New Adult Romance Box Set

by Emme Rollins, Julia Kent, Anna Antonia, Helena Newbury, Aubrey Rose

  Trevor snorted awake just as she said the words and then sat up, his rock hard dick poking out from under the thin blanket. He looked just like he'd looked the night of his party, completely naked, a smattering of hair down his chest thickening where it thickened on all of us. The fucker had that perfect athlete's body completely effortlessly, never needing to work out like I did. He just could jump on a bike and go for a hundred mile ride or take a kayak out for a ten mile journey without conditioning his body in between. It filled me with instant rage to think how effortlessly everything came to Trevor—even wild women.

  “Hey, Trev, fancy meeting you here,” I said. Darla snickered.

  “Oh, God, Joe, you're here.” If that was supposed to be a tone of gratitude it wasn't even close.

  “Yeah, about that,” I said, pulling out my phone. “Your mom is psycho right now.”

  “Fuuuuuuuck,” he groaned, holding his head in his hands.

  Darla walked back into her...whatever you call this shack, and motioned for me to come in. I walked in. Cool little place she built, actually. Did she live here? Is this how it worked in trailer land? A chicken half-flew past, some kind of guinea hen that looked starved. A kitten followed it. It was missing one leg and had a pink bow around its fluffy white neck, like a quality control reject from the Hello Kitty factory.

  Darla stood with her back to us, off to my right, while Trevor leaned back and plunked his head on the pillow, grinning madly at me. I rolled my eyes and looked for a place to sit down. There wasn't any so I just grabbed a spot on the floor, on a carpet square that reminded me of kindergarten. She had a bunch of them strewn in neat little patterns around the floor. I guessed this shed was about what? 8'X8'? Something like that—no bigger than the one we used to store our tractor mower in at home. If this was her home then Trevor and I were worlds away from Sudborough.

  She opened a can, the snick of a seal being broken, and then I watched her do something with a manual can opener. They still make those? I heard the sound of water pouring and then the slow gurgle, a sound I knew from my Grandma's house. It was a coffee maker, the kind that used a basket filter and had a pot. Not like the one at home—we used the Keurigs now or Mom pulled out the espresso machine.

  Trevor looked at me and said, “What the hell happened to me?”

  “I don't know, man,” I said. What the hell did happen to you? I thought. “Like I told you, you took all that peyote.”

  “You're the one who got it,” Trevor protested.

  “I got it out of the evidence room. I didn't think you'd sit down and eat all of it.”

  “All of it? I really ate all of it? I thought I must be remembering that wrong.”

  Darla turned around, her eyes wide with surprise. “You ate all of it?” she asked Trevor. He just shrugged. Whipping around to me, she asked, “How much was there?”

  “I don't know.” I held my hands up to try to indicate the size of the bag and Darla started choking with laughter.

  “Holy shit, Trevor! No wonder you were high as a fucking kite when I found you and that was...how long? Twelve hours? More than that? After you went missing. You're crazy.”

  The look he shot her was more intimate than anything I'd ever seen him give anyone, including me, his best friend. “It got me here, didn't it?” he said.

  She softened and smiled back, matching his affection. “I hope,” she said, “it won't take another giant bag of peyote to get you to come back.”

  Trevor

  I had never been so happy to see Joe in my entire life—and that included the time someone at school had stolen my shirt from my gym bag during gym class and replaced it with a Yankees t-shirt on opening day. He'd saved me from having the shit kicked out of me in our Boston suburb. That had been super lame compared to this. What kind of friend drives eleven hours to rescue you, goes into a trailer park that might as well have been the streets of New Delhi compared to Sudborough, and rescues you?

  If I was so grateful to see him, why was I also so sad that he was here? Making love with Darla last night had been unbelievable, wild and carefree, tender and powerful. She instilled in me a sense of what it must feel like to break every rule in your life, to reject the pre-programmed set of guidelines that made everything function on autopilot. I wanted to run away from everything, ignore final exams, set aside my law school acceptance letters, reject my parents' notion that I needed to become a lawyer—tell them all to fuck off and just go out on the road and sing my fucking heart out.

