Page 2 of Playing With Forever (Hollow Point #4)

CHAPTER ONE

It had been a long time since I’d done the walk of shame.

In fact, it had been so long I wasn’t even sure that was a thing anymore.

Thirty years ago, when a woman snuck out of a man’s house in last night’s clothes, she prayed no one saw her.

Now, rightfully, women simply walked out the front door, ordered an Uber to come pick them up, and didn’t give a rat’s rear end who saw them.

I didn’t even think women quietly rolled out of bed, crept out of the bedroom gathering clothes as they went to silently dress in the hallway, before tiptoeing out of the house.

Which begged the question: why was I right then tiptoeing out of Evan Sanders’s house before dawn after a night of mind-blowing sex?

It had not been thirty years since I’d engaged in wild, energetic, unbelievably fantastic sex.

Seeing as I’d never engaged in such activities.

I’d been married for sixteen years—seventeen by the time the divorce was final—and in the fifteen years since then I hadn’t lived in a nunnery.

I had experienced what I’d erroneously thought was great sex.

Though this was not the first time I’d had the realization that I’d never had good sex.

My first awakening happened with my first post-divorce lover.

It was then I realized that Dameon was shit in bed, but since Dameon had been my first, then my husband for sixteen years, I had nothing to compare it to.

Honesty? I’d naively thought all the hype was just that—hype.

Then I learned differently. That wasn’t to say every man I’d had since I’d divorced Dameon was great, but they’d all been better than him by a mile.

But none of them held a candle to Evan Sanders.

And for some bizarre reason, that had me fleeing the scene of said phenomenal sex.

I would like to think my escape had to do with last night being a lapse in judgment, due to our loose connection.

But I wasn’t sure it was completely due to the fact we had friends in common, and it was never a good idea to get romantically involved when there were shared acquaintances.

Though his ties to the group were tighter and deeper than mine were.

Still, it wasn’t a good idea. Evan also volunteered at the center I ran.

While I wasn’t in charge of volunteers, it wasn’t smart to mix business and pleasure, and the kids he worked with at my center needed him more than I needed mind-bending orgasms. (Yes, plural.

In the hours I’d spent in his bed, he’d doled out climaxes like Oprah did cars.)

This was not good—because it was all really good, and now that I knew how good—no, scratch that, how astonishingly great sex could be, I was ruined for all other men.

Not to mention that aforementioned loose connection, and now I’d have to face him in the rare times we were together, having firsthand knowledge of his prowess.

(And what he looked like naked, and how pretty his cock was—and yes, I’d learned last night that a cock could be beautiful when it was perfectly shaped—and how skilled his mouth was, and then there were his incredibly sexy hands.

That was something else I learned last night, I’d had a latent hand fetish, or at least I had one with Evan.) None of this boded well for me.

Then there was a small piece of me that was worried my escape had nothing to do with any of that but instead with my insecurities.

I couldn’t face the possibility of waking up next to Evan only to find out that Dameon was right, I was the one who was crap in bed, and that’s why he’d gone looking for sex outside our marriage.

Insecurities I’d been certain I’d worked through after the shock of his betrayal had worn off.

Wasn’t that most men’s excuse for stepping out of their marriage—blame the wife instead of taking accountability for their weakness?

But there I was, a fifty-two-year-old mother of two grown children sneaking out of a man’s house in the wee hours of the morning like a twenty-something of the sex-shaming-women era.

All because I’d had the best sex of my entire life with a handsome man who, at his age, had a body that should be criminal—as in felonious.

As wondrous as that was, and it had been an eye-opening journey discovering the ridges and valleys of his abdominals, it was still off-putting in the sense that he was Adonis and I was nowhere near… a goddess of anything.

And if all of that wasn’t bad enough, with Evan being cut from marble and me being soft and curvy—if memory served, and I knew it did because the last four hours were seared into my memory in a way I knew I’d never forget a single moment—he’d had to instruct me.

Instruct. Me.

So, yes, I was escaping.

“Josie, hey,” Quinn Lancaster called out from the doorway of my office.

