1
Ruby
“SURE. I’LL CALL YOU.”
As soon as hell freezes over.
I nudged the inn room’s door shut, letting it bump into the guy’s—Greg? Craig? Kirk?—shoulder when he leaned in, clearly hoping for a kiss.
“God,” I muttered once I was alone, scribbling a quick note for housekeeping to clean the room in the morning.
The bed wasn’t touched, the sofa barely rumpled. Thankfully, my instincts had kicked in before I let it go that far.
Sure, he had the body for it—planes of muscle and a clear white smile. But all that promise fizzled the moment he opened his mouth. Whiny praise, fumbling hands, fake tan, and kisses like a teenager who was about to come in his pants. When he whispered, like it was foreplay, “I don’t deserve you,” I’d had to fight the urge to laugh.You don’t even know me, but if you say so, you must be right.I gave him a gentle push away and ended it right then and there.
These days, I preferred a good night’s sleep over mediocre sex. And even that kind of sex was getting harder to come by.
I snorted.Pun not intended.
Crossing the garden toward my cottage, I tugged my jacket tighter around me. Living and managing the Coral Bay Inn came with perks. Like access to a whole row of cabins and rooms for the occasional hookup I didn’t want to bring into my actual home.
“It’s fucked up, you know,” Rio, my best friend, had said once. “You sleep with them but won’t let them in your house.”
It was. But I didn’t exactly lose sleep over it.
Casual was fine. Casual was safe. No expectations. No heartbreak. Just clean exits and full control. Casual meant I got to set the terms—what I gave, what I didn’t. Sex was the limit. No feelings. No sleepovers. My home and real life were off-limits.
I showered, wrapped myself in my favorite oldStar Warstee and a comforter that smelled like sleep and soap.
And him.
The only man allowed into my actual bed.
Sebastian Sawyer.
My friend with benefits for the last decade.
There were two reasons for this exemption. The first, I reluctantly admitted even to myself—no one had ever knocked him from the top of my list sex-wise.
And the second was simple—he’d been there from the start.
Before I had cheekbones. Before my skin cleared. Before my curls were curls instead of something that looked like a floor mop. Before men like Craig-or-Kirk thought I was worth a second glance.
BeforeIthought I was.
He’d seen it all: the braces, the big mouth that always got me into trouble, the nerdy girl who never questioned her worth until the world taught her to, who only realized she was an ugly duckling when the teasing started ... the girl who then used that mouth to strike back harder, even if it stung like hell on the inside.
I shoved his image aside, forcing my mind toward tomorrow. The contractors were coming in the morning to assess the storm damage. The place was too close to the beach and too old not to suffer when bad weather hit. Years of drought and dry heat, then torrential rains and surprise floods—it was the perfect recipe for rot, cracks, and everything else you didn’t want creeping into your foundation.
There was always something.
But this inn had been my whole life since I graduated from college. When my Aunt Amy told me she wouldn’t sell it if I could prove I could run it, I took that deal and didn’t look back—not even when my mom said, “You? In hospitality? With that mouth?”
Aunt Amy owned a café and a catering business in Riviera View, a town over an hour away, so I had free rein and a stake in the inn. And I fell in love with the town, too. Coral Bay was quiet half the year and bustling with tourists the other, sunny, and just nosy enough to be charming.
For years, I’d handled entitled guests, power outages, room renovations, and staff drama without blinking.
But lately, God help me, I’d started envying the guests.
