This wasn’t happening. This wasn’t Asher. This wasn’t the guy who rubbed my feet after a long day and packed me snacks to take to work. The guy who told me I was hot no matter what I was wearing. The guy that whispered in my ear at night that I was his other half and made sure I always had extra batteries and memory cards before a big shoot.

Shit. Footage. Hadn’t Jameson said something about footage?

My attention shifted to the laptop, and I moved across the room, grabbing the sleek computer and settling on the new sheets that I no longer planned on christening tonight.

Opening the screen, I hesitated at the password screen. What would he use?

My fingers pecked out the letters, and I hit enter. The home page appeared. Touchdown, I thought.

I ignored the software icons and looked at the file folders in a row across the bottom of his screen. The first four yielded nothing, but the one labeled Work Proposals had two subfolders labeled 1001 and 1002. After clicking on the first one, thumbnails of video files lined the screen, each meticulously labeled with dates. Opening the most recent, I saw an ass — my bare ass — walk across the screen. The camera was aimed at the bottom two-thirds of our bed. The bed I was sitting on.

In shock, I slid to the floor, away from what was playing on the screen. It was earlier in the summer. I could tell by my tan lines. I watched, stunned, as I crawled across the bed, over Asher’s naked body. You couldn’t see our faces. My hair was in a messy ponytail, and Asher kept his face turned toward the windows, away from the camera. I squinted at the screen. I had noticed that vague change in his behavior. How he often faced that way during sex in recent months.

Fucking bastard. And I did not mean that as a compliment. As my onscreen self lowered onto Asher’s erection, I closed the video.

I clicked on the other folder, the one labeled 1002. Again, video thumbnails neatly organized by date popped up in a box. Picking one at random, I double-clicked.

My bedroom, same view as before. Only, that wasn’t me bobbing between Asher’s spread legs. That big-breasted, pale skinned girl was my assistant, Rebecca, who I had considered a little sister.

I exited the video immediately, bile rising in my throat. The bottom of the file folder cheerfully informed me the folder contained forty-one items, dating back just over five months, to July fourth.

I gagged, dropped the computer, and rushed to the bathroom.

When I emerged thirty minutes later, throat raw from acid and tears burning my eyes, I walked back to the laptop and cradled it carefully in my arms, the metal still warm, before returning to the bathroom. Taking a deep breath, I tossed the computer in the bathtub. My steps never faltering, I retrieved all the tech gear I could find of Asher’s, filling the tub with shades of silver, gray, chrome, and black. Walking down the hall to the closet that held our washer and dryer, I snatched a bottle of detergent and a jug of bleach and returned to our bathroom. I drizzled the electronics with both liquids until the bottles were empty and then turned the shower on high, leaving the curtain wide open.

Packing my stuff haphazardly into whatever luggage and duffle bags I could find, I made four trips to my red Wrangler before I just couldn’t stand to be in that loft we’d shared any longer. Making one last trip to our bedroom, I dug out that shiny piece of coal from under Asshole’s trouser socks and tossed it on the middle of the bed.

Just so he would know I knew exactly what I was walking away from.

As I peeled off down the road, heading south toward the Carolina coast, I had one last fleeting thought. There was nothing left in that loft I would miss.

Except those sheets. Bastard owed me a set of sheets.

CHAPTER 1

I’m done being a vegetarian. As I eased into my morning run with little enthusiasm for the three miles left to go, I concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other while avoiding the washed-up jellyfish that dotted the mostly empty beach. So done.

I needed to get laid. And soon. If I was starting to compare my currently meatless love life to a diet, I was in trouble.

My feet pounded over the wet sand, and I tried to focus on the sunrise coming up over the Atlantic instead of my appetite, but this morning, even the sun was pissing me off. It was colder than I had anticipated, the sun’s rays weren’t doing jack to warm me up, and the damn angle of the light reflecting off the water was partially blinding me. My sunglasses were sitting in the cup holder of my Jeep, forgotten as usual.

Tipping my water bottle, I took a swig, wishing it were hot coffee instead. I sighed and pushed my pace faster, skipping the slow jog I usually started with in favor of flat-out running, wanting my goose bumps to go away. I should have added a light jacket to my flimsy tank and shorts combo.

