I scoffed. “First, this isn’t a matter of love. Second, I’m pretty sure you know a hell of a lot more about ‘ghost cock’ than love.”
He held up a finger like he was about to argue, considered, then shrugged. “Either way. My idea is solid. You’ve got to learn to hate the guy. Embrace your anger, Kenzie. Loathe him. Because you can trust me on this. Every time a woman gets obsessed with me, the only thing that ever seems to get them to give up is when they manufacture some false reality where they can hate my guts.”
I tried not to smile. “So you believe these women are all living in a made up fantasy? That’s the only way they could hate your guts? It wouldn’t have anything to do with one-night stands, ignoring calls, adopting their pets, or any of the other shit you’ve pulled?”
“I adopted one woman’s pet, and she was all for it. It’s not my fault she changed her mind after I released it into the wild where it belonged.”
I blinked. It wasn’t even worth trying to argue with him. If anyone lived in a fantasy world, it was my brother. He lived in a fantasy world where consequences didn’t exist, and every risk paid off. He was blessed by some unseen magic charm that let him skip and slide right through life as if obstacles were a figment of everyone else’s imagination. Sometimes I hated him for it, but the feeling never lasted.
“All I have to do is convince myself to hate him?” I asked.
Travis nodded. “That’s it. First comes hate, then goes the urge to masturbate.” He frowned, looking up. “That sounded wiser before I said it.”
I shook my head. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, I thought Travis had a point. After all, I’d been doing a pretty good job of hating Sebastian right until I walked into that room at the conference.
And just like that, I decided to learn to hate everything Sebastian St. James stood for. Except his books. I was definitely still going to read the next one as soon as it came out.
5
Kenzie
Four Months Later
I didn’t go to sleep in a four-poster bed with a multi-million dollar view, but that’s where I woke up. My first thought was that I’d somehow managed to go to Travis’ place and crash for the night, but the view out my window was of landscaped gardens and an expanse of green grass on rolling hills. Birds were chirping outside the windows and there were no giant monitor lizards or cats using me as a pillow.
Definitely not Travis’ place.
Using my expert powers of deduction, I concluded something had gone terribly wrong last night.
My first hint was how it felt like someone had used my head for boxing practice.
There was also an IV in my arm, which was concerning.
I’d seen a movie once where a girl went on a blind date with a guy. It started badly when he forgot his wallet and made her pay for dinner. It got worse when he took her to his place and stole her kidney.
I lifted the sheets and found I was in a medical gown. Bad sign. I pulled up the gown and was relieved to see my pasty white belly and chest didn’t have any grisly organ removal scars.
“Okay, Kenzie. You’ve still got all the same organs you started with. How bad could this be?” Talking to yourself is a bad sign, too, I thought. Since when do you talk to yourself?
I scooched myself up against the pillows and sat upright. The movement made me wince and clutch my temples. I’d definitely hit my head on something, but my memory of last night was fuzzy. All I could recall was being furious and… Ugh. Even trying to think about last night made it feel like someone was driving a handful of those little plastic swords they spear grapes with into my brain.
The door opened. A pretty young woman with chestnut hair in a ponytail down to the waist of her scrubs came in. She was pretty in a won’t steal your boyfriend kind of way, which earned her a few points with me. She had on a white coat and was carrying typical doctor gear. I certainly wasn’t in a hospital, though.
My stupid, muddled brain very briefly wondered if I was dead and the woman was some sort of angel, but that also didn’t make much sense. If your head could hurt this badly in heaven, I was going to consider scoping out other options for the afterlife before I agreed to stay.
She noticed I was awake, smiled, and came to my bedside. “Oh, good,” she said. “Sebastian hasn’t stopped lurking around me ever since last night. Maybe he can finally relax once he knows you’re awake.”
“Uh, hi,” I said. “What’s going on. And wait, did you say Sebastian? As in Sebastian St. James?” Now I definitely knew this wasn’t heaven. If Sebastian was here, it was probably Hell.
“Yeah,” she said with a conspiratory little smile and a wrinkle of her nose. “I hear you’re not a huge fan.”
Understatement of the century. Sure, he’d curled my toes at the conference and given me a time that was almost impossible to forget—trust me, I’d tried.
Eventually, I’d had no choice but to take Travis’ advice. I learned to hate him. The process turned out to be really easy, considering the more I hated him, the more the way things went had pissed me off. I found myself guiltily dwelling on the memory of what it had been like to be with him. It came to me in the shower, in my dreams, and when I tried to work on my book. He’d been following me like a sexy asshole ghost ever since that day four months ago.
Ghost cock. Travis’ dumb phrase echoed in my head with an ethereal sort of reverb, like he was whispering it in an enormous church.
I felt like Sebastian had given me a hit of the world’s most addictive drug and then ghost cocked his tight ass right out of my life, leaving me with a lifetime of junkie fever for something I could never get my hands on again. Worse, all the logical parts of my brain didn’t want to get my hands on him again. He’d told me himself. He didn’t do relationships. Commitments. Friendliness. Okay, he hadn’t explicitly told me that last one, but it was clear after interacting with the man.
He was bedroom material. Not boyfriend material.
“What am I doing here?”
“You hit your head.”
“Oh, God,” I said, groaning. “Don’t tell me I’m in some cliche amnesia situation. Is this the part where you tell me I’m actually a duchess and my arranged wedding is tomorrow? Is the Duke at least really hot? Maybe kind of growly?”
The doctor grinned. “Amnesia? Are you having difficulty remembering things?”
I paused, looking up and to the left. “No,” I said after a few seconds. “Unfortunately, it’s all there. Damn. I didn’t even forget middle school.”
“Well,” she said. “I’m just going to check your blood pressure. And you should take these.” She held out a little white cup with two pills inside.
I looked at them distrustfully. “No offense,” I said. “You look super nice and all, but I try not to take pills from random people when I wake up with head injuries in mysterious mansions.”
She nodded. “I’ll leave them here. It’s just a pain reliever, though, if the head starts bothering you. And don’t worry, it’s a safe pain reliever for your condition.” She slid the cuff around my arm and started pumping, then pressed two fingers to the inside of my elbow.