Hot & Sticky: Sunset Bay: Book 1 Read online

  Hot & Sticky

  Sunset Bay: Book 1

  Madison Faye

  Contents

  Hot & Sticky

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Epilogue

  Also by Madison Faye

  Mailing List

  About the Author

  Copyright Notice

  Hot & Sticky

  Scorching hot, stormy, humid and sticky, with a high chance of wetness ahead.

  And then, there’s the weather forecast…

  * * *

  Working for my sleezy uncle at his cinnamon bun shop is hardly my idea of a fun summer before college. I should be out hanging on the beach, making bad choices, and maybe even finally getting rid of this pesky v-card. Throw in a record-setting heat wave, horrible tourist customers, and a broken air conditioner, and I’m about ready to burst into flames.

  And that’s before the completely gorgeous AC repair guy scorches into my world. Because after that, I’m definitely catching on fire.

  West Farrow is sinfully hot, rough, and dangerous—a surf loner with a glint in his eye and a jaw that makes my panties melt. He’s here to fix the AC and “cool things off"? Yeah, good freaking luck with that.

  But a lack of central air is the least of my problems when armed men start shooting. And before I know it, West is whisking me away from a whole heap of trouble, to his surf shack to lay low.

  Just me and my crazy good-looking and stormy-eyed hero: hot, sticky, and all alone.

  Gee, what could possibly go wrong?

  * * *

  Smutty, steamy, and oh-so-fun. If you’re hungry for the type of beach-read to make you growl at the cabana boy, look no further ;). Get yourself a cool drink and some sun screen, because things are about to get very, very hot.

  * * *

  The Sunset Bay books can be read in any order.

  Chapter One

  Taylor

  “So are yours frosted too?”

  I blink slowly, trying to decipher what the leering, creepy guy in the sunhat standing in front of me is saying.

  “Sorry, sir?”

  He grins lecherously and elbows his equally skuzzy looking pal. Both are sporting surf-brand clothes, though both also look like they might have heart attacks if they were to actually attempt to surf.

  “I was just curious if your buns were frosted, too.”

  My brow wrinkles. “Well, sir, you can get them plain if you like, though it’s the same price. You can also add extra glaze for fifty cent—”

  “I’m talking about your ass, sweet cheeks.”

  Instantly, my smile fades. Across the counter, the two dipshits start to chuckle at my reddening face and total lack of comeback. I have no idea how I managed to not see that one coming, especially since it’s hardly the first time a creep has decided to say it to me while working here. Actually, in the twenty-year history of the “Buns Out” cinnamon bun stand on the pier, you’d probably have a million bucks if you took a quarter every time some poor girl got that gem of a line working here.

  My lips purse. I wish I was sassy enough to give them both a piece of my mind—something witty and blistering. Or I wish I was bold enough to slap them both across the face or throw a soda over their heads. But instead, I just stand there swallowing thickly, trying to come up with something while my cheeks burn.

  “Oh relax, sweet cheeks, it was a fuckin’ joke,” the buddy says, rolling his eyes.

  “Yeah maybe smile more, honey,” the first creep grumbles. “Look, give us two buns, both with extra frosting. Christ.”

  I mumble something incoherent and turn to grab their stupid cinnamon buns. I’m tired, my feet hurt, my arms are sticky and tacky with sugar frosting up to the fucking elbows, and it’s so fucking hot. I mean, melting hot—hot like I feel like I’m serving fucking buns from inside the oven.

  My hair is stuck like glue to the sides of my face, and I can feel the sweat dripping down the small of my back and soaking through the white tank-top with the “Buns Out” logo on the front. The whole uniform is disgusting—it feels like something I should be wearing as a cocktail waitress at a strip club, or maybe being up on the stage itself at said strip club. The too-small, plunged-neck white tank, the frayed, ridiculously high-cut daisy dukes, and the—wait for it—knee-high stripped socks. I literally look like I belong in a porn movie set in a cinnamon bun shop.

