by Daisy Jane
The Corner House
A Reverse Harem Romance
Daisy Jane
Smeared Ink
Copyright © 2021 by Daisy Jane
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.
Cover design by Smeared Ink.
Edited by S.B.
Created with Vellum
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Epilogue
If you liked this story…
Other Books by Daisy
Acknowledgments
To the “family” of friends I’ve met through this journey of becoming a self-published Indie romance writer, thank you.
Without my fearless Beta readers, my ARC readers, my friends who have to hear about all my dirty and obscene ideas when all they want to do is catch up—I see you all and appreciate every last one of you.
Without you guys, this would be pretty weird.
Thanks for everything.
Prologue
“Stop.”
“I’m Serious.”
“Shut up.”
I shake my head. “I will not.”
Another moment of silence. “Serious?”
“Like a heart attack.” I lean forward, shaking my head once for effect. “Like a migraine.”
There is a small, collective gasp as they finally accept—I’m serious.
Brynn finishes her wine and her arm reflexively juts for a refill. Abbie does the same, followed by Kayla. Laughing, I push off the couch, making my way to the kitchen. One of the last times I’ll be serving the girls from my kitchen. I’m sad to lose this beautiful little house but I’d be the biggest liar if I said I didn’t want to serve them from the corner house, make them jealous and drool-y with my three new extremely hot roommates.
“We need another bottle but if we drink one more, we definitely aren’t packing anything.”
Brynn lifts her glass in the air from her partially-reclined spot across my couch. “Fill ‘er up, damn it,” she calls, and Abbie and Kayla laugh, raising their glasses too.
“Gah, how boring am I if news of me moving in with three guys makes you all need to drink?” I bellow, pouring a tiny bit of wine in my own glass. It’s been nearly a week since the last migraine, I’m completely and utterly hydrated, the lights are low, I haven’t been in the sun and I don’t plan on needing to go anywhere. After all, it’s closing in on eight o’clock. One small glass of wine should be safe. And truthfully, telling the girls I’m moving into the corner house this weekend, well, it is nerve wracking.
In my mind, I tried to prepare for things they’d say.
Are you sure you want to live with three guys?
Doesn’t it seem fast to live with people you’ve only known a few weeks?
The only question, though, that I didn’t have a good answer for was one that only Brynn could ask, because she was the only who knew my deepest, dirtiest desires.
As I expect from best friends, Abbie starts with her first concern as I pour wine into her glass.
“Three guys, I mean, no drama like you’d get with females but guys are gross,” she says, scooping up homemade guacamole with a tortilla chip.
“These guys aren’t like that, they have a system for everything,” I respond to Abbie.
When I went over there last Thursday, dressed and prepped to ask for all three of them—I was surprised when the corner house guys had asked me to be their roommate. And as much as I needed a place to stay or roommates, I wouldn’t have moved in with them just because they’re hot.
I’m horny, yes, but I also watch True Crime. I’m not crazy-horny.
But I want this group thing.
I really like the guys in the corner house, as friends. And that’s why they’re so perfect for this fantasy. Because they themselves are a fantasy. Add in some group sex and I’ll have an experience that no one outside of my group of friends will believe.
It all feels too good to be true. If it even happens, of course.
“You guys talked about like, everything then, huh?” Kayla asks as she tilts her head completely to the side, shoving her taco in at an incredible pace.
“Jesus, Kay, slow down,” Abbie chides, sprinkling cabbage salsa onto her taco from a small, plastic container that came with our chips.
“Hmm, mmm,” Kayla mouths through the bite, “you go fast or the toppings spill out,” she adds, using the taco her hands are wrapped around to motion to the plate in front of her. Indeed, it was a toppings graveyard. Lettuce, deliciously crisp bits of meat, cilantro and pan seared onions.
“Your shit spilled everywhere anyway,” Abbie says, now adding a dollop of Greek yogurt to her taco. “Tastes just like sour cream,” she professes as she does every time she adds yogurt instead of sour cream.
“Totally,” Brynn adds, but Kayla and I will never agree with them on this. I hold out my closed fist and Kayla abandons her dual grip on her taco to fist bump me back.
“Sour cream for life.” We bump knuckles.
“So, which one of them is Vegan, again?” Brynn asks, sifting through the guacamole with a spoon to pick out any obvious chunks of tomato. It’s gross but we let her do it because we love her. Never mind the fact that there’s so much tomato blended into the guac that she’s literally eating tomato in every bite.
“Bodhi,” I say, finally picking up my own taco to have a bite. “The one you did the Dutch braids for,” I nudge her back to the memory and her eyes light up with recognition before they go a bit dark.
“Oh yeeahhh,” she draws out, looking at me with a mouthful of taco. “He’s not the one you like?” she says with surprise in her tone. “I think I’d pick him.”
