Page 1 of Someone To Claim
PROLOGUE
SLOANE
Last Summer
The Alcove will never be includedon a list of Nashville hotspots. There are no neon signs announcing its presence to passersby. No bachelorette parties shrieking from a pedal bar out front. It’s a squat brick building wedged between a dry cleaner and a vintage record shop. It wasn’t even recommended as a hidden gem I should check out. I stumbled upon it two nights ago when I got lost looking for a pharmacy and noticed the door propped wide open with a cinder block.
I immediately liked the vibe: dark wood, low lighting, and a bartender who didn’t try to make conversation when I ordered my drink.
The back corner booth has a ripped vinyl seat and a wobbly table, and no one in this nearly empty dive bar cares that I’m sitting in it alone with a glittery gold notebook and a Sprite with extra cherries. The Alcove serves crushed ice. An underrated luxury if you ask me.
Tonight I’m three pages into a letter I’ll never send.
Dear Mom and Dad, you are aggressively awful at being parents. I’ve made a list detailing the specifics.
My pen pauses when a shadow falls across the table.
“Thought I wouldn’t see you here again.”
My one-night stand from last night slides into the booth without waiting for an invitation, like we’re old friends instead of strangers who happen to know how our bodies fit together. Jensen (we didn’t exchange last names) is wearing a faded black T-shirt and jeans. A lock of dark hair falls across his forehead in a way that should look careless but probably isn’t. He’s smirking, and I’d bet money he knows precisely what that smirk does to women.
Heat crawls up my neck. I’m a grown woman who owns a bookstore in a small town nestled in the foothills of Colorado’s Front Range. So I’ve read enough romance novels to know that blushing at a sinfully handsome man in the back of a bar is embarrassingly cliche.
“Thought I might have other plans.” I close the notebook and tuck my pen inside the spiral binding, casual and unbothered. The exact opposite of how I felt this morning when I did the walk of shame from one hotel to another, replaying every minute of the night before in full-color detail.
“Yet here you are.” He tilts his chin toward my glass.
“Turns out there aren’t a lot of places around here with tiny ice.” I take a sip. “I happen to love tiny ice.”
“No one loves tiny lice.” He stretches his forearms on the table, long fingers laced together. Oh, god, what those fingers did to me. “Although tiny and lice might be redundant.”
“Ice,” I tell him slowly, taking a sip of my soda. “You know I said ice. And we did our thing last night. So this—” I wag a finger between him and me and fight the smile tugging at my lips “—might be redundant.”
“Our thing.” He lifts a heavy brow. “We’re a thing.”
“Are we, though?” I hate how breathless I sound.
“Yes, Sutton. We are.”
He calls me Sutton. Because when a tall stranger with broad shoulders and an easy laugh who makes promises without needing words sits down next to you in a bar you wandered into by accident, you don’t give him your real name. The whole point of coming to Nashville a few days early was to be someone who doesn’t have a seven thirty appointment at Vanderbilt’s oncology department tomorrow morning.
Sutton isn’t sick with a brother who’s micromanaging her cancer journey like a CEO reviewing quarterly earnings. Sutton is a woman in a bar who had the best sex of her life with a stranger and came back the next night because he said he’d be there. But I’m not admitting that part…duh.
His leg presses into mine under the table, and the warmth of him through my jeans sends a current up my spine that short-circuits whatever resolve I had left.
“Because you came back,” he adds as the smirk vanishes. What’s underneath it is far more devastating—intense and unguarded and directed entirely at me.
I can’t take my eyes off him. “Don’t let it go to your head.”
“Too late.” He reaches across the table and touches one calloused fingertip to my knuckle, and my body reacts like the slutty slut it is. “Do you want another drink, or do you want to get out of here?”
I should take the drink. I should sit in this booth and write my unsendable letter and pretend that the flutter low in my belly is just nerves about starting the next step of my cancer treatment tomorrow. But his muscular leg is still pressed against mine, and the memory of last night—his mouth on my collarbone, my back arching off the mattress, hearing him whisper the fake name I gave him into my hair—is making it difficult to give a rat’s ass about what I should do.
“We could go to my apartment,” he offers.
“No.”
“Yourhotel?”
