ad.
The upscale address and surprisingly affordable rent had caught her eye that morning in the coffee shop. She’d been desperate for a new living situation. Sharing a one-bedroom apartment with a coworker was less than ideal, especially when said coworker was an absolute slob.
She’d called the number immediately and reached Mick’s voicemail. He’d called her back around lunch, and they’d arranged an Between Friends
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evening viewing and interview. As soon as she’d laid eyes on the Mediterranean-style house situated on a beautifully landscaped corner lot, Whitney had decided she’d do whatever it took to seal the deal.
She’d have put up with just about anything to live in such a great place.
Meeting Eddie and Mick had been the icing on the cake. Sexy as sin. Funny. Sweet. Successful. One of them carried a gun and the other a stethoscope, so she always felt safe and secure. As a single woman in LA, that wasn’t a feeling she’d often enjoyed, living with her old roommate in that crummy apartment in a not-so-great neighborhood.
During that first meeting, she’d gotten a bit of a strange vibe from the pair. She’d assumed it was the fact she was a girl. They’d been totally upfront with her about their gender preferences for their new roommate but had decided to give her a chance because they felt the chemistry worked.
Later, she’d realized it wasn’t their iffiness about a female roommate but something else entirely. It hadn’t taken her long to pick up on the pair’s intimate level of familiarity. She’d put two and two together and realized Eddie and Mick were more than friends.
They were lovers. Well—sometimes. There was so much bed hopping going on in the house she often felt like Goldilocks. Mick in Eddie’s bed. Eddie in Mick’s bed. Some hot nurse in Mick’s bed. A girl from Eddie’s favorite bar in his. Both of them and the hot nurse in Mick’s bed. And every combination in between.
Not that Whitney was ever part of the bed hopping. She sat on the sidelines and stared on enviously as everyone else got a piece of the hot-sex pie. She’d been working sixteen-hour days for a solid year.
Add in all the traveling to New York and Paris and Milan and Tokyo and, well, there wasn’t much time left for dating. Hell, meeting a straight man who wasn’t a stuck-up model was damn near impossible.
Stylists, designers, buyers, publicists—the bulk of the men she met in her field had boyfriends or longtime lovers of their own.
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Lolita Lopez
Or they wanted short flings. Casual sex that meant nothing.
Whitney couldn’t do that. She wasn’t a prude by any stretch of the imagination. She enjoyed rather-naughty erotica and even amateur porn on occasion. She’d had a handful of sexual relationships but never a one-night stand. She simply wasn’t programmed for nostrings-attached sex.
In many ways, Whitney was an old-fashioned gal. She wanted the stable relationship, the kids, and the white picket fence. She wanted a man who took charge but was sensitive and caring. She wanted someone well-read and rugged. A man who was just as at ease schmoozing at society galas as he was pitching a tent in a woodsy clearing and hiking a mountain.
Of course, the older Whitney got, the more she realized that maybe that perfect man didn’t exist. Maybe, just maybe, she was looking for two men. Two drop-dead-sexy, sweet-as-pie, perfectly compatible men who just happened to share her living space.
Speaking of said twosome, Whitney called out their names again and heard nothing. Annoyed, she carefully lowered the air conditioner box to the ground and rearranged the bags of takeout. She grabbed her keys from the deadbolt and locked the door behind her. Dropping her keys and purse next to the window-unit box, she went in search of Mick and Eddie.
Her eyes widened at the messes she discovered in the dining room and kitchen. They hadn’t been kidding. The place was wrecked. This was exactly the kind of