Free Eight Nights by Keira Andrews

Chapter One
    As he rounded the staircase, Lucas McKenzie stopped for a moment and sighed. He could already hear the pounding bass emanating from above, and he knew without a doubt it was coming from his room.
    Well, from Sam Kramer’s room.
    It was technically Lucas’s room, too, but Sam didn’t let that stop him from doing exactly what he wanted to do, when he wanted to do it. As the star forward on Brookfield University’s basketball team, Sam was used to getting his way, and Lucas didn’t have the energy to argue most of the time.
    The hallway was crowded with revelers celebrating the end of the December exam period. Everyone in the dorm except Lucas was a senior, and although he knew some of them well enough to say hi to, he hadn’t really made any friends. Lucas stepped over the drunken people sitting in his doorway and was greeted by a can of cold beer that bounced off his chest and rolled to a stop under the foot of his bed.
    “Buddy!” Everyone was Sam’s buddy. “School’s out!” Sam whooped loudly, his muscled arms thrust over his head. Dark-haired Sam was tall and gorgeous; his chiseled features and 2 Keira Andrews
    sculpted muscles would be just as at home on a movie screen as they were on the basketball court.
    Lucas gave Sam a thumbs-up. “I’m totally stoked!” He’d learned early on in the semester that the best way to deal with Sam was to smile and agree with everything he said.
    “Grab a beer and party with us!”
    Nodding and smiling, Lucas retrieved the beer from under his bed and popped the top after stashing his knapsack in the closet -- currently the only part of the small room that wasn’t occupied by a fellow student. A girl Lucas recognized as living down the hall was sprawled on his bed, sticking her tongue down the throat of a guy who looked old enough to be in his seventh or eighth year of college.
    “Holidays are here!” Sam’s proclamation was met with a loud cheer from the partygoers. Lucas kept the smile on his face as he worked his way back into the hallway, holding his can of beer aloft in a toast. He headed back toward the stairwell, hoping that he wouldn’t run into --
    “Lucas!” Andrea Price materialized in front of him, grinning widely.
    “Hey, Andrea. How’s it going?”
    “Great! I’m so glad exams are over. I can’t wait to go home.”
    “Me either.” Lucas found it easier to just lie. “Well, enjoy the party!”
    “You’re not staying?” Andrea touched his arm, her fingers light on his bicep. “I thought maybe we could hang out in my room.”
    Lucas groaned inwardly. Andrea was a beautiful girl -- blonde and petite with a bright smile -- but she just wasn’t Lucas’s type.
    Not by a long shot.
    He’d dated girls before, and he knew plenty of them found him attractive, but he wasn’t sure why. He had no fashion sense to speak of, and although he was almost six feet, he Eight Nights

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    didn’t have bulging muscles like Sam and the other athletes. Yet the other day he overheard Andrea and her friend cooing about his blond hair and green eyes.
    Unfortunately, he didn’t find women attractive. At least, not in the way they found him. “Andrea, I’d love to, but I’ve got a really bad headache. I’m just going to get some air.
    Alone.”
    Her face fell just a fraction before she smiled again. “Sure, I understand. Well, merry Christmas if I don’t see you again tonight.”
    “You, too.”
    Leaving a disappointed Andrea in his wake, Lucas reached the stairwell and headed up one more flight to the roof. He would love to have her for a friend, but she seemed incapable of reading his signals, so he’d started avoiding her a few weeks earlier. He briefly considered dating her so he could meet some other people, but he swore when he left Michigan that he’d stop pretending. Start being himself.
    Of course, he was too nervous to join the campus gay association, so now he didn’t date women or men. He told himself it would be his New Year’s