Free Suck and Blow: Party Games, Book 1 by Lexxie Couper Page A

topic of the supermodel. “She could be anywhere…with anyone!”
    Alec shot him a sideward frown. “Why the hell the sudden carry on over what Lillian McDermott does? And with whom? Isn’t she just your best friend’s sister? I mean, the three of you have been sharing a house together for what, a few years now, right?”
    Mac let out a barely audible growl. “Don’t worry about it,” he mumbled, sounding very un-Mackenzie like, before lifting his beer to his mouth and taking a sharp pull.
    It was the second time tonight that Alec’s control-freak brother had come unruffled thanks to Lillian McDermott, and if Alec wasn’t so self-absorbed with his own apparent failure to convince Frankie he was worth a second go, he would have been worried.
    As it was now, he wished Mac would find the balls to go look for the supermodel and take the bloody US contract with him.
    So what? You can sit here and mope?
    No. So he could design his next phase of what was fast being called Project Winchester in his head.
    He wasn’t giving up. He didn’t give up. His parents hadn’t raised him to be a quitter, and just because Frankie hadn’t returned to him didn’t mean he would roll over and show his belly to defeat. Hell, he’d spent too many years of his life beating her to stop now.
    Okay, that didn’t sound quite as heroic and romantic as he’d intended it. But damn it, there wasn’t a single doubt in his mind that he and Frankie were meant to…
    He paused, gripping his glass tighter. To what? Fuck each other senseless? Be together forever?
    Be in love?
    “You okay, bro?” Mac’s sudden question—spoken with worried haste—made Alec start. Again.
    He turned to his brother. “I think I fucked up a chance with someone special, Mac.”
    Mac raised an eyebrow. “Really? I didn’t know there was someone special.”
    Alec snorted a wry chuckle, turning back to his untouched drink. “You remember Francesca Winchester?”
    “The Gun?” Alec could hear the incredulous mirth in his brother’s voice. “I thought you’d gotten over her back in high school, mate?”
    Alec let out a ragged sigh. “Me too. Apparently, I hadn’t.”
    “So when I saw you talking together earlier…”
    “It was the beginning of the end of my sanity.”
    “I’m pretty certain you lost your sanity somewhere around the time you turned fifteen,” Mac said, the words laced with laughter. “The day your balls dropped and you realized Francesca Winchester looked damn fine in a pair of tight jeans.”
    Alec shot his brother another sideward frown, accompanying it with a shake of head and grunt. “You’re not helping, Mackenzie.”
    Mac grinned, a wide goofy grin Alec bet no one in any courtroom in the country ever got to see. “Okay, sorry. Let me ask you a question then. If you’re designing a garden for the latest celebrity sensation—still think you need to sign that contract, by the way—and there’s a tree growing where you want to locate an arty-farty water feature, what do you do?”
    Alec raised his eyebrows. “Arty-farty?”
    Mac waved a dismissive hand, very much the ruthless lawyer for a split second. “Shut up and answer the question, squirt.”
    Alec chuckled. “Okay, depending on how well it fit with my design, I’d do one of two things. I’d either pull it out and replant it elsewhere, or redesign the garden around it.”
    Mac looked at him. “And how well does The Gun fit with your design, Alec? You know the one I’m talking about? The design that takes the rest of your life to finish? How well does she fit with that design? Are you going to rip her out of it and plant her somewhere else you don’t have to water or tend, or approach the whole…thing…from a different perspective?”
    “You know,” a very husky, very feminine, very familiar voice murmured behind Alec and Mac. “I’ve been compared to many things in my life, but never a tree. It’s a first for me.”
    Alec jumped and spun around on his bar