swallowed me with an unexpected sense of accomplishment. This thing was my baby. I’d nurtured it, grown with it over the years like a close friend. I’d watched it make mistakes, veer off the path to greatness, but I’d pulled it back and I was proud of what it’d become. A place where people could find almost anything. A place where people who were lucky found something worthwhile like I had.

  BAD_Ruck (6:15PM): Hey, Rose. You busy? I’m just curious how the date went. I didn’t get to check in with you over the weekend.

  I stared at the message window, waiting to see if she would reply. I was just about to give up waiting when the little bubbles popped up on the screen.

  TAPRoseNEXT (6:17PM): If avoiding contracting bubonic plague from the passenger next to me can be considered busy, then sure. I’m just on the train on my way back from work.

  BAD_Ruck (6:17PM): And the date?

  “Put your phone down, K. Everyone is waiting on us,” Thatch shouted.

  I looked up to find the team captains still in the middle of the rugby field, known as a pitch, chatting, but I tossed my phone down anyway. Any amount of dawdling would only be cause for Thatch to publicly bust my balls. As my best friend of more than a decade, he had too much ammunition and a specially made gun for the job.

  I broke into a jog for extra measure, joining the group of no-good assholes I called my teammates. Sponsorship wasn’t necessary for obvious reasons, but we played the league on the straight and narrow, using businesses to sponsor the team like everyone else. I’d volunteered Brooks Media, but with a dating site being one of the main focuses of the company, that had resulted in a resounding, “Veto!”

  Instead, Wes’s restaurant, BAD—a fucking joke of a name for all the success he had—was our sponsor and earned our team as a whole the moniker “BAD Boys.” But because everyone thought they were fucking cute, that wasn’t enough, and the trio of Thatch, Wes, and I were forever dubbed the Billionaire Bad Boys. It was there to stay. Trust me, I’d been trying to shake it for years.

  “We’re skins,” John announced to the informal huddle when he came back from the captains’ meeting.

  “Fuck,” Thatch breathed, rolling his head in distress for some reason.

  “What’s the matter, Thatch?” Wes asked. “Afraid one of the boys is going to pull out your titty ring?”

  “Blow me, Torrence.”

  “Torrence?” I questioned, feeling a wrinkle form between my eyebrows.

  “It’s a Bring It On reference,” John remarked casually as he stretched out his hamstring by pulling his heel to his ass, as though it wasn’t weird that he’d know that.

  When I turned my curiosity from Thatch to him, he piped up again.

  “What? Kirsten Dunst is in the movie, and she’s fucking hot.” He added, “And I have a younger sister,” when the group was slow to buy in.

  “How is your sister, Johnny?” Thatch asked with a smirk.

  John’s eyes flashed brightly before turning to stone. “Eighteen, motherfucker.”

  Thatch turned to me, and I could practically see what was coming. He didn’t actually want to bone John’s little sister. Not even a little.

  “What’s that he said, Kline?”

  He might have been a manwhore, but Thatch fucked women—not girls just starting to make the transition. What he wanted was to poke at one of John’s pressure points just enough to make him explode.

  I trained my face to look serious and held in a laugh. “I think he said she’s legal, Thatch.”

  John lunged and my humor finally broke the surface. I grabbed his shirt with both hands and shoved him away playfully while Thatch busted out in hysterics beside me.

  “Relax, John,” Wes coaxed. “Thatch doesn’t need your sister to fill his pussy punch card. He’s got all the tramps he’ll ever need right here in Manhattan.”

  Thatch tsked. “There’s no card, Wes. My dick is not a Value Club.”

  “It sure fucks in bulk,” John threw in, eager to even the score because of some running feud between the two of them. We were all well-off, grown-as-fuck men, but you’d be surprised by how similar we were to a group of teenage girls sometimes.

  “And how would you know, Johnny? Got a camera in my bedroom?” Thatch snapped back.

  “All right,” I called, babysitting like usual. “Drama club is over, assholes. Let’s go play rugby. Focus all of that energy into your attack, for fuck’s sake.”

