HOT MEN: A Contemporary Romance Box Set

by Ashlee Price

  “Okay,” she said, when I didn’t add anything else. “I’ll look this over, we’ll come up with a strategy, and we’ll see this through. Remember what I said, Linc: let’s keep it together till court.”

  I nodded and stood. “I appreciate you seeing me so early,” I told her.

  “I appreciate you waking up early enough to get here and sitting through that last run-over,” Carol told me with a little smile. “Keep that kind of patience and attention to detail going and we’ll make this happen.”

  I nodded again and left her office, knowing that there wasn’t anything else I could do about the situation for the moment; I would just have to rely on my lawyer to pull something together for me. The receptionist looked less like a frightened animal as I walked past her and out through the front door, but I thought I should probably do something the next time I had to come in—bring her a coffee or something—since Lisa was clearly going to make it hell for me for years to come, and I didn’t like the idea that someone I didn’t have anything against was terrified of me.

  If Lisa was terrified of me she might stop pulling this shit, I thought as I walked out to my car. But then, if I were the kind of guy to deliberately make Lisa terrified of me, she’d actually be in the right to make my life hell for it. And making Lisa terrified of me would only make Jazmin terrified, too—and that was the last thing I wanted. Just keep your cool, do what your lawyer tells you, and get yourself out of this. I decided against going to the bar, at least for a few hours; I was not about to become the guy who gets drunk every time something bad happens.

  Chapter Four—Sky

  When I got up the morning after my eventful first meeting with my landlord, the first thing I wanted to do was take a nice, long bath and drink some coffee. I was scheduled to start at the new job in a few days, and before that I would need to meet with Cassie, see about getting groceries, and figure out how to move all my stuff into the little apartment.

  I rolled off of the futon mattress that I’d finally decided to bring into the unit after my first inspection. I looked around the room. My bleak thoughts about the apartment building—fueled mostly by the malfunctioning door lock—were tempered by about seven hours of sleep and some daylight. Obviously, the place was old, but without the anger I’d felt last night, it looked more the way it had in the pictures I’d seen of it: homey, almost cozy. The hardwood floors were worn but clean, and I definitely liked old hardwood better than I liked the idea of old carpet that had had who-knew-what ground into it over the course of years.

  The bathroom had a long, deep tub, with a showerhead and a slightly yellowed-looking curtain. A few of the blue-and-white tiles on the floor were cracked, but that just made it look more authentic somehow. I took care of my bladder and went into the kitchen, where there was a beat-up old porcelain sink, a big water heater that looked about as old as my parents, a microwave, and a fridge with a cracked handle that hummed when I pressed my ear to it. There was a little table, too—laminated particle board, I thought it was, with three rickety-looking chairs pushed in around it. Good enough.

  I went out to my car and crawled into the back seat to find my kitchen stuff. I’d taken precious little, but it was still more than I could fit into the tiny trunk, and I hadn’t wanted my plates and cups smashed by the larger items I’d put in the moving trailer. Cassie, my friend who’d helped me get the job in Denver, had promised to take me shopping when I got my first paycheck, to get the stuff I needed to make my apartment a home.

  I dug through boxes until I found the one with my favorite coffee mug in it; it had seen me through about a dozen finals week cram-study sessions. It was a Harry Potter themed mug, green and gray and black, with the Slytherin house crest and name on it; it was silly, but I loved it—and it was the biggest mug I’d ever owned in my life. I went back to the driver’s seat of the car and found the grocery bag on the floorboard in front of the passenger seat. I grabbed it and climbed out of the car, locking it behind me.

  It wouldn’t be a great cup of coffee, I thought as I walked back towards my apartment, but it would be something: Starbucks Via instant coffee, some powdered milk, water, and a little sugar, and it would at least get me awake enough to deal with the rest of the day. I’d brought in my backpack with my toiletries in it the night before, along with the futon mattress, so I figured that I would make myself a big cup of coffee and get into the tub and just soak the last little bit of soreness out of my muscles before I did anything else.

