Late Call (Volume 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

have? Because I have some words that are several letters stronger than damn shit!”
    Her shoe comes into contact with my shin.
    “Ouch!” I sit up and glare at her.
    “Pull it together, Dayton,” she orders. “You don’t lose your shit over a guy. Ever.”
    “This… This shocked the ever-loving life out of me, Liv. I had no idea it was him. He was an anon and he thought he’d hired Mia Lopez. The girl he got was little old me.”
    “I can’t see how it’s such a bad thing.”
    Jesus Christ. Every brunette might need a blond best friend, but next time I’ll have a switched-on one, please.
    “Do I need to spell it out for you?”
    She nods.
    “One”—I hold up a finger—“personal relationships are off-limits with clients. Pretending to be a girlfriend is different, but you never, ever fall in love with them. Two, Mia Lopez is that for a reason. She separates the pretend from the real, the working from the playing. And three, Aaron Stone knows my name. He knows who I am. There are a handful of people in this city who really know who Mia Lopez is, and he’s now one of them.”
    “Okay, but it’s not your fault you have a personal relationship with him. If you’d known it was him when Monique called, you wouldn’t have done it, right?”
    “Obviously not. You don’t mix business with pleasure in my life.”
    “So you don’t even...” She raises her eyebrows.
    “Liv.”
    “Sorry. Sorry. I’m just sayin’…”
    “No. I don’t. Can we get back to the problem now?”
    She shrugs one shoulder and leans back, tilting her glass side to side. “I get everything you said, babe, but I just don’t see the problem. He needed a date for one night and you did it. It’s not like you’re going to see each other again, is it?”

    “See you again soon, Mr. Michaels.” I shut the door to the extension and lean against it. God. He’s always a tiring one. There are only so many ways you can have sex with a fifty-year-old man before you’re afraid you’ll break his back—a memo he didn’t get, because he thinks taking Viagra before he gets here will make it nice for us both.
    Thank God my fake orgasm would show up a porn star’s.
    I leave Monique’s twenty percent in the envelope, and tuck my share into my purse, ready to deposit it in the bank tomorrow. The only thing on my mind right now is a hot shower to scrub old man off me and then sinking into a bubble bath until I turn into a prune.
    The water practically burns my skin as I stand beneath the spray, but I definitely feel cleaner when I get out. If I lived anywhere other than Seattle, the water bill would kill me, even with my higher-than-average earnings. As it is, it costs me more to heat the water than it does to use it, and my water tank barely holds enough to wash a freaking bunny rabbit.
    This job requires shower after shower after shower to scrub old man and sneaky husband off my body—something that would be slightly more bearable if there was the chance of an orgasm once in a while. But no. No orgasm. Not even a tremble of one.
    That’s why I have Mr. Jack Rabbit under my bed.
    Yep, that’s me. Dayton Black, high-class escort and responsible for my own orgasm since 2006.
    I’m about to dip my toe into my corner tub when my cell shrills. Fuck that. Monique won’t call when she knows I’ve just finished with a client, and anyone else can just wait. I let it go to voicemail, and I’m about to sit down when her voice rings through my house.
    “Dayton, get your ass to my house now. We need to talk.”
    Aw, shit.
    What was that about her not calling?
    I throw on some sweatpants, a tank, and Ugg boots and shove my still-wet hair into a ponytail. She wants me now? She takes me as I am now.
    The drive across Seattle to her suburban dream is surprisingly stress free, and when I pull up, she’s standing with her hands on her hips in her doorway. Her lips are pursed and her brows furrowed in a look I know too well. It’s a look that says