Page 10 of Cocky Brutal Sinner

I march in place while my heartbeat lowers, circling my shoulders to stretch them. When I wipe the sweat from my eyes with the bottom of my soaked shirt, my reflection comes back into focus. I look like shit. My face turns tomato-red when I do cardio, and there’s nothing sexy about the sweat dripping from every pore.

Grabbing my water bottle, I pound down water until my stomach aches from it. Now that I’m finally still, my body takes the time to remind itself of all its complaints. My too-sore quads from a brutal run yesterday. My tennis elbow, twinging from all the chopping I did for prep last night. My left knee, which is always fucking pissed at me, ever since I took a bad spill at twenty and swore off motorcycles.

One of these days, my body is going to force a rest day on me. Right now, though, I need to keep pushing. The wedding last weekend—that thrilling ten minutes in the coat closet with Brinley—it fucked me up. It got me thinking way too much about everything I want but can’t have.

Maybe there’s a world where Luke will find out I’ve been secretly screwing his sister for five years that won’t end with me in the hospital with my jaw wired shut. One thing’s for sure: I don’t live in that world.

I yank off my shirt to send a sweaty selfie to Brinley anyway. She reacts with a gif of a drooling wolf, making me chuckle. I switch over to the group chat, expecting to have a few missed messages. The guys and I shoot the shit all day, and it’s easy to miss a few messages now and then.

Luke

This is such fucking bullshit. I’m going to lose my fucking mind.

My brows shoot up. Luke is normally easygoing. What the hell’s got him so rattled?

Nate

They can’t just drop out of the deal this late in the contract, can they?

Luke

They pulled a fucking morality clause. Said I was a danger to their brand. Fuckers.

Ryan

Not sure the language is helping, Luke. You’re abusing the F-word.

Nate

I’m not sure now’s the time to tease Luke. He’s pissed.

Ryan

Correction, he’s FUCKING pissed.

Luke

Can you blame me? This is the last fucking straw.

I scroll back up through the conversation, trying to figure out what I missed. When I catch a link to the Toronto Tea, I freeze.

Luke Windsor’s Kinky Bedroom Sins: Exclusive Insider Interview.

Oh, no.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

As I scroll up further, the pieces become horribly clear.

The Toronto Tea, the city’s premiere gossip blog, loves to publish shit about me and the guys. The worst of them is codenamed Peppermint, a writer who has an uncanny ability to find out all our secrets and spread them online at the worst possible times.

This time, Peppermint didn’t even need to publish at the right time. The “exclusive insider interview” went online almost two years ago, and it didn’t make much of a splash at the time.

Until today.

When Luke’s whiskey company, Twisted Devil, sent out a press release announcing that they would be exclusively supplying whiskey for Air Canada’s VIP lounges. That press release had a particularly handsome headshot of Luke, which prompted a few viral TikTok videos about him, which turned into horny netizens scouring the internet to find out his dating status.

They found a whole lot more than that.