  “You’re the one who can’t manage to make it past halfway without getting tackled and steamrolled into the ground,” Wes pointed out. He laughed as he said it, though, continuing the teasing vibe by wrapping his arm around my shoulders and walking out onto the field with me.

  “At least I manage to touch the ball every once in a while,” I jabbed back, shoving him away and jogging to the other side of the pitch.

  At this point in the season, practice consisted mostly of scrimmages, dividing into two teams and trying to outplay each other. I was just glad that when we split up, Thatch was usually on my side. He might have acted like a clown from time to time, but the dude was one big motherfucker and had been known to do some permanent damage when he tackled you. I liked to walk without a limp, and if I was going to be told I couldn’t have kids one day, I sure as fuck didn’t want testicle mutilation to be the reason.

  I shook out of my daydream when the ball slammed into my chest, a smirk ghosting Wes’s lips from the success of his unexpected pass.

  I took off at a run, dodging a defender and reaching the halfway line. Pain shot through my waist as another defender made hard contact. I tossed the ball underhanded and toward my back, the only direction allowed for a legal pass in rugby, and tucked my arms to my chest to take the impact of the fall without breaking a wrist.

  “Jesus,” I groaned, shoving Tommy off of me as quickly as I could in order to rejoin play.

  “Lay off the cookies, Tom,” I shouted as I ran toward the ruck my teammates had going.

  “Weights!” he yelled back. “I think when you said cookies, you meant weights!”

  And fuck, by the way my spleen throbbed, Tommy just might have been right.

  I slammed my body into the linked shoulders of Thatch and Wes, pushing them forward over the loose ball and helping the group gain momentum in the fight upstream against the defenders. Thatch fought for control in front of me, and I nearly took an elbow to the face in the process.

  Rugby was a rough game, and when my organs felt like they might fall out or a limb ached like it might fall off, I wondered why I did it.

  But then the ball was in my arms again, tossed underhand and over his shoulder by Thatch, and I remembered without question—the adrenaline, the thrill, the all-out expulsion of a week’s worth of tension, stress, and aggression.

  I was convinced a little extracurricular rugby not only kept me in prime physical shape, but it also kept my mind at peace and on an even keel. I could only hope that as my physical health started to subside with age, my need to vent would dwindle along with it.

  The weight of three bodies hit me at once as I was crossing the try line, but Thatch had them off in no time to celebrate the score. I was barely on my feet before the choreography started, Thatch firing off shots from his crotch like a semi-automatic weapon, the men of our team playing into his antics by hitting the ground one by one as he fired off “rounds.” As the scorer of the try, I was the only one who’d earned the privilege to stay on my feet.

  I laughed and high-fived my teammates before jogging back across the pitch to do it all over again. Practice had just started, and now that I’d scored, my body was ready for more abuse.

  * * *

  I ran for the train just before it was set to depart, sliding through the doors in just the nick of time. Starving and ready to be home, all I could think about was getting there, showering, and ordering a pizza.

  As my tired ass met the surface of the seat, I took a moment to be thankful fo
r the lack of pregnant women and elderly. I was worn the hell out, but I wasn’t a prick. The rest of these fuckers could fend for themselves.

  I wiped some of the lingering sweat and mud from my face with my towel and pulled my phone from my bag.

  A message sat waiting from earlier.

  TAPRoseNEXT (6:18PM): Gah. The date. The date was amazing. And then it was pretty fucking traumatic.

  BAD_Ruck (7:52PM): Traumatic??? Am I going to need to hunt this guy down?

  TAPRoseNEXT (7:54PM): No, he’s great, I promise. It wasn’t traumatic because of him. He’s…I don’t know, Ruck. I’ve got this gut feeling that he’s some kind of wonderful.

