Page 1 of Playboy For Hire

1

RYDER

The critical thing to know about me is that I’m a dumbass.

Yes, I’m other things too. A soccer player. A college student. Pretty damn hot, though I know I’m not supposed to say that out loud. But none of that is as important as the main thing: I’m just kind of an idiot.

Case in point, it was six thirty on a Sunday morning, and I was standing on a narrow precipice of a dormitory, three stories above the ground, with a growing crowd of people below me worried that I was going to jump.

“Don’t do it!” shouted a guy in a fluorescent yellow T-shirt and even brighter pink basketball shorts. The shirt had a picture of the earth with the phrase‘Care for our mother’in bold Comic Sans underneath.

“You have so much to live for,” called a tweedy-looking girl with a heavy backpack and three textbooks in her arms. Was she already on her way to the library at this hour?

These were exactly the kind of people to stop and ‘help’ a stranger who was actually doing just fine, thank you. Orhadbeen doing fine, until they started yelling and causing a fuss.

“I’m not committing suicide,” I sort of shout-whispered at them. I glanced over my shoulder at the bedroom window I’d just climbed out of. Could Ashley hear me? “I’m just looking for a way out.”

“There are better ways than this, bro,” shouted earth-guy. “There’s still hope.”

“I know there’s hope,” I snapped back at him, forgetting for a moment that I was trying to be quiet. “I’m just trying to disappear without causing a fuss.”

“Disappear?” cried the girl with all the books. “You don’t want to do that, I promise. There are people who love you. If you’ll just go back inside and come down safely, I can take you to the campus counseling center. They have such good services.”

“Not disappear like that,” I said, frustration mounting. “Will you just shush and let me figure out a better way to get down.”

I’d climbed out of the window and onto the ledge in panic, but I was beginning to realize how bad an idea that was.

“Itwillget better,” called a tiny girl in a coxswain’s outfit. She and the crew team must have been coming back from practice on the Potomac. The whole lot of them had paused underneath me to watch.

“Come on, we can catch him,” shouted one of the rowers. In thirty seconds, they’d all formed up below me, making a zipper with their hands, ready to break my fall.

“Will you all please just go?” I hissed. Or, well, tried to hiss. It turns out hissing isn’t really meant to be a sound that carries across three stories, and when I tried to make it louder-but-not-too-loud, I choked on my own spit and started hacking up a lung.

My body skittered forward, and a gasp flew up from the crowd. Backpack girl dropped her books and shrieked, which only drew more attention from passersby.

Seriously, what were this many college students doing awake at this hour? On a Sunday, no less. What ever happened to being hungover in bed until two?

I grabbed at the window frame, keeping myself from toppling to my death, and looked left and right. I didn’t have time to keep arguing. When I woke up in Ashley’s bed this morning to find her beaming at me, those giant Bambi eyes wide enough to verge on little-green-men-from-Mars territory, I knew I needed to get out of her on-campus apartment as soon as possible.

I shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Ashley was a client, and not even a regular. She’d contacted Heartbreakers Anonymous a week ago, looking for a date to her sister’s wedding last night. Wedding dates are kind of my specialty at Heartbreakers, and Mason threw a lot of that business my way. I was more than happy to take her on—until we’d met, that is.

It turned out Ashley didn’t just want a date for Carina’s wedding. She wanted to make a scene. The ceremony had gone fine, mostly, until I’d realized the tears Ashley was crying were because Carina was getting married before her. Nevermind that Carina was twenty-eight and Ashley was still in college.

“I’m the pretty one!” She’d stamped her foot as we stood in the church pews, watching her sister walk up the aisle. “And I hadmy first boyfriend at twelve. Carina didn’t even start dating until she was twenty-three. It should be my turn, not hers.”

Ashleywaspretty, I had to give her that. She had big, blue teacup eyes, a small nose, and lips that were either gorgeously full on their own or tastefully filled with the most subtle cosmetic surgery I’d ever seen. Her blonde hair was piled into an artfully curled mass on top of her head, but a couple of tendrils had come loose and were tickling her smooth, swan-like neck.

But pretty only gets you so far in life. Trust me, I know this from experience. If you’re not smart or particularly talented, you need to benice, in addition to nice-to-look-at. Ashley seemed to have missed that memo.

I wasn’t even sure I wanted to get married, period, let alone at age twenty-two. But it wasn’t my job to tell a client she sounded nuts. My job was to help her have as nice an evening as possible. And I tried.

Ashley had brought a flask of vodka in her tiny clutch purse and was smashed before we even got to the reception at a yacht club down on the river. I spent the first hour alternately holding said purse while she posed for family pictures and listening to her complain about how ugly her sister’s dress was.

“I don’t knowwhyshe thought she could get away with a strapless gown,” she grumbled, taking another swig from the flask. “Like, yeah, she’s got huge boobs, but have a little class, you know? She’s practically falling out of that thing, and it makes her armpits look like chicken cutlets.”

She handed her flask and purse back to me and rejoined her family for pictures.

Personally, I thought Carina looked great, but I was smart enough not to say that out loud. I also thought I was being pretty smart when I sneakily emptied the contents of the flask onto the grass, but as soon as we went into the cocktail hour, Ashley grabbed two glasses of champagne and downed both of them. Then she grabbed two more, but made no move to pass one to me. That’s when I knew it was going to be a long night.

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