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Dair grinned. “Have time to sit down and talk some shop?” he asked me. “I’d like to shoot some ideas off you.”

“Always,” I replied. Dair was another author and had been one of my heroes since I was a teenager. He was a decade older than me, and he was one of the reasons I’d started writing in the first place. I considered his friendship to be a privilege. Growing up, I’d never dreamed I’d one day become his colleague. We usually had a coffee and book talk session at least twice a week.

Ro coughed, staring pointedly at me. “Remember telling me something about staying on task today?”

“Hush,” I said, patting her on the head again. It seemed to drive her crazy when I did this, and I got a kick out of that.

We went to grab coffee first. The good kind, not the basic stuff in my office.

The three of us walked into the kitchen and stopped dead.

Two naked women, Blondie and Red from the day before, were sixty-nine-ing each other on my kitchen counter.

CHAPTER FOUR

“WHAT THE FUCK, Thorn?” Dair burst out, sounding disgusted.

“What?” I shot back, sarcasm coming out on auto-pilot. “Look how generous they’re being with each other.”

And then I remembered Ro.

My hands clapped over both of her eyes exactly one second later.

Fuck. I was doing a hell of a job of not corrupting Ro.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

With my hands still over her eyes, I guided her away from the kitchen down, down, down the hallway and into my office.

Dair was hot on my heels like he couldn’t get away from the flexible nymphos fast enough. Which was fair, since he had a smokin’ hot wife at home that put both of those women to shame.

“I apologize for this unfortunate incident,” I told them both solemnly, and for some reason I had a hard time so much as looking at a blushing Ro as I said it. “I’m not sure what’s going on in there, but I’ll see to it right away.”

I started to leave and noticed Ro was following me.

“What are you doing?” I asked her.

“Don’t you need help?” she asked back.

My eyes tried to bug out of my head. “You should have never seen that. I’m very sorry that you did, and I don’t want you to see any more, okay? So sit tight. I’m going to ask them very nicely to leave, and then I’ll be right back.”

She didn’t try to follow me when I left that time, and I did exactly as I said I would.

The naked women, predictably, tried to talk me into joining them.

For some reason I wasn’t even tempted. Perhaps because I was a bit mortified by what my house had turned into, and how it made me look in front of Dair and my new assistant.

I couldn’t even blame this on these random women. I had no idea why or how they were there, but it was a fact that I’d fucked both of them together and separately, and they had every reason to believe I’d enjoy the little show they’d staged for me.

When they realized that I wasn’t going to play today, they left with reasonably good grace, even getting dressed first.

I walked them politely to the door, waving goodbye.

“How did you get in here?” I asked their backs.

“Veronica let us in before she left,” one of them said. Their backs were to me and I couldn’t even tell which one said it.

Good to know. So I didn’t need to change the locks. I just needed to quit letting random women come inside in the first place. Noted.