I had an open-door policy with everyone who worked, volunteered, or used Hope Center facilities.

That was, if my door was open, they were welcome to come in.

Quinn and her crew had been working with the center in some capacity for years; she was well aware of the policy, so her standing outside my door gave me pause.

“Come in.” I motioned her forward. “Did everything go okay with Brynne?”

“Yes. She’s…” Quinn paused, obviously struggling to find the correct adjective.

“Difficult, smart, frustrating,” I supplied.

Quinn walked into my office while saying, “You said it.” After she gracefully arranged herself in the chair in front of my desk, she finished with, “The frustrating part is, she’s so smart and doesn’t see it.”

I nodded my understanding. Brynne Cole was nineteen.

At her mother’s demand, she’d been part of the center’s after-school program for years.

As was usually the case, the first few months of Brynne’s attendance were difficult.

Teens, in general, were demanding. Teenage girls, who were already struggling with a variety of high school issues—not least of which was where they fit among their peers, boys, popularity, and mean girls—hormones were harder to get through to.

Adding to that, the Hope Center being what it was—a place for youth to come after school and on the weekends with the intention of keeping them off the streets, occupied, mentally and physically challenged, and offering avenues to further their education, along with mentors to help in these pursuits—took a goodly amount of work by all of the adults in the building to get them to engage.

Brynne had been no exception. Now she was a high school graduate who was taking her first steps into adulthood and was at the center to utilize the services Quinn and her partners at Women’s Inc. offered.

“Indeed.”

“But…um…that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Is there a problem?”

“No. Nothing like that. Everything’s great. This is…um…personal.”

Twice she had paused mid-sentence, which was very un-Quinn-like. The young woman was confident and bold, unapologetically herself—qualities I greatly admired in her.

“Do we need to close the door?” I asked as my invitation for her to continue.

“No. The only people left in the building are the cleaners.”

Darn. I’d lost track of time. Not out of the ordinary, but my reasons for burying myself under the mountains of paperwork today were not my normal motives.

“Brice and I started preservice training.”

I took a moment to sit with that. Quinn and her husband, Brice, had been trying to start a family for years with no luck. Preservice training meant they were taking steps to either adopt or foster.

“That’s wonderful,” I cautiously said.

Her striking green eyes filled with so much emotion I couldn’t get a lock on which one would win out—the enthusiasm, angst, sorrow, eagerness, anticipation.

She didn’t make me wait to find out. “I’m excited. I want to be a mom.”

That was easy to read.

“But?” I prompted.

“I’m scared. There’s a grief and loss class.”

She was smart to be scared. Fostering children was one of the most selfless acts someone could perform. Adoption was the same, with the added layer of fear that the child could be given back to its birth family.

“There’s a lot to be scared of,” I acknowledged. “Is your plan to foster or adopt?”

“I don’t know if I can do it,” she whispered.

Yes, very unlike Quinn Lancaster.

But understandable.

“Quinn,” I called when her eyes focused on the pen holder on my desk. When her gaze lifted, it was easy to see she’d settled on anguish.

“Maybe I wasn’t meant to be a mom. Maybe I’m supposed to be the fun aunt and spoil my nieces and nephews rotten. Fill them up on candy and popcorn and send them back to my siblings. You know, as payback.”

As far as I knew, there was nothing to pay Quinn’s siblings back for.

Jason, Delaney, Addy, Hadley, and Quinn were close—not only with each other and their in-laws but also with their parents, Jasper and Emily.

Then there was their extended family; they were a tight-knit bunch who openly displayed the care and love they had for one another.

They were the example of the family unit I wished all of my kids at the center had—a blend of blood and bond, step-children, half-siblings, adoption. They were all of those things, yet they weren’t. They were simply family.

“Perhaps,” I conceded. “Or maybe you and Brice were meant to bless numerous children during the hardest part of their lives. Maybe the two of you were meant to be given an unwanted child and give that child what every child deserves to have—love. Maybe it’s your place in this world to be a mom to a child who wouldn’t otherwise have one. ”

Her eyes filled with tears.

“I’m being?—”