  The corners of my lips started to curve, some weird, unconventional but meaningful relationship between us forming and instilling genuine happiness in me. But before the smile cycle could complete, utter disbelief washed over me in a wave of tsunami-like proportions—the conversations we’d had, the things she’d said. Work relationships and awkward yet somehow easy conversation. The way Rose, despite my more than infatuation with Georgie, managed to make me feel.

  None of it made sense, not one single piece of it, until all at once, it did.

  No fucking way.

  The doors of the subway opened, and I didn’t even hesitate, shoving my way through the throng of people without apology or remorse. I didn’t even know what fucking stop we were on, but I ran for the stairs with single-minded abandon, taking them two at a time and reaching the top on a leap.

  New Yorkers scoffed and jumped out of the way, burning me with their dirty looks and judging eyes. The yellow of a cab shone like a beacon in front of me.

  I ran for it without thought or pause or respect for my surroundings. The heavy leather of a handbag may have even grazed my shoulder in a glancing blow, but I didn’t care. Words thrummed in my head in time with the memory of her heartbeat, building and buzzing around my brain until I almost couldn’t stand it. The not knowing, the unlikelihood—it was all too much.

  “The Winthrop Building. Fast as you can go,” I demanded abruptly to the cabbie, but he didn’t bat an eye at my brusque delivery—grunts and commands were the nature of more than half of New York City.

  I dug in my bag for my wallet and fished out the first bill I came to. With a swift thrust, I dropped it through the plexiglass window and jumped out while the last notes of his screeching tires still rung in the air.

  Pigeons panicked and people swerved as I wove my way through them, and a woman strummed a guitar on the corner.

  The building was locked after hours, but being the CEO afforded me access to the keyless entry code on the main door. Until today, I could honestly say I’d never broken in to my office building before.

  Sixteen smashes of the elevator call button, another code, and a fidgety ride later, I stepped off onto the fifteenth floor in all of my sweaty glory and strode straight for Human Resources.

  The lights were dimmed, and once again, the outer door to Cynthia’s office door was locked, but nothing could stop me at this point. Not a lock and certainly not my morals.

  I ran to my office at a near sprint and around the back of my desk, yanking drawers open one by one in search of my old master key that opened all of the individual office doors. I hadn’t had a need for it in years, so it took me several minutes of digging through pounds of junk to find it.

  Priority for tomorrow: My desk needed to be fucking reorganized. Stat.

  Mud under my fingernails from practice, I clutched the key tightly and jogged back down the hall.

  With a turn and a click, I was in, moments away from officially violating half a dozen privacy laws.

  I breathed a sigh of relief when the drawer of the filing cabinet slid open with ease, laughing maniacally to myself before trailing into words.

  “Of course it’s not fucking locked. It’s not like she was expecting a fucking psychopath to break into her office and dig through it.”

  Like fluttering wings, my fingers shuffled through the labels, knowing Cynthia followed an unbreakable filing system. Nothing was ever out of order or place, and finding it would be easy enough.

  Not knowing the actual wording of the label challenged me a little bit, but it wasn’t more than five minutes before I was pulling it out of its spot and cracking it open.

  Tracing the lines of the employee names, I ran my finger down the page, muttering through last names until the one I wanted stood out in stark relief.

  “Cummings, Georgia.” I slid it across the page in some kind of slow-motion daydream until the other column sealed my fate in undeniable bold text.

  TAPRoseNEXT.

  Some Kind of Wonderful.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Georgia

  Gary clicked to the next PowerPoint slide, stating something about the cost effectiveness of blah blah blah… Who knows what he was talking about by that point? We’d been in the meeting for over two hours, and I was seconds away from losing my cool.

  My stomach growled its irritation.

  I glanced at my watch and noted it was five minutes past three, which meant it was five minutes past my daily scheduled sugar fix. I had a Greek yogurt and a leftover piece of cherry cheesecake sitting inside the break room fridge with my name on it.

  Conclusion: Someone needed to end this or I was going to end Gary.

