Random Acts of Fantasy (Random Series #3, Invitation to Eden)

  Random Acts of Fantasy

  by Julia Kent

  Be careful what you wish for. You might just get it.

  Copyright © 2014 by Julia Kent

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher.

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  We are very pleased to issue your Invitation to Eden, an exciting series coming to you in 2014 from 27 of the biggest names in romance. Join us as we take you on an exciting adventure to Eden, where anything… and everything goes!

  http://www.invitationtoeden.com

  To all of my absolutely amazing readers who made Random Acts of Crazy a wild success in the summer of 2013. You’ve changed my life in so many ways. I always sign my books with the phrase, “Be Random!” and, indeed, life is random on the deepest levels. This book is for all of you – you who have begged for more Darla, you who have insisted on more Trevor, you who have worried about Joe (and quietly lusted after him) and you who just wish we all had a little more sass and a little less judgment in our lives.

  For all of you, each and every one, this is a love letter, a hug, and my sincere gratitude. I could not have written this without you.

  Chapter One

  Darla

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. My Aunt Josie had sent me the link with a cryptic comment: Don’t get bird flu.

  What the hell did that mean? I clicked and read:

  Hockenfield Times, May 3, 2013

  Hockenfield, Mass.

  By Janet Simkin

  Naked Man Steals Chicken, Evades Local Police

  Hockenfield Police Chief Bart Jansen has issued an alert for a white male, early twenties, with blond hair and blue eyes who stole a chicken from farmer Mike Kemper’s coop this morning at 2:33 a.m. The man is completely naked, and while unarmed, is considered a potential threat to public safety.

  “I heard rustling and figured it was a fox,” Kemper explained. “Instead, I got an eyeful. Naked guy, young, wearing a collar around his neck like a dog. And a guitar. Nothing else. He kept calling my laying hen ‘Mavis’ and hollered he was eloping with her.”

  After a brief scuffle, during which the chicken scratched him, Kemper let go. The man shouted, “I wasted my only answered prayer!” and fled.

  Kemper called 911 immediately, though the cruiser was delayed as the operator struggled to understand the nature of the call, but local police arrived within eleven minutes.

  Too late.

  “The suspect escaped on foot with the allegedly stolen chicken under his arm, headed for the Mass Pike,” said Jansen. "Concerned citizens with any information are advised to contact the Hockenfield Police at our non-emergency number at 413-555-1000, and travelers on I-90 or any other interstate should not, as always, pick up naked hitchhikers by the side of the road.”

  Bird flu. Haha. Motherfucker.

  Sitting here at the reception desk at work, I found myself wondering what I was supposed to do with that piece of information. Torture my boyfriend Trevor some more, sure—but, um… he stole Mavis? The man stole a chicken from a henhouse while naked and high, right before I met him seven months ago?

  Random Acts of Crazy indeed. It wasn’t just the name of Trevor and Joe’s band. Living out here in the Boston area meant seeing him and Joe plenty enough, even though everyone—Uncle Mike, Mama, hell, even Aunt Marlene, the resident slut of my hometown, Peters, Ohio (and it took a lot to earn that title, if you know what I mean…)—thought that moving out here meant I’d find myself chained to someone’s basement wall and erotically tortured within an inch of my life, then sold off into some underground of sexual slavery where cellulite was worshipped.

  Hey. Wait a minute. Maybe that would have been better than sitting here with a letter opener and an anti-virus program malfunctioning on my new computer.

  Me, Joe, and Trevor had some talking to do.

  Tucking that into a dark corner of my mind to be dealt with later, I looked around the small office and marveled that I was getting paid to work somewhere that didn’t require a polyester vest and a pile of sawdust next to the mop bucket in case of vomiting customers (or their dogs). Office jobs that paid $40,000 per year just didn’t happen for people like me. What a life change these past few months.

  Picking Trevor up by the side of the road back in Ohio, naked as the day he was born except for the guitar he wore. Meeting his best friend, Joe, when Joe came to retrieve him, six hundred miles from their home in Massachusetts. Falling for them both. Moving to Cambridge. Starting my job at Good Things Come in Threes. Enrolling at Harvard.

  Harvard. I know!

  That one had been at Joe’s urging—he’d so carefully walked me through how to take courses at Harvard’s super-secret night school (super-secret to me, at least—Harvard letting me take a class seemed like inviting Kanye West to ghostwrite for Jonathan Franzen), and now here I was, taking an English course and a math class, all on account of my stupidity in picking up a naked dude wearing a guitar back home.

  If it weren’t for stupid choices, I wouldn’t have made any choices. That this one turned out so well was either dumb luck or divine interference, and I didn’t see the hand of God anywhere near these days, so I leaned on the lucky side. Maybe I was part Irish. I’d have to ask Mama the next time we talked, which would be tonight, because lately Mama was so lonely she glommed on to whatever I would give her in terms of attention. Hours alone now (what with Uncle Mike on the road) meant Mama had been doing double-time on entering online sweepstakes, and the result had been, well…

  I reached back and plucked the ass floss that passed for underwear out of my butt crack. Mama had won me a complete set of underwear from a rust-proofing company that sprayed chemical coatings on car undercarriages. The giveaway slogan was “Don’t Let Rust Destroy What You Love Down Below.” The g-strings had rust spots on the tiny little postage-stamp front cloth and made me feel like I was looking at a medical textbook full of pictures of STDs, but hey—free underwear, right? The guys hadn’t seen them yet, and I did a mental check to groom the lady parts, because right now my muff must look like a dandelion covered in a rust-coated muzzle.

