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  Get Cuffed

  Cuffing Season #1

  C.M. Kars

  Contents

  Copyright

  OTHER WORKS BY C.M. KARS

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  Family tree

  1. ONE

  2. TWO

  3. THREE

  4. FOUR

  5. FIVE

  6. SIX

  7. SEVEN

  8. EIGHT

  9. NINE

  10. TEN

  11. ELEVEN

  12. TWELVE

  13. THIRTEEN

  14. FOURTEEN

  15. FIFTEEN

  16. SIXTEEN

  17. SEVENTEEN

  18. EIGHTEEN

  19. NINETEEN

  20. TWENTY

  21. TWENTY-ONE

  22. TWENTY-TWO

  23. TWENTY-THREE

  CUFFING AND TURKEY STUFFING

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Get Cuffed

  Book One, The Cuffing Season Series

  by C.M. Kars

  Copyright © 2021 C.M. Kars

  All rights reserved.

  This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.

  Cover design by Indigo Chick Designs

  Editing by Aquila Editing

  OTHER WORKS BY C.M. KARS

  The Never Been Series

  Never Been Kissed

  Never Been Nerdy

  Never Been Loved

  Never Been Under the Mistletoe

  Never Been Boxed Set

  Sera & Hunter: A Never Been Collection

  The Fangirl Chronicles

  Fangirling Over You

  To All the Footballers I Loved Before

  Bias Wrecked

  Pucked Romance

  Never Say Never

  The Fangirl Chronicles Boxed Set

  The Cuffing Season Series

  Get Cuffed

  Cuffing and Turkey Stuffing

  Cuffing and Tree Trimming

  Cuffing New Year’s Resolutions

  Cuffing and Loving

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  Family tree

  ONE

  October…

  “Hey, Amber?” my assistant Liz’s voice rises an octave from the door frame of my office, and I know I’m in trouble.

  “Yeah?” I call around a mouthful of carrot sticks, wishing they were a stack of pancakes right now.

  It’s mid-afternoon, I haven’t eaten all day, and I packed myself rabbit food this morning, trying to pre-emptively curtail how many calories I’m going to be ingesting for the upcoming holiday season from now.

  I’m preparing so I can be ready for my aunt’s world-famous (not really the world, but definitely my world) pumpkin pie with vanilla whipped cream, and a sprinkling of cinnamon on top that already has me drooling just at the mere thought of it.

  God, I would commit a crime for a slice of that pie—if I had the whole thing to myself and didn’t have to fight to the death for it against my cousins. Hell, I’d topple governments.

  “Mr. Kane is coming in, after all,” Liz says, her shoulders hiking up to her ears, as if I’m going to reprimand her because she re-booked (for the third time) Brody Kane.

  The Brody Kane who’s a class-A jerk and an overall pain in my ass. The Brody Kane who broke my dumb heart ten years ago, and it feels like I’ve been chasing a love like his ever since.

  I take another vicious bite of my carrot stick, clenching my jaw through every bite.

  I’d gladly punch Brody Kane for a sniff of pie, a mere whiff of it baking in the oven.

  Yeah, right.

  He’d probably be happy that you touched him in that way, and then you’d die because he smiled at you like he used to all those years ago.

  I pull in a deep, deep breath through my nose, trying to be calm about all of this.

  I had my day scheduled out, time-blocked to the minute, organized to every single task I had to do today, and my fingers were flying across the keyboard to write up my reports on each one of my patients, but now I’m here.

  The rest of the day is now ruined ’cause Mr. Pain in my Ass Brody Kane has decided to finally grace us all with his presence.

  Liz hastily grabs my coffee mug, and I’d be worried about her sloshing the coffee around if there were any leftover. She keeps it out of reach, so I don’t do something nuts like fling it across the room, or at least pretend to.

  The man infuriates me, God! If he was on fire and I had a glass of water, I’d drink that thing down.

  Shit.

  Brody Kane and I, we have a history, true. The kind of history that friends and family know of, but not my assistant, Liz.

  She just knows the bare minimum—that we can’t really stand each other based on our previous appointments. She knows that Brody hates, with every single cell in his entire being, that I am the one in charge, making him do exercises, testing his flexibility and the mobility of his injured leg.

  She doesn’t know the history.

  A history, that I, for one, wish I could erase, just completely bleach from my brain. Brody’s honestly just come back in my life to torture me—obviously.

  What I’ve done to deserve this, I just don’t know.

  “Will you be okay?” Liz asks, and the way she asks ticks me off, too.

