The Grumpy Roommate Gamble (Heroes of Huckleberry Creek #1)

THREE

GABE

The notion that I’d sleep straight through the night when I was accustomed to dozing in snatches and being braced to roll straight into action against insurgents was laughably ambitious. That eighteen straight hours was more like a fitful nine. But at least I’d been in my own bed, and my dreams had been full of a very different sort of homecoming, where Felicity had been waiting for me and dropped that towel so I could explore every delicious, touchably soft inch of her. That potent image was a damned sight better than the nightmares about our camp being attacked again. I’d woken hard and aching more than once in the middle of the night.

It wasn’t the first such fantasy I’d had about Felicity Harmon. She’d held a starring role in my dreams from the moment she’d offered me a pen shaped like a daisy on my first day at Huckleberry Creek High School in tenth grade, when I realized I’d forgotten to bring anything to write with. She’d looked fresh-faced as a daisy herself and just as sweet. Given my own attitude was dialed permanently to surly in the wake of losing both my parents, I’d mostly kept my distance rather than do anything to bruise that petal-soft heart of hers that she wore on her sleeve. But I’d admired her from a distance, existing on the edges of the same friend groups for all these years. She’d stayed sweet. Stayed kinder than anybody deserved. And her body had filled out to the lush curves of a silver-screen goddess to add a little naughty to those girl-next-door fantasies.