by Cara McKenna
Praise for Cara McKenna’s After Hours
“The sweet, smoking hot, standout erotic romance you’ve been craving.”
—New York Times bestselling author Beth Kery
“Intense, funny, and perfectly dirty.”
—USA Today bestselling author Victoria Dahl
“Cara McKenna brings the steam.”
—New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Ava Gray
INTERMIX BOOKS
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
UNBOUND
An InterMix Book / published by arrangement with the author
PUBLISHING HISTORY
InterMix eBook edition / October 2013
Copyright © 2013 by Cara McKenna.
Excerpt from After Hours copyright © 2013 by Cara McKenna.
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eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-62199-8
INTERMIX
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Contents
Praise
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Special Excerpt from After Hours
About the Author
For my editor, Jesse—taker of chances, redeemer of hermits, alchemist with the power to turn common crows into incontinent dogs.
With many thanks to my agent, Laura Bradford, who digs my flavor of crazy.
And thanks also to tremendous friends and authors Ruthie Knox and Jill Sorenson, who read it first and made it better. Plus extra, whopping great thanks to Charlotte Stein—amazing friend, heartbreakingly talented writer, and this book’s Ideal Reader.
Chapter One
From: Merry
To: Lauren, Kat
Subject: Farewell drinks?
Hey gals! Anybody free for pre-vacay drinks tomorrow? I figure it’s pretty likely I’ll get taken captive as a sex slave by some rippling, kilted Highlander next week, never to return. Promise you’ll keep San Fran warm for me.
I’ve got a zillion things still to wrap up at work, but I should be free by 7:30. Any takers? So hoping to see you guys one more time before I fly out.
Mer
From: Lauren
To: Merry, Kat
Subject: re: Farewell drinks?
Wouldn’t miss it—I could use a drink this week. Or three. Just tell me where.
L
From: Kat
To: Merry, Lauren
Subject: re: Farewell drinks?
Hell yeah. See you then!
Kat
From: Lauren
To: Merry, Kat
Subject: re: Farewell drinks?
Is it totally cunty that I’m sort of looking forward to Merry being gone for a month? Probably. But I swear she lost her old personality, right along with the weight. If it gets any worse she’ll start tossing her hair and giggling every time someone tells her how great she looks. My last nerve. She is on it. Bon voyage.
Okay, yeah. That WAS cunty. Whatever. See you tomorrow!
Cuntily yours,
Lauren
Merry blinked at her phone’s screen, just as another message alert pinged.
From: Kat
To: Merry
Subject: re: Farewell drinks?
Uhhh . . . o_O I’m guessing Lauren didn’t mean to reply all. And I don’t think she knows she did. Shall we just let her keep thinking that, or . . . ??? Anyhow, I can’t wait to see you tomorrow!
Awkwardly,
Kat
Merry frowned, considering her reply.
She wasn’t hurt.
Well, yeah, she was. But not surprised. Lauren’s default setting was snide, but it stung Merry to have her suspicions confirmed. She’d lost ninety-two pounds, but clearly she’d gained something else—readmission to the joys of high-school bitchery! Nothing like a reply-all faux pas to make thirty-one feel like fifteen.
She squished the carpet between her bare toes, wiping her smudged screen with her sleeve. To confront or not to confront.
Lauren had told her once, “You can be fat, or you can be a bitch. But you can’t be a fat bitch. Bitchiness is a luxury only hot girls can afford.”
Merry hated that motto, but she still remembered it word for word, five or more years after Lauren had decreed it. As though a girl couldn’t be big and a bitch, and, for that matter, hot. Though sadly, it seemed perhaps a girl could not be Lauren’s best friend if she didn’t stay fat.
Which was a rather bitchy policy, Merry felt. Nearly as bitchy as that e-mail.
Was she more annoying now? She hadn’t thought so.
Like anyone on earth isn’t annoying, from time to time. And if she was chirpy and smiley when people complimented her, it was because her mom and had raised her to accept praise graciously, never to deflect or apologize. Save your deflecting for the insults—there’ll be plenty. Swallow the kind words whole.
Merry sighed, physically feeling the angst, forcing it from her body as she’d trained herself to do in lieu of muffling it with food.
Let Lauren sulk. Let her vent. Let her think Merry had turned traitor by veering off a comfortable, delicious collision course with diabetes or joint problems or whatever else she’d managed to ignore until last year.
Maybe Lauren would come around, in time. And if she didn’t, Merry might have to admit that perh
aps Lauren was two hundred additional pounds she’d be well rid of.