  Maybe I could convince Joe to join me. A laugh escaped me and Joe and Darla looked at me again as if I were a little unhinged, a little dangerous. And they were right—I was. There is nothing more dangerous than someone who comes to realize that the reality they've been force-fed isn't the only option.

  “You know, your dick is pretty amazing, dude, but put something on and cover it up,” Joe said.

  I threw a balled up sock at him and he threw one back so I slipped the sock over it, then stood up.

  “We're Random Acts of Crazy, not the Red Hot Chili Peppers,” Joe chided.

  The coffee maker sent out the most delicious scent of java. It was probably just some cheap brand of coffee, and not the espresso I'd become accustomed to, but I didn't care. Anything would help right now to give me some focus, take away my caffeine withdrawal and make all of this last a little longer. I was going to leave Darla any minute now, go back to my life—and it felt like having something ripped from me fiber by fiber, bone crunching against bone.

  Darla frowned, then took a really good look at Joe, at me, my erection, and back to Joe. “Oh my God, you're Joe Ross, aren't you?” She gawked at him, triggering some twisted bit of jealously in me. Women looked at Joe like he was some kind of museum man, an animated sculpture from Roman or Greek times. Any other woman and I wouldn't have cared.

  Darla? For some reason, I cared.

  He shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “You're the bass player for Random Acts.”

  “Yeah,” he said, scuffling his foot on the floor and looking down. Of the four of us, Joe was the most humble, the guy who thought he was along for the ride just because he was my best friend. He was also the least committed to the idea that we could break out as a rock band. I don't think, though, that it was because he didn't think he had what it took, or that he didn't think that we had what it would take to make it big. It's more that Joe was the one who was the biggest conformist, the guy who did live that pre-programmed life because it was what was expected of him.

  Stolen peyote excepted. That was a crazy outlier moment for him, the first time I'd ever known him to be so bold. He'd shrugged it off as no big deal, but it made me wonder.

  “So you're telling me I have two out of four members of one of my favorite bands sitting in here in my little purple passion place—” Joe made a snorting sound, a choked noise of shock, “—and we're about to enjoy a cup of coffee like polite strangers?”

  I took two steps toward Darla and cozied my sock covered dick up against her hip, leaning down, breathing quietly into her ear. “It's your pink passion place that I like most. And we're not strangers anymore,” I hissed.

  She pressed against me and I heard Joe clear his throat. “Ahem...Get a room, guys,” he said.

  “You're in it,” Darla announced and grabbed my balls, gave them a gentle, playful squeeze.

  Darla

  If you had told me a week ago that I would have Trevor Connor and Joe Ross from Random Acts sitting in my little purple passion place I would have told you you were crazy. There are a lot of things you could have told me that would have made me tell you you were nuts.

  Most of them had happened to me in the past twelve hours.

  But this one? The two hottest guys from my favorite band? Un-fucking-real. It was like the time space continuum had ripped into shreds and poured out all the hope and joy in the universe into the armpit of Ohio and added a huge jar of Nutella to it. It seemed so domestic, so June Cleaver of me, to pour a cup of coffee
for each man. I only had two mugs in my place because why have more than two when no one ever came here? Just me. What was I going to do, have a third mug for the stray cat or for the neighbor's chicken that roamed all over the place?

  The two men, Joe on the floor, Trevor sitting reclined on my bed, my uncle's tube sock still covering his now limp penis, made for quite a picture. If I were the type to go on Facebook and record every fart, sigh, and perceived insult, who photographed, non-stop, every moment of my life as if the only way to remember it was to capture it in an image like someone who was brain impaired and needed that chronicling, then I'd have been snapping pictures like crazy. It was unfortunate that I didn’t do that, really, and that anyway, my cheap little flip phone didn't have that feature, because this would be one hell of a picture.