  No more than fifteen minutes later, I sank into the deliciously hot water in my new bathtub, my mug full of coffee within reach, and closed my eyes. I was tempted to fall asleep again, but I knew if I did that I’d just spend a good hour or two in the tub doing nothing until the water got cold enough to wake me up. Or you’ll drown, like Mom always says you’re going to when you fall asleep in the bath at home. But my parents’ house wasn’t ‘home’ any more—no more than the dorms at West State were.

  I gave myself about thirty minutes to enjoy the heat of the water, drink about half of my cup of coffee, and think about what I needed to get from the grocery store to stock the kitchen at least to a bare minimum. I had thought living in dorms for four years would be enough to prepare me for being on my own—but I hadn’t really thought about how different it would be to start more or less completely from scratch. I had to buy furniture, even; I had the frame of the futon in the trailer attached to my car, but if I ever wanted to have someone over, I would need a couch, a coffee table, something to put my TV on.

  Then, when every excuse I had for soaking was exhausted, I got to work scrubbing myself down. I’d had a terrifying night of semi-sleep in a rest area the night before I’d finally gotten to Denver, curled up in the front seat of my car with my old college throw wrapped around me and the windows cracked—I hoped—enough to keep me from running out of oxygen, but not enough for someone to get into my car to grab me. I felt filthy from head to toe. So I shampooed twice, and then shaved my legs while I let the conditioner sink in. I emptied the tub and filled it again and used my favorite loofa to get every inch of my skin below my neck as clean as it could possibly be.

  Finally, I climbed out of the bathtub—and very nearly killed myself in the process. I slid on the floor and barely caught myself on the lip of the tub before I would have cracked my head against it. As it was I was pretty sure the toilet next to the bath had collided with my ass hard enough to leave a bruise. “What the hell?” I looked at the cold tile floor and saw a puddle of water, not huge but big enough to have made the floor where I’d stepped slippery. Had I splashed?

  I looked around on the floor more intently and saw water oozing out from under the tub. “Oh, great,” I said with a sigh. I closed my eyes. This was just what I needed. Of course: another thing that would force me to call my gorgeous-but-awful landlord. “And of course he’ll accuse me of just splashing too much or something like that,” I said to myself bitterly. I decided that I was not going to give him the chance to make that case. I would clean up the mess that the tub had already made—sacrificing one of my few clean towels to do it—and then I would run the bath again, without me in it, and I would wait for the leak to appear. He couldn’t argue with that, could he?

  I waited for the tub to empty and finished off my coffee, drying myself off enough to throw on a pair of lounge pants and a tee shirt. I took my time combing my long, black hair and went back into the bathroom to make sure the tub was absolutely empty. I mopped up the water I’d slid in and then started up the tap for the bath again, plugging the drain right away. I waited for it to fill up, putting lotion everywhere I’d scrubbed, and then when the tub was full, I sat on the toilet—for lack of a better place—and waited.

  Sure enough, water began to appear from underneath the tub within a few minutes, and I let it drip, fuming to myself. “Of course he’s still going to try and find a way to make it your fault,” I muttered to myself, emptying the tub as soon as there was a reasonably-sized puddle on the floor ne
xt to it and going into my bedroom to get my phone. I tapped my toes on the floor of my empty living room while the phone rang; but as irritable as I was—and as bad an opinion as I had of my new landlord—I was not expecting the first words I heard from him when he finally answered.

  “What the hell do you want now?”

  I had no idea what had gotten into him, but after everything he had put me through so far, I was not in any mood to even pretend to be some helpless damsel. His impolite opening was like gasoline on the banked embers of my annoyed feelings, and I just exploded.