  Because we both know I’m all talk and no bark, unless I’m really pushed to the brink, and anything Brody Kane says or does just isn’t worth my time.

  You say that now, but he’s going to swear at you again when you make him work on his injured leg, and you know it. I’m a professional, no matter how many times I commit murder in my head.

  It’s going to be fine.

  Fine, fine, fine.

  It’s not fine.

  Brody Kane walks in a whole half hour late to his appointment, right when I’m eating my late-afternoon snack—a Cortland apple that I just picked over the weekend and had to convince myself to eat on the whole and regular before I stuck it in a pie.

  Liz comes back to my office to let me know all about that asshole showing up even though I knew it was bound to happen.

  I pick up my patient file, munching on my apple until I’m almost choking, wiping my face and sticky fingers before exiting my office and heading back towards the open-space area where we do most of our rehabilitation.

  I want Brody Kane to not even notice my office space or look at it in case he contaminates it with his shit (and entitled) mood.

  It’s amazing that no one’s lost it on him and brought him down a peg or two, honestly.

  It’s not gonna be me, that’s for sure.

  We have another twelve weeks of this, these stupid power plays—which brings us to just past Christmas.

  God, I’ve gotta put up with this until after Christmas?

  I can handle it, I’m a professional and I will not kill one of my patients, no matter how much his attitude is begging me to.

  I chew on my last bite, pull myself to my full height, straighten my posture and get ready to rumble.

  Brody Kane used to be pretty, back in the day.

  Soot-black eyelashes contrasting with his icy blue eyes, the kind that are clear and cold. He’s got that bronzed skin, the kissable lips, the sharp jawline. It was all meant to devastate any high school girl and boy who took a single look at him and lost their collective
shit.

  Brody’s cells had recombined so beautifully, the way his muscle and flesh settled over his bones managed to hit the DNA jackpot.

  But now? Now?

  Brody Kane has lost that roundness to his cheeks, the brightness in his blue eyes that I’d call innocence if I were looking for the right word. Those eyes are now steely when they look me over, sweeping me up and down, and there’s a split-second almost-reaction where I want to cover myself.

  I’m pretty sure he X-rayed me with those killer eyes of his and figured out the color of my underwear, like he knows about my body piercings, or the tattoo curling around my thigh underneath my work-appropriate pants, and down to my sneakers that won’t give me balance problems if I had decided to pull on some heels this morning.

  I need all the balance I can get when I look at him, the inky black hair, the way it looks with those steely eyes, and then there’s the rest of him. If I let myself think about the rest of him, I’m going to swoon right here, or drop whatever I’m holding while my brain sits and buffers while I process this level of hotness.

  Too bad he’s such a dick though. And it’s not like it matters, anyway. I’m the one in control now. I’m going to be the one saying goodbye this time around when he’s no longer my patient.

  Too bad, too bad.

  And I honestly wouldn’t repeat that mistake again…

  Nope, not me.

  Not gonna happen.

  It still happens though, feeling like I’ve gotten a brick to the back of the head at the mere sight of him, disoriented by the attraction I still somehow hold for him. He’s not even wearing anything super nice.

  Maybe that’s the clincher, he’s just wearing a look that screams boyfriend, giving me the image of a cuddly guy ready for me with open arms—until he opens his mouth.

  “You’re late,” Brody says, glancing down at his expensive-looking watch, as if he can somehow get those seconds back. I stand there in my sneakers, tapping my toe, trying to restrain myself from punching him.

  Then again, though, he’s paying me to help him, so who’s the real winner here?

  God, he’s such an asshole. Such. An. Asshole!

  And I used to be in love with that? Was I nuts, or just too young to know any better?

  I don’t say anything, ignoring the burn of indignation sitting at the back of my throat, wanting to spill out in harsh words. It’s fine, I’ll run on the treadmill after, pump some weights, whatever to get my mind off him.

  It’s literally the third time we’ve seen each other, and I need alternative methods to cope with him being a part of my day.

  Just when I thought I had finally got over him, had finally moved on, here is again, coming back into my life. Like a terrible seasonal infection of some sort, a fungus that refuses to die.

  I nod, because I’m not even going to bother to talk about him being late, and gesture to the rolling chair (wheels locked, of course), for him to take a seat. I remain standing and flip open his patient chart on my McGill clipboard and pretend to re-familiarize myself with his injuries.

  “I thought you would have memorized that by now,” Brody says, voice a little raspier from how I remember it, different and yet not. When I glance at him quickly, it’s to find him trying to stifle a smile.