  Instead, I blinked slowly, as if my eyes were a camera shutter, so that I could freeze my brain, extract the memory at any given time of the bliss of just this. Aunt Josie wasn't gonna believe it. She didn't believe half the shit that came out of my mouth, but she really wasn't gonna believe that I could have a dream-come-true moment like this. We'd both given up on dreams, probably the night our daddies died.

  She'd been begging me to move in with her ever since she'd got out of this hellhole, but I'd been held back in by Mama and all her needs. It felt good to have my needs fulfilled and as Trevor sipped his coffee he looked at me, puzzled, and said, “What about you, Darla?”

  Oh my God, could the man read my mind? Was I that transparent? “What about me?” I said, a cagey tone seeping in.

  Joe set his cup down, looked at Trevor, looked at me and said, “He's right, where's your coffee?”

  “Oh, I'm fine,” I said, not wanting to admit that I didn't have another cup.

  Trevor stood, pulled the sock off himself, and started to get dressed.

  “About time,” Joe said, taking another sip.

  “Hey, man, I spent twenty-four hours buck naked doing God knows what.”

  “I know what you were doing,” Joe said, shooting me a jaunty, slightly naughty, incredibly evil little grin.

  “We were only doing that part of the time,” I said innocently, batting my eyelashes. “I have no idea what happened to him before I found him.”

  “Nevertheless,” Trevor interrupted. “I'm getting dressed now but it's not my natural state anymore.”

  Joe snorted, coffee almost spraying everywhere but he held it in, a general politeness and decorum in all of his actions. As I spent more time with the two of them, even these twenty minutes or so, I saw how much of it was in Trevor too. There was a gentility that was bred into them—or maybe it was just forced into them—by so many years of being taught, or scolded, or both. It was what people around here would call snobbery—or in a more slang way they would say, You think you're better than us?

  There was a tone of that in both men, that kind of politeness, that kind of polished pattern to their words, the perfect grammar (unless they were talking smack on purpose), the near-flawless eye contact, the gestures that were well thought out and sophisticated. The whole way that they operated in one smooth, collected, classy way. No one in my life acted like this—and for sure no man in my life acted like this. I just liked watching the two of them, but I especially liked watching Trevor's body as he slipped into the ill fitting clothes—which prompted Joe to take a final swig of his coffee, hand me the cup, and jump up out the door.

  “Wait, don't get dressed yet.” He held up one finger and sprinted outside.

  “Which is it?” Trevor complained. “You want me to get dressed. You want me to not get dressed. What the hell?”

  “Maybe he wants a threesome,” I joked, winking at Trevor —who went dead still.

  He turned around to me with exquisite clarity and said, nostrils flaring, eyes widening, hands reaching out for me, “Is that an option?”

  God knows what I might have blurted out—my mouth seems possessed half the time, conduit for God the other half—so I was grateful when Joe burst back into the room holding a small paper bag, the kind you get at really nice grocery stores that we don't have around here.

  “I brought you a change of clothes,” he said, shoving the bag at Trevor.

  Still staring at me, Trevor seemed reluctant to end our conversation. I was grateful, though, for Joe's intervention saving me from needing to answer a question no man had ever asked and that I'd assumed no man would ever ask. Around here, a threesome meant some good ol' boy who got so drunk that he hired two women to come service him because he forgot about the first one and then ended up too drunk to perform for either of them but owed one fuck of a lot of money.

  Trevor's idea, though, had an edge to it, something that would tip us into a new dimension. I wanted to make sure before I answered that he meant what I thought he meant. Even if he didn't, the better route was to say nothing. So, thank you Jesus, thank you God, thank you Joe.

  Breaking eye contact, Trevor looked in the bag. “Awesome,” he said, nodding, pulling out a cotton t-shirt that had some sort of joke I didn't get on it, a pair of jeans that slipped onto him like a glove, his own socks, and a pair or Merrills. He dressed with unthinking familiarity and grace. Now he just looked like any old college student.

