Bear No Loss (2 page)

“Keep it in mind for what?” she asked, quirking a brow at him.

“For later, obviously.”

“Later? I don’t think my body could take a
later
,” she admitted with a smile that just about swept him off his feet.

Good thing he was lying down.

“Oh, I can make you want later,” he said, stealing a kiss from her lips.

The whimper she let out as she kissed him back made his fingers curl against her tighter, pulling her to him. It was late as hell, and he was supposed to be back in the hotel sleeping so he’d be ready to climb on the bus the next morning and start the hellishly long trip back to Shifter Grove, Idaho, but as far as Memphis was concerned, April was worth
at least
one sleepless night.

Frankly, he was pretty sure that if he didn’t get to fuck her really soon, he might just lose what bit of sanity that hadn’t been pounded out of him by choosing professional hockey as a career path.

Things were just getting interesting, with his palm cupping her heavy breast and his thigh shoved between her legs, April writhing beneath him as they made out, when a sudden crash somewhere in the apartment made April scramble out from underneath him.

“Shit,” she whispered, practically throwing herself out of the bed as she dove for a bathrobe. “You’ve got to get out of here, now!”

April tossed him his shirt as she rushed to the door leading into her small bedroom, hitting the lock just as a hand fell on the handle.

“April? What’s going on?” a slightly muddled female voice called, knocking on the door. “Let me in! I have vodka and gossip!”

“Why? What’s going on? Jealous girlfriend?” Memphis questioned with a frown, peeling himself off her bed more than a little bit reluctantly as he pulled on his shirt.

They’d never gotten through undressing at the front door so his boots and jacket had made it to the bedroom as well.

“No, just… it’s the roommate I was telling you about,” April said, her cheeks lit with a blush that had to be equal parts mortification and the aftermath of his talented fingers. “She’ll kill me if she finds out I had you here. Just… you need to go. We have a pact... no men in the apartment and… ugh.”

April pulled a hand through her hair and Memphis shoved his feet into the boots, adjusting his cock in his pants and cringing through the process. He shrugged on his jacket while the mysterious roommate pounded on the door again, her voice getting whiny now.

“Apriiiil!”

“In a minute, Nicky!” April called back, flustered.

Memphis caught her in his arms and pulled her close for a moment, kissing her on the mouth as if he had all the time in the world. He was pretty sure he could scare the living hell out of any fangirl with one well-placed growl, but he wasn’t the kind of guy to go against a woman’s wishes. Even though every fiber in his body wanted to toss April back on the bed and fuck her so hard she’d forget all about any lost sense of morality she might have had.

“I wanna see you again,” he said, keeping his voice as quiet as he could.

“You’re leaving tomorrow though, right?” April asked, though he caught the hint of a smile that crossed her expression when he said it.

“I am. But we have games all over the place. I’ll send you tickets,” he said with a grin, squeezing her for a moment before letting her go. No way was he done with her yet, which was another surprising change to his usual modus operandi. “Now, how am I supposed to get out of here?”

“Window. Fire escape,” April said, her sense of urgency returning as she ran past the bed and opened the window up as wide as it would go, motioning toward a rickety fire escape ladder outside.

Memphis looked at the ladder dubiously, glancing from her to the window, before shrugging his shoulders slightly and squeezing through it and into the chill of the winter night.

“You’re gonna show up, right? You wouldn’t leave a guy out in the cold, Miss April, now would you?” he asked, waggling his brows at her.

“Just get out of here,” she laughed, but she leaned out of the window for a second to plant a kiss on his lips before slamming the window shut and scooting to the door again.

Memphis shook his head with a sigh, beginning his descent from the third floor, with his dick still hard and his mind revolving very pointedly around the pretty little thing he’d had in his arms a minute ago. And how she wasn’t there anymore and how that bothered him like nothing else could.

You must be getting old, Memphis,
he mused wryly as he dropped down the last ten or so rungs on the ladder, the snow squelching under his boots.

But that didn’t make him want to see her again any less.

CHAPTER TWO

April

“April! What is this bullshit that I’m reading?” Sally Tarley called from across the hall, rousing April from her seat like a bullet to the brain.

She’d just been daydreaming of a very long, very
detailed
scene involving her favorite polar bear hockey player, who hadn’t stopped popping up in her thoughts every chance he got lately.

“Oh, someone’s in trouble,” Nicky commented with a sly grin, which looked a little bit
too
eager to see April get reamed by her boss.

“Coming, Sally!” April shot back, grabbing her pocketbook from the desk and running into Sally’s office.

“Close the door, April,” Sally said with a sigh that verged on exasperated, throwing her a look that was all vinegar.

April complied with a frown, closing the door that was usually kept open and sinking into a chair across from Sally with a very pronounced feeling of dread. Tarley Events was one of the biggest event-organizing and marketing firms in all of Cheyenne, specializing in lavish affairs that usually ended with at least some B- or C-lister drinking too much champagne and making an ass out of themselves in front of clamoring paparazzi.

As much as April would have wanted to claim that to not be the fault of the company, she knew that Sally Tarley didn’t shy away from anything to get a good buzz going for her events. More than once, April had found herself doing things she didn’t quite find palatable because of it. It didn’t help much that her heart wasn’t entirely in it when it came to her current employment, but that didn’t make Sally’s foul moods any easier to bear.

“What’s wrong?” April asked, flipping open her notebook and finding a page that wasn’t filled with scribbles of that one novel she dreamed of writing but by the looks of things would never get to.