The other two girls, who haven’t met any of the guys from the corner house, now have opinions.
“Men in uniform, though,” Kayla says, referring to Bastian. She licks the sour cream from the corner of her mouth and drives a chip into the guac. “I think that’s why all the male teachers at Eastwood turn me on. The uniform.” She nudges Abbie. “I bet you like Devers in his uniform,” she teases, and Abbie goes red.
“A police uniform is way hotter than a boarding school teacher’s uniform,” Brynn says, rolling her eyes at them.
“Eli,” Brynn says with a snap of her fingers when his name drifts back into her memory. “That’s the one you like.”
“Wait, you like one of them?” Abbie asks, leaning back against the chair. She’s got one of my dining table chairs pulled up next to the couch. One of the chairs that she asked as soon as she walked in tonight if she could have. “The whole set. I’ll either borrow them until you have your own place again or I’ll buy them from you.” I told her borrow. As muc
h as I’d like to accept that I may not live on my own again for a while, I couldn’t accept it quite yet. Too many changes all at once.
“Thanks a lot, asshole,” I say to Brynn whose eyes go wide.
“They don’t know?” she grimaces at her slip and I turn to see two women, annoyed but temporarily sated by tacos.
“I don’t like Eli anyway,” I clarify, doing my signature hand wave that mentally erases things. Or so I tell myself. “He’s just, I don’t know. A bit quieter than the other two but in like, a very mysterious way. Like he’s holding back or that he has thoughts he doesn’t want to share.”
“He sounds like a very broody Don Draper,” she responds.
“What’s he look like again?” Brynn wrinkles her nose then burps, attaching a far-too-small ‘excuse me’ to the end of the wall-shaking belch.
Leaning back against the arm of the couch, where I’ve carved out a sliver of room, I sigh. A loud sigh that comes from my belly, that warms my cheeks and makes my skull tingle. Because when I think of Eli, my body just does that. Goes all desperate and needy, excited and wanting.
Eli does something to me. Different than my attraction to Bastian or Bodhi, wherein my thoughts are mostly primal and tethered emotionally to the rush of newness and sexual gratification.
Closing my eyes, I picture Eli from the other night. How his eyes held onto mind, not letting them go even when they attempted to wander. How rich and deep his voice was when he chastised my ex. I remember how he was somewhat shy when I was trying to learn about him, how Bastian and Bodhi offered up many of the details.
And his hobbies. I clutch my chest.
His hobbies are reading and craft whiskey. No video games and Coors Light.
“Captain America,” I reply, fanning myself with the paper menu from our bag. “He looks like Captain America. And I don’t mean he looks like Chris Evans. I mean he looks like the actual superhero in the suit.”
A sea of sighs. One random “ooh” which I think came from an over-wined Kayla.
“And he has tattoos.”
“Mmm.” Abbie looks out the window lazily, a smile on her lips.
“Oh, Daddy, yes.” Kayla finishes her wine and her cheeks are red as she raises her eyebrows to me.
“Anyway, I don’t like him. I barely know him. But when you guys meet them, you have to be cool, okay? Like, don’t tell them I read romance novels and talk about what a loser Brett was, please?” I clasp my hands together in an exaggerated beg.
“When do we get to meet them?” Kayla asks, sitting up straight.
I hook my hands together in front of me. “They’re moving me in this weekend.”
“Can we tell them about the time you microwaved a metal to-go mug?” Abbie’s spine goes straight as the memory of my first mini-fire comes flashing back. She was there. She’d spent the night after a very successful girls’ night wherein we drank much vino and watched The Godfather. Then she was drunk and too scared to Uber because “you never know who’s gonna be a Corleone!”
“Oh!” Kayla leans forward, almost knocking over the table full of food. She steadies it then herself before returning back to her thought. “What about the time you thought you lost the earring your dad gave you so we had to walk ten blocks backwards in heels after drinking all night to find it?”
“And it was stuck in your hair, remember?” Abbie nudges me and I cup my face in my hands. I nod.
Brynn laughs and pulls my long hair behind me, down onto my back and smooths her palm over it.
“Don’t worry,” she says softly. “Guys usually think absent-minded is cute.”
I jump up from the couch. “I am not absent minded! I have made a few mistakes and you guys just all remember them really freaking well!”
Kayla and Abbie lean back at the same time and Brynn rises and puts her hands on my shoulders, unexpectedly. She smiles and I know our teasing is over and that this moment we’re on the brink of is real.
“I think you need this,” she says, quietly. I nod, a sudden rush of emotion behind my eyes.
“I do,” I admit, freely. Though Brynn knows more of what I need, I still am not ready to share with the other girls.
“So which one can I hit on?” Kayla asks, filling a Styrofoam to-go container with anything she can. I’m broke but she’s a teacher. That’s a whole new level of broke. And while I wasn’t ready to share my ultimate goal with my other friends, that tiny bit of white wine has me feeling safe.
