New Adult Romance Box Set

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

  Except for her.

  “What's your name?” I asked, now really getting a look at her.

  “Chippy Pete.” She deadpanned, as if there were some inside joke I was supposed to understand. Ohio had some really strange naming conventions for women.

  “Uh, OK...?” I asked, my voice rising. Her face fell, though, as if I'd disappointed her. Some deep sorrow came out of her skin, as if it were a dementor, seeping into my heart and making me feel like an ass. I didn't know what I'd done, but I felt really awful suddenly, and wanted to make it up to her. But we were sitting in a cheap rustbox on the side of some interstate in Ohio and I was naked.

  My only option? To reach over and kiss Chippy Pete. Because when you're coming down off 'shrooms and NyQuil and find yourself naked in a car older than you, 600 miles from home, a kiss is about the only thing that can make it all better.

  Chapter Two

  Darla

  Whoa. If I had to pick a dream to come true, I'd have chosen the winning MegaMillions lottery ticket dream, but this would do as a distant second, Trevor's mouth warm and inviting, tasting like orange tangy yumminess. He kissed with his whole body, hands roaming through my hair, his tongue parting my lips and going on a search for something so deep in me I thought he'd never reach it and I would have to live in the ecstasy of being loved by his mouth forever.

  I was OK with that.

  The fact that he was naked brushed through my mind and then my hand brushed against his thick, gleaming manhood, making his stomach tighten under my hands, splayed against the fine, taut skin of his abs. Washboard. I'd heard that word applied to a man's body before but had never understood it til then. His flesh so different from my own full curves, as if I were exploring an alien body in a state of arousal so high I would reach nirvana soon.

  “Oh—” he groaned breathlessly, then stopped. “What's your real name?” he whispered.

  “Darla.” It came out in a rushed gasp as his fingers found my right nipple and pinched just enough to make it—and my pink nub—pebble instantly, as if they were one long, connected nerve ending. His other hand explored my back, sliding up under my shirt, the heat of his flesh pouring into me. The fact that he was fully naked and I was not was a kind of tragedy.

  We needed to fix that.

  No central Ohio man flared this kind of intensity in me within seconds, Trevor's mouth so soft and hard at once, his essence in his breath, a sensuality that was complete and inviting, imploring me to go to places of the flesh with him, to enter a new world where all that mattered were touches and licks and sighs and moans and friction. Ah, friction.

  I needed friction.

  He leaned the passenger seat back and pulled on my leg, his face spreading into a grin that told me so much, a smile of absolute delight. In my fantasies men looked at me like this. In real life, they barely kissed me. What were the odds that I'd be driving along I-76 one night and find a naked man who wanted me? The look on his face was more arousing than any touch, which perplexed me. If he could make me—Darla Jo Jennings, just a small-town (fat) girl from central Ohio, daughter of a lush and college wanna-be—feel this special with one deep, excited expression, then what else did the world hold that was waiting for me?

  And then there was that joystick of his. Slinging one leg over the stick shift, I straddled him, leaning back against the dashboard. His erect shaft stood between us like a very erotic chaperone making sure we didn't dance too close. That ship had sailed about thirty seconds ago, though, and whatever Miss Manners had to say about how to remain proper when you have a naked dude in your car covered with guitar splinters and the increasingly cloying scent of dead raccoon filling your car through the hole in the floor, I didn't much care.

  He reached up and took my breasts in his hands, a soft, smooth touch that stretched into something yearning, my face curling down to kiss him, mouths happy and luxuriating in the pure joy of this, his mouth warm and wet as his tongue explored me, my breasts swelling under his fingers, strumming me like I was a replacement for his destroyed guitar.

  Play me, man. Play me all night long.

  That raccoon scent, though, was starting to make this decidedly less appealing. Trevor seemed to notice it, too, and pulled back.

  “That's the raccoon. Not me,” he announced, brushing the hair away from my face with one hand and raising his eyebrows, pretending to be serious.

  I burst out laughing, the sound filling my tiny car, the windows fogged already. My eyes caught some old shadow of finger-writing on the window from the last guy I fucked in my car. OK, the one and only. It read, “I luv Durlu.”

