Someone To Claim (The Skylark #7)

Prologue

SLOANE

Last Summer

The Alcove will never be included on a list of Nashville hotspots.

There are no neon signs announcing its presence to passersby.

No bachelorette parties shrieking from a pedal bar out front.

It’s a squat brick building wedged between a dry cleaner and a vintage record shop.

It wasn’t even recommended as a hidden gem I should check out.

I stumbled upon it two nights ago when I got lost looking for a pharmacy and noticed the door propped wide open with a cinder block.

I immediately liked the vibe: dark wood, low lighting, and a bartender who didn’t try to make conversation when I ordered my drink.

The back corner booth has a ripped vinyl seat and a wobbly table, and no one in this nearly empty dive bar cares that I’m sitting in it alone with a glittery gold notebook and a Sprite with extra cherries. The Alcove serves crushed ice. An underrated luxury if you ask me.

Tonight I’m three pages into a letter I’ll never send.

Dear Mom and Dad, you are aggressively awful at being parents. I’ve made a list detailing the specifics.

My pen pauses when a shadow falls across the table.

“Thought I wouldn’t see you here again.”

My one-night stand from last night slides into the booth without waiting for an invitation, like we’re old friends instead of strangers who happen to know how our bodies fit together.

Jensen (we didn’t exchange last names) is wearing a faded black T-shirt and jeans.

A lock of dark hair falls across his forehead in a way that should look careless but probably isn’t.

He’s smirking, and I’d bet money he knows precisely what that smirk does to women.

Heat crawls up my neck. I’m a grown woman who owns a bookstore in a small town nestled in the foothills of Colorado’s Front Range. So I’ve read enough romance novels to know that blushing at a sinfully handsome man in the back of a bar is embarrassingly cliche.

“Thought I might have other plans.” I close the notebook and tuck my pen inside the spiral binding, casual and unbothered. The exact opposite of how I felt this morning when I did the walk of shame from one hotel to another, replaying every minute of the night before in full-color detail.

“Yet here you are.” He tilts his chin toward my glass.

“Turns out there aren’t a lot of places around here with tiny ice.” I take a sip. “I happen to love tiny ice.”

“No one loves tiny lice.” He stretches his forearms on the table, long fingers laced together. Oh, god, what those fingers did to me. “Although tiny and lice might be redundant.”

“Ice,” I tell him slowly, taking a sip of my soda. “You know I said ice. And we did our thing last night. So this—” I wag a finger between him and me and fight the smile tugging at my lips “—might be redundant.”

“Our thing.” He lifts a heavy brow. “We’re a thing.”

“Are we, though?” I hate how breathless I sound.

“Yes, Sutton. We are.”

He calls me Sutton. Because when a tall stranger with broad shoulders and an easy laugh who makes promises without needing words sits down next to you in a bar you wandered into by accident, you don’t give him your real name.

The whole point of coming to Nashville a few days early was to be someone who doesn’t have a seven thirty appointment at Vanderbilt’s oncology department tomorrow morning.

Sutton isn’t sick with a brother who’s micromanaging her cancer journey like a CEO reviewing quarterly earnings. Sutton is a woman in a bar who had the best sex of her life with a stranger and came back the next night because he said he’d be there. But I’m not admitting that part…duh.

His leg presses into mine under the table, and the warmth of him through my jeans sends a current up my spine that short-circuits whatever resolve I had left.

“Because you came back,” he adds as the smirk vanishes. What’s underneath it is far more devastating—intense and unguarded and directed entirely at me.

I can’t take my eyes off him. “Don’t let it go to your head.”

“Too late.” He reaches across the table and touches one calloused fingertip to my knuckle, and my body reacts like the slutty slut it is. “Do you want another drink, or do you want to get out of here?”

I should take the drink. I should sit in this booth and write my unsendable letter and pretend that the flutter low in my belly is just nerves about starting the next step of my cancer treatment tomorrow.