  With a little pink tongue.

  Let’s swing away from that image, because once I start comparing my lady bits to things that require muzzles I need to question my own sanity. Or sex life.

  Or both.

  Leaving Ohio had been the ballsiest move ever. Took even more ovarian fortitude than picking up Trevor that night, all tan and blond and muscled and just plain old yum. Moving away took even more courage than giving in to what me, Trevor, and Joe had turned out to actually want that night at the bar, after Trevor sang me the new song he’d written, just for me. No other man in the band had written a song for their lady…love? Crush? Booty call? Eh. Call me whatever you want.

  Just sing to me. And about me. Because when a naked soul finds you, you find them right back.

  Abandoning every preconceived notion I had about who I was and what I would turn out to be was like killing a piece of myself off and hoping against hope that it would grow back better and stronger.

  I
smiled.

  It had.

  I caught a familiar set of golden-haired legs walking down the outside flight of stairs. Even through the thin sliver of window that slitted the main door, I could catch Jack’s approach.

  Jack. Deliverymen with hot legs were worth their weight in gold. Who else could make those brown shorts seem like something out of a Gap ad?

  And then there was that grin. “Hey, Darla,” he said as he smiled back. Surfer dude mixed with a hint of hot porno actor. He was a pre-orgasm on legs. Toned, tanned legs that a woman could imagine bent at the knee with his head between—

  “Jack!” I gasped, looking straight into his eyes, doing that fake control thing where you will your mind to stop imagining his face buried between your thighs as you hope what you’re thinking isn’t written in three-inch letters in permanent red marker all over your face.

  Even if it feels like it.

  “Hooked up any threesomes?” he asked, waggling thick brown eyebrows that slanted down just a touch at the edges of his eyes, giving him the perpetual look of a hot Jake Ryan from that Sixteen Candles movie Mama made me watch every time it was on TBS.

  Sure. How about you, me, and your tongue. That’s three.

  “Nope,” I said, looking away, wondering if my chest were as flushed as it felt. Like an Arizona forest fire combined with a Bessemer furnace. I worked here at my aunt’s company, a threesome dating service. Jack knew what we did because you can’t deliver packages to a business and not know.

  “I’m sure you will,” he crooned. “Something special came for you. Need your signature.”

  “Sure. I’ll take it.” Our fingertips brushed and it was like having a feather dragged across my clit. You’re probably wondering why I’m all drooly for Jack when I have rock-star gods I can fuck damn near any time I want, and I will join you in your confusion. Let’s sit at the bemused table for a round of what-the-fuck discussion. My best guess is that being turned on all the time by Trevor and Joe is like buying a white car.

  (Bear with me here. I do have a point).

  Until you own a white car, you don’t notice all the other white cars on the road. And then, suddenly, they’re everyfuckingwhere. Invading the streets. Your neighbors own one, your boss drives one, and the ubiquity of it makes you a little dizzy.

  Like Jack. Being with two hot guys made me see hot guys with more acuity, and that meant my clit was at a libido-induced buffet of scrumptious masculine brunch.

  With a big old side of sausage.

  “It’s for you,” Jack said. The nondescript envelope felt like a lead weight in my palm.

  “You said that.”

  “No. I mean for you. Darla Josephine Jennings. Certified, signature return, blah blah your firstborn baby and all that required. Not for Good Things Fuck in Threes.” Big grin. The joke had gotten old by the third time he said it a month or so ago, but a reflexive return grin stretched my mouth, one side curved up.

  Oh, honey, if only you knew.

  And the man talked about babies, which were conceived by sex, which made me think about his penis and…shit. There went my clit. Squirming in my chair, I stood, hoping it wasn’t obvious. Damn, Trevor was about to get rode hard when I got home.

  “Me?” The package he handed over was your standard overnight mail envelope. Sure enough—my full name, with my title. “Operations Assistant.” Josie and Laura decided that was the best way to describe me. I recommended “Grunt” but they vetoed that one.

  “You.” He handed me a little plastic electronic machine thing with a stylus. I signed where he tapped.

  After ripping open the envelope, I found…another envelope. This one felt rich. Rich. The slide of the paper fiber against the pads of my fingers was so alien, as if there were materials on earth I didn’t know could be generated. The luxury spoke of a different world, far beyond the confines of my office, certainly way outta this world compared to my trailer back home.

  I wanted to lick the envelope just to know that some part of my DNA was on something so fine.

  Jack must have seen my tongue peek out between my lips as I brought the fine paper closer to my face, for a look of alarm scattered over his face.