Sucked, though—ten years of friendship, and she’d never noticed how codependent they’d been. Kind of like how she’d never quite realized she’d gotten so overweight, despite the numbers on her jeans tag and the scale giving it to her straight on a daily basis. People were nothing if not selective in their perceptions of reality.
She hit reply.
From: Merry
To: Lauren, Kat
Subject: re: Farewell drinks?
Awesome! Americano at 7:30. First round’s on me.
Mer
Yeah, awesome. Merry could be the bigger man . . . even if she was now the smaller girl. She’d broken some unspoken, fat-girl solidarity pact she’d subconsciously entered into with Lauren. She could forgive the woman for feeling betrayed or abandoned.
Though, yeah. It was pretty cunty.
She turned to the catastrophe that was her living room, strewn with three weeks’ hiking supplies she had to magically clown-car into one pack. She lined items up by necessity—tent, sleeping bag, water filter on the front line. Essential clothes, followed by if-there’s-room clothes . . .
Friends love each other, she thought, checking the caps on her travel bottles. Friends hurt each other. Friends came and went, but Merry had already lost a lot in the past year and a half. Her mother, over a third of her body weight, then her . . . Well, not her boyfriend. Her fuck buddy. Jason had quit texting a few months ago, right around the time Merry had spun giddy circles in a department-store dressing room after the zipper had slid home, practically dancing out into the street carrying her first size-twelve dress, with a side of intoxicating confidence.
Magically, a few weeks later, she’d had to take that dress to a consignment shop—it was too big now. After this vacation, she might need to do the same with her tens. Holy shit. Size eight. The single digits. She might actually one day fit into the sample sizes she patterned at work. Shangri-fucking-la.
The weird thing was, she still felt like the old Merry inside—caring, competent, fun, loyal. But now people were reacting differently to the package those qualities came in. Guys from work who’d never said more to her than, “How do you change the toner in this thing?” were suddenly asking about her weekend, her vacation, her opinions on the latest reality-TV scandal.
While part of her was thrilled—male attention was a side effect of the weight loss she’d been hoping for, after all—another part had to think, Caring, fun and loyal don’t really count for much, do they? Not unless they came wrapped in a pleasing female shape. Not if you wanted to get past the proverbial receptionist with a guy. Which kind of sucked.
And yet . . . she did want that. Thirty-one, and she’d never been in love. She’d been infatuated, sure. She’d been in love in a guy’s general direction, but she’d never felt that light and heat shining back on her. She’d been clad too heavily in her own self-consciousness to welcome it. Some women wore their curves proudly—rocked the hell out of them, in fact. But that had never been Merry. Her extra weight had been defensive, something to hide behind, not to embrace.
Now the armor was gone. She felt exposed, but the sensation was as thrilling as it was scary. And if she ever wanted to get tangled in the writhing tentacles of passionate, mind-blowing, stupid-making, reciprocal true love, she’d have to make peace with this naked feeling.
Perhaps Lauren, like Jason, had preferred the old Merry, the Merry who’d bent over backward to please the people she liked, who’d put herself last.
You’re welcome to her, she thought, stuffing her sleeping bag into its sleeve.
This new Merry’s off to walk across Scotland.
And she’s not coming back until she’s fucking found herself.
Chapter Two
She was a water nymph. A weightless, ethereal goddess of the loch.
A mattress of undulating coolness under her back, sunshine heating her breasts and belly and face. With her ears submerged, her pulse became the very heartbeat of the earth, the cascade of her hair dancing in the gentle waves. She was more spirit than flesh, a wisp of pure energy to be blown where the breeze wished to take her . . .
But the cold got her first. Her feet found the smooth stones and mush, bracing autumn air clenching her back muscles. Weightlessness going, going, gone as she sloshed to shore.
The water nymph was no more, and she was just Merry. Same old Merry, still thumbing through the owner’s manual for this body she couldn’t yet call her own.
The breeze pebbled her dripping skin as she tiptoed between the sharper rocks to her towel—a towel that was in desperate need of a good machine-washing after more than two weeks’ trekking.
As she dried herself, she took in the landscape, thinking she’d never felt this small before—a smallness that had nothing to do with her dress size or body mass index. Those measures felt so abstract now.