But his muscular leg is still pressed against mine, and the memory of last night—his mouth on my collarbone, my back arching off the mattress, hearing him whisper the fake name I gave him into my hair—is making it difficult to give a rat’s ass about what I should do.

“We could go to my apartment,” he offers.

“No.”

“Your hotel?”

“I already told you I’m not sharing that information. Nothing’s changed.”

He studies me, and I watch him decide not to push. Or call me out on the lie. Because last night changed everything.

“The same hotel as last night,” I say slowly.

“That works. For now.”

“Now is all we have,” I tell him, but a thought trails behind my words unbidden.

It could be more.

When he stands and offers me his hand, I pop the final cherry from my glass into my mouth and then take it. My breath hitches as his fingers close around mine, and we walk out of The Alcove into the humid Nashville night.

Sutton—a woman with no acute lymphocytic leukemia diagnosis, who doesn’t have an appointment with the head of Vanderbilt oncology, a friend her aforementioned micromanaging brother’s—walks the three blocks to the upscale chain hotel, holding hands with a man who makes her laugh.

I’m dressed and leaving the hotel room at six fifteen, before the pale light filtering in from the edges of the beige curtain has fully committed to a new day.

Jensen is sprawled face down on the bed, the white sheets covering the lower half of his perfect body, and I let myself stare at him for ten seconds.

I count them because, without the numerical boundary, I’ll keep standing here until the sun comes up and I miss the appointment my billionaire brother moved heaven and earth (ask him) to arrange.

My gaze roams over Jensen’s muscled back and the ink on his right bicep.

His chest rises and falls with a steadiness that stirs an ache in me that has nothing to do with the malignant cells currently multiplying in my bloodstream.

The door handle is cool under my palm when his deep voice stops me.

“I’ll see you tonight, Sutton.”

I don’t turn around, but I want to. I want to crawl back into that bed and forget every reason I had for getting out of it. But I can’t afford to forget anything today.

“If you’re lucky,” I say to the door.

“I was born lucky.”

A laugh bubbles out of my throat as I slip into the hallway. He has zero idea how much I hope some of that luck has rubbed off on me.

My hotel is a block from this one, so I have time to shower and change clothes before starting the fifteen-minute walk to Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

I pretend I’m Sutton as I cut through Centennial Park, past the Parthenon replica that has always struck me as gloriously weird.

Who builds a full-scale Parthenon in a park in Tennessee?

Nashvillians, apparently. I love that this city doesn’t apologize for the contradictions that make it special: honky-tonks next to the symphony center, fried bologna served down the street from white-tablecloth restaurants, a Greek temple in the middle of a public park.

Right now, I’d like to absorb a little of that energy.

Jeremy is already in the lobby of the medical center when I arrive, because Jeremy is always already wherever he’s supposed to be.

He lives in California, but flew in from a congressional meeting in D.C.

this morning. He’s wearing a button-down with his initials monogrammed on the cuff, and an expression that suggests the world is a problem he’s been personally tasked with fixing. Or maybe I’m the problem.

“I sent a car to the hotel.”

“I wanted to walk. Morning sunlight in my eyeballs and all that.” I wave a hand at him. “You should try it. They say fresh air can help with personality disorders.”

“I’ll remember that the next time I want help.” He sounds annoyed, but I see the corner of his mouth twitch. My brother is human underneath all that irritating arrogance. At least I think he is.

He takes a moment to scan me head to toe, visually cataloging whether I look sicker than the last time he saw me. I’ve gotten used to being inventoried by my brother. It’s how he says I’m terrified of losing you, which is both sweet and its own kind of scary.

“Your cheeks are pink.”

“I walked fast.” I touch two fingers to my heated skin, thinking the flush might be left over from the three orgasms I had last night. Three. Obviously, I don’t mention that theory to Jeremy.

He shakes his head. “Next time, take the car.”

“Maybe this will be the only time.” I’m planning to have the first round of chemo in Colorado, but Jeremy insisted I see his friend for a second opinion on the overall treatment plan.

