Unbound: (InterMix)

Praise for Cara McKenna’s
After Hours

“The sweet, smoking hot, standout erotic romance you’ve been craving.”

—
New York Times
bestselling author Beth Kery

“Intense, funny, and perfectly dirty.”

—
USA Today
bestselling author Victoria Dahl

“Cara McKenna brings the steam.”

—
New York Times
and
USA Today
bestselling author Ava Gray

INTERMIX BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) LLC

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

penguin.com

A Penguin Random House Company

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the
product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is
entirely coincidental.

UNBOUND

An InterMix Book / published by arrangement with the author

PUBLISHING HISTORY

InterMix eBook edition / October 2013

Copyright © 2013 by Cara McKenna.

Excerpt from
After Hours
copyright © 2013 by Cara McKenna.

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices,
promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized
edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning,
or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting
writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or
electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy
of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized
editions.

For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-62199-8

INTERMIX

InterMix Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group

and New American Library, divisions of Penguin Group (USA) LLC,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

INTERMIX and the “IM” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) LLC

For my editor, Jesse—taker of chances, redeemer of hermits, alchemist with the power
to turn common crows into incontinent dogs.

With many thanks to my agent, Laura Bradford, who digs my flavor of crazy.

And thanks also to tremendous friends and authors Ruthie Knox and Jill Sorenson, who
read it first and made it better. Plus extra, whopping great thanks to Charlotte Stein—amazing
friend, heartbreakingly talented writer, and this book’s Ideal Reader.

Chapter One

From: Merry

To: Lauren, Kat

Subject: Farewell drinks?

Hey gals! Anybody free for pre-vacay drinks tomorrow? I figure it’s pretty likely
I’ll get taken captive as a sex slave by some rippling, kilted Highlander next week,
never to return. Promise you’ll keep San Fran warm for me.

I’ve got a zillion things still to wrap up at work, but I should be free by 7:30.
Any takers? So hoping to see you guys one more time before I fly out.

Mer

From: Lauren

To: Merry, Kat

Subject: re: Farewell drinks?

Wouldn’t miss it—I could use a drink this week. Or three. Just tell me where.

L

From: Kat

To: Merry, Lauren

Subject: re: Farewell drinks?

Hell yeah. See you then!

Kat

From: Lauren

To: Merry, Kat

Subject: re: Farewell drinks?

Is it totally cunty that I’m sort of looking forward to Merry being gone for a month?
Probably. But I swear she lost her old personality, right along with the weight. If
it gets any worse she’ll start tossing her hair and giggling every time someone tells
her how great she looks. My last nerve. She is on it. Bon voyage.

Okay, yeah. That WAS cunty. Whatever. See you tomorrow!

Cuntily yours,

Lauren

Merry blinked at her phone’s screen, just as another message alert
ping
ed.

From: Kat

To: Merry

Subject: re: Farewell drinks?

Uhhh . . . o_O I’m guessing Lauren didn’t mean to reply all. And I don’t think she
knows she did. Shall we just let her keep thinking that, or . . . ??? Anyhow, I can’t
wait to see you tomorrow!

Awkwardly,

Kat

Merry frowned, considering her reply.

She wasn’t hurt.

Well, yeah, she was. But not surprised. Lauren’s default setting was
snide,
but it stung Merry to have her suspicions confirmed. She’d lost ninety-two pounds,
but clearly she’d gained something else—readmission to the joys of high-school bitchery!
Nothing like a reply-all faux pas to make thirty-one feel like fifteen.

She squished the carpet between her bare toes, wiping her smudged screen with her
sleeve.
To confront or not to confront.

Lauren had told her once, “You can be fat, or you can be a bitch. But you can’t be
a fat bitch. Bitchiness is a luxury only hot girls can afford.”

Merry hated that motto, but she still remembered it word for word, five or more years
after Lauren had decreed it. As though a girl couldn’t be big
and
a bitch, and, for that matter, hot. Though sadly, it seemed perhaps a girl could
not be Lauren’s best friend if she didn’t
stay
fat.

Which was a rather bitchy policy, Merry felt. Nearly as bitchy as that e-mail.

