by Liz Meldon
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
ALL IN Trilogy
Regrets Abound
Chocolate Knight
Climactic Reunions
Meddling Meddler
You Fucking Twat
Spill Your Guts, Sir
S.O.K. (Save Our Kitty)
All In
The End
Or Is It?
Newsletter Connect
Thanks for reading!
About the Author
Skye
All In, #3
Liz Meldon
Copyright Liz Meldon 2017
Amazon Edition.
License Notes
Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to purchase their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.
Contents
Acknowledgments
ALL IN Trilogy
1. Regrets Abound
2. Chocolate Knight
3. Climactic Reunions
4. Meddling Meddler
5. You Fucking Twat
6. Spill Your Guts, Sir
7. S.O.K. (Save Our Kitty)
8. All In
The End
Or Is It?
Newsletter Connect
Thanks for reading!
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my phenomenal beta reader and editorial guru Amanda, along with my amazing proofreader Phoenix, for catching my errors with poise and tact. As always, much love to my author besties group, my sun and stars, and my parents for being incredibly supportive of this journey. Last, and certainly not least, a great many thanks to my readers, especially all you squeeing about the trilogy on #bookstagram.
I was beyond blown away at all the love and excitement that surrounded this trilogy. For the first time, I felt like I was doing something right. So, thank you, dear reader. Without you, there’s nothing but me and my imagination.
ALL IN Trilogy
FINN
COLE
SKYE
Skye (All In, #3)
Skye Summers: A sugar baby no more.
1
Regrets Abound
“Is that the last of them?” Skye Summers watched the herd of former high schoolers—according to their IDs—push through the main doors of Gallery Sens, chatting just as animatedly as they had when they first arrived. However, when they had strolled into the sex museum two hours earlier, full of giggles and whispers, they’d been much more intolerable. Now that they’d had a chance to see what was inside, their tune had changed for the better.
In her first month as the front desk and museum admissions attendant, Skye had realized that was the case with most. Sex was still such a taboo topic, even in the age of free porn and celebrity sex tapes. Most visitors under the age of forty arrived all aquiver, like they were doing something naughty by visiting Coral Bay’s infamous sex show.
However, once they went through the exhibits and realized this was a place to learn and appreciate the history of human sexuality, they usually left with the same energy as those high schoolers: subdued but interested.
Hans Timmons, museum/gallery owner and boss extraordinaire, nodded at her question without looking up. He was rather particular about how the brochures were arranged at the back of the front desk cube, and even though Skye had a month of experience under her belt, apparently she still couldn’t get them right.
“They were quite loud, weren’t they?” he muttered as he shuffled a few stacks of brochures around, then straightened up with a smile. “But we’re done for the day. Why don’t you count down? I’m sure you have somewhere more exciting to be.”
“One can dare to dream,” she said with a chuckle. Skye had nothing waiting for her after her eight-hour shift but a certain fluffy white cat and leftovers from yesterday’s dinner. Oh, and Fear Factor. The TV gods had revived the program, which she had watched religiously as a kid, and lately Skye had a thing for reality shows featuring people who were more of a mess than she was.
After balancing her cash till, chatting amicably with Hans as she worked, Skye stepped aside and let him confirm her numbers. When he finished, the pair tidied up the front desk area, and she ended her day by sweeping the lobby. There weren’t many big bosses out there who would take the time to help their lowliest employees clean their station, but Hans did. Every day, without fail, he usually hung around for the last ten minutes of her shift. At first Skye had thought he was micromanaging—until she learned he did it with every employee, and used the time to find out how their day had gone. It was why the fifteen employees who staffed the museum had staggered clock-out times—and any work problems were addressed almost immediately.
Even if selling tickets and giving information to tourists and lookie-loos wasn’t what Skye had envisioned as her first postgrad job, she had never been happier at work. For the first time in her life, she didn’t dread the start of each day, nor did she lay in bed fantasizing about elaborate, awesome ways to quit as her alarm shrieked unchecked on her nightstand.
And she needed that, considering every other part of her life was a fucking disaster.
Just after Skye put her cleaning supplies away in the small, nondescript storage closet near the museum exit door, a bright-eyed college-aged woman strolled into the lobby, dressed to the nines with a folder tucked under her arm. Before Skye had a chance to intercede, Hans directed her to carry on through, saying he would be there momentarily.
“I’m considering bringing on another intern,” he explained when the woman disappeared through the museum entrance. Skye schooled her features as she nodded. When she had applied to work here, she’d been passed over because she lacked experience. That woman couldn’t have been older than twenty-one.
“That’ll be nice.”
“One of the college programs is doing an HR internship,” he clarified, as though sensing the shift in her tone. “I’ll get additional funding for hiring one of their students.”