  My uncle Matt has owned Buns Out since it started, and he’s the creep behind the uniform choice, or why no guy, ever in the history of Buns Out has ever managed to land a job here. How odd. Or any girl over the age of twenty-two. Or any girl who didn’t physically fit into his stripper outfits. Or any girl who wasn’t blonde, now that I think about it. The nice version, from my mother, is that her adoptive brother, my Uncle Matt, is a “bit of a lech sometimes.”

  The unsanitized version is that he’s a disgusting creep who mentally undresses every single woman he sees, and as much as it wants to make me barf, I’m including myself in that metric.

  “Miss! Miss!”

  My attention snaps to the next woman in line, barking at me. She’s sweating almost as much as I am in the sweltering bun shack. It’s hot a hell outside in the blazing southern California summer heat. But the air conditioner inside is shot to hell, and my uncle’s been promising to get a repair guy in for about four days of sweaty, sticky hell.

  “Miss!”

  “Yes! Hi!” I smile so hard my jaw hurts. “How can I help you?”

  “By not staring into space and helping me,” she mutters. “A dozen, extra extra glaze.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “I said extra glaze.”

  I smile painfully again. “Yep! Coming right up.” I turn to start packing up her order.

  “I said extra because last time, you cheaped out on the extra glaze!”

  “Well, ma’am, I’m sorry that—”

  "Today, honey!”

  I hate my job. I kind of hate my life right now, too. Who the fuck is buying hot, sticky cinnamon buns to eat, outside, in ninety-eight-degree summer heat with an eighty percent humidity index? I mean honestly.

  I give the lady her order, and I cave when she barks at me for daring to charge her for the extra glaze. I could make it a principle thing, but I honestly don’t care. I’m exhausted, I’m melting, and there’s zero respite in sight.

  See, the fun part of all of this is, when I finally manage to leave tonight, after my fourth double shift in a blazing hot cinnamon bun stand with no AC, the nightmare doesn’t end. After graduation last spring, my parents sold our house and moved up to Vancouver for my dad’s new job. I stayed the summer since I’m going to be going to UCSD in the fall, and of course, I found myself working at Uncle Matt’s shop. But what’s even worse? When I go home tonight, it’s to Matt’s house. I go from working at creepy, lecherous Uncle Matt’s gross cinnamon bun stand, to sleeping in creepy, lecherous Uncle Matt’s house, where I lock the bedroom door and push a dresser in front of it every night.

  Like I said, I kind of hate my life right now.

  I’m about to move on to the next scowling looking customer, when suddenly, my roaming eyes freeze.

  Holy shit.

  The guy is, to put it mildly, gorgeous. Tall, tan, and built with a white t-shirt sticking to his powerful looking chest and shoulders like a second skin in the heat. He’s in surf shorts, too, and his slightly shaggy dark hair is pushed back from his absolute
ly beautiful face. His chiseled jaw has a swarth of scruff on it, which somehow makes him even better.

  The guy is standing next to a parked pickup truck, and as I watch, he suddenly reaches down and peels his shirt right off. My breath catches, and I bite my lip as my cheeks flush. Holy sweet Jesus. His abs flex and ripple, and I can feel my pulse beating faster as he stretches and flexes his ripped, muscled frame. He reaches into his truck and pulls out a clean shirt, and I shamelessly watch as he tugs it back on.

  “Miss! Are you fucking deaf!?”

  I blink and startle, and my attention swivels to the voice screaming at me. I groan inside: it’s the same woman from a minute ago, with the extra extra glaze.

  “Hi, can I help you?”

  She sneers. “You can stop fucking ripping me off is what you can do to help! Extra! Do you fucking understand what that means?!”

  “Ma’am, I’d be happy to fix your—”

  “Refund! Now!”

