Spite Club (Mason Brothers 1)

I launched myself onto the bed and grabbed for the phone.

I landed on his hard body, and he didn’t even flinch. He just kept his grip on the phone as Scout jumped up and ran to safety. “Stop!” I hiss-whispered at him.

“Where are we?” he said, echoing my mother’s question. “My place, I guess. In my bedroom. Who am I? I’m—”

I wrenched the phone away from him. “Mom!” I said into it.

“Who,” my mother said, her voice breathless with shock. “Who… is that man?”

How to explain my mother? She was the nicest, kindest person I’d ever known. She was sweet and gentle and a great mother. She was also stuck in a time warp, where modern dating didn’t happen. Nothing about my current situation—literally nothing—would make sense to her. “It’s… it’s no one, Mom. It’s nothing.”

Nick raised his eyebrows at that, and I realized I was lying on him. Directly on top, straddling his hips. He was freaking sculpted, hard as marble. And I was pressing against… I could feel… He gave me an amused smile, like he was watching me figure it out, and I pushed off him, using my free hand as leverage against his shoulder. The hot, gorgeous skin of his shoulder.

“That was not no one,” my mother said in my ear. “Evie, it’s seven thirty in the morning and you’re with a man. A man who is not your boyfriend. I don’t understand what’s going on.”

“Nothing’s happening,” I tried to explain, disentangling myself from the bedsheets and running for the bathroom again. I gave him a pretty good show of my backside as I went. I realized I was dressed a lot like Gina had been the other night, except the shirt was Nick’s, I had panties on, and my ass was a lot bigger than hers. So maybe not quite as sexy. “I mean, nothing happened,” I said, closing the bathroom door behind me. “He’s just a guy I know. We were just sleeping.”

God, that sounded like every lame excuse made to a mother since the beginning of time. Except it was true.

“Evie.” My mother sounded confused and disappointed at once. She didn’t mean to be judgmental, I knew—she just didn’t get it, and the last thing I wanted to do was explain modern sex lives—my sex life—to my mother. “What was he saying about Josh? Are you not with him anymore?”

“No, I’m not,” I said. Normally, I would have waited until at least Christmas to break this to her, then say it had happened months ago. Thanks a lot, Nick. “He, um, he found someone else. And he was dating her behind my back.” I used the word dating instead of fucking, because I had never used the word fucking in front of my mother in my life. “So it’s over.”

“I can’t believe that. Are you sure it’s true? It’s so strange. He seemed like such a nice man. I had high hopes for you two.”

Marriage, babies—that was what relationships were for in my mother’s world. Josh had seemed like a good prospect for both. “Yeah, well, I guess not,” I said.

“You seem to have… found someone else, though. And I don’t mean to pry, but… already?”

“No, Mom, I told you, he’s just—”

“No one,” Mom said. “That’s what you said. But I know you, Evie. If you’re in a man’s… bedroom”—she had to force the word out, it was so shocking—“at seven thirty in the morning, it’s because you’re very serious about him. It’s because you have feelings. That’s the kind of girl you are. That’s how I raised you.”

I closed my eyes. “Oh, God, Mom.”

“Bring him to dinner on Sunday,” Mom said. “I want to meet him.”

“No way,” I said, my panic rising even higher. “Absolutely not.”

“Well, I’m cooking for four,” Mom said. “That’s what I was calling you about. I was asking if you were going to bring Josh on Sunday. I was hoping to catch you before work. But now you’re bringing—what did he say his name was?”

“Mom, please.”

“Evie.” My mother was never stern or angry, but for some reason when she said my name like that, I always caved. “This is surprising, I admit, but I wasn’t born yesterday, you know. This young man is obviously very important to you. Tell me his name and bring him to dinner.”

“His name is Nick,” I said weakly.

“Five o’clock on Sunday,” Mom said. “I hope he’s hungry.”

Nine

Nick

While Evie hid in the bathroom, trying to explain me to her mother, I got out of bed, pulled on some sweatpants, and fed Scout. She did another happy jig around her kibble bowl—happy jigs were Scout’s specialty—and dug in, pulling each kibble out one by one and dropping it on the floor before eating it.

I put on some coffee, made toast, poured some juice. I wasn’t too hung over, because I’d had less to drink than Evie did. Someone had to keep their head, and last night, it wasn’t Evie.

My instinct had been right. Evie knew how to party, and she’d learned it somewhere. I wondered where.