All First Chapter Samples

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.

“I’m really into the pizza flavors we’ve been working with this round, but the pineapple…I feel terrible for saying this…but I’m not sure it goes in macaroni-and-cheese.” I winced as boos and laughter went around the room.

I loved the members and I loved all the interesting ideas that popped up, but voting was the hardest part of advising the most delicious club on campus. “I’m going to have to vote no.”

Ugh.

How had I gotten roped into judging again?

Every semester I said I wasn’t going to do it because it was too stressful, and every semester I somehow ended up doing it again.

College students were pains in the butt sometimes.

This could not be my fault.

Somehow I just needed to channel some Daddy energy next time and not the little energy I had to be radiating.

“I don’t care if he’s an alien or has the most boring kink on the planet. The snark will stop.” Skyler’s stern words ripped through the room, bringing everyone to a standstill.

I’d seen the explosion coming, but I’d thought it would take something worse than Loki ironically calling me riffraff to set Skyler off.

However, as his eyes narrowed and he leaned toward the counter, everyone in the store sucked in a breath. “The only one that gets to insult my customers is me.”

He was fucking serious.

This place got weirder and weirder.

Eventually, I was going to move out to the suburbs where everyone hid their kinks like they had when I’d been living in the country. But since it seemed like the city had to do everything differently, I waited to see what would happen.