  “What the hell do I want?” I started pacing, and words tumbled out of me before I could even fully think them. “I want to have a landlord who doesn’t fucking pretend like he’s doing me a goddamned favor by renting me a piece of shit apartment that I can’t even get into, or like it’s such a damned problem to do his job and come take care of shit on his own property! I want to be treated like a freaking human being who just paid you over a thousand dollars for a place to live and has some damned rights to an apartment that isn’t some kind of death trap!”

  I went on and on—I don’t even know how long I kept going—until I’d actually forgotten the reason I’d called him in the first place. When there was nothing but silence on the other end of the line, I hung up; I wasn’t in any mood to deal with him. I needed a minute to calm myself down, and I thought, as I took a few deep breaths, that maybe he did, too.

  Just about the time I finally felt calm enough to try calling him back, my phone buzzed in my hand. Linc’s number flashed on the screen. “Hello?” He must have heard the tension in my voice—and maybe my cursing spree from a few minutes before had sunk in for him. The voice that came across the line was a lot more respectful.

  “This is Sky, right?”

  “Yeah, it’s me,” I said. It occurred to me for the first time that he might not have known who I was when I called; he probably hadn’t entered my number in his phone yet. Still: what kind of way was that to answer the phone?

  “Look, I’m sorry, okay? I thought you were someone else when you called,” Linc said. At least that explained his rudeness—a little bit. Whoever it was he thought I was apparently was just as terrible as he was. “What can I do for you? It’s not your key again, is it? You know, if I gotta come let you in every day, I feel like I should charge a fee.”

  I stared at my phone for a long moment, not sure if he was joking or not, but not appreciating the comment either way. I made myself take a breath and brought the phone back to my ear.

  “You are charging me a fee. It’s called rent. I was going to talk to you about something, but I’ll just wait,” I said. “Do you have office hours or something?”

  “No, if you need something you just call.” Oh great. Such professionalism. I thought for a moment.

  “Is there a better time to call you?” I put long odds against the answer to that question being helpful—but if there was any time of the day when he was in a better mood, that would be a major improvement on matters.

  “At the moment, no. If you need something, spit it out, because there isn’t going to be a better time than now.”

  I huffed; I couldn’t help it, even though I knew a guy that big would probably just think it was cute—the little young thing getting upset like she thought she could do something about it. “There’s a leak in the bathroom that I was hoping you could take a look at. It’s coming from underneath the tub, I think,” I said, keeping my voice carefully level.

  There was a long silence on the other end of the line and I waited for him to tell me that it was probably my fault, to accuse me of inventing problems to try and get him to lower my rent—or whatever it was that he was going to say to discredit me and make me feel small. I heard him clear his throat on the other end of the line and steeled myself to get angry again, and to push down my anger for the sake of at least getting something done.

  “Okay, Sky. I’ll be down there in the morning to look at it,” he said. At first, I was glad: at least he was taking me seriously. But then the second half of the sentence worked its way through my mind: tomorrow morning?

  “Okay,” I said. “What am I supposed to do until then?”

  “I don’t know, Sky. It can’t be that bad.” I heard that tone in his voice—the same one that had come into play when he’d accused me of not knowing how to use a key. My free hand tightened into a fist, and any kind of goodwill I felt towards him for being willing to entertain the thought that there was an actual problem evaporated.

  “I just wanted you to know. I don’t want anything getting damaged because I didn’t call soon enough. It’s in the lease that I’m liable if I don’t contact you immediately.” There was another pause on the other end of the line, and I wondered why Linc seemed to get taken by surprise so often. He seemed like a fairly smart man, if not a very polite one.

  “I’ll be down there tonight if you think it’s going to be that bad of an issue,” he said finally. “I don’t want any more damage either.”

  “I appreciate it,” I said, letting myself relax a little bit. “I understand that I can’t just call you for every little thing—but I want to make sure that things are the way they should be to begin with. That’s fair, right?”

  “You’re right, it’s fair,” Linc said. “I’ll be there tonight.”