  Trevor did a double-take and started giggling when he saw it. “The gene pool a bit shallow here in Io—, er, Ohio?”

  “My mama spelled it that way on my birth certificate,” I deadpanned. His face faltered a bit, that smooth brow uncertain, his body tighter now as I stared him down.

  “Oh. Uh—” I couldn't make him squirm anymore, largely because he was making me squirm. Fucking him here by the side of the road, with eau de roadkill permeating the air through my floorboards wasn't exactly a Harlequin novel setting, either. Swinging my leg back over to the driver's seat, I started the engine and got back on the highway. If we didn't move soon, a state trooper would find us, and I did not want to have to explain why I had an expired registration and a naked man in my car. One would be hard enough.

  The other was just hard.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, sitting up. With as much dignity as a naked man with an aching boner I wanted to ride like a pogo stick could ever manage, Trevor repositioned himself on my torn vinyl seat and gave me his full attention. Those blue eyes had pupils that were normal now, the effects of whatever he'd eaten back in Massachusetts fading out.

  “I can't. I'm merging.”

  “No, I mean—you're joking, right? No one would really spell it...” his voice faded out. Polite enough to realize he'd really bungled if my mama really had spelled it that way, he was stuck in a Catch-22.

  “No, she really did. You should see how she spells my twin sisters' names. Lemonjello and Orangejello.”

  A sputtering sound filled the car, and it wasn't from my muffler. He was gasping for air, laughter making him wheeze. It wasn't that funny, but apparently he still had just enough of whatever made him trip to keep him laughing for the next two mile markers.

  I hoped it stayed in his bloodstream just long enough to touch more of him, to have him explore me, because there was a sliver of a chance that whatever he'd taken was what made him kiss me. Part of me deeply hoped it wasn't true, that he found me innately attractive, but I'm a realist.

  I'll take what I can get. And if 'shrooms or K2 or Swiffer solution made him kiss me like that, then I would let him huff a tube of Vicks to have one wild night out here in Hoopieville.

  “Where are we going?” he asked, his hand sliding up my knee, headed toward my hoo-haw.

  “Where you want to go?” I asked. Please say somewhere private.

  A look around outside made his face fall. Not many options. We were in flat country and our options were...well...our option was singular.

  A rest area.

  Rubbing his eye with his other hand, he sniffed and shook his head. “I just realized that I need to at least start the process for getting back to Massachusetts, you know. And,” he gestured to his nude chest, my eyes a magnet and his dick a series of iron shards. God, it was gorgeous. Really. Like the winner of the Miss America pageant of dicks.

  “And what?” His words had just faded out as he examined a shard of guitar like it was the Hope diamond.

  “And what?”

  “Is there an echo in here?”

  “Oh.” He startled. “I need to call Joe. My friend. In Mass. He can help me get home.”

  Disappointment filled me. So no sexy time. Eh, it was too big a hope, anyhow. Good enough to kiss, but not sweet enough to fuck at a rest area. The man had standards.

  Besides, he did wear a collar. I had standards
, too.

  “Here.” I handed him my mobile phone.

  “A flip phone? Did I travel back in time as well as space? Is it 2005?” A privileged sneer curled his lip, his eyes cold suddenly. Wow. What a change.

  What an asshole.

  “Sorry it's not an iPhone 69 complete with an asslicking app and a reacharound. 'Round here all I have is my little cheapy flip phone that doubles as a horse whip in an emergency. But it will call your butler in Massachusetts so he can retrieve you, Mr. Thurston Howell III, so just shut up and use it.”

  Trevor

  Way to go, Trevor. Kiss the most magically spectacular woman you'd ever met, with an ass to fill nine pairs of hands and a tongue that could play bass and lead guitar all at once, and piss her off with one mouthful of stupid. Damn it.

  The thing is, I really hadn't seen a flip phone since 2005; no one in Sudborough would be caught dead with one. The line at the Natick Collection (we don't even call it a “mall”—that's too common) Apple Store during a new hardware release looks like a soup kitchen line during a famine. Except everyone's wearing Abercrombie and Juicy couture and pretending not to care about their new $600 phone.

