The morning after the SKIN Design office party, Carl Jefferson peeked reluctantly out from beneath his duvet. His forehead creased as he squinted at the curtains covering his bedroom windows. There was nothing particularly offensive about them. They were a perfectly reasonable shade of blue. They even did a pretty good job of keeping the dawn light out of the room.

 

As far as Carl was concerned, the only problem with the curtains was that he was pretty sure they’d been red with a maroon stripe along their base when he went to sleep. Come to think of it, ever since he moved into his new flat, his bedroom window had faced north. It had never caught any of the morning sun’s rays.

 

Carl frowned at the blankets covering his body. The bedspread should have been decorated with dark red stripes, but for some reason it had morphed into a blue-green checked fabric overnight. Carl lifted his head and peered suspiciously at his surroundings.

 

It…Well, for one, it wasn’t his bedroom.

 

He sat up so quickly his head spun. Closing his eyes very tightly, Carl covered his mouth with his hand. Minutes passed as he waited for his stomach to settle. Finally, he felt capable of cautiously reopening his eyes.

 

The room stopped rotating after a few seconds, but even then it stubbornly refused to morph back into his familiar bedroom.

 

He peeped beneath the blankets. He was completely naked.

 

Carl pulled the blankets all the way up to his neck as he desperately searched his mind for some memory of removing his clothes, only to find a gaping black hole where the previous evening should have existed.

 

His frown deepened when he spotted something wrapped around his arm. A strip of black leather an inch wide encircled his wrist twice before being buckled firmly in place. Yet another thing Carl had never seen before. Great.

 

And even better, it was a—

 

No, it couldn’t be. Carl’s mind stubbornly refused to go there. It was a strip of leather wrapped around his wrist, nothing more.

 

Quickly looking away from it, Carl forced a deep breath into his lungs and did his best not to give in to a very strong temptation to panic. He just had to take things one step at a time, and everything would be fine. Even inside Carl’s head, that sounded like a lie, but he went along with it anyway.

 

A detailed visual examination of his surroundings, made with the blanket still up around his neck, finally provided three pieces of what Carl felt confident was concrete information.

 

One—he had never set foot in this room before. Two—he had no recollection of how he arrived there or anything he might have done while in that bed. Three—his clothes were on a chair by the window.

 

Pushing everything else aside, Carl focused on that third piece of information, on his possible salvation. Moving very slowly in an effort to combat his continued queasiness, Carl dropped his legs over the side of the bed and slipped out from between the sheets. He tiptoed across to his clothes, without any idea if there might be someone within earshot.

 

He remembered the suit hanging neatly on the back of the chair. That was reassuring. He even remembered buying the T-shirt that was draped across the chair’s seat, specifically to wear it to the office party.

 

Scrambling into his trousers, his fingers trembling more violently with every movement, Carl quickly did up his fly. The zipper sounded insanely loud in the otherwise silent space.

 

Carl held his breath as he stared at the bedroom door, but no one came in to check what all the racket was about. He muttered a curse as he fastened the button at his waist. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d had some idea who might have walked in on him.

 

He looked around the room one last time. It was obviously a man’s bedroom. Everything, from the bits and pieces on top of the dresser to the stark lines of the furniture implied that, whatever else Carl may have done, it hadn’t involved an impromptu trip back into the closet.

 

Closing his eyes, Carl tried, with rapidly increasing desperation, to remember anything that happened after he’d arrived at the office party. He’d spent the first half an hour talking to Debra from accounting and the new guy from admin. He was clear on that point.

 

But after that…

 

Damn, but his head ached unlike anything he’d felt in all his twenty-three years. Carl pushed his hand very gently through his hair. Muttering a curse, he leaned to his left and peered into a mirrored wardrobe door. The black spikes that usually stood out from his head in a nice even arrangement were all wonky and flattened.

 

Bloody marvelous. That was just the icing on the worse piece of cake he’d ever woken up to. For damn near the first time since he’d hit his teens, Carl turned away from a mirror without attempting to make himself presentable.

 

He lifted one foot to pull his trainer on, then thought better of it. Grabbing his messenger bag off the floor next to the chair, he slung it over his shoulder and picked up his shoes. With sock clad feet, he crept toward the bedroom door and listened for any sound of movement outside. Nothing. He cautiously turned the handle.

 

The mechanism was silent. The door swung toward him without a sound. Carl peeped around the edge of it. The little hallway was empty. Carl glanced both ways and tiptoed forward. Step after silent step, he made his way along a hallway just as unfamiliar as the bedroom.

 

He was within sight of what looked like a front door when a noise from his left made him freeze. Gathering together what courage he could, Carl snuck a quick look through a doorway to his right. Past an open plan living room, he saw a man standing in a tiny kitchen. He appeared to be making breakfast.

 

The guy might have had his back to him, but Carl really didn’t need to see his face in order to recognize him. Broad shoulders, short brown hair, a fantastic arse and, more than anything else, a complete sense of confidence that laced every single movement he made—there was no mistaking Miles Kavanagh.