Page 2 of My Hotshot

I stared at the screen in my hand, and the call log blinked back at me like it didn’t know what the fuck just happened either.

“Son of a bitch,” I muttered.

I shoved the phone back into my pocket, but that didn’t stop the tension thrumming in my veins. My knuckles cracked as I clenched my fists, and my body practically vibrated with confusion and fury.

Stretch.

The one person I thought would never turn his back on us.

The one guy I thought I knew inside and out.

Now I wasn’t so sure.

Chapter One

Dice

I was just about to blow past Main Street when a flash of long, sun-kissed hair and a pair of tanned legs stopped me cold.

I hit the brakes hard enough that the tires squealed. My bike fishtailed half a foot before I got it steady, and I swung my head around so fast that it damn near gave me whiplash.

No way.

No goddamn way.

I whipped a U-turn and parked in the nearest parking spot.

I kicked down the stand and climbed off as my boots crunched on the pavement. “Lainey,” I called.

And then she turned.

Her head tilted like she was trying to make sense of me and the fact that I was standing in front of her for the first time in sixteen years.

“Duane,” she said, and I swear it hit me in the gut like a fist.

I shook my head. “Not Duane.”

She raised an eyebrow, like I was the confusing part of this moment. “You said Lainey, and then I said your name. Are you not Duane anymore?”

Hell, I hadn’t been called that in over a decade. Probably closer to fifteen years. “Dice, baby.”

Lainey blinked. “You changed your name from Duane to Dice? I know you never really liked your name, but I thought you would’ve picked something less… weird.”

I gave a short laugh and shrugged. “I didn’t pick it.”

She looked around like she was expecting an alien mothership to swoop down and whisk her away. Her gaze kept flitting back to me, though—like she couldn’t believe I was real.Like I’d been some ghost hanging around in her memory and now here I was in leather and denim and tattoos.

We were on Main Street in the parking lot of the grocery store, right by the corner with the diner and that old barber shop. I’d just been cruising by when something about the woman walking toward the store yanked my soul out of my chest. I did a double-take so hard I nearly wrecked.

It was her.

My Lainey.

At least, she’d been mine once.

Back in high school, when the world was simpler and we were invincible. I left town a few weeks after graduation to chase that itch to get out and keep moving.

Lainey? She had college lined up. Scholarships. Plans. A future. Everything I didn’t.

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