No frigging way am I putting myself through that again. I’m done with love, with men.
With Kaden Hansen. We were an unlikely couple from the start – the artsy photographer from downtown Chicago and the handsome mechanic with a penchant for ass-play and raw, rough sex.
Only a miracle could throw us back together again.
They say you should be careful what you’re wishing for.
Then again, I hadn’t realized how much I did wish for it until it happened, and by then it was too late.
Part Two
UNFORGIVEN
Chapter Five
Kaden
The light shining into my eyes feels like knives. I try to turn my head away from the pain, but my head is glued to the pillow. Or weighed down by rocks.
Either way, I can only groan and suffer until the light goes out.
So much fucking better in the dark.
“Well, hello,” a woman’s voice says.
“Wha zup?” I ask, and pause, because my brain hurts and my mouth is doing its own thing, not paying much attention to what I want to say. “Wha,” I try again, “happen?”
Fucking hell.
Just how drunk am I? I feel as if I drunk a truckload of beers. Or maybe chasers? That would do it, wouldn’t it?
Doubt wiggles in the back of my head like a worm. This has happened to me before, hasn’t it?
Wiggle.
There was a time I woke up on the floor of my bathroom, and couldn’t remember my own name.
More wiggles.
It’s fine. I mean, that time it took me a few moments to get my bearings. Remember what I’d done the night before. The girl I’d fucked behind the bar. Her name and all.
So it will come back to me in a minute.
The reason why I’m lying in a bed that isn’t my bed. In a room that isn’t my room. Is it a hotel room? I glance at the bare walls, and wince at their whiteness.
Doesn’t feel like a hotel room.
I’m so tired.
I can’t remember how I got here. Or why I am here.
Wait. Wasn’t there a person in the room just now? Where did they go?
I try to roll my head and a groan tears out of me in response to the blinding pain exploding inside my skull.
Holy motherfucker.
Closing my eyes tight, I struggle through the agony, and it goes on and on until I think I’ll die. My head will blow into pieces. Jesus.