Bound by Her Best Friend (A Club Smex Story) Read Online Free Page B

worries. How Zak envied them. How he wished he could stand up, grab Gemma, throw her over his shoulder and retire to his room, completely guilt free. Hell, it wouldn’t even need to be her; he could pick from any number of the women who’d cast him a flirtatious glance or smile since he’d arrived.
    Gemma. Marissa. Penelope, Lacy, Claire…the names went on and on in a never ending circle. They were all ridiculously attractive. The club had very exacting standards for the women they allowed in. Each was lovelier than any woman Zak had ever dated before and yet…
    Zak felt his stomach roll a little as he mentally counted exactly how many of them he had spent time with over the last year. Though the number was low, it was too many, but then what else was he supposed to do, he thought bitterly. There was never any option of a girlfriend. Not anymore. He’d tried that over the last decade and no matter how great those women had been they were not her , and as the weeks with them went by that fact wormed its way into Zak’s brain until he couldn’t stand to be with them any longer. No, the club was the only option now. It combined networking, business and the possibility of meaningless encounters with women who expected, and wanted, only one thing from him.
    A compromise.
    The only way to try and assuage the guilt and deal with the fact that despite the fucked up situation he found himself in, he was still a red-blooded male with wants and needs.
    “You should have gone with her,” Rob said slowly, interrupting his depressing thoughts. “She’s lovely.”
    “They’re all lovely,” Zak said.
    “But not as lovely as her ?” Rob asked. “The woman we’re not allowed to mention. The one you don’t want to scare away.”
    His stomach rolled some more as Rob, as usual, hit the nail directly on the head, and Zak rubbed a hand over his face—both because the scotch was working on him, and because he felt abruptly deflated.
    It didn’t need saying, and it certainly didn’t need thinking, but the words whispered through his mind anyway. No one could be as lovely as Freya, not ever.
    And suddenly, maybe because of all the scotch, or the fact that Freya had looked so fucking adorable wrapped in his tee, her damp hair curling around her shoulders, or just because he’d reached the end of his tether, Zak found himself mentally repeating the questions that Rob and Mitch had been asking him for months.
    How much longer am I going to live like this? How many more years do I have to wait? How many more meaningless encounters before I accept that I have to move on with my life?
    He didn’t have a single answer. The only thing Zak knew for sure was that the wanting, the longing, it was never going to go away. At some point, something was going to have to be done about it, but just like for the last decade, he had no fucking idea what.

 
    Chapter Three
     
    Friday morning, as she always did, Freya texted Zak to thank him for the night before and to make sure he’d gotten home safely. He replied with a simple smiley face.
    On her lunch break, stressed beyond belief after another incident with one of the older kids, she messaged him a joke she’d found on one of their favorite websites. He replied with another smiley face. There was no reciprocal joke or quirky story, which, admittedly, disappointed her a little. His wry humor would have gone some way to making Freya feel a little better about the rest of the afternoon.
    That night she sent him a weird news story that had gone viral and was clocking up about a hundred thousand YouTube views an hour.
    Zak did not reply.
    Zak did not answer a single one of her texts following that, and by Saturday morning Freya was worried, more than worried, she was panicking. He never kept her waiting for more than a couple of hours before replying. Okay, sometimes more if he was in a busy meeting, but never a whole day.
    Despite the knot of panic in her belly, she let it lie all Saturday