Free Screw Single by Tacie Graves

Growing up in Blue River, NY, there was one word that was a curse: single . I married at 20 to get away from it, but my husband, Liam, decided that “Love, Honor, and Obey” was really man-code for “Screw Over and Betray.” I decided I deserved better than that and, going against every word of advice I ever received, left him. Then I was, to my Irish Catholic mother’s eternal dismay: divorced .
     
    Saints preserve us.
     
    Time passed and people finally stopped thinking of me as divorced and started thinking of me as single again, so I began to date. Then I was single, but dating . Now single, but dating , is better than just single , but not by much . Single, but dating is just a step on the road to married as far as Blue River is concerned.
     
    When my sex-drive stepped in and informed me that my sporadic ventures into dating weren’t cutting it, I finally gave in to temptation and slept with Donovan Collins. That moved me from dating , to easy , because even though Donovan and I had worked together for years, he wasn’t interested in a long-term relationship . Hell, he wasn’t interested in a relationship at all. No one would ever accuse him of dating .
     
    I have to admit, the sex was incredible. It was an earth-shattering, toe-curling night, but I was too brainwashed by my Irish Catholic upbringing to be comfortable with the idea of easy . So, I went back to dating —with a little push from Donovan that felt caring even if it was more than a little insulting.
     
    All this back and forth and up and down was making me crazy . I wasn’t cut out to be married . I wasn’t even good at the dating, if I was honest. So, I finally put my foot down and went back to just being single . Mom could spit it at me as much as she wanted, but I was pretty damn sure it was better than easy in her book.
     
    Easy , though… Easy was a constant temptation . I have enough hormones to medicate an entire nursing home through menopause, and although I had my trusty shower massager, it just wasn’t the same . I hadn’t had a social orgasm in months, and I was beginning to think in terms of if instead of when when it came to sex . Donovan said he’d be back in my bed if it was empty for too long, and I was almost angry that after six months he hadn’t made good on his threat… I mean promise . The truth was, though, that I hadn’t even seen Donovan since I stopped dating . He’d been out of Blue River for months working on something he couldn’t explain to me . I figured that meant some Government something—like taking over a South American country, or rescuing an African diplomat.
     
    Even so, I wasn’t ready to give up the Donovan fantasy completely . As a matter of fact, fantasy Donovan was really good to have around on those lonely late nights when my hormones were grumbling about my having ditched my latest “boyfriend.”
     
    I could have found someone to date . Two officers down at the station had faced my father’s wrath and invited me out to dinner and a movie . A guy I went to high school came back to town to take over his family’s numbers running racket, and he asked if I wanted to lay a bet on a “sure thing. ” None of them appealed more than fantasy Donovan, though, so I politely turned them down saying I was taking a breather from the dating scene . After everything I’d been through , no one questioned that.
     
    I distracted myself with work . Being a private investigator in a family full of cops isn’t easy. Sometimes I found myself on the wrong end of a discussion with someone who’ d been locked up by my dad or one of my brothers, and, unsurprisingly, they often think it’s the perfect opportunity to get even with a McAnally since I don’t wear a badge. This is where Donovan usually comes in. Being my own boss I’ve had to take a lot of contract work to fill in during the lean times, and over the past few years I’ve helped him out on more than one occasion--even uncovering an