Braydon

Braydon by Nicole Edwards




To family.





PROLOGUE


Getting his feet to move in time with the music was harder than Braydon Walker anticipated. It had nothing to do with the fact that he was a poor dancer, either. In fact, he wasn’t all that bad.

At least he didn’t think so.

Since he had yet to trample any feet with his size thirteens, he considered that a good thing.

No, for him, there was a simple explanation for the figurative two-ton boulder sitting on his chest today. The one that made him ache with a need so intense, he sometimes forgot how to breathe.

She was always the answer to every unexplained reaction he had these days.

Jessica Prescott, better known to them all as Jessie, Kylie Walker’s younger sister, aka Travis’s sister-in-law. Yep, Jessie was the woman who kept Braydon in a state of high alert. On every count.

Because of her, or rather, because of his overwhelming feelings for her, Braydon felt as though he was dragging the bottom of a raging river, his head barely above water. No matter how many branches flew past his head, he couldn’t seem to grab on to one and pull himself to safety. The only thing he wanted to do was to grab hold of something . . . anything.

But like Jessie, salvation was always just out of reach, leaving him grasping but still coming up empty.

Not that it was bad. That wasn’t necessarily the right word for it. No, what he was feeling was intense, magnified by the reckless ache he had developed over the past few months. And he wasn’t opposed to the feeling, it just wasn’t what he had anticipated for the first time he fell in love with a woman. Everything seemed to be back-ass-ward from what he would’ve expected.

Love.

Damn, the word even sounded strange in his head, but he had accepted that there wasn’t any other way to explain the feelings he had for this woman.

The bigger issue was the fact that Jessie was their friend with benefits. “Their” referring to him and his twin brother, Brendon. The sad part . . . it was even more complicated than that, thanks to the unconventional nature of their friendship.

The friend part didn’t bother Braydon. It was the benefits aspect that he was having an issue with. Ever since the beginning, for whatever f*cked-up reason, Braydon’s hard-on for Jessie wasn’t purely a physical reaction. Well, technically it was, but there was more to what he felt for her than just simple lust.

As for Brendon, Braydon knew his identical twin cared about Jessie. But Braydon also knew there weren’t any deep feelings between Brendon and Jessie. Yet something between the three of them was off.

Until Jessie had walked into their lives last year, appearing out of the blue at the same time her sister Kylie showed up in Coyote Ridge, Braydon had been happy with the ebb and flow of his life. For reasons that a shrink would likely have a field day with, Braydon had been content with sharing women with his twin. Hell, up to that point, they’d lived by one main rule—variety was key. And maybe because of that, no one had ever captured his attention the way Jessie did.

Before Jessie came along, Braydon had experienced countless threesomes where his one and only intention was to pleasure a woman beyond her wildest imagination. Anything that went on outside of the bedroom was pretty much immaterial by design. It was a path that he and Brendon had taken since they were old enough to realize their passionate fascination with women. And it had worked, too.

There had only been one flaw in that plan. Neither of them had bothered to update their woman code since they were young and dumb and . . .

Up to this point, Braydon had never encountered a woman he wanted to hold on to—not since the first girl they had both kissed back in the sixth grade. Apparently, thinking about the future had never occurred to him because, in Braydon’s world, one plus one equaled three. For sure when it came to his sex life.

Yet here he was, holding Jessie against him, the warm, smooth skin of her back beneath his fingertips, swaying to a slow song in the middle of the elaborately decorated reception hall, and he still found it hard to breathe around her. The sweet scent of her golden-brown hair, the way her body moved perfectly with his, and the sexy way she laughed . . . Every single one of his senses was well aware of her at all times.

Braydon got lost in the slow country tune, focused on the way Jessie swayed against him. She smelled so damn sweet. Like lavender and a hint of vanilla, a fragrance he’d grown quite fond of.

“You okay?” Jessie whispered in that sexy, husky tone he loved, pulling back and staring into his eyes.

Braydon swore he could see so much emotion in the beautiful blue depths of her gaze. The way Jessie looked at him, spoke to him . . . He had recognized a difference in the way she responded to him as opposed to her reactions to Brendon recently, but he’d feared reading too much into it. As much as he wanted to believe Jessie felt something for him, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to deal with the truth if he were wrong.

Smiling, Braydon felt the insistent punch of his heart in his chest. He couldn’t find the words to answer her, his throat closing as he looked down at the most stunning woman in the room.

“The ceremony was beautiful,” Jessie stated, obviously wanting to make small talk.

As far as Braydon was concerned, he just wanted to hold her against him; words were merely an interruption he didn’t much care for at the moment.

“Yeah,” he croaked, forcing the word out through the lump in his throat.