Crazy, Stupid Sex
How to Land the Hot Guy 1.0
A multimillionaire by the age of 27, app developer Evie James is clueless when it comes to hooking up. So she does what any self-respecting geek-girl looking to get laid would do: she programs her own app for landing a hot guy. After a few failed attempts at making contact, beta testing leads her to Caleb Anderson.
Caleb is used to female attention, but finds himself attracted to Evie because of her unique brand of awkward. A master of one-night stands, he’s more than happy to show her what she’s been missing in the bedroom. But he quickly discovers that one night with a woman like Evie will never be enough for him…
Sexy, contemporary romance stories for today’s fun, fearless female.
Cosmo Red-Hot Reads from Harlequin
To Jessica Lemmon. Remember that time we brainstormed this book in a hotel lobby in Kansas City? I do. Thank you.
Dear Reader,
I love a geek girl. I think that’s evident since they pop up in my books often. The truth is, I’m a geek. I’ve been known to dress up for movie premiers. I may, in fact, own an elven cloak.
So when I got the chance to write a book for Cosmo Red-Hot Reads from Harlequin, I knew I wanted to put a geek girl at the center of it. A woman who’s smart, tough and savvy in so many ways…but not necessarily in the ways of dating.
From there (and from latent Ryan Gosling fantasies) came my hero, Caleb. A man who has nothing together at all…except his dating skills. Or, rather, his pickup skills.
I’ll be honest—wearing an elven cloak did not bring Ryan Gosling to my yard. (And by the time I met my husband, the cloak had been retired from being worn in public). But Caleb is certainly attracted to Evie’s personal brand of quirkiness.
And isn’t that one heck of a fantasy? A guy who appreciates the things about you that are unique? And who doesn’t make you get rid of your
Lord of the Rings
memorabilia. (Okay, my elven cloak is hanging in my closet. Yes, I still have it. My husband has accepted it.)
Of course, as smooth as Caleb seems, once he and Evie hook up, it’s clear who actually has it more together out of the two of them. (Hint: not him.)
I hope you enjoy
Crazy, Stupid Sex.
The geekiness, the hotness and the unicorn burrito. (You’ll see.)
Happy reading!
Maisey
Crazy, Stupid Sex
Maisey Yates
Sexy, contemporary romance stories for today’s fun, fearless female.
Cosmo Red-Hot Reads from Harlequin
Contents
Chapter One
Acquire social lubricant.
Check. Step three of this theoretical man-landing mission was complete. She’d already put on panties that would make her feel confident and sexy, then found a bar in the right part of town that was sure to contain the right sort of people.
Now she just needed to relax so she could engage a potential mate.
Evie James looked down into her pink drink and frowned. She didn’t feel particularly socially lubricated. Or lubricated in any fashion, really.
She was nervous. Shaky and neurotic and nervous. This was what years of hiding in her office had gotten her. What years of dating the same boring man who hogged the covers and treated the female orgasm like an elusive, nonexistent unicorn that didn’t bear hunting for had gotten her.
She didn’t know how to pick up men. She knew how to program apps. How to manage a team of creatives. How to sell and market what she created, to a whole roomful of people if necessary, and she had a few million dollars in her bank account that stood as a testament to that. On a personal note, she also knew how to find a moving service to get your rat-bastard ex’s shit out of your apartment and have it delivered to his mother’s house in boxes marked “things to clutter up your basement when your man-child returns.”
Yeah, she knew how to do that.
But picking up men? New men she had never talked to before? Men she wanted to do sexual things, not business things, with? Not so much.
Not that she was actually going to do any sexual things with a guy tonight. She just needed to see if she could get one to take her bait. So to speak.
She sucked up more pink drink through her straw and waited for some magic to happen. None.
She tugged her iPad out of her purse and opened up the basic mock-up of the app she’d been using as a guide.
Flirt
magazine had commissioned her to create this app that would be a field guide for fashion, flirting and hooking up.
Right now, the app needed some beta testing. And she was the one testing it. Because hell, if it could work for her it could work for anyone.
She clicked on the “10 Dating Tips” article and skimmed to number four.
Put yourself out there! You don’t have to wait for a man to approach you. That went out with corsets and stays. The rules of the dating game are in your hands.
Her shaky, sweaty hands.
Sweet.
She looked around the bar. It was so dim. She wasn’t sure how anyone was supposed to tell how attractive the people around them were. Though, maybe that would work in her favor. Whilst she’d followed the “How to Get a Smokey Eye in Three Easy Steps” guide religiously while getting ready, she was privately afraid she looked like she’d been punched in the face.
