Summary

At twenty-four, Alex Keene has never had sex. He's spent years carrying the shame of it, thanks in no small part to a father who made sure he understood exactly what kind of man he was supposed to be. So Alex comes up with a solution: drive a hundred miles from home, hire an escort for the night, and finally get it over with. Lauren has met plenty of men like Alex. Or at least, she thinks she has. What begins as a twelve-hour transaction quickly becomes something neither of them planned. Dinner turns into a disaster. A quiet night on the beach becomes unexpectedly intimate. There's bad karaoke, worse moonshine, a bar fight, and somewhere along the way, two strangers who have spent their lives learning all the wrong lessons about intimacy begin telling each other the truth. But Lauren was only hired until seven in the morning. And with every passing hour, the line between what's paid for and what's real becomes harder to see. They have one night together. Neither of them is prepared for what happens when it ends.

Genre: Romance

Author: PeytonLanclos

Status: Ongoing

Chapters: 6

Rating: n/a

Age Rating: 18+

Alex: 7:01 PM

Dalstrom, Texas, stretched six blocks from salvation to sin, with enough churches, bars, and cheap motel rooms to offer plenty of both.

It wasn’t much to look at, but I’d chosen this tiny coastal town for one very specific purpose.

To get laid.

Before you judge me as some sort of player or womanizer, I assure you I’m about as far from either of those things as Odysseus was from home.

I had actually never had sex in my twenty-four years on this planet, and it haunted me far more than it reasonably should have.

My father made sure of that.

So here I was in Dalstrom, a hundred miles from home, perched on a rickety bus bench and waiting for my specific lady of the night to arrive.

The autumn air was crisp, especially for Texas, but I couldn’t shake the numbness creeping through me, coating my insides like batter on chicken.

I’d thought making the whole thing transactional would erase the insecurity.

Instead, it amplified it.

What if she’s sick? What if she shows up and I know her?

A hundred miles wasn’t that far in the grand scheme of things.

“Hi, handsome.”

I spun around.

A woman with striking green eyes stood behind the bench, maybe a couple years older than me.

Before I could say anything, she hopped over the back and dropped into the seat beside me, flashing a toothy grin that shone a deep white beneath the fading sunset.

“Hi. Are you the—”

“Am I the what?” she asked, her face twisting with disgust.

“Oh, I—uh—I—”

“Relax, I’m kidding!” She broke into a laugh. “I’m the girl you’re looking for. Lauren.”

“I’m Alex.”

We shook hands, and our eyes lingered on each other for a second longer than they probably should have before I instinctively dropped mine to the ground.

“So, do you have a place, or—”

“Are you hungry?” I blurted.

“What?”

“Food. I’m starving.”

She smiled again, probably sensing the torrential swarm of butterflies currently wreaking havoc on my lower intestine.

If we were sticking with The Odyssey, she was Calypso.

And for the next twelve hours, I was her slightly willing captive.

“If you’re paying, I’m eating.”