Popping my ear buds in, I looked down at my phone and debated which playlist to pick. They were loosely organized by letter instead of genre. I was thinking maybe M this morning. John Mayer, Maroon 5, Matt Nathanson, Jason Mraz, and Mat Kearney. My M playlist was one of my favorites. Maybe it would cheer me up. I selected it then tapped the random button.

“The Cave” by Mumford and Sons started, and I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. Even my music was talking about being a meat eater. It was a sign. Time to move on.

I hadn’t had sex in five months. Five long, hard months. Damn it! My starved libido latched onto those adjectives with greedy fingers — long, hard, fuck. The motion of my thighs rubbing together as I ran made me crave a different kind of friction altogether.

I mean, I had been taking care of things myself, but I hadn’t had an actual sweating, panting, thrusting guy in that length of time. Shit, there I went again. Length. My vagina was lonely.

And horny.

This dry spell wasn’t my fault. After all that shit had gone down with Asshole, I hadn’t even wanted to look at another guy for months. I shuddered at the memory and pushed him from my mind. He didn’t deserve anything from me anymore. Not even a single disgusted thought.

I sidestepped to miss a glob of jellyfish, almost rolling my ankle, and the sound of a mournful bay from up ahead caught my attention. Squinting, I could see a huge black and tan dog running up and down the waterline, a piece of driftwood in his mouth. Out in the ocean, a handful of guys were surfing the early morning waves. The glare from the sun made it hard to get a good look at any of them, but I could see bare chests and muscles, and my pulse kicked up a notch. My missing food group.

They must’ve been locals.

Reynolds Island wasn’t very big. It was one of South Carolina’s barrier islands, mixed in with Fripp, Kiawah, and Edisto, cuddled between Beaufort and Charleston. It was prime real estate, though. Property values were ridiculous, especially oceanfront. Unless you had bought the property over thirty years ago, odds were, you were doing pretty well for yourself.

The beach here on the south side of the island was where the locals and the wealthy summer transients stayed. It was easy to tell which houses belonged to which group. The transients had huge oceanfront mansions. Show-off houses. Farthest south, toward the jetty, were the more reasonably priced houses the local working class occupied. To the north were the rental properties and the Water’s Edge resort. I lived with Rue midway down the island, in one of the rental properties, even though Rue was considered a local since she’d moved here permanently after she finished her MBA last year. I was a local now too since moving in with her five months ago, in the wake of that mess with Asshole.

The baying dog — some kind of hound — ran alongside me for a distance as I passed the surfers. Slobber flew from his jowls, and his long droopy ears flapped like wings. As big as he was, I think he was still a puppy. His paws were huge for his size, and his skin hung on his frame. A surfer called out eventually, and the dog turned back.

I didn’t bother to really study the guys, after my initial ogling. One thing Rue had drilled into me, was that locals weren’t for flings. That’s what tourists were for. Hot guys delivered weekly, ready for a hook up, and already prescheduled to leave, erasing the chance of awkward future run-ins.

A fling was exactly what I needed. While I didn’t distrust men now as a whole, the thought of starting up another relationship just seemed like too much damn work. I wanted something easy. Disposable. If a relationship was equivalent to a five-star restaurant, then I was searching for the nearest drive-thru.

Rue had an almost foolproof system in place. There were three bars on the island — two frequented by tourists, and one by locals. She stuck almost exclusively to the tourist bars, picked out her flavor of the night, then went back to his place. Always to his place. It was that simple.

And it worked. Rue went through men like Halloween candy, unable to pick a favorite and in a hurry to try them all. And they all seemed just as eager to sample her, no strings attached. She had been begging me to go out with her, and I was finally ready to cave. It was time to see if I remembered how to flirt, in any case. Appetizers, my dirty mind chimed in.

Zoned back out to my music, I reached the jetty at the end of the beach, where the sand disappeared into coastal scrub. I hadn’t meant to run this far, which meant I had even longer to go to get back. Great. Taking a break, I bent over at the waist and tried to catch my breath. I downed a third of my water bottle and looked out over the Intracoastal Waterway, my chest heaving from exertion.