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One Week to Score
A Tall, Dark, and Texan Novel
By Kate Meader, Liz Pelletier Robin Haseltine Entangled Publishing, LLC
Copyright © 2016 Kate Meader
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63375-706-6
CHAPTER 1
Seven years, four months later
Olivia Elizabeth Kane blinked at the hot mess staring back from the saloon mirror at the Four Seasons in beautiful downtown Houston. Panda-eyed, lipstick-smudged, but still perfectly veiled.
Awesome.
Her mother's voice boomed in her head. Sit up straight, Olivia. Pride starts with posture.
Her response to that maternal nag? Slump a few inches forward over the bar. Recovering her pride after today's events would require Liv to be stretched spine-taut on a medieval torture rack.
Five minutes ago, she had climbed onto the bar stool, arranged her Vera Wang gown's cream puff layers, and delivered a brook-no-bullshit glare. The bartender took one look and knew better than to refuse her. Who would refuse the bride on the happiest day of her life? Especially one who had just witnessed the rapidly deflating cock of the groom mere moments after it had been wedged between the maid of honor's over-tanned thighs?
In response to her demand for oblivion, five shot glasses were now lined up like good little soldiers on the bar. One for each year she had wasted on Peter Whitehouse, the not-so-honorable congressman from Texas.
She picked up the first and raised it high, like she was checking the color of a fine wine instead of contemplating how exactly she should dedicate this particular shot of Van Winkle Special Reserve.
"To freedom," she spoke to no one in particular, and knocked the bourbon back. The smoky burn scored her throat and pooled with the acid in her stomach. No doubt she'd be getting re-acquainted with that shot later.
What else deserved a toast? Who else?
Certainly not her bridesmaids, led by that rat-faced, traitorous wench, Jess. Not a single one of them had stayed with her. Stung by their malevolent glee, Liv had sent them away immediately after the wedding-that-never-was. In their eyes, she saw exactly what they were thinking: my-shit-don't-stink Olivia Kane sure is one ugly crier and ... squirrel! Now to re-purpose these bridesmaid gowns for the glitzy Houston wedding season.
Usually, this was Liv's favorite time of the year. As the owner of Let's Party!, the premier event planning firm in Houston, she was a veritable fixture on the scene. Everyone wanted her services, her élan, her joie de vivre. An Olivia Kane wedding was an event with a capital E, so naturally her own would be remembered as the most spectacular bash of the year.
Oh, there'd be no doubt about that.
Who knew her brother, Mr. Uptight Nerd, had such a clean right hook? Well, her former fiancé Peter was now in possession of that salient fact. So sweet of Brody to make Peter aware of his opinion in such a heroic way. Unlike Flynn Cross, her brother's best friend, business partner, and the man who had once filled Liv's fevered teenage dreams. That blue-eyed devil had stood by with a sardonic raise of his eyebrow that said it all: Slow clap for you, Liv.
She hadn't even invited him.
Somehow, the miscreant sheep fucker had wangled an invitation as Jess's plus one. That's right — the maid of honor, her so-called friend, the woman whose basketball-leathered thighs had been wrapped around Liv's former fiancé's hate-handles. Flynn hadn't seemed all that upset that his date was caught in flagrante with the groom. Knowing him, he probably had an arrangement with Jess to bang as many guests as possible before they hooked back up for the first dance.
Second shot down. Glass overturned. Evil Eye thrown at the judgy bartender.
How dare he? It was his job to accept drunken misery in all its misshapen, mascara-streaked, perfectly-veiled forms.
Damn, she'd forgotten to toast before that shot. "To Jess's heifer thighs," she shouted at the empty glass, drawing a few offhand looks from the other customers. Screw them. This was her wedding party and she was the fucking bride!
Her dirty scowl garnered her additional expressions of disgust mixed with pity ... except for one.
Well, hello, there, hottie-with-the-million-dollar-smile. Unlike the rest of the whispering bar patrons, this sandy-haired cutie pie was undoubtedly enjoying her efforts to strut through her misery (while sitting down). So her wedding day sucked, but the wedding night was looking up.
She raised her empty glass in his direction, not ready to waste precious bourbon on him just yet. He tipped his Stetson back to her. Promising. She turned back to her only friends — the shots she had yet to down. They'd see her right.
A one-night stand. She'd never had one before. She'd never dared. The daughter of Texas senator Broderick Kane II and Houston society doyenne Suzanne Boudreau Kane — both now happily divorced, thank her stars — was not one-night stand material. She'd disappointed her parents in numerous ways, from her unimpressive grades to her failure to meet the body image standards of a child beauty pageant queen (put that Ho Ho down now, Olivia!). But never by getting her name on Page Six or making an ignominious crawl home after a sexy hook-up.
Could she do this? After the day she'd had, her judgment was surely impaired.
Yes, she could do this.