Was
she more annoying now? She hadn’t thought so.

Like anyone on earth
isn’t
annoying, from time to time.
And if she was chirpy and smiley when people complimented her, it was because her
mom and had raised her to accept praise graciously, never to deflect or apologize.
Save your deflecting for the insults—there’ll be plenty. Swallow the kind words whole.

Merry sighed, physically feeling the angst, forcing it from her body as she’d trained
herself to do in lieu of muffling it with food.

Let Lauren sulk. Let her vent. Let her think Merry had turned traitor by veering off
a comfortable, delicious collision course with diabetes or joint problems or whatever
else she’d managed to ignore until last year.

Maybe Lauren would come around, in time. And if she didn’t, Merry might have to admit
that perhaps Lauren was two hundred additional pounds she’d be well rid of.

Sucked, though—ten years of friendship, and she’d never noticed how codependent they’d
been. Kind of like how she’d never quite realized she’d gotten so overweight, despite
the numbers on her jeans tag and the scale giving it to her straight on a daily basis.
People were nothing if not selective in their perceptions of reality.

She hit reply.

From: Merry

To: Lauren, Kat

Subject: re: Farewell drinks?

Awesome! Americano at 7:30. First round’s on me.

Mer

Yeah, awesome. Merry could be the bigger man . . . even if she was now the smaller
girl. She’d broken some unspoken, fat-girl solidarity pact she’d subconsciously entered
into with Lauren. She could forgive the woman for feeling betrayed or abandoned.

Though, yeah. It was pretty cunty.

She turned to the catastrophe that was her living room, strewn with three weeks’ hiking
supplies she had to magically clown-car into one pack. She lined items up by necessity—tent,
sleeping bag, water filter on the front line. Essential clothes, followed by if-there’s-room
clothes . . .

Friends love each other,
she thought, checking the caps on her travel bottles.
Friends hurt each other.
Friends came and went, but Merry had already lost a lot in the past year and a half.
Her mother, over a third of her body weight, then her . . . Well, not her
boyfriend
. Her fuck buddy. Jason had quit texting a few months ago, right around the time Merry
had spun giddy circles in a department-store dressing room after the zipper had slid
home, practically dancing out into the street carrying her first size-twelve dress,
with a side of intoxicating confidence.

Magically, a few weeks later, she’d had to take that dress to a consignment shop—it
was too big now. After this vacation, she might need to do the same with her tens.
Holy shit.
Size eight.
The single digits. She might actually one day fit into the sample sizes she patterned
at work. Shangri-fucking-la.

The weird thing was, she still felt like the old Merry inside—caring, competent, fun,
loyal. But now people were reacting differently to the package those qualities came
in. Guys from work who’d never said more to her than, “How do you change the toner
in this thing?” were suddenly asking about her weekend, her vacation, her opinions
on the latest reality-TV scandal.

While part of her was thrilled—male attention
was
a side effect of the weight loss she’d been hoping for, after all—another part had
to think,
Caring, fun and loyal don’t really count for much, do they?
Not unless they came wrapped in a pleasing female shape. Not if you wanted to get
past the proverbial receptionist with a guy. Which kind of sucked.

And yet . . . she did want that. Thirty-one, and she’d never been in love. She’d been
infatuated, sure. She’d been in love in a guy’s general direction, but she’d never
felt that light and heat shining back on her. She’d been clad too heavily in her own
self-consciousness to welcome it. Some women wore their curves proudly—rocked the
hell out of them, in fact. But that had never been Merry. Her extra weight had been
defensive, something to hide behind, not to embrace.

Now the armor was gone. She felt exposed, but the sensation was as thrilling as it
was scary. And if she ever wanted to get tangled in the writhing tentacles of passionate,
mind-blowing, stupid-making,
reciprocal
true love, she’d have to make peace with this naked feeling.

Perhaps Lauren, like Jason, had preferred the old Merry, the Merry who’d bent over
backward to please the people she liked, who’d put herself last.

You’re welcome to her,
she thought, stuffing her sleeping bag into its sleeve.

This new Merry’s off to walk across Scotland.

And she’s not coming back until she’s fucking found herself.