  Chapter Five—Linc

  I’d almost forgotten about the situation with Sky’s apartment by the time I finally made it home. I got into my apartment and took off my shirt and jeans, thinking about what a shit-fest the day had been. I’d missed a call from Jazmin—at least, that was what Lisa had said in the voicemail she’d left me, which I’d gotten maybe five minutes before Sky had called me. I spent the rest of the day dealing with a bunch of paperwork bullshit: tax stuff for the apartments, a repair that one of my other tenants had been bugging me about for a week, shit like that. I threw myself down on the couch, considering the possibility of drinking half a handle of Jack to get to sleep. Then I remembered: Sky. I groaned and pulled my jeans back on, hoping that she might have forgotten about it.

  Not even bothering to put on a shirt, I walked the short distance over to her apartment and knocked. It was warm in the hallway, but every hair on me was standing on end. She opened the door and smiled up at me.

  I remembered her vaguely from the night before, but I felt like something must have been wrong with my eyes; was she that beautiful then? Yeah, I’d had a bit too much to drink, but I felt like I’d failed somehow in not remembering that she was so damn pretty.

  Her lips were red enough to make me wonder if she was wearing lipstick, there in the apartment by herself, and my mind went instantly to how they would feel wrapped around my cock. Not a good thought to have about one of your tenants—stop that shit in its tracks. It was only too easy to picture her looking up at me, those big eyes full of innocent lust.

  She had long legs, which was actually surprising, since altogether she came up to about the middle of my chest. My eyes, almost with a mind of their own, glanced down to her rack for a moment before they came to rest on her face again. I tried to distract myself from her soft lips, sure that I would say something inappropriate if I didn’t. I had to remember that she was way too young to even think about that way. Besides, Sky was a tenant. Get yourself under control, sailor.

  “Thanks for coming over, Linc,” Sky said. “I had almost started to think you’d forgotten about it.”

  I told her that it wasn’t a problem and moved into the apartment as she stood back to let me in. It looked like she’d spent the day a lot more practically than I had: all of her stuff seemed to be unpacked, not that there was much. Not even a couch or a coffee table for the living room. Her taste was all over the place, which didn’t help me to guess her age, even if I already knew—no matter what it was—that she was too young for me. There were a couple of vases in the kitchen with no flowers in them, a few paintings up on the walls. I was sure she had to have gotten the rugs secondhand, but at least
they weren’t ugly.

  I knew where the bathroom was and I started going that way without waiting for her to show me. I’d done enough work in all of these apartments that I knew them like the back of my hand. There was no sign of whatever leak she’d been talking about that morning. But then, I thought, she had to be at least a little responsible, and anyway she probably wouldn’t have wanted to step through a puddle every time she had to use the bathroom. Stay focused, Linc. I cleared my throat and looked around the base of the tub, along the caulked edges where it attached to the wall.

  “Did you take a bath or a shower?” I looked up to see her framed in the doorway, and once again got a little jolt of heat straight to my groin: it was cooler in the apartment than it had been in the hall, apparently just cool enough for her nipples to harden. I could see them, perky—and totally without a bra—straining at the fabric of the tight little tank top she wore.

  “A bath. Why does it matter?”

  It helped me to envision her naked in the bathtub, was why. I could see her sprawled out in the big, long tub, maybe splashing a little bit—not enough to cause the kind of puddle that would make her think there was a leak, but enough to get those gorgeous tits soaking wet. For just a second I thought I could almost smell whatever shampoo she used, and some kind of warm, vanilla-scented soap for her skin; but I told myself I was just imagining things.

  I made myself snap out of it. “If you took a bath your overflow pipe is probably leaking,” I said. “It hasn’t been used in a while, so maybe it’s rusted out.”

  She nodded her head, but I could tell she wasn’t that worried about the cause of the problem, just the question of when it was going to be fixed. “I think I’m going to have to turn your water off until I can get a new pipe in the morning,” I said. “You were right to call me. We had a rough winter, so some of the other pipes may have cracked when it froze. But I won’t be able to tell how bad it is until I get into it tomorrow.”