Third shot down. Feel the burn. Sneer at Benny the bartender. (He looked like a Benny.)
She was going to do this. She was going to have hot, drunken, impaired-judgment sex with a stranger on her wedding day while wearing her Vera Wang dress and a gorgeous veil. Maybe in the bar restroom of the Four Seasons in beautiful downtown Houston.
Hauling a deep, make-me-feel-sexy breath, she pinned on what she hoped was a coquettish smile, turned as smoothly as her bulky gown allowed, and found her previously pleasure-filled sightline newly blocked by six-foot-and-change of home-grown Texas assholery.
This particular example happened to have thick, wavy hair as dark as his heart, deep, soulful eyes as blue as the garter still circling her thigh, and a face that made angels weep. Probably after he'd screwed them senseless, knocked them up, and abandoned them with a wink and a smile.
Flynn Cross, her least favorite person in the world — and that was saying a lot after the horror she'd witnessed earlier in that back room of the First Congregational Church — leaned on the bar, looking (a) devastatingly handsome in a tux and (b) like he had any number of smart-ass comments at the ready.
And because the worst day of her life could always descend one more hell-born circle, he obliged on (b).
"Why, Miz Olivia Kane, you sure know how to throw a party."
* * *
Flynn could think of no woman in the world who could pull off the Bride-With-One-Foot-In-Hell look better than Liv.
As diminutive as she was, she still managed to bear herself like a queen, even with that gash of smeared pink lipstick across her cheek and the damp smudges of make-up below her whiskey-colored eyes.
War paint.
The last place he'd expected to find her was here, in the bar of the hotel where she was to hold her reception for the wedding that had spectacularly crashed and burned this afternoon. When he'd asked Brody if she was okay, he'd been informed she was curled up in a fetal ball of misery in her room.
Bullshit.
Misery and this girl had never been on speaking terms. Not the girl who could drink every one of her older brother's friends under the table. Not the girl who had kept Flynn's hopes for the future alive during his tour of Iraq.
Not the girl who hated his guts for reasons he understood only too well and a few she had yet to discover.
"Don't even think about it," she hissed at him.
"What?" He sat down on the stool beside her. "Crash this pity party you're throwing? Don't mind if I do."
He noted the line-up of shot glasses on the bar. Two down, three to go.
"Drinking alone? Slippery slope and all that."
"I think if anyone's entitled to get smashed tonight, it's me. And I don't need a drinking buddy or guardian or spy. Toddle along back to ..." Those summer storm eyes, still remarkably focused for someone with likely more alcohol than plasma in her bloodstream, narrowed on him. "Oh, I see. Apparently even you have standards and don't want to sleep with that skank who brought you to my wedding. Is this why you're trawling hotel bars, Flynn? Looking for a warm body?"
He was looking for a moment's peace, a quiet place to have a drink. In fact, he'd almost about-faced when he saw Liv hunched over the bar, not wanting to inflict one more iota of misery on her. Christ knew, he'd hurt her enough. But she'd turned just then, a tentative smile on her face, and a soul-lightening thought had pinged his brain:
That's for me.
It wasn't, because the gods were off taking a piss right now. No, Liv's smile was directed at some pipsqueak with a Stetson too large for his head over near the fireplace. The guy was sitting alone in a hotel bar, so what did that tell you? At least Liv had reason to be here solo with her five — now, three — shots of bourbon, and Flynn would've had a good reason, too, because he had planned to get very, very drunk. Except he no longer needed that excuse because now he was here to rescue the fair damsel.
A knight in beat-up armor is still a fucking knight.
"Jess and I weren't sleeping together, by the way."
Growling her disbelieving disgust, she tossed sun-blond hair and a stiff-looking veil over her shoulder.
"And she did you a favor," he added. Hell, Jess couldn't help herself. That girl was just naturally horizontal.
At that sure-as-shit pronouncement, Liv's palms splayed on the bar, likely because that kept her from wrapping them around his neck and squeezing what little life he had left from his weary body. He had no problem playing truth teller. One more shot, and she wouldn't even remember this conversation.
"My maid of honor," she gritted out, "your date for the wedding to which I did not invite you, by the way, fucked my fiancé in the back room of the church where I was supposed to get married."
"Speak up. Not sure that couple in the corner heard you." He winked at the elderly lady duo, enjoying their pinch-faced shock and Flynn-induced blushes. No demographic was immune to his charm.
"God, you can't stop, can you?"
"No need to be jealous, Liv. Lovely as those ladies are, I can't take on both of them at once. The one on the right looks like she scratches."
She cast her eyes upward. "Why are you here again?"
"I had hoped to have a nice, quiet drink. No drama, no fireworks, and then there was you. The quietest girl I know." He gave her his cockiest grin. He knew it would piss her off.
But not quite. In fact, not at all.