That and the threat of Kayla snagging the attention of one of the guys. She can have them once I get my fantasy plan in action. Until then, though, I can’t afford a wrench in the plan.
Sitting down, I pour everyone another glass of wine and tell them exactly what I want: a sexual escape with all three of those men involved, however it looks, I don’t know. But that’s what I want.
We drink in silence for a few minutes while they digest, and now that Brynn’s met Bodhi as well as Bastian, I know she gets it. Finally, Abbie breaks the silence.
“We get the details, right?”
I nod and sigh with relief at her acceptance.
Kayla puts her hair into a small ponytail, the logo of Eastwood showing on her now visible lapel. “I mean, I’ve never done that but you know what, you do you. I think it’s cool.”
I sigh again.
They didn’t have to accept it for me to still want to do it. It just makes it all that much nicer that they did. And that they didn’t embarrass me about it, either.
I smile to myself as I usher the girls out the door an hour later.
I have more than headaches.
I have a fantasy plan.
Chapter 1
I knew I should have shaved my legs. I knew it. But noo, I decided that I wanted a toasted bagel for breakfast so I got out of the shower early, skipping the second round of conditioning that my ends are accustomed to and of course, the shaving of the legs. I didn’t need the bagel! I should have shaved my legs, damn it!
“Miss Bowers?” The glossy-print men’s magazine looking cop lifts a brow to me, his palms wrapped around my thigh. He’s not “cute for a small town” or “kinda hunky”, he’s an actual orgasm in human form. Shiny, silky, freaking commercial gorgeous dark hair, cut and styled to the shove of his fingers, chiseled features and a thick chest with solid arms. Damn.
A little louder for those in the back. Damn.
“I’m going to do it now, alright?”
He’s going to do it. The it being the popping of my leg back into the socket. Popping my fucking leg back in the actual socket. Oh god, don’t puke Sloane. You already have an embarrassing length of stubble that Officer Sexy’s large, alpha hands are totally touching. The type of stubble that doesn’t just scream I’m single but, at the top of its lungs, in an Opera voice, screams it's been a while, too.
I just had to have the bagel.
I cannot puke in front of this man, knowing what a dramatic puker I am. Yes, I cry, I cannot help that even at twenty-six years old, I still cry when I puke. What?! It’s gross and traumatic. I definitely don’t need to vomit and sob after having my hairy mammoth legs discovered in the span of ten minutes. That’s too much humiliation for eight o’clock in the morning.
Hell, that’s too much humiliation in front of this slab of sex in a uniform.
Have I mentioned that this man looks like some sort of Superman? White teeth, piercing blue eyes that make my skin hot. I mean, I do probably have a fair amount of adrenaline soaring through me considering I was just in a car accident. But I swear it’s his gaze heating my skin.
On my way to work this morning, I got t-boned. The old classic. I stopped at a 4-way stop and went, while a man travelling towards me decided he didn’t feel like stopping. Though he ultimately did stop—the side of my poor little car stopped him. I’d never been in an accident until now but wow—I was lucky my body just got jerked towards the driver’s door. A dislocated something is better than a dead everything. Fortunately, my trusty old Prius kept me pret
ty safe, considering the farming beast that plowed into me looked more like a tractor than a truck. I was already a few minutes behind schedule when I got hit, and I already had a client waiting. I couldn’t possibly cancel another entire day. I'd done that too much lately.
When I called 911, I didn’t know they’d send Henry fucking Cavill to the rescue. I think I would’ve limped to the salon with my leg out of the socket had I known.
I should have shaved my legs!
“One, two,” he gives me a nod and his perfect blue eyes twinkle at me, and my chest sparks and then --
“Fuuuuuuccckkk! Oh my gosh, oh, you didn’t say three! You didn’t say three! I thought you were going to say three!”
I may as well have puked because the howling in agony that I’m doing isn’t much better. And I know when I scream or yell that I have a vein in my forehead that goes full Julia Roberts. Now, as I writhe in agony, holding my hip, I can feel that vein popping to the rhythm of my woes. I have never screamed that loud in my life and I’m pretty sure I peed my pants a little, too. Shit.
“Take a breath,” Clark Kent says, one of his hands now slowly traveling up and down my spine. The pain of the initial jolt seemed to surprisingly be fading away. Or maybe I was focused on the way his fingertips seemed to dig deeper into my body, in a more than comforting way.
“How are you now?” he asks, studying me intently. Too intently for how I must look and honestly, I am a little mad at myself for caring about that in this situation. Some dipshit just crashed their truck into my car and now I’m late for my first client and my hip and leg are going to be sore for some time. I can already feel the pain halo around the socket, sore and throbbing.