  Fumbling under the bed, he found what he was searching for and put the straw hat on his head.

  “What the hell is that?” Joe asked, laughing.

  “Beats me.”

  “That's what he had on him when I met him,” I said. “Well...not on him. All he wore was a guitar and a collar.”

  Joe gaped at me. “A guitar?”

  “That's it. Just standing there on I-76 with his thumb in the air and a big old silly grin on his face.”

  “When you put it that way, who wouldn't stop for him?”

  I opened my mouth to respond, but Trevor stopped me cold.

  "Hey," Trevor whispered, his hand snaking over my hip. The way he touched me, like he possessed me—I liked it. His lips were next to my ear and I shivered. "Thanks for last night."

  I turned around, found myself in his arms and looked up. "No, the pleasure was all mine," I said, smiling.

  Joe cleared his throat and stepped outside. "We really need to get on the road," he called out. “Sorry."

  "I'm the sorry one," Trevor said, his eyes full of mourning. I imagine mine were filled with more. He kissed me softly and then suddenly, like a drowning man, his hands were all over me, grabbing my ass, sliding over my ribs, cupping a breast. The passion was like a dying man going after his last meal before execution. I felt it too, the desperation, but the words that kept going through my head weren't going to come out.

  No, they weren't. Dammit.

  I wasn't going to ask, I wasn't gonna say we'll meet again or you can always come back or any of the other things that raced through my brain a million times a minute because I wasn't going to be that girl. I wouldn't beg. I wouldn't plead. If someone like Trevor Connor wanted me he knew damn well where I was and he could find me. The hurt I’d risk from asking would wipe away all the pleasure and the fun of the past day. I could risk having my heart broken by having him leave, but I couldn't risk having him break my heart by saying he wouldn't come back.

  “Hang on,” he said, pulling away breathless—and then he trotted outside and said something to Joe.

  Joe came back in and said, “Can I get another cup of coffee before we hit the road? I'm exhausted and Trevor can drive but—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I stopped him in mid-sentence, poured him a cup. “It's good. It's all cool. Where's Trevor?”

  “He just went out to talk to his mom.”

  “Oh, OK,” I said quietly.

  For some reason I could hold it together when Trevor was in the room, next to me, his scent filling the air, but Joe was a stranger. He sat in silence. I didn't know too many people who could do that. Actually, I didn't know any people who could do that, including me. His body was tight, a bit nervous, as if he weren't quite comfortable in that beautiful skin
of his. I wondered why not. If I looked as perfect as he did I'd walk around all day admiring myself and being the most comfortable person in the room.

  My mind clung to that brief little interlude just so that I could keep the tears at bay. Trevor was leaving, this madness was done, and my life...well, the clichéd thing to say would be my life would never be the same but that was a big load of shit and I knew it. My life would go back to being the same. The same thing every day, the same job which, by the way, I had to be at today at four o'clock, working a stupid four to nine shift. The same everything. Trevor had come into my life—a hitchhiker who took me for a ride when it came down to it. And now Joe was here to take Trevor back to his world and leave me stewing in mine.

  I looked around my little cottage and suddenly it seemed so silly, so child-like. A little girl's attempt at an escape from a very dismal reality. Maybe that was it? I thought as I let the tears fill my eyes, because fuck it, if Joe was gonna see me cry, Joe was gonna see me cry. When Trevor came back in he'd find a red-faced Darla and if I was never gonna see him again then why did I care?

  I felt like a little four year old again, confused and not knowing why I was so sad, except now I was twenty-two and I knew exactly why I was so sad. Because I was losing the one guy I'd ever responded to on every level and that had to be OK. I had to be OK with it.

  But I wasn't OK.

  “So you play with Random Acts of Crazy,” I said to Joe, hearing the shake in my own voice, hoping he was polite enough to pretend it wasn't there.

  That blindingly beautiful face turned to me. He leaned back in his chair, a little awkward now, but trying to give the impossible impression of casualness. “Yeah.”

  Oh, boy. This one was talkative.