2. Ford

CHAPTER 2

FORD

Sitting in an overstuffed leather chair on the main floor of The Black Door, the exclusive kink club my friends and I were all members of, I picked mindlessly at a hangnail on my thumb. I wasn't paying attention to the annoying scrap of skin, my attention was instead focused on a man across the room who, if I closed my eyes or had enough to drink, could have looked enough like Boston to get me hard. Not that Boston was the only person who gave me an erection. In fact, far from it. But I'd developed a bit of an unhealthy fascination with my best friend's twin brother from the moment Kale told me not to.

He should have known better, obviously, because telling me not to do something not only inspired me to do it, but to do it faster and better than everyone else. Kale's barely younger twin brother should have been off-limits because there had to be an age-old rule somewhere about not sleeping with people who shared DNA with your friends, but I was an only child and also not a fan of the word no.

"You're going to rip your skin off." Another one of my best friends, Brooks, sank down in the empty chair to my right, passing me a tumbler of golden-colored whiskey.

I glanced at him, took the whiskey, then looked at my thumb, which I'd apparently done quite a number on. Lifting the wounded digit to my mouth, I sucked at the pearls of blood that had beaded around the edge of my fingernail, then chased the copper taste down with a swallow of liquor.

"Thanks for the drink and the warning," I said, smacking my lips after I swallowed.

"I didn't know you were coming out tonight."

I didn't know I was coming out tonight either. It was a Friday night and Kale was apparently off with Christian at the goddamn ballet, our fourth friend, Alex, was off still nursing some unspoken wounds that were going to come to light eventually, and I honestly hadn't even thought to see what Brooks was up to. I'd walked to The Black Door on autopilot after parting ways with Boston at the office.

Earlier at work, I hadn't gone downstairs to look for him, and I definitely hadn't meant to spend the whole time flirting with and flustering him, but sometimes the world worked in my favor. I'd sincerely been searching for Kale, who'd been extremely hard to pin down since he shacked up with his new boyfriend, Prince Christian of whatever little island Kale had found him on.

"I didn't mean to," I admitted, trying to shake Boston and his B-rate doppelganger out of my mind. "Kale is off with his Prince and I was bored."

Brooks gestured toward the swollen corner of my thumb. "I think there's better ways to entertain yourself than ripping your fingernails out."

"I had a hangnail," I said.

"Then go get a manicure."

I snorted, rolling my eyes and taking another sip of my drink. "It's too late for that."

"I can't believe you don't have a manicurist on speed dial," he countered.

"Do I strike you as the type?"

"You're wearing thousand dollar shoes and drinking two hundred dollar whiskey," Brooks said, eyes dancing with amusement. "You very much strike me as the type."

"Do you have a private manicurist?"

"Of course." He stretched his arm toward me, giving his fingers a bit of a shake before letting his wrist fall limply over the edge of the chair. "Hands are my favorite part of a man."

"Your favorite part of yourself?"

"No. That's clearly my cock."

I chuckled, choking on my own spit in a notably unattractive way. I chased the stray saliva with another swallow of whiskey, groaning as the liquid burned its way down my throat. I'd been drinking whiskey for years, but I'd admittedly never developed a taste for it. I liked to enjoy my drinks, my meals, my men, and whiskey had always been too sharp on the front end for my liking. I found it near impossible to go all in on something that made me feel like it wanted to burn my throat out of my body, though there was one particular brand I'd started to develop a taste for. Maybe that was part of the only child syndrome, but I liked things to be handed to me, and I liked them to be easy.

Boston, though.

Boston was far from easy.

My flirting with him had started harmlessly enough. I'd taken Kale's warnings to heart, believing that his straight younger brother was well and truly out of reach for me, but something had changed tonight. I'd been with enough men to recognize arousal when I saw it, when I smelled it, and Boston…

He'd been well on his way.

I would have been perfectly happy to do nothing besides tease him and torment Kale into an early grave, but Boston's body had responded to mine earlier. Whether his mind had caught up with his hormones or not, there was something there when he thought about me, and what kind of man, what kind of friend would I have been if I didn't guide him toward those urges and give him a safe place to explore them? Because, honestly, if Boston wasn't as straight as he and his brother imagined him to be, there wasn't a more qualified person to show him the ropes than me.

I knew Kale thought I was scared of relationships, but that wasn't the case. I was bored of relationships. I'd dated plenty in college and in my twenties, and that had been fine and good, but it wasn't exciting. It was always predictable and boring. The truth of the matter was while everyone had pinned me as a fuck boy, I was a romantic at heart. Not like I would ever let any of my friends know, lest they hold it against me, but that was the real reason I fucked instead of dated.