“Oh.” She brightened, then instantly felt ridiculous for having such a sour reaction. After all, who was she to make a face at Hans’s hiring procedures? At least she had a job she liked and a boss who liked her. She still had the opportunity to join the back-of-house museum staffers in a few months, at the very least. “That’s great. If you need help organizing the interviews, just let me know.”
They quickly tidied up the rest of the space, and, just as she was switching from heels to flip-flops, Hans stopped her.
“One last thing,” he said. “There is a museum fair happening next weekend. All the local establishments will have a booth. There will be games, prizes, guest lectures from specialists. We even have a few larger institutions gracing us with their presence, and I was wondering if you would like to help me and Theresa man the booth?”
Skye blinked, taking a few seconds to process the wealth of information, then hastily nodded. “I would love to!”
Anything to show she was committed to being a more hands-on member of the team.
Hans told her he would give her the details tomorrow, then shooed her out, insisting her shift had ended eight minutes ago and she had the whole night ahead of her. Weekdays meant an eleven-to-seven shift, so by whole night, he meant dinner and a few hours of TV before crashing in bed. Still, Skye appreciated that he took an interest in their out-of-work lives and was always determined to at least try to get everyone out on time. Gossip through the museum circles suggested that other owners, directors, managers and the like were less inclined to believe their employees even had a
life outside of work.
She hurried out the main glass doors, waving as Hans locked them behind her, and walked home with an extra bit of pep in her step. However, that pep quickly leeched out of her when she spotted her apartment building—an ever-present reminder of Cole Daniels, and, by association, Finn Rai, two men she had been trying to keep out of her mind since ending things with both them a month ago.
That was always made more difficult, however, when she returned home to find a stack of moving boxes by the front door, still flat and waiting to be put together. Since ending her sugar daddy contract with Cole and cutting ties with the company who had paired them, Skye had been determined to move out of his apartment and find a place of her own. Unfortunately, rent was sky-high in Coral Bay, and after living in an incredibly safe building for the last four years, sketchy suburbs and rundown low-rises on the city outskirts had zero appeal. Cole had insisted she stay until she found something better—but better seemed more and more unlikely with each day Skye spent scouring apartment ads.
“Love of my life,” she greeted as Oz weaved his way around the boxes, purring thunderously. She swept him into her arms and snuggled him close, knowing that even if she had lost Cole and Finn, she would always have Oz to keep her warm at night.
In theory, anyway. As soon as the white floof got what he wanted—a quick snuggle and a chin rub—he squirmed out of her arms, circled her legs purr-meowing, and then stuffed his face into her work bag. Rolling her eyes, Skye stepped around the purse-diving expedition and grabbed her pad thai leftovers from the fridge, dumped them in a pot, and set them on the stove. After changing out of her work clothes, she stretched out on the couch, got the TV going, and half watched while she perused her phone’s notifications.
A little part of her was always disappointed not to see anything from Finn or Cole—but that was absurd. Of course she wouldn’t get anything from them. She had sent them packing firmly and abruptly when they showed up at work on her first day, insisting the jig was up. That had been a month ago, and besides the brief bit of contact she’d had to have with Cole about the apartment, both men had kept a respectable distance.
Did she regret how it all went down? Absolutely.
Was her regret strictly related to how she handled things? No.
Did she regret walking away from them? Definitely.
But Skye knew she couldn’t change that now. As much as she missed texting all day with Finn or wiping lipstick off Cole’s cheek, laughing, nothing could change what had happened. Her decision, while heart-wrenching, would be the best for everyone in the long run. All she could hope was that they were both happy. Because they deserved to be happy.
Skye, on the other hand, accepted her regret, her sadness, and her pain in stride. She had been in the wrong, even if Cole could never communicate properly and Finn probably shouldn’t have pursued his friend’s sugar baby. It didn’t matter now. It was in the past.
So why couldn’t she stop thinking about it?
Why did she hope to see their names flashing on the screen whenever her phone rang?
Why had it hit her this hard?
And why, for goodness sake, couldn’t she stop thinking about them? Both of them. Work offered some reprieve, as she was still learning the ins and outs of the business, but as soon as those heels came off and she was out the door, Cole and Finn managed to wriggle their way to the front of her mind. It was a vicious cycle: missing them, then remembering she had severed the connection and this was all her fault, then scolding herself for being upset, followed by a swift game of what if. It wasn’t healthy, but she couldn’t stop it. That fucking cycle was on repeat, and now, a month after everything had happened, Skye still hadn’t figured out how to break it.
At the sound of something sizzling on the stove, she tore herself away from her phone and dashed across the sprawling living space into the kitchen, hastily turning down the burner and stirring her day-old noodles. After a few pitiful meows from Oz, she fed him his dinner a little early, then flopped back down on the couch for a little guilt-free TV time before she dove back into rental listings.
