All First Chapter Samples

He knew he should stay away, but he couldn’t. Something about the couple had called to him from the first moment he’d seen them. He’d tried to leave them alone and find someone else that attracted him, but it wasn’t possible.

Watching as Troy carefully wrapped a still-shaking Oliver in a soft blanket, he told his feet they needed to walk away from the intimate moment in front of him, but the traitors kept taking him closer. Inch by inch he worked his way toward the darkness.

The sounding scene had been for the audience at Bound & Controlled as well as the men, but now that it was over, the aftercare was only for the two of them. It was intimate, private. Every rule and piece of etiquette he’d ever learned screamed at him that he needed to leave them alone and give them their space, but something kept him orbiting their private world.

Bound & Controlled was a gay BDSM club that was open and accepting, but there were rules and boundaries. Bryce knew he should find someplace else to be, but it was impossible. It didn’t matter that he was supposed to let them have their space after a scene. Bryce couldn’t leave them. He’d managed to walk away in the past, but it was quickly becoming impossible.

Everything changed when she left us.

Dad always said that she was taken from us, maybe that was a better way to look at it, but I could never see it that way. She was always so strong and such a fighter, how could anyone have taken her from us? Dad just shrugged and said cancer didn’t always care how hard you fought or how tough you were.

Cancer sucked.

I still wasn’t sure how I’d gotten dragged to another photo shoot. I’d told Eli no. Hadn’t I? I was pretty sure I’d said no. Maybe.

It was all Lane’s fault.

He’d been the one to bring Eli to lunch, so this had to be all his fault. I still wasn’t sure why Eli had wanted to come in the first place. Normally, all Lane and I talked about was business stuff. The plan had been to talk about the possible marketing options for when I took my freelance accounting business to the next level by quitting my corporate accounting job, but that had to be put on hold with Eli there.

The fantasy was supposed to be anonymous.

It wasn’t—not to me, anyway. To anyone else, it would seemed completely random, and there was nothing the professor was reading that would give away the identity of the person. Hell, they didn’t even say if they were a man or a woman, just that their roommate was a guy. A sexy guy who, in the writer’s words, looked like he should be in a motorcycle gang, not going to college.

If that had been the only thing to sound familiar, I wouldn’t have even thought twice about it. Just because my roommate’s friend had asked me what bike I rode when we’d first met didn’t mean anything.

There were a lot of guys on campus who didn’t look as upper class as people expected to see at a college. But there was only one person I knew who rambled on when they were nervous and who looked so vanilla it was almost painful.

Best. Town. Ever. “Didn’t that online list say chocolate starfishes? Why are these strawberry?” The wonderfully fun old dragon leaned over the table at the pile of what I thought was homemade mochi from what I’d overheard and frowned at it like it was a bug. I still wasn’t sure what was going on but I knew it was going to be amazingly weird. I just had to be patient and quiet until we got to the punch line because the grumpy old dragons who seemed to live at the diner were easily distracted and could quickly jump to a new weird topic before finishing the first one if I wasn’t careful. It’d happened with the cuffs and I still […]

What should have been a quick thirty-minute errand had taken a fuckin’ hour and a half. Traffic, the guy at the grocery store who couldn’t function in the checkout lane, and even the normally intensely focused clerk at his best client’s business had conspired against him. She always had everything ready to go so he had no idea why it had taken twenty minutes to find the paperwork.

Thirty minutes would have been plenty of time. An hour would have been close but doable. An hour and a fuckin’ half? Nope.

Putting his bags on the counter in the simple, compact kitchen, Mark grabbed the manila envelope. Normally he would pick up a box filled with receipts but today it was a large envelope. Making his way towards the master bedroom at the back of the apartment, he jumped when his phone buzzed in his pocket. Hiking up his sweater, Mark dug the phone out of his jeans, and frowned at it as he saw the name on the screen.

He didn’t have a choice. If he didn’t answer she’d call back in five minutes worried that something was wrong or super excited that he was on a date. Either conversation would be weird.