Give It All Read Online Free PDF Page B

while his mouth said, “Thanks for the lesson, Ms. Harper.” He smoothed his tie from his collar to the V of his vest and they both wandered from the gyrating crowd. “Consider me educated.”
    “I’ll consider you warm-blooded.”
    Another smirk. “The alcohol must have ignited me.”
    “I got you dancing,” she mused. “You asked about my ex.”
    “And?”
    “So much humanity, all of a sudden. This all because you’re underworked? You only taking my bait because you’re bored?”
    “Does it matter? Business or biology—neither’s personal.”
    “You sure know how to make a girl feel special, Duncan Welch.” Though she shared that philosophy herself.
    “Apologies. But if you’ll excuse me, I have a date with my motel room and a box of wet wipes.”
    Snarky little fucker.
“You’re a real piece of work, aren’t you, Duncan?”
    He met her eyes with those pale ones. “I’ve been told I’m a real piece of something. I leave it to the individual to fill in the blank.”
    She came close, pretending to fuss with his tie but tugging the knot loose, shifting it all cockeyed. He corrected it the second she took her hands back, the act looking more reflexive than petulant.
    She smiled sweetly. “I bet you jack off with your pinkie stuck up in the air, don’t you?”
    His smirking lips twitched, faint and quick as a flea sneezing. “Picture it however you like.”
    “Good night, Duncan.”
    He offered a smarmy bow. “Ms. Harper.”
    She gave a little curtsy, glaring at his back as he exited. She couldn’t tell if she wanted simply to fuck with that man’s head or straight-up fuck him. In either case, she’d pay good money to hear him beg for mercy.

Chapter 4
    Duncan was hungover.
    He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been properly hungover. Overindulgence was
not
his style. He’d walked back to the Gold Nugget Motor Lodge with a sway in his step, the five or six shots’ worth of liquor in those drinks like a bender to a normally temperate man. To a man who craved self-discipline. He’d escaped, slipping out of range of a cat’s batting paws before he could find out what Raina might want out of him. Would that have ended with Duncan’s body wound in her sheets, or did her pleasure come merely from her ability to wind him up? She had far too much control over him. And control was a commodity Duncan treasured above all others.
    So rather than follow the flirtation to its natural conclusion, he’d headed to the motel, popped a couple of Ambiens and more than a couple of ibuprofens, and woken up with a brass band playing in his skull, and chores beckoning. Always chores.
    The bathroom fan whirred all around him, and the world was speckled laminate and smooth white acrylic. His knees hurt, the towel-thin bath mat and his lounge pants doing nothing to protect them from the biting tile. But he wasn’t bowed before the toilet, sick from the vodka. No, he was sick in a far different, and deeply familiar, way.
    His shoulder ached, and his lower back, and he felt high from the bleach. But that was good, surely. Meant the stuff was doing its job.
    He scrubbed at the plastic tub. Plastic—worst. Porcelain would be so much easier to disinfect. Plastic never felt clean enough to trust. Never.
    Degrading though these chores were, the calm was coming to him now. The fumes and the ritual were subsuming him, quieting his brain, banishing the panic and the pulsing headache.
    He could hear his bygone foster mother’s voice in his head—that soft, cultured accent offering the only kind words he’d known in the first half of his life.
Look at that! You cleaned that all by yourself? What did I do to deserve such a good helper?
To deserve
him
. Insane, those words had seemed—insane and wondrous as a choir of angels after ten years of being called a burden at every turn. Thirteen measly months he’d gotten with his silver-haired savior. Then she’d been taken away, her kind voice and eyes hollowed out by a