Rascal (Rascals Book 1)(6)

Emerson looked about as dazed as I felt, so I took that opportunity to scramble to my feet, gathering my things as I did.

“I should go,” I managed, my lips still swollen from his amazing kiss.

“Wait.” He stood, putting a hand on my arm. “We should at least exchange numbers. Last names?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I told him.

He looked surprised, but

I didn’t wait for him to respond. I grabbed my bag and pushed past him, leaving him alone in an ATM with two fewer beers.





3





Alex





I tried not to think about Emerson. It wasn’t easy since I had fallen asleep thinking about him—the way his mouth had felt on mine, the way his hand had tightened in my hair as he kissed me, the way he tasted like fancy beer and something else wonderful and all him . . .

I might have considered the entire thing a fever dream brought on by my period and the bottle of wine I downed when I got back home—except I discovered that at some point, Emerson had slipped his packet of beef jerky into my shopping bag. It was the only proof I had that anything had happened.

And I needed proof. Because it was completely unlike me. I didn’t kiss strange men. Lately, I didn’t kiss anyone—whether they were men and/or strange didn’t really matter. I was working myself ragged at the office and way too busy for this kind of distraction, and the fact that I spent the entire evening in my bathtub with a glass of wine that I kept refilling as I replayed the hottest kiss I’d ever had in my life instead of doing the pile of paperwork I had intended to do was further proof that this was the kind of distraction I really, really didn’t need.

I went to bed, my alarm set for an ungodly hour for a Saturday morning, allowing myself one final replay of the kiss. Of course, that just led to me having incredibly intense, very sexy dreams about him in which the power hadn’t come back on when it did and we finished out our evening having sex against the wall of the ATM.

Really, really great sex.

Great sex that was ruined by the sound of hammering. At first I thought it was just in my head, that I was being punished by a splitting headache for eating nothing but Chunky Monkey and a bottle of wine for dinner, but as I woke fully, I realized that the sound was coming from downstairs.

It was also two hours before I had set my alarm. Which meant some asshole was downstairs hammering something at six a.m. on a Saturday while I was dealing with a hangover and cramps. I had officially entered hell.

At first, I tried to go back to sleep, burrowing my head underneath my pillows, but that barely did anything to dull the noise. After twenty minutes of not sleeping and nearly suffocating myself under my pillows, I gave up and got up.

Five minutes later, I had a cup of super-strong coffee at my side and earbuds blasting white noise in my ears. I had grown up in crappy motels and even crappier apartments, so I had experience dealing with noisy environments. I had learned how to cope when I was a kid, managing to get straight A’s despite shitty circumstances outside of my control—I could cope with some hammering now.

When my dad left, he left us with nothing. My mom went back to school while balancing a full-time job. Eventually she got her nursing degree and moved us out of the worst neighborhoods, but we always struggled to make ends meet. She gave up a lot for me, and all I wanted was to make enough money that she could retire early. So she could actually enjoy life for once.

Unfortunately, a mountain of student loan debt stood between me and my goals. I’d had to put myself through undergrad and law school and neither of those had been cheap, despite getting scholarships and working as much as I could. My pay right now was good, great even—but I couldn’t spend any of it, because there was still the chance it would only last until the end of summer. But if I won the permanent associate spot . . .

Goodbye, five-dollar bottles of wine, hello, ten-dollar bottles of wine!

I wasn’t even kidding. I had daydreams about what I’d do if I won that job. Long, detailed, luxurious daydreams about Target sprees and cute kitchenware. I’d be able to start paying off my debt and maybe even find an apartment with a window. Secretly, I was hoping that I’d be able to take my mom on a trip for Christmas. Maybe a cruise or something fancy like that.

Not that I was complaining about life right now. I was on track, just like I’d always planned. I’d finally left roommate wars behind and found a dirt-cheap studio on my own, which I was more than grateful for. I had a job and I had the support of my friends and family. Sure, I was making sacrifices—living off of ramen and putting a self-imposed embargo on my love life—but it wasn’t anything less than what my mother had given up for me. She was my hero and I wanted to make her proud.

And I knew I was capable of it. All I needed to do was work hard and show everyone at the firm what I was made of.

Usually, that wasn’t a problem. But for whatever reason, not even my noise-cancelling earbuds and the white noise app on my phone could dampen today’s hammering from downstairs.

I tried everything to block the noise.

I stuffed towels under the door to try to muffle the sound coming from below. Switched from white noise to classical. Finally, I relocated to my bathroom, the quietest of all the rooms, and built what was essentially a noise-cancelling fort out of pillows and the ratty cushions of my second-hand couch.