Looking for Trouble
Riley Hart
Synopsis
Dylan Sutton doesn’t go looking for trouble, but it always seems to find him. After the devastating loss of his father, he travels across the country to deliver a letter to his dad’s estranged best friend. But surely, he deserves a night of relaxation when he first gets to town, right? He sets his sights on the attractive older guy at the bar—except his almost-one-night-stand turns out to be the very man he’s in town to see. Oops.
Clayton Turner has a nasty habit of either losing or hurting the people he cares about. After his partner died, he’d decided keeping to himself was the smartest life choice. He doesn’t count on trouble stumbling into his life in the form of a sexy guy twenty years his junior… and for that guy to be linked to one of the most painful losses of Clay’s past.
Fate steps in and Dylan gets stranded in Bailey Springs. He gets a job, and Clay can’t stop himself from trying to help Dylan get on his feet. And Dylan? Well, Dylan can’t seem to stop flirting with Clay. He tries, he really does…just about as much as Clay attempts not to like it. They couldn’t be more different…or are they? Soon, Trouble and Sad Eyes realize they have a lot more in common than they thought, and once they land in bed together, there’s no going back. Moving forward isn’t any easier, though. Clay’s always walked the straight and narrow, always followed all the rules. But what does he do when the only right path involves looking for trouble?
CHAPTER ONE
Dylan
Dylan Sutton brushed his thumb against the worn envelope in his hoodie pocket. He had no reason to take it with him to the Raleigh gay bar, but he hadn’t let it out of his possession since he began this trip, and the thought of doing so then felt strange.
Which was ridiculous. He was fully aware of that. He had zero reason to take the damn thing on what he hoped was a night of dancing and sexual debauchery. Or to wear it like armor, and he had no idea why he did. The letter wasn’t his. It wasn’t for him or from him.
It was Dad’s dying wish. I have to do this for him.
Ding, ding, ding! There was the answer to why he protected the damn thing as if it was worth more than his life. He didn’t want to fuck this up; he’d spent most of his twenty-five years fucking things up. His dad had cleaned up too many of Dylan’s messes to count. He would do this for his father, even if he wasn’t around to see it.
Dylan owed him that.
But first? First he needed to let off a little steam. He’d driven across the country. He deserved some of that sexual debauchery he was just thinking about. Hence the reason he stood in front of a mirror in the motel down the block from the club.
He’d never been to Raleigh before, but the place had been easy enough to find with a simple Google search. He’d driven his piece-of-shit car all the way from Oregon, the letter weighing him down even more than his heart already did since he watched his father take his last breath a few months ago.
It had taken Dylan a little while to get things in order. He’d had a shitty job he’d hated, so that hadn’t been a big deal, but he’d also been broke, and it took money to drive across the country. And even though his car sucked, he loved it, loved it because it had been his dad’s project that he hadn’t gotten around to fully restoring before he’d passed.
But really, those weren’t all the reasons it had taken him months to come. It took more guts than he’d realized to deliver his dad’s dying wish. The fear still burned through him because even though his dad wasn’t around to see the results, Dylan would know, and anything other than forgiveness for his dad would feel like a failure on his part.
Too bad he didn’t know what the forgiveness was even for.
Sighing, he pulled the envelope from his pocket, looked at his dad’s distinctive, scratchy scrawl across the front, and set it on the bedside table.
He stripped out of his clothes as he made his way to the motel bathroom. He turned on the water as warm as he could handle it because there was nothing like the feel of a hot shower.
Before getting inside, he made sure his body was ready for what he hoped would go down tonight, then pulled the shower curtain aside and climbed in. The motel soap was cheap but did the trick. Once he was clean, he savored the feel of the water pelting his skin and cascading down his back before he turned the faucet off and got out.
After drying off, he rummaged through one of his suitcases until he found his favorite jock, black jeans, and a tight, baby-blue V-neck shirt that always got him a lot of attention.
There was one desired outcome for that night and one outcome only—to find a sexy, preferably older man to fuck him until he could forget everything else. To make him feel connected to someone or something in a way he rarely did outside of sex. And when he did? Well, when he did, shit always went wrong anyway, so really, he didn’t see the point in trying.
Most people couldn’t put up with him for long. He was good for a little fun or to get what they wanted, but it always stopped there. Whatever. He didn’t care about that. He didn’t need anyone anyway.
He slipped on a pair of socks, then shoes before he made it to the mirror again. He ran his fingers through his damp hair a few times, which gave him the desired result—tousled and sexy.
Bouncing on the balls of his feet, he forced himself to take a few deep breaths to calm down. His thoughts started racing, and he wondered if he should be going out, if it was responsible, but damn it, he deserved this, didn’t he?