The valleys of northwest Scotland were sweeping, the craggy black mountains grand and ominous, the loch long and wide, wavering like old glass under a vast blue sky. She was well off the popular Great Glen Way route, and the only sign of humanity she’d spied in the past several days had been the ribbon of white smoke rising from the chimney of a holiday cottage she’d passed early that morning.
Once dressed in her hiking pants and a zip-up, she perched on a boulder to tug on thick wool socks. The rock poked rudely into her butt, and she nearly missed her old padding. Two weeks’ backpacking had probably rounded up her total weight loss since the previous summer to a tidy hundred pounds.
She’d fantasized about the day she’d hit that lovely round number. One hundred freaking pounds.
In her imagination, she’d risen at a pious hour just after dawn, stepped on the scale, clasped her hands with rapturous delight, then skipped down the hall to celebrate the accomplishment with exactly three-quarters of a cup of high-fiber cereal and exactly one-half cup of soy milk, a breakfast that—in her fantasy—she’d magically come to find both palatable and satisfying. 220 calories. Write that down. 220—that’s sixteen minutes on the treadmill at 6.2 miles per hour. That’s twenty-one minutes on the elliptical, excluding warm-up, at 115 strides per minute at a 7.5 resistance.
Fucking numbers.
In her imagination, after said breakfast she’d head to work. She’d take a long lunch break that day, and under the flattering lights of the J. Crew changing room she’d discover she did indeed fit into a pair of size eight jeans. Jeans for which she’d pay ninety dollars—more numbers, always numbers—smiling as she signed the receipt, dutifully not thinking about the working conditions of Cambodian children.
Reality looked nothing like her expectations. The past two weeks’ journey had changed all her perceptions, finally plugging her into an authentic model for qualifying all these changes. Dozens of miles she never could’ve hiked in her old body. Steep hills she never could have scaled and views she’d never have glimpsed from their peaks. The feel of the wind or the weak autumn sun on her naked skin. This sensation of perfect solitude. This mirrorlessness, with no one’s eyes on her body, not even her own. To relate to her physicality from the inside, through what she could do, not how she looked.
The numbers didn’t matter. The numbers were just markers people used to convince themselves how much better or worse they were than others, to calculate their relative human worth.
In no time at all this trip would be over, and in no time at all, Merry might be back to giving a shit about the markers. Those rituals may have whittled the equivalent of a fifth grader from her frame, but that compulsive level of vigilance wasn’t sustainable. Plus Merry had tasted of the bacon-wrapped scallop, the fried pickle with ranch, the brownie batter never to see the inside of an oven. She’d been tossed too many years ago from the garden where there grew only carrot sticks and hundred-calorie packs of pretzels, and there was n
o readmittance. Her mouth had lain in sin with too many Reubens.
For now, no food diary. No logging her day’s cardio session. For as long as she was out here, the numbers could go fuck themselves.
The numbers back home said Merry’s daily calorie budget was 1,450. She smiled, opening a bag of cashews, eating them by the handful as she watched the breeze rippling the loch. She’d surely blast past the 1,450 mark on these alone, inside five minutes. Yet she’d burn them off by noon, humping her forty-pound pack over hill and dale, tugging up her too-big hiking pants when they slipped low and chafed her recently excavated hip bones.
Out here, her body wasn’t a collection of desirable parts and shameful ones, a thing to be tricked and punished and outsmarted, outwilled. It was merely a vessel for food and water and sunshine, a structure of muscle and bone, a capable and ready thing. A machine primed for this trip—170 miles on foot, nearly three weeks to ponder all this natural beauty and appreciate her success. Numbers that qualified her efforts instead of tallying her female value.
She wrapped her hair in the towel and lay across a smooth stretch of grass, surrendering to the smallness. Leaving her body behind as she shut her eyes and welcomed the sun’s heat.
Two hours later, the cramps started.
***
It began as stabby pangs just beneath her ribs and a roiling in her stomach. She’d had to scrap the day’s miles, hiking at a staggered pace back to the loch, lest she get stranded too far from a water source. The pains were followed by a long night of taunting half-sleep, of unsettling, looping dreams, twisted by a growing nausea.
Merry longed to vomit—surely it’d make this hounding dizziness go away—but that mercy never came. The crisis moved to her bowels by dawn, and that didn’t quell the queasiness, either.
The cramps sharpened and a headache grew, and no matter how much water she drank, thirst dogged her. When her bottles were empty, the simple effort of crouching and pumping the filter made her muscles ache and her limbs tremble.
Something was seriously wrong, and it probably wasn’t just the too-many dried apricots she’d had for lunch the day before.