  It was Thursday afternoon, and it’d been five whole days since I’d had any real private interaction with Kline. We’d texted a lot, snuck a few minutes to chat and say hello here and there, and even had lunch together twice, but he’d been unbelievably swamped with work and activities and I was still one hundred percent determined to keep a professional relationship in the office. The combination of all that crap had put the kibosh on substantial alone time. And let me tell you, the memory of last weekend had my anticipation riding at an all-time high.

  Gary plodded over to his laptop, tapping around on the keys. The man moved like a turtle. He was a genius when it came to numbers, but a moron when it came to social cues. While everyone in the room was moments away from falling face first into a coma, he appeared to think we had all the time in the world to discuss more goddamn numbers.

  I was numbered the fuck out.

  “And if you’ll just give me a minute here,” he mouth-breathed, licking his lips and clicking away. “I’ll pull up another spreadsheet that documents how effective we’ve been in narrowing down our target ratios for the last financial quarter.”

  Jesus Christ in a peach tree.

  My stomach roared its impatience. Hunger pangs. Crazy, loud hunger pangs. It’s a mystery no one else heard it over Gary’s droning.

  The flash of a text notification caught my eye.

  Kline: Was that your stomach, Cummings?

  Okay. Obviously, someone heard them.

  The handsome bastard was sitting beside me. Honestly, I had no idea why he was subjecting himself to this meeting. It was solely for my marketing team. I glanced at Kline out of the corner of my eye, scratching the side of my face with my middle finger. His body jerked noticeably with the effort to conceal his laugh.

  Me: It’s 3:05pm, Brooks.

  Kline: Ah, right. Georgie’s snack time. What was I thinking?

  Me: I don’t know, but if you don’t end this soon, I will murder Gary with my pen.

  Fighting a smile, he subtly nodded his head in understanding as he set his phone down on the table. My eyes trailed to his forearms—sleeves rolled up, hard muscles and thick veins on display. To quote Uncle Jesse, Have mercy. If I hadn’t been so damn hungry, I’d have happily sat through this tedious meeting just to gawk at those glorious arms. They were a beacon of muscly man delight.

  Gary chuckled, seemingly entertained by himself. His monotone voice penetrated my daydreams about Kline’s forearms, officially popping my Big-dicked Brooks fantasy bubble.

  I tapped my pen against my notepad. Shut Gary up. Now.

  Kline knew it was a warning. He flashed a secret grin, eyes crinkling at the corner
s. God, his eyes, they were this flawless shade of blue—so bright, so vibrant. Montana-sky blue.

  I’d started to make a game out of nicknaming Kline’s eyes. Those ever-changing blue retinas could be Montana-sky blue one day or, like today, M&M’s blue. But that probably had more to do with the starvation setting in than anything else.

  Mmmmmmm, M&M’s. I’d have devoured a bag of that candy-coated chocolate goodness.

  “Fantastic work, Gary,” Kline interrupted moments later. “I think we can all agree we’ve gained valuable information on Brooks Media’s projections for the fiscal year.”

  Everyone in the room nodded, agreeing far too enthusiastically.

  I knew I wasn’t the only one dying a slow death with each PowerPoint GoodTime Gary put on the projection screen.

  Gary started to respond, but Kline stood up from his chair. “Go ahead and send the materials out to the rest of the team. That way all departments within Brooks Media can see how they’ve contributed to another fruitful quarter.”

  “Oh, okay, but—”

  “Really great work, Gary.” Kline patted him on the back, not giving him an inch. “I think we can officially say, successful meeting adjourned.”

  My coworkers scattered faster than roaches when light flooded the room. I followed their lead when I realized Kline would be tied up with Gary for a few more minutes. My stomach couldn’t wait. I damn near sprinted to the break room, all kinds of ready to dig into my snacks. Would I start with my yogurt and then move on to the cheesecake? Or would I just go for it and dig into the cherry cheesecake first?

  The world was my oyster, baby.

  “Uh oh,” Dean announced, walking out of the break room. “It’s a quarter after three and Georgia isn’t eating?” he teased, making a show of glancing between my face and his watch.