And tried, at least for a few hours, to forget about the man who actually owned her apartment—and the man who had once showed up at its door with chocolate roses.
2
Chocolate Knight
Skye was in a waking nightmare.
All around her, kids aged seven and under screeched at the top of their lungs, running into each other, knocking things over—and no one was coming to save her.
“Guys,” she cried as she tried to gently remove gum from a sweet little blonde’s very fragile hair. “Come on, let’s settle down. We can’t start our games if you don’t… settle… down…”
Hopeless. The only relatively sane one was the delicate creature whimpering in front of her, tears spilling down her cheeks and a wad of bright pink gum in her hair. The best she’d been able to offer, when Skye asked who had done it, was a boy, which was promptly followed by waterworks. And not a parent in sight, of course.
“Almost out, sweetheart,” Skye told her, but from the look on the girl’s face, she didn’t trust Skye’s half-crazed smile and frantic eyes. Somewhere behind the multicolored jungle gym playset, someone screamed, the sound followed by laughter and the scattering of a bunch of little shits in superhero shirts. Skye exhaled sharply, wishing she’d had the good sense to tie her hair up before she had stepped into this madness. Sweat trickled down the back of her neck. For an indoor kiddie playroom, it certainly was sweltering as fuck.
Or maybe Skye was just melting into the floor.
She could deal with that. Just dissolve into a puddle of sweat and stress. Puddles didn’t have to manage a herd of twenty monsters.
Everyone had done it, apparently. The Central California Museum Togetherness Festival at White Water Point, a midsize city about a half hour inland from Coral Bay, had a children’s room inside the convention center where parents could dump their brats. It allowed them to peruse the many booths, displays, and exhibits without worrying their kid might break something, get lost, or cost them extra cash. Museums got a discount on their booth fee if they signed up for an hour of monitoring the playroom. They had all been told that an attendant who handled kids this age for a living would be present. From what Skye had heard from the other museum folk suckered into this gig, it had sounded like an hour of phone time.
When Skye arrived, Janet, the trained attendant, had zipped out immediately, citing the excuse that she hadn’t had a break yet during her ten-hour day. So there was Skye. Alone. In a room that smelled sticky, with twenty chubby-cheeked munchkins who wouldn’t. sit. still.
Had she expected Hans or Theresa to do this? No. Both had seniority over her. Both were more knowledgeable at the booth. But she would have at least preferred there to be a vote. Something. Instead, Hans had clapped a hand on her shoulder about fifteen minutes ago and smiled sadly. Skye had known right then and there that things were about to take a turn for the awful.
“There we go,” she said, a victorious cackle slipping out of her mouth when she pried the gum from the little girl’s hair. “Free!”
She had expected the tears to cease immediately and the gum’s prisoner to rejoin the chaos. Instead, the girl dug her hand into Skye’s jeans pocket—hooray for informal attire—and followed her to the garbage can.
Okay. She was going to have a shadow now. The blonde couldn’t have been more than four or five, and when Skye crouched down and asked her for her name, she uttered an almost inaudible Cassandra before her lip started to quiver again.
“What a pretty name,” Skye cooed. “Do you want to be my helper?”
Lip still wobbling, Cassandra nodded, blonde curls bouncing and cheeks a rosy pink. Skye sighed and straightened, trying to figure out the best way to keep Cassandra from bawling and wrangle the rest of them into something closer to organized chaos than what it was right now.
“Well, doesn’t this look like a barrel of laughs…”
>
Skye’s head snapped in the direction of the door, eyes widening at the sound of an all-too-familiar voice—one she hadn’t heard for over a month, but sometimes whispered naughty things in her dreams. Finn Rai. In the flesh. Leaning on the locked swinging gate—which came up to roughly to Skye’s waist and was the only thing keeping the beasts from breaking out and ruining the festival. There was an actual door located inside the storage room at the back, of course, if she needed to make an escape to the outside world. It had been singing its siren song for the last ten minutes or so. Suddenly this door, however, was much more appealing.
The convention center that had offered to host the museum fair had several rooms just like this. Some were used for choir practice or other musical affairs, given how wonderful the acoustics were. This one, however, sat at the far end of the building, past the bathrooms, the for-rent art studios, and even the food court. Totally round, its walls coated in animal kingdom murals, the day care took place inside during the week. Parents would check their child in at that little gate, which would swing open and lock soundly behind them, and then watch the little hellion dive into the fun from the safety of the other side.
Someone should have been manning said gate. The person who was paid to deal with kids should have been manning it, monitoring the sheets of parent names that coordinated with a specific child. Well, no, Skye should have been doing that. Fucking Janet should be pulling gum out of string-thin hair and wrangling the little monsters.