I'd spent enough time in therapy to know it was a result of being an only child with too much money and too much unsupervised time, but I didn't do things in half measures. When I was six, my parents decided I needed to learn how to play the piano, so I'd been enrolled in private lessons that took up every second of time I wasn't in school. I had mastered Haydn's piano sonata in B minor before my seventh birthday. When I was fourteen and had wanted to learn how to paint, I found myself enrolled in a six-month intensive with teachers flown in from Italy to critique my technique. When I was much older and wanted to learn how to fuck, well…I had to resort to some more creative educational measures, but the end result was the same.

I'd thrown the same level of intensity into my relationships until I realized the reward was not worth the work. My first serious relationship after college was a perfectly tolerable man named Matthew, and while I enjoyed making him come his brains out, I didn't enjoy much else with him. He found my attention to be overbearing and controlling, and it was words like those that had led me straight to The Black Door. Harnessing the natural dominance in my personality to be better at something I already excelled at was one of the most enjoyable learning experiences of my life.

But none of those interests, those skills, those talents…none of it fixed the problem of not finding a man who could match my energy for the long term. It was always fun at first and then it was too much. I was too much, but one thing I would never do was apologize for that. I found it easier for everyone—mostly for myself—if I kept my extracurricular escapades to the physical side of things.

Flirt.

Fuck.

And, in the end, flee.

It had been so long since I'd been with someone seriously that I occasionally wondered if I'd forgotten how, and I'd found myself at The Black Door picking at an annoying hangnail wondering what that would be like with Boston Sheffield. A truly horrible daydream for multiple reasons, first of which being I didn't want to have a relationship and last of which being he was my closest friend's straight twin brother.

"That man over there is watching you," Brooks said, pointing his chin toward the far corner of the room and the man I'd been squinting at before his arrival.

"I was watching him."

Clearing my throat, I finished off the drink he'd gotten for me, hoping the burn of the whiskey would be enough to get me out of my head and back into my body for a while.

"Finish your drink," I said, clinking my empty glass against his. "I'll get you a new one."

Brooks tipped the rest of the drink down his throat, and I took both of our glasses to the bar to get another round.

"More of the same?" the bartender asked.

"One for him," I said, glancing up at the bottles on the wall behind him. "I'll have a vodka tonic with lime."

While I waited for our drinks, Boston 2.0 sidled up beside me at the bar, being far too forward and bold for my taste.

"I saw you looking at me earlier," he said.

He had a nice enough voice, and the way he enunciated his syllables confirmed he had a decent upbringing.

"I've been looking at lots of people," I said, tapping my fingertips against the bar.

"Not as hard."

I chuckled, angling my body toward him so I could get a proper look at him. Up close, he didn't look anything like Boston. He was too slim, too short, his hair was too pale and his mouth too thin. He wouldn't do at all.

"I thought you looked like someone I knew." I turned back toward the bar as the bartender slid both drinks toward me.

"Do you want it on your account? "

I gestured over my shoulder toward where I'd left Brooks. "Put it on his."

Picking up the drinks, I turned away from the man who couldn't be Boston even if he spent an entire life practicing and pretending. I made it two steps away before his fingers curled around my bicep, dragging me to a stop.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

"Get your hand off me," I warned, not turning back toward him.

The longer I talked to him, the more ways he proved how wrong he was for me. And while I didn't mind a challenge or a game sometimes, I couldn't stand people who didn't understand the fundamental rules of engagement at a place like this.

His fingers fell away from my arm.

"You're a good-looking man," I said, hoping it landed as a consolation, "but you're not my type."

"I could be."

"You definitely could not be." I frowned, shaking my head. "My type would never say something as humiliating as that."

"Asshole," he muttered.

"Like I said. Now." Raising one of the glasses in a mock toast, I shifted my grip so I could give him the finger. "Have a good rest of your night."

When I returned to my seat, Brooks was watching me with a curious look on his face. I passed him his whiskey and sat down, flipping the twist of lime off the edge of my glass and onto the ice.

"What?" I asked.

"What did he want? "

"He wanted to fuck." I watched as the man wandered over toward the corner of the room where I'd found him.

"He seemed like your type," Brooks said.

"And what's my type?"

"Breathing."

That earned an honest laugh, starting as a low rumble in my chest. Leaning back into the soft leather chair, I stretched my arm toward Brooks and clinked our glasses together. "I have standards," I assured him.

"Breathing and willing?" he teased.

"Exactly."

I was content to let my friends believe that about me because it was easier than sharing the truths of my dreams. The fantasies and the wants that kept me up at night, that almost always involved a comfortable home to share with a man who was a willing hole, but also so much more. Because that was another thing I'd learned as an only child—no matter how much you want it, you can't always have it all.