  I frown. Great, just what I need. Matt barely raises a finger to run this place. But for some reason, he’s got a sixth sense for sniffing out refunds. The woman shoves the box of buns my way, the lid half open. I open it the rest of the way and arch a brow: half of the dozen are gone.

  “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but I can’t refund them if you’ve eaten them.”

  “What!!” She screeches. “Well I had enough to check more than one to know that you’d fucked the whole thing up, you stupid bitch!”

  I bristle. “Ma’am—”

  “Fuck this place!” she yells. “And fuck you!”

  I gasp as she shoves the whole box at me and whirls. Half-melting cinnamon buns tumble against my face, my chest, my arms—all of me, covering me in gross, tacky, sticky sugar glaze. The woman storms off, and the people in line start to chuckle.

  I fucking hate my life.

  I look up, but when my eyes find the truck, my face falls. The truck is still there, but the hot guy is gone.

  So much for my eye candy, I grumble.

  I try and napkin off some of the stickiness, but I’m already right back into taking orders. Sweat and sugar melt over my skin, and the blistering heat makes me feel like I’m actually melting. Order after barked, rude order, it feels like the world is pushing me down into a puddle of sugar, with no end in sight. Mercifully, finally, it the rush simmers out, and there’s finally no one in line.

  Right then, the buzzer for the service door at the back of the shack, through the kitchen, goes off. I groan, my heart sinking. Now what. I’m soaked in sweat and frosting, my hair is slicked down the sides of my face, my feet are killing me, and I’m sure my porny white tank top is glazed, sweaty, and translucent enough at this point to look like it actually is from a porn set.

  I traipse back into the blazing hot kitchen and yank open the back door.

  “Yeah, what—”

  I gasp, and I stop short. My eyes go wide, and my mouth falls open as my pulse skips a beat. Because standing right in front of me, is him—mister sexy change-my-shirt-in-public from before. Only now, he’s right here, towering over me, looking even freaking hotter.

  …And here I am, dressed like a porn star, covered literally heat-to-toe in sugar frosting.

  “Um…” I swallow. “Hi?”

  He grins—God, why is he so fucking smoldering hot when he smiles? And even though I thought I already was, I melt even more.

  “Hey, I’m here to cool you off.”

  I snort. “Well good luck with that!”

  What. The. Fuck. Is. Wrong. With. Me.

  I cringe, physically, and I decide the best course thing I can possibly do right now is go drown myself in the vat of bun frosting. I’m waiting for him to ask if I’m having a stroke, or to just look at me like I’m insane. But instead, he just grins even wider.

  “I’m from Farrow HVAC?”

  I blink, still wondering how fast I can stick my entire head in the vat of frosting. Mr. Gorgeous grins again, and I swear, if they weren’t already melting off from the heat, my panties would be spontaneously combusting right now.

  “I’m the AC repair guy,” he growls in a low, velvety and deep voice.

  Oh fuck me sideways.

  Chapter Two

  West

  Fuck it’s hot. My t-shirt feels like its clinging to my skin, and I can feel the sweat dripping down my back and chest. Southern Cali’s always hot, but shit, it’s this fucking humidity that’s killing me. I park the truck and groan. It’d be funny in a stupidly ironic way that my truck’s AC is out, seeings as I currently work for my Gramps’ AC repair business. But today, and all of this week actually, it’s a pretty shitty joke.

  I turn and look out wistfully over at the waves down to the beach. Shit, now that’s where I’d most want to be right now—out in the ocean catching a sweet wave and riding it hard. It’s not even just the heat, either. I always wish I was surfing, and it’s been like that ever since I was old enough to stand on a board. Gramps always jokes that I got my surf legs before I got my land legs, and I don’t think he’s wrong.

  Gramps—my grandpa Gus—is basically the one who raised me up. My mom was gone when I was five, and my dad peaced out to who knows or to fucking cares at this point where not long after. So, Gramps took me in and showed me how to surf, how to fend for myself, and how to be a man. He does alright with his HVAC business, but college was always going to be a stretch for me. I had my heart set on business school, to help me out with my dream of opening a surf shop here in town.

