prologue

LUKA

As I rolled over in bed, I reached out for Kat and came up empty. The room was dark, but something had woken me up from a deep sleep. I was exhausted from the trip to her school straight on the heels of packing up my dorm room and heading home for the summer. We’d gotten out a week before she did, so I’d decided to surprise my girl by coming down to help her pack her things. I felt like it was the least I could do because the strain in our relationship was entirely my fault.

Kat and I started dating our junior year of high school. It shocked the shit out of everyone at first since we’d known each other all our lives because our parents were close friends. She was the girl next door for me, so we’d grown up together and never really thought of each other that way until one day when she’d run into me in the hallway at school. Her body slammed into mine and my dick finally took notice of her. She’d grown up from the little girl I’d played with as a child.

Things were great between us in part because we knew each other so well. I didn’t put up with any of her bullshit like her other boyfriends had done, and eventually everyone realized that we were solid. We applied to the same schools, and then all our plans flew out the window when I was offered a full ride to Blythe College. I’d lucked out when their hockey coach caught one of my games at a local tournament and was impressed with my skills. He’d come to see one of my teammates who wasn’t interested because he had plans to play in the juniors first since he really wanted to follow in his brother’s footsteps and make it to the NHL. As long as he was there, Blythe’s coach talked to my coach, who arranged a sit-down with him and my parents. I liked what he had to say, so we took a trip to the school to check it out. The guys on the team had good things to say about Coach, which impressed me. He’d earned their respect, and that wasn’t an easy thing to do with hockey players.

The campus was cool. The school was smaller than the ones Kat and I had already applied to. She was looking forward to the big-university experience, but it just kinda seemed like an extension of high school to me because so many of our classmates would be there too. When they offered me the scholarship, it was impossible to say no.

My parents had immigrated to Chicago from Russia before I was born because they wanted their children to have the American dream. I was the first to attend college in my family, and if I could do it for free and leave the money my parents had scrimped and saved for me to attend for my brothers to use, then hell yes I would do it. Unfortunately, that meant that Kat and I had been doing the long-distance relationship thing for the last three years since she refused to even consider coming to Blythe with me.

So here I was, in her sorority house, in her bed, with no idea where she’d wandered off to. I pulled my phone off the bedside table and realized that it was barely past three o’clock in the morning. Where the hell is Kat?

I rolled out of her bed and yanked my jeans up. No way was I going to leave her room in my boxers with her friends around. As I walked to the door, I noticed that the window was open. Maybe she got warm since she isn’t used to sleeping with me?

I walked over and was about to pull it down because it wasn’t safe for her to keep it open when her room was on the ground floor of the house when I noticed that her screen was popped out. And then I heard her giggle coming from outside followed by a moan that I was intimately familiar with. One that should be reserved for me and only me because it meant that she was turned on. What the fuck is going on here?

I leaned closer so I could peek outside. Her room faced the small parking lot where I had parked my car. There was a red Mustang parked next to it now with the engine running. The windows were fogged and cracked open. I heard a grunt and Kat’s low moans again as the car began to rock. And then it dawned on me—my girlfriend was in that car, having sex with another guy, knowing that I was right inside her room, asleep in her bed. How fucked up is our relationship that she would pull something like this?

I grabbed my shirt from the floor and shoved my phone into my pocket. I glanced around the room to make sure I wasn’t leaving anything behind before heading to the door—which I found locked. My head swiveled to the window as I realized that the screen was popped out because Kat had climbed out the fucking window for her hook-up. I guess my impromptu visit had put a crimp in her plans for the evening and the surprise was on me instead.

I walked over and put the screen back in, pulled the window closed, and locked it. I made sure the front door to the house was locked too before I walked to the parking lot. Kat’s cell phone was still in the room, so she was going to have to wake the house up in order to get back inside. Let her explain what the fuck she was doing outside in the middle of the night with no way to get back in.