I hook my arm through his because physical contact is the fastest way to disarm my brother, and despite his penchant for hovering, I’m glad he’s here. “Let’s go.”

We take the elevator to the third floor, where a nurse in floral scrubs leads me down the hall to an exam room while Jeremy catches up with his friend the doctor in his private office.

There’s a corkboard on the wall opposite the exam table, with photos and thank-you cards tacked to it.

I’m casually scanning it as the nurse takes my blood pressure, when one photograph suddenly catches my attention.

The man I left tangled in the sheets an hour ago is sitting on the edge of a hospital bed with a guitar across his lap and three patients gathered around him.

The young woman beside him in the photo is grinning, her bald head wrapped in a bright yellow bandana.

My brain stops, and my lungs forget how to function.

The nurse follows my wide-eyed gaze. “Oh, do you know Jensen Grant?” she asks brightly.

What comes out of my mouth sounds like air leaking from a punctured balloon, only the hole is in my heart.

I clear my throat, like that’s an answer to her question.

If I try to speak, I’m afraid I might blurt out ‘yes, I had sex with him twice last night, and then again a couple of hours ago.’ I’m guessing this nice woman in cheerful scrubs wouldn’t want that mental image.

“He’s one of our most dedicated volunteers,” she says as she loosens the blood pressure cuff and records my vitals into the chart, oblivious to my internal freak out. “Comes in at least once a month to play guitar for patients or just visit. He’s been doing it for years.”

“Is he—” My voice sounds like I had a sawdust omelet for breakfast. “Is he famous?”

Her easy laugh feels like jagged glass against my skin.

“Anybody who knows the Nashville music scene has heard of Jensen. He’s played with just about everyone at this point.

” She sighs like a schoolgirl with a boy-band crush.

“Had the talent to see his name in lights, just wasn’t interested in fame.

” Her hazel eyes go soft at the edges. “The story I’ve heard is that he lost his mama to cancer as a teenager and had to raise his younger brother on his own.

So he knows what it feels like to lose somebody you love. ”

The floor tilts. Or maybe that’s my stomach. Possibly both. Maybe even the entire building.

“You okay, sweetie?” the nurse asks.

“Fine.”

Not at all fine.

My brother and his doctor buddy enter the exam room, and I force a smile.

“What’s wrong?” Jeremy’s whiskey-colored eyes dart between the nurse and me. Why in the world does my brother choose this moment to develop a spidey-sense?

“Nothing.” I shake my head. “We were talking about one of the volunteers who plays guitar.”

One thick brow arches. “Are you suddenly into sing-alongs? I could probably hire one of the Backstreet Boys if music therapy is your thing. You were obsessed with them in seventh grade.”

The nurse and I look at him with the exact same “bruh, what” expression while the head of Vanderbilt Oncology chuckles.

“Please stop talking, Jeremy.”

“I’m just saying you have better options than a local guitar player.”

“You haven’t heard Jensen Grant play,” the doctor tells him, then introduces himself to me.

I haven’t heard Jensen play, either. But as we review my medical history, I think about him on the edge of a hospital bed, strumming his guitar for people whose bodies are turning against them in the same way mine is turning against me right now.

He lost his mother to the type of disease growing inside of me.

He volunteers in the department where I’m now a patient.

But when he pressed his mouth to the hollow of my throat and breathed the fake name I offered against my skin, he had no idea that the woman underneath him was already marked by the same thing that took the person he probably loved most in the world.

While the doctor discusses a treatment plan, I make a plan of my own.

I will not go back to The Alcove tonight. I will not let Jensen Grant look at me across that scuffed table or call me Sutton or slide his calloused hand into mine.

And I will never let him sit on the edge of my hospital bed with his guitar across his lap. I won’t let myself be a person who reminds him of the biggest loss of his life.

I won’t do that to him or to me.

Jensen told me he was born lucky.

The smartest thing I can do for both of us is to make sure that’s still true tomorrow by ensuring that today is the last day he ever sees me.