  The sad part? They kind of don't. Because in a few months, they'll just get a new one. Flip phones? We gave those to domestic violence shelters as part of high school service projects, madly scribbled on our ivy league college applications and never thought of again. So this was where old phones went to die, huh?

  And, apparently, where cocks died, too, because my ignorant mouth killed off what had just promised to be a rocking fuckfest with Miss Darla here.

  “Hey,” I said, finally finding a small strand of decency tucked somewhere deep up my ass. “I didn't mean to be rude.”

  “But you were. We weren't all raised where men go naked and wear dog collars. Pardon me for not living up to your—” her eyes combed over my naked body, and not in an arousing way—“obviously higher standards.”

  Touché. She had me there. Lounging on her rattletrap's shredded seat completely naked was becoming a little too comfortable. Clothing wasn't optional in society; I was at her mercy, completely. Aside from needing to apologize and mend whatever mess my mouth had created, I had two goals:

  1. Find a way back into her good graces so she'd let me make love to her.

  2. Get some pants, shoes and a shirt. In that order.

  I had to admit, though, that sitting here, naked and vulnerable, I felt a kind of freedom that was impossible to have back home. Or anywhere my regular friends were. Or—OK, anywhere I went. Except on stage. I'd been singing since elementary school, but when I was in eighth grade Mom and Dad let me take electric guitar lessons. Open to what my fingers could do and where the music could take me, it was such a revelation—a place where standardized tests, grades, and sports didn't tell me how valuable I was.

  The music did.

  Drugs replaced that high for a while, but the music stuck around, too. A last-minute need for a junior prom band had brought me, Joe, and Liam together to practice for two weeks solid in my parents' garage, and from there we'd formed the band Zombie Merit Scholar. It seemed cool when we'd just taken the PSATs, you know? We added Sam as a drummer when we realized we Liam was better on guitar, and voila—we were instantly hot.

  A name change our freshman year of college and boom—we were Random Acts of Crazy.

  Karma's a bitch.

  My hand shook as I struggled to remember Joe's number. Once you program a number into your contacts, you don't need to know it, so my brain worked overtime to envision it on the glass of my iPhone. Shit . 508—87something. 874—I guessed, taking four tries before finally getting it right.

  “'lo?” a groggy voice answered. I kept my eyes straight ahead as my dick went limp and rested on the faded vinyl upholstery like a chided puppy. Darla had that look girls get when they're trying to act like they're not going to cry, her eyes facing straight ahead, her throat working overtime to swallow. My heart sank. Damn it.

  “Joe?”

  “Trevor? Jesus, where the fuck are you?” Out of breath and his throat clogged with God-knew what, Joe’s voice still felt like a life preserver after the Titanic. I wasn't quite clinging to the back of a broken door, but this was close.

  “I'm in Ohio.” I let the sentence hang out in the air for a few beats, and then added, “And where are my clothes?”

  Darla made a choking laugh and I flashed her the best come fuck me grin I could muster. Maybe I could salvage this. A sidelong glance from her and a crooked, sultry smile were my reward. Hope springs eternal. So did my cock, which began its not-so-slow ascent, making her look again and blush this time.

  So much hope. Where was that rest area, again? Taking a chance, I put my hand on her knee again. She inhaled sharply but said nothing. Good enough. We could go slow.

  Plus, she was 100 percent in charge, right? All I had were my wits and charm, and right now, the wits were pretty well blown.

  Charm, don't fail me now.

  “OHIO?” His shout was so loud I had to pull the phone away from my ear and Darla hunched her shoulder up, flinching. “How'd you make it to Ohio?”

  “Well,” I answered, staring at my own nude flesh, “I didn't fly or take a bus, so one of you assholes must have driven me here.” A dawning realization that yeah—what the fuck? How did I get here?—soaked in.

  “Where, exactly, in Ohio are you?”

  “In the middle of a wheat field on some Interstate.”