So maybe the dim lighting would work in her favor.
The guy across the bar was actually pretty nice looking. He was wearing that standard blue business shirt, collar open, his tie probably ditched in whatever fleet car he drove. A company car, she was willing to bet. He had an eight-dollar haircut. That she was sure of. She could see the razor tracks from twenty feet away, but that wasn’t
so
bad.
He probably sold something. Insurance maybe.
So maybe she could get a little ego salve and a good rate on a policy for her motorcycle all in one night. That would kind of rock.
She stood up and started walking toward him before she could overthink it. Before she could think at all.
A wall of cheap body-spray scent greeted her when she got within five feet of him. She nearly gagged. They needed serving-sizes on that crap. She’d banned it in her offices. The young male interns completely believed the commercials that promised random ménages with strangers and seemed to bathe in the stuff before work. It gave her a headache.
It was giving her a headache now.
That didn’t bode well for the flirting.
She really would like it if she could manage to stun a guy with her witty repartee and stunning beauty. If she could get a guy to ask her to come back to his place. Partly because she was trying to figure out how successful her app was, and partly because she really needed the boost to her self-esteem.
The loss of Jason the Ass, and the fact that he’d been sleeping with another woman, had dented her confidence. A little male interest would go a long way in fixing that. Not all the way to the bedroom, mind you.
She couldn’t even imagine that being worth it. In her memory, sex had never been so hot, in spite of rumors to the contrary.
It had been a long time for her. Even longer since sex had thrilled her in any capacity.
Jason had been boring in bed. There. She’d admitted it. And yes, she was probably a little bit boring in bed, too, but that man hadn’t made her toes curl in years, and even then, he hadn’t made them curl with any consistency.
Someday, she would investigate if the toe curling was real. If the panting and sweating and things that her friends always talked about, that the magazines said were possible, were in fact possible.
Her entire sexual career boiled down to one man who seemed to think foreplay was a golf term.
It was partly her fault. Because she’d been seventeen and a virgin the first time she’d been with him, and she’d basically just kept being with him because she hadn’t known what else to do. They’d followed each other through life. Through college and their first apartment. Their first jobs. And then her quitting her job to develop apps. And her ensuing success.
Success, which had,
apparently,
made him feel neutered and had forced him to seek greener pastures. And by greener pastures, she meant another woman’s vagina.
Bastard.
The thing that sucked,
really
sucked, was that when she’d come home from her office to find him with his head between another woman’s legs she’d been pissed about two things.
The first being that he’d said he didn’t like that. Always. He’d tried it on her once, and said he hated it. And he’d never done it again. So, there he was after ten years with her, doing it for another woman with an enthusiasm she’d never seen from him before.
Yeah, that had pissed her off.
The second thing was that she wasn’t brokenhearted.
The realization that
she
didn’t love
him
anymore either was a hard one to swallow. Because in some ways, even though she was angry, she just felt free.
Free to move his things out. Free to tell him to leave. To tell him to enjoy life without his meal ticket. Free to put on music he hated and dance in her panties and go to bars to pick up men who got her much more excited than Freaking Jason.
It had made her angry because it was ten years of her life, poured out on a guy she couldn’t even cry over.
Her most righteous and frightening anger was at herself. Six months she’d had it stewing on the back burner. She hadn’t wanted to date. She’d barely wanted to look a guy in the eye because it just made her a little stabby.
Her poor interns.
Then she’d gotten the offer to do this app for
Flirt.
And that had plunged her into research on dating, hookups and sex. Which was why she had sex, and toecurling, on the brain when she’d successfully ignored the concept for quite a few months.
She’d already compiled a profile for herself in the app. The things she would need, with her personality and experience level, to pick up a guy.
Now, it was time to see how it worked. In theory, at least. All she needed was for him to indicate he wanted to hook up, and then she’d know that her app was a success. And that she actually had a snowball’s chance in hell of having another relationship someday.
“Hello,” she said, moving to where the guy was sitting. “Evie, Evie James.” She stuck out her hand and stood, waiting for him to reciprocate.
He did eventually, but he had that look in his eyes that her sisters usually got whenever Evie was trying to explain something techie to them.
“Brent.”
“Nice to meet you, Brent,” she said, smiling broadly. She mentally went through the list again. “A drink,” she said. “I’d like to buy you one.”