Free All or Nothing (bad boy romantic suspense) by PJ Adams Page A

ground coffee to her lips, took a scalding mouthful, and then said, “I didn’t call him. Didn’t feel ready.”
    Marshall nodded and drank from his own mug.
    Sally nodded, too, and said, “Told you she was a smart one, didn’t I, Marsh?”
    “You didn’t think I should call him? You didn’t say anything.”
    “You make your own choices, honey,” said Sally. “Good ones. Bad ones. They’re all your choices.”
    Cassie took another pancake and a little more maple syrup. She wasn’t hungry, but with Sally and Marshall the food was like punctuation to spending time together around that big kitchen table.
    Outside, the morning’s rain had turned to sleet, a sudden, intense downpour. By Thanksgiving it’d be snow, and things at Saco Cabins would be picking up again as the White Mountains ski season kicked off.
    “You made any plans?” asked Marshall, hitching the loose strap of his bib overalls over his shoulder and fastening it.
    Last night, when Denny had fled, Cassie had been left with no money and only the clothes she was wearing; today, though, she’d realized that it hadn’t only been a note he had left when he snuck in early that morning. He’d left her bag from the Lexus and, tucked into it, that roll of hundred dollar bills he’d been carrying.
    So she had some fresh clothes and toiletries, she had some money. Right now she didn’t need plans, just time to breathe a little.
    “Not really,” she said. “I have a cabin out on the coast, south of Bangor. Rent’s paid up until January. No work, though: place I was working has two more nights before it closes up for winter. Most of the casual work over there dries up over winter.” She thought of that roll of cash; she had some savings set aside for winter, and she’d been putting a few supplies by, too. “No pressure on me, though: I’ll have a roof over my head and a stove to keep the place warm while I work out what I want to do with myself.”
    “Place for you here,” said Sally. “There’s always work looking after the cabins when it’s ski season.”
    “Don’t you have someone already?” She couldn’t just breeze in and take someone else’s job.
    “Things’ve been tight,” said Sally. “We were plannin’ on doing it all ourselves this year. Me an’ Marshall never been shy of a bit of hard work.”
    “You’d be helpin’ us out,” said Marshall. “We’d give you room and feed you good, an’ if things start to pick up some...”
    “I’d need to head out to Maine to pick up my things.”
    “You could borrow the station wagon.”
    “A fresh start,” she said, more a thought out loud than anything that needed answering. She topped up their coffee from the jug and outside the downpour eased, and all of a sudden this morning seemed a long way removed from everything that had led up to it.
2
    S he lasted a week.
    A week of getting back into the old routines of life here with Marshall and Sally. Prepping the cabins for the first winter guests. Airing and cleaning the rooms, dressing the beds and getting the heating in order. Helping with some of the routine maintenance: touching up the paintwork, filling potholes in the track and changing the glass in a cracked window.
    It was good to be busy, and to occupy her mind so that she wasn’t going round and round in circles twenty-four seven.
    But in the long night hours, as she lay awake, her head just wouldn’t let up. Going over those two days she’d been with Denny. The highs and lows, the lies. The way he’d made her feel. Not just the obvious physical things – although it was hard to get away from that – but in her head and heart. The way she’d so quickly moved from the wild abandon of a one-night stand with a complete stranger to that moment when she’d realized she couldn’t see a future for her that didn’t feature Denny McGowan.
    It hadn’t been a planned thing. It hadn’t been a thing she understood or even felt complicit with.
    It had just