  “I-76. And it's corn, not wheat,” Darla said loudly. My hand slid further up her thigh in gratitude. She squirmed. My mouth began to water. So did my dick, a tiny dot of pre-cum forming on the tip, my asshole tingling as all the muscles in that area prepared to deploy, body nearly groaning for release. If I had to exist in a state of constant nudity, shouldn't I get some sort of benefit out of it?

  “I-76,” I told Joe. “Near...?” I looked at Darla and made a questioning gesture.

  “You're between Cleveland and Pittsburgh.”

  “I'm—”

  Joe interrupted me. “I heard her. So you're in the middle of fucking nowhere.”

  “That's exactly how it's described on Google Maps.” I clicked the Speaker Phone option on her phone (who knew flip phones had that option?) so my other hand could slide along her jaw line, admiring her soft skin, her silky hair.

  The car slowed down as Darla turned on the blinker to exit. Rest area. Hallelujah! My prayers were answered, hand sliding higher, I felt how hot she was, her face implacable, impossible to read. But getting off the Interstate and finding a place to get out—and get off—told me what I needed to know.

  “Ask the woman you're with—”

  “Darla.”

  “Who the fuck is she, Trevor? Last thing I remember you were telling Judy all the reasons why you wouldn't fuck her, but you were naked as the day you were born and asking her if you could borrow her Diva cup to insert it to understand what it's like to be a woman.”

  Speaker phone was a bad idea, Darla's shrieks and howls of derisive laughter, filling the car as she pulled into a parking spot, reminded me that I was an idiot. I clicked out of the public option and shoved the phone to my ear.

  “I did what?”

  “You were so fucked out of your mind, Trevor. We all passed out and when we woke up, you were gone.”

  “Woke up?” I looked around in the darkness and pulled the phone away from my ear. 8:09 p.m. What?

  “I've been gone for nearly twenty-four hours?” I screamed. Blood pumped hard through my chest, down to my hands and feet, my thighs tightening and flexing, body and brain finally really waking up and understanding the mess I was in. Naked—without a single stitch of anything to cover myself—and coming down off the most fucked up state ever.

  And worst of all—I was in Ohio.

  “Yep.”

  “My parents must be freaking.”

  “I told them you were over here crashing at my place, but you probably have a fuckton of text messag
es on your phone.”

  Phone. My phone! Must be with my clothes. And my memory. And my common sense. What the fuckall had been in the cocktail of crap I fed myself yesterday? Blackouts weren't my thing.

  Neither, apparently, were clothes.

  “Let me get this straight. Last night, some time after midnight, I was naked in the basement and high as a kite. You guys woke up this morning and I was gone. I just started to sort of come to about an hour ago and found myself naked, by the side of the highway, carrying my acoustic guitar and wearing a spiked collar, a straw cowboy hat shoved inside the guitar. That's the complete inventory of my possessions.”

  Joe's laughter cackled out into the silent car, Darla's eyebrows arched, her face poised to hear more. “Trevor,” Joe said, gasping for air, “it's like you're auditioning for a Hangover movie.”

  Chapter Three

  Darla

  Poor Trevor. Whatever his friend was telling him made his face fall. I couldn't hear much now that he'd taken it off speaker phone, his face redder than a farmhand's neck at harvest time. A Diva cup? Up his ass? What kind of parties did they have there in Massachusetts? Around here we just get a few bottles of Boone's and go cow tipping. I only really did that once. Mostly we hit the Huddle House and eat pancakes half-drunk, then crash on the couches in someone's grandma's double-wide.

  Classy.

  “And now the guitar was shattered when we hit a raccoon, and the hat—where's the hat?” he said, fumbling and searching for it. A quick look in the back seat and I found it, and I handed it to him. He clung to that damn thing like it was his child. I guess when you have three possessions and one shatters and you threw the other out the window, the final thing becomes your lifeblood, even if it is an ugly hat.

  The hat made a nice penis cozy.

  “No, I'm not going to put her on!” Trevor said with a hiss. Uh, oh. Whatever twist the conversation had taken, I had zero desire to talk on the phone to some tight-jawed preppy boy who thought it was fun to lose track of his menstrual-cup shoving, peyote-chewing, naked friend.