“I was going over the marketing drafts you made for the next St Paddy’s Day Ball and I have to say, this shit is
atrocious
! Please stop thinking that you’re some writing savant here. I don’t need a thousand words on why someone should go to the event, I need taglines! Catchy! Punchy! In your face! Not this… whatever this is,” Sally said, holding up April’s carefully organized proposals in a misshapen heap in her hand.

“Noted, I’ll cut the bullshit,” April said with a quick nod, feeling her stomach twist.

She’d worked hard on that proposal. Not only hard, but she thought that finally they could use something other than slimy taglines and promises of mountains of booze and boobs, which seemed to be the common theme for all events coordinated by Tarley Events. Okay, so maybe she had gotten a
little
carried away with describing the options for the campaign leading up to it, but was that such a bad thing?

Apparently it was.

“This just brings me to my next point. I’m sure you know this is our low season. Past Christmas and New Year’s, nothing happens until the weddings start rolling up in the summer. We’re scraping at the bottom of the barrel here and frankly, I don’t have enough work to go around.”

Oh no,
April thought, her hazel eyes growing wide with worry.
If I lose this job I’ll be so screwed!

“Sally, I’m sorry for the mistake. It won’t happen again! You know me, I’ve been working for you for three years now!” April began, her fingers clutching the pages of her notebook.

There was no love lost between Tarley Events and April, that much was true, but the thought of getting fired still sent bile creeping up in her throat. Coming from a wealthy family, she’d made it her life’s goal to manage her own finances and get by on her own merits now as an adult, and Tarley Events had been a big part of that.

After picking up an English Literature degree, back when she had less qualms about living off of her parents’ fortune, it had become abundantly clear that there simply weren’t that many options out there for someone with her passion for writing and a lack of desire to ruin people’s lives. Journalism seemed to be more about screwing everyone else over than it was about getting a good story and writing books… well, that too was an uphill battle against agents and publishers and finding what spoke to her enough to try. So she never really had given it a fair shot, more preoccupied with her own doubts to make an honest go of it.

“Stop it, I’m not firing you,” Sally said with a roll of her eyes, lifting up her hand.

“Oh,” April sighed, letting out a breath she didn’t know she had been holding.

“But I will put you on extended leave until the busy season starts again. You’ve been with me the longest so you have tons of vacation days saved up that you need to put into good use. I’ll pay you seventy percent of your usual wages past those. I think you really need to take some time off and figure out how you’re going to work with me, because
this,
” Stella said, holding up her reports again as if they were something dead and fermenting, “is unacceptable.”

When April finally walked out of Stella’s office, after hashing out the details of her newfound free time, she was in something she could only describe as a haze of confusion. On one hand, she suddenly found herself with far too much free time and nothing to do with it. And on the other hand, her own boss had just told her what April herself already knew—that she wasn’t happy where she was.

So what was a girl to do?

“I need a drink,” she said and thought at the same time, her eyes meeting Nicky’s when she was only two paces from Sally’s door.

“I’m game!” Nicky quipped with a wide, happy grin, scooping up her purse and jacket before April could even make it back to her desk.

***

It was the fourth shot of something that included far too much vodka and not enough of anything else that did April in. Her phone had been sitting on the table and when Memphis pinged her on SassyDate and the alert showed as a notification on the screen, she hadn’t been fast enough to stop Nicky from snatching it up and reading the text.

“Memphis Corley is messaging you!?” Nicky asked, half-gasping, half-sputtering as she braced herself with one hand on the table. “And you’re here talking about what you’re going to do with your vacation? Woman, we have far more interesting things to discuss.”

Nicky shoved the phone in April’s face as if April wasn’t aware of the man hitting her up on the dating site, leaving her a tiny bit more sullen as she took her phone and read the notification quickly. It was a little pun about their names and how he thought Memphis in April was a fine place to be.

That bastard,
she thought with a grin and a shake of her head, but some of the amusement dissipated as she looked up into the brown, intense eyes of Nicky Volley, a woman not exactly known for her sense of decorum.

“Yeah, I guess I sort of… forgot to tell you about the fact that I met him,” April said, cringing as she reached for another shot on the tray they’d bought after the first round of beers.

One thing was for sure, she was going to feel this in the morning.

“You forgot to tell me that you met
Memphis Corley
?! Only my number one, most favorite hockey player of all time?! Oh, I know when this was,” Nicky said, leaning back in her seat with her mouth gaping. “It was that night, wasn’t it! When I thought I smelled Calvin Klein and SEX in the apartment! Did you make him climb down the fire escape? You did, didn’t you?”

April was nodding before she could even attempt to stop herself, and then throwing back another shot just to make herself stop giving Nicky more ammunition. The “but you don’t even watch hockey” died on her lips along with any denial she might have been formerly ready to rattle out.

“I can’t believe you,” Nicky said with a shake of her head, her expression tight but her smile wide. “You should have at least introduced us!”

“I was embarrassed, honestly. I mean, we met at a bar and we ended up hitting it off and one thing led to another and then he was in the cab and in the apartment and… God, I’m such an idiot,” April said, letting her head fall on her arms with a thunk, the loud music in the bar one block down from the office drowning it out well enough.

“Why? I mean, I’m not mad,” Nicky said, making April glance up.

Nicky’s eyes seemed a little cold and distant, but her smile was genuine enough now. Nicky reached out her hand and put it on April’s, rousing her from the fit of self-pity she’d been trying to disappear into all night.