Uncertainty came over her, a startling vulnerability on her elfin features that checked him hard. He remembered that. It was the same expression thirteen-year-old Liv would wear whenever her father called at the last minute to cancel his one weekend a month with her. Broderick Kane II, the senior senator from Texas, made every effort to be a stand-up parent to his male child. But with Favored Son away doing his nerd-off mathlete events, father-daughter quality time was never deemed an adequate substitute. The bastard only started to appreciate his amazing daughter when she reached marriageable age, and then only as a pawn in his byzantine political machinations.
Back when they were kids, after yet another ditched daddy-daughter visit, Flynn would have put his arm around this beautiful girl and whispered, "Much prefer when you hang out here, Livvie." And he'd meant it. But within a couple of years, he'd learned not to touch. She was his best friend's sister, off-limits, and so what if he wanted to be the guy who made her forget her troubles? She was also a Texas American princess, bright as the North Star, while he was the homeless son of an abusive alcoholic who relied on the Kanes' charity to survive. Who lived on Olivia Kane's smile like it was sunshine to a weed.
Dumb kicker of a kid, that's what he'd been.
Eyeballing him, she seemed to give her brain an inward mental shake, and that soft, hopeless expression turned as hard as the cherry wood bar. She leaned in, a move that displayed the tops of her ample breasts as they strained for freedom.
Come on, beauties, make that border break.
He swallowed. Hard. And then his cock got on the "hard" train and he was officially on an express to hell. Because who the fuck lusts after a woman — after his best friend's sister — when she was having the worst day of her life? A day that had Flynn's bloody fingerprints all over it?
"You know what?" she announced imperiously. "I'm glad you're here."
"Need someone to pay for those shots?"
She picked up one and blinked those big, amber eyes. "Yes, I do, but that's not what I meant." She held the glass aloft. "To going for it."
"Going for what?"
His query delayed her mid-chug. "It."
He nodded wisely. "Oh, it."
She threw her drink back like it was lemonade, not even a grimace. Atta girl.
"You didn't finish," he prompted.
"Yes, I did." She turned the shot glass over to match the other empties. Three bullets gone, two left in the barrel.
"You didn't finish telling me why you're glad I'm here."
She frowned at him, as if he hadn't been paying attention. "I need to get laid."
His lungs went on hiatus. He could not have heard that right. Should not have heard that right. More likely, she didn't know what she was saying. She was mighty upset, in a weakened state, vulnerable. She'd downed at least three shots, though he'd seen her put away more and still walk a straight line in five-inch heels.
Stop trying to rationalize this, man. There is no scenario here that ends with you between this woman's thighs.
Though it went against every instinct raging through his veins, he kept it cool. "Can't help you there, Livvie."
"Don't call me that," she snapped. "I'm not a kid."
"You'll always be little Livvie to me." Getting this back to their usual dynamic was imperative, for his sanity and the stress levels of the fabric covering his straining dick. They annoyed the hell out of each other, like any brother and sister. That's how it had always been. Though their dynamic had also been overlaid with a confusing mix of sexual tension and something deeper he had a hard time labeling.
Liar, liar.
Now she wanted to find comfort. Not wholly unreasonable after the day she'd had.
"So you want to get laid." Said so damn casually it had its own whistling soundtrack.
She squared her shoulders and delivered a look that should have given his dick frostbite. The little bastard merely turned harder.
"Flynn Cross, if we were the last two people on earth and the fate of the human race depended on us procreating, I would happily go to my grave knowing mankind's blip in the universe's history had just come to an end."
"No guilt?"
"Not one iota." She leaned in again, showcasing those breasts with their own gravitational pull. "I'm glad you're here, because I want you to play my wing girl."
"Don't you mean wing man?"
"No, wing girl. You've always felt like a sister to me — an older one I despise but am obliged to talk to because, y'know, family."
Torn between happiness that she appeared to be her snarky, fork-tongued self and foreboding at what exactly she might mean by her request, he schooled his expression to a blandness he did not feel. He saw where this was going, and it was a ditch he had no intention of traveling.
"There's a guy here ..." She grabbed Flynn's arm dramatically. "Don't look!"
He hadn't made a move.
"He's the perfect guy to help me get over the disaster piece that is today. An orgasm. That's what I need."
Keep calm and think of Brody. "Orgasms tend to be short-term solutions."
"Maybe in your case, Cross." Another dick-shriveling look. Another appreciative jolt from said dick. "Though I suppose when you have to move so quickly from bimbo to bimbo, taking the time to make sure each one is satisfied is going to have an unfortunate effect on your sex-point-average."
So he'd spent a few years since leaving the military sewing his oats and had gained a not undeserved reputation as a man who knew how to pleasure a woman with no expectations outside of the bedroom.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from One Week to Score by Kate Meader, Liz Pelletier Robin Haseltine. Copyright © 2016 Kate Meader. Excerpted by permission of Entangled Publishing, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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