Page 62 of The Playboy

I knew they’d all been talking about me behind my back. They couldn’t help themselves. My brothers had been doing the same, sending me texts that gave me shit about being whipped, which I wasn’t.

I just wanted her.

And I couldn’t fucking have her.

“What are we telling him?” Jenner asked Camden. “That he’s ready to be tied down, like we suspected all along, or that he’s pussy drunk—which he thinks he is, but we know better.”

“Who’s pussy drunk?” a new voice asked.

“Macon thinks he is, but he’s really in love,” Camden responded.

“Macon, my fucking man,” the new voice said.

Dominick.

The eldest Dalton. Quite possibly the cockiest too.

“I’m going to tell you the same thing I said to the guys that night at the club,” Dominick continued. “No pussy-drunk dude leaves a group of fellas, celebrating a bachelor party, to run across the dance floor, like a lovesick fool, just to get laid. Not when he gets laid five nights out of seven. And then proceeds to talk about her for the rest of the evening without giving a single detail about what happened. Only a dude who’s whipped does that.”

“And by whipped,” Camden said, “he means in love.”

“Jesus Christ,” I groaned, thinking it was a bad idea that I’d called my best friend. “You guys really believe you’re a bunch of relationship experts, don’t you?”

“We’re right,” Jenner pressed. “And you know we’re right.”

I sat up, my feet falling to the pool deck while I drained the rest of my glass. “Right about what?”

“That you’re in love with her.”

That word hit me.

Hard.

Because I didn’t know what it meant.

What it felt like.

What it even looked like.

All I knew was that I couldn’t get that gorgeous woman out of my head.

And I didn’t want to.

“I feel things for her, yeah,” I admitted. “And I’m trying to hang out with her, but she’s not giving me the opportunity.”

“So, make the opportunity,” Dominick said.

I didn’t want to ask the question. I didn’t want to inflate their egos any more since they already thought they knew everything. But these guys had more experience with relationships than I’d had, and maybe they’d thought of something I hadn’t.

I squinted my eyes closed, hoping I wouldn’t regret this. “And how do you suggest I do that?”

“You’re Macon fucking Spade,” Jenner said. “You find her. You lay the groundwork. And you make her yours.”

EIGHT

Brooklyn

“Housekeeping,” I called once I knocked on the door of Macon’s suite, following the protocol even though I knew he wasn’t inside. I waited a few seconds and knocked again. “Housekeeping.”

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