  “Uh, wow. This is…”

  “Yeah.” He emitted a low whistle and shifted his hips. I almost sighed aloud. Goddammit, girl, my conscience hissed, aren’t your two hot bods enough?

  “Yes!” I exclaimed in answer. Jack looked ready to bolt. “Um, yes—it’s an interesting invitation.”

  “I hope the wedding’s fun,” he said politely, then beat it out of there like I was the skanky ho on the first episode of a new season of The Bachelor.

  Huh. It did look like a wedding invitation. And then my phone rang. The display said “Mama.”

  I answered, and before I could get a word in edgewise, Mama said, “Darla, do you like minty condoms?”

  “You mean, like as a late-night snack?” Because the thought of talking with Mama about Trevor and Joe’s penises encased in condoms that went inside me made a giant air horn blast off in my head.

  The throaty smoker’s laugh that greeted me sounded like a stranger, not the soft, sad Mama who loved me. She sounded like a woman with a past, a woman with a sense of the sensual divine, and it made my head spin for a minute.

  “If you like to gobble ’em—”

  “Mama! That ain’t what I meant!” I groaned with horror. “Why are you asking me about condoms?”

  “You’re making Trevor wrap it, right?”

  Let’s stop here for a minute, because you know I’m with Trevor and Joe, and I know I’m with Trevor and Joe, and Uncle Mike is pretty fucking sure I’m with them both (though he’s still a bit weirded out that Trevor proposed to Mavis the Stolen Chicken while high as a kite and traveling naked), but Mama?

  No. Just…no. Mama can’t know I’m with them both, and that is a sore spot in my little sweet threesome.

  Then again, Joe hasn’t told his parents about me at all. At. All. Trevor’s mom has heard about me, though. But not the fact that Joe’s all naked and at attention in the room at the same time.

  We have a lot of invisible people getting up in each other’s nude skin.

  “Can we change the subject?” I asked archly, clearing my throat. “I am not pregnant and will not be pregnant, and why are you asking about minty condoms? And before you answer that, ewwwww. My vagina does not need to taste or smell like a cough drop.”

  “Taste?” Mama gasped. Time to turn the tables.

  “Are you calling to ask for advice? You find yourself a man?” Yeah. Right. Mama’s parts had been retired since my daddy died two decades ago. She was about as likely to go off and find a friend with benefits as I was to join Joe’s mom at her Pilates class.

  That same disconcerting laugh, deep and knowing, poured through the phone like a demon’s whisper. “No. But these romance writers are having all these giveaways now, and the sweepstakes forums are full of these contests. One of them includes a big win of mint condoms, and I wondered why any woman would want that inside her. Wouldn’t it feel like shoving a tube of Ben Gay inside your pink tunnel?”

  My mouth formed a giant O and I pulled the phone away from my ear as if it had transmogrified into Satan’s face. Who in the fuck was on the phone with me? Because it sure wasn’t my mama.

  “But…no…Mama…the…those are for the mouth.” Those last words poured out of me like vomit. Oh, God, I was going to throw up all over this beautiful linen envelope as I tried to explain oral sex condoms to a woman who had last had sex when the television show Full House was still in original episodes.

  “Why would someone need a condom for their mouth? Makes no sense—ohhhhhhhhhh.” Mama’s voice went down to a whisper. “For when you…oh.”

  Kill me now.

  “I guess mint would taste a hell of a lot better than spooge,” were the next words out of her mouth, and I swear if there’d been an old-fashioned letter opener on the desk, like in those Mad Men episodes Joe liked to watch,
I’d have plunged it straight into my ear and pierced the drum, giving myself a lobotomy so that I never had to properly comprehend my mother’s use of the word “spooge.”

  It took everything in me to tighten my core and force out the next words. “Mama, there isn’t a delivery truck about to deliver a pallet of mint condoms to Josie’s front yard, is there? Because we only just got rid of all that kitty litter two weeks ago, and if you expect me to use up an entire pallet of condoms, I’ll need a few lifetimes.”

  Silence.

  Aw, shit. “Mama?”

  She cleared her throat. “No. Nothing like that. But you will be getting two large packs of them and some, uh…hang on. Let me read the letter here.” Shuffling sounds came next, giving my heart a chance to resume its normal rate, and for my stomach to stop doing the two-step.

  “You win an assortment of sexual aids and lubrication devices, along with those condoms.”

  What in the hell is a lubrication device? The words came so close to flying out of my mouth, but if I had to hear the answer from my own mama’s lips I wouldn’t ever have sex again. Hell, I would take fishing line and a rusty nail and sew my pissflaps together at this rate.

  “Um…thanks?” I said.

  “Darla, I was trying to win the $250 gift card. It’s not my fault some of these writers give away these specialty prize packs. You also get an assortment of—oh.” The way her voice went quiet made me cringe.

  “I’ll just look at it all when it comes. You don’t have to detail it—”

  “Chocolate penises.”

  Bucket! I needed that pile of sawdust and a bucket for vomit emergencies at the gas station right now. I was going to be sick.

  “Well, thank you much, Mama. Now—can we change the subject to something that doesn’t involve procreation?”