  But, yeah, college is fucking expensive, and Gramps could only cover so much. So, I did what a lot of guys do: I went to fight for my country. I went with the Marines and did three brutal fucking tours in the Middle East before I got shipped home with a medical discharge and a purple heart after a roadside IED. The shrapnel wound to my shoulder doesn’t keep me from surfing, though it does hurt sometimes.

  But the biggest change when I got back was that business school was the last damn thing I wanted to do. After the shit I saw over there, all I wanted in the world was to disappear into the zen that surfing brings me. Course, even just being a surf bum costs money, and Gramps is getting older and all. So, I spend a lot of my time working for Farrow HVAC.

  I sigh, sweat trickling down my chest into my already drenched t-shirt. Fuck, I wish I was surfing.

  I turn away from the waves and look over the pier towards the job today. I grin at the neon “Buns Out” sign, with two cinnamon buns squashed together in the worlds least subtle ass reference. I used to come here growing up, and I definitely remember my buddies and I giggling at the big dollops of frosting coating the buns on the sign. We used to call this place the “jizz hut,” being the witty, crude fourteen year olds we were.

  Man, it’s crazy that this place is still open, especially in this fucking weather. Yeah, I used to come here when I was a kid, but not in the middle of summer. I mean, I love a warm, sticky cinnamon bun as much as the next guy, but who the ever-loving fuck is eating these things in the ninety-nine-degree heat? With this fucking humidity?

  I groan and step out of the truck. Jesus, there’s even a line to get those fucking things. Hot, sticky dough, on a day like this. People are fucking weird. I’m about to grab my tools out the back of the pickup, but I realize I’m beyond sweaty—I’m fucking drenched. Not exactly a good look for a job. I peel the t-shirt off and let the hot sun dry my sweat for a second before I grab a fresh one from the cab. I pull it on and glance back at the bun shack. But this time, I’m not looking at the stupid sign, or the line of weirdos.

  This time, I see her, and my whole fucking world stops spinning.

  The girl behind the counter is fucking stunning. She’s beautiful, and not just “good looking beautiful,” I mean “the essence of fucking beauty beautiful.” She’s the kind of beautiful that Renaissance painters try to get onto a canvas. She’s so beautiful it’s like it’s ethereal, or unreal—like she’s a fucking fairy or something.

  She looks frazzled, but it doesn’t do a thing to
dull that shine. Some bitch is yelling at her, but she’s just smiling back, looking radiant. Then there’s the clothes—I mean, fuck. I guess the outfit hasn’t changed at all since the last time I was here. In this heat, it happens to be sticking to her like a second fucking skin, and I’m not gonna lie, that does things to a man. I can tell it’s not like she’s doing it for tips or to be sexy—I mean, it’s clear it’s the heat. But hell, it’s still sexy as fuck.

  I growl, and my cock throbs hard. My eyes wander over her, and I groan. Fuck, it’s been a very long time but this ain’t the time or the place. I grab my tools, and I head over to the bun shack. I walk around back to the service door and ring the buzzer a few times. Seconds later, I can hear muttering from inside, and the lock being pulled.

  “Yeah, what—”

  She stops cold. Her eyes go wide, and she sucks her bottom lip between her teeth. A gasp catches in her throat, and she actually stumbles a step back in order to look up at me.

  …She was gorgeous from afar. Up close, she’s a fucking goddess.

  She might be covered in frosting, and sweaty, and totally frazzled looking. But I love every damn thing about the whole picture, instantly.

  “Um, hi? She croaks. Her eyes slide over me in a hungry and yet bashful way, and I grin. But standing there in the doorway, I’m suddenly hit with the warmth from inside. Fucking hell, it’s almost hotter in there than it is out here. She looks like she’s about ready to melt, so I clear my throat and crack a smile.

  “Hey, I’m here to cool you off.”