Party of Three: A H.O.T. Cops Novel Read Free Page B

breath, poleaxed by the very idea. Strange how fear and stark desire could mix. And they both swirled inside her now as she tried to wrap her mind around the fact that he was offering this to her. Not as a fantasy, but as reality. Even though they weren’t those kind of people. They were mainstream, middle-of-the-road; they were dependable and responsible. Yes, a little dirty talk in the bedroom—but that was about as kinky as it got and she’d always been perfectly pleased by what they shared. “We have great sex,” she felt the need to remind him. “Mostly, I mean.” Maybe not so much lately, but back when things had been good between them, the sex had, too.
    “I know we do,” he told her, now cupping her cheek in his palm. “But I want this weekend to be … something beyond normal for us, beyond great. I want it to be something new, something extreme, something that’ll bring you more pleasure than you can even imagine.”
    Okay. It was beginning to sink in that this was really happening, that he was really planning on this. But he didn’t know her as well as he thought if he didn’t realize … “Ethan, I can’t have sex with just anybody. I mean, you know I haven’t been with many guys.” She’d always been in serious relationships. She’d never had a one-night stand in her life. And she’d never been intimate with anyone she hadn’t gotten to know first. For her, good sex was about trust, about knowing the person you were with. “So I can’t imagine who on earth I’d really want us to …”
    “Rogan,” he said simply—and that was when another tremor shook her world.
    Oh Lord. Rogan Wolfe was … well, God, what wasn’t he? Ex-boyfriend, tough cop, bad boy to the bone—and the man who had taught her to love sex. She’d never told Ethan that part about her relationship with Rogan, but while before him she’d liked sex just fine, with him she’d found her true sexual being, and she’d loved how much he’d drawn that out of her. In fact, she credited her good sex life with Ethan—well, before its recent decline—in part to her time with Rogan.
    Still, she was stunned to hear this was who Ethan had in mind. “You don’t even like Rogan,” she pointed out.
    At this, though, her boyfriend just shrugged. “We get along all right.”
    The fact was, Ethan and Rogan went back a long way, all the way to police academy and the Hostage Ops Team on which they’d been placed and where they’d trained together, both having shown a particular aptitude for handling hostage situations and other similar crises. And she’d always been keenly aware that, in some aspects, the three of them were closely, weirdly intertwined.
    She’d met Rogan when he’d joined the Charlevoix Police Force when she’d been in her mid-twenties. She hadn’t even known Ethan yet, but he and Rogan had worked together on the force and even now they still played on the same summer softball team.
    And what had led Rogan to charming Charlevoix on Lake Michigan in the first place? He’d been looking for a new position and, after reaching out to the other H.O.T. members, who’d kept in touch over the years, Ethan had let him know there was an opening there.
    So she’d have never even met or dated Rogan if not for Ethan’s involvement in bringing him to town. And maybe she’d have never met Ethan, either—even though they’d both been born and raised in the Charlevoix area—if she hadn’t started coming to Rogan’s softball games when she’d been dating him. It was funny how much of her world had been shaped by the actions of these two men.
    “Getting along isn’t the same as liking,” she pointed out to Ethan. Because despite the things they had in common, Rogan and Ethan were very different. Almost like night and day in ways. And despite them both being part of a tight-knit group of old friends who got together once or twice a year, apart from the H.O.T. affiliation, they weren’t at all close. They might