  I decide to ignore him, running my tongue over my teeth, glancing back down at my methodical notes. “I have a lot of patients, Mr. Kane,” I say offhandedly, flipping through the pages “How’s the level of pain?”

  “Awful,” he says immediately, and I fight, I fight hard, not to roll my eyes.

  Not that I don’t believe he’s in pain. I wouldn’t be able to do what I do if I couldn’t tell when a person’s in actual pain or not, if their body has reached their limit for the day.

  Hell, I didn’t go to school for a million years and go through all those clinical hours to not be sensitive to someone else’s pain thresholds—and that they’re all different, depending on the time of day and baseline stress levels.

  I get it, I do.

  It’s just I can’t really stand when someone’s late—it’s such a gross disrespect for the person waiting for you, a clear neon sign that your time just isn’t as important as theirs, and that says a lot.

  I know it’s another little power game.

  There are literally a ton of PTs on the island of Montreal —so many. I should just kick him to the curb and never think about him again.

  As if that’s possible with Mom and Dad hoping for something that isn’t there to come back again…

  “We’re going to try to do some front-loaded squats today…”

  Brody looks like he wants to kill me, maintaining eye contact now for seconds too long, and I know enough to say that he’s definitely not attracted to me anymore, so yeah, that prolonged stare? If I could sum up in one word? Murderous.

  “We’re not doing any weights, or anything, I just want to see if your flexibility has improved since the surgery.”

  “I don’t know why you make me sit if I’m just going to be standing,” he huffs, annoyed, voice clipped and sharp, like tiny stinging bees along my skin.

  Sitting in a chair is basically a squat position, except you get to rest in that seated position.

  I watch him stand up carefully, favoring his bad leg, getting himself upright before moving a few steps away from the locked-in-place chair. He makes a show of tying another knot at the waist of his sweatpants, and I resolutely keep my eyes pinned to his face.

  So he’s even more beautiful than before, so what?

  So he’s still the most gorgeous guy I’ve ever seen, so what?

  It’s not like I don’t know what his body looks like, even if it’s changed a lot. When I knew him though, his body was closer to that of a boy’s, back when we were together that very first time.

  Now? It’s all man.

  I manage to hold the stare until my eyes begin to water, watching him blink first and only then do I do victory laps inside my head.

  It’s the small wins, sometimes. It all counts.

  I’m sworn at a total of fifty times with no exaggeration involved. Fine, maybe just a little. And maybe those expletives weren’t directed at me, per se, just in the general vicinity of my person, but it still pisses me off.

  He’s got the dirtiest mouth of all my patients, and I see everyone: male, female, intersex, cis or trans, from the ages of eighteen to eighty-nine years old (Mrs. Murphy is the absolute cutest and I want to be exactly like her when I grow up).

  We finish our hour-long session with flexibility moves and slowly increase his range of motion before his frustration finally peaks and he gives up.

  “Are we at the end?” I ask, making sure, wanting to verbally check with him and then carefully dissuade him from doing anything else. We’re at the tipping point where the good kind of pain can change rather quickly to the bad kind of pain.

  It’s like looking at a stranger, the way he looks at me, teeth bared in a snarl, face a grimace of pain. He squeezes his eyes shut to get that one more, elusive rep, before he collapses onto his back and just lets himself breathe.

  I hate this part, I really do. I’m going to have to work on his hip flexors and we’re going to have to get close, the kind of close that I never thought I’d be with him ever again, and yet, here we are.

  I’m almost afraid to touch him, half-afraid that he’s going to cast some sort of spell on me, and it’ll be like I’m eighteen again, falling in love for the first time.

  Brody Kane might be the reason it never worked with anybody else, but he’s not going to be the reason I go back to him. Nope, I’m not doing that again.

  I steadily move my mind to that blank place where he’s just another patient that I don’t really know, nothing more than a stranger with a familiar face. I have a job to do. I have to get him better so he can eventually get out of my hair and go do what he was doing in the first place before he came back to Montreal.

  So he can leave again, and I can go back to living
my life like I’ve been.

  Alone, without Brody. And it was just fine.

  “Are we still not going to talk about it?” Brody asks on a hiss as I come down to the padded flooring on my hands and knees, alongside his mat.

  “I’m going to grab your left leg now,” I say. “I’m going to support your knee and gently stretch out your hip flexors, if that’s okay with you.” I wait for him to give me his permission to touch him. I place my hands on my thighs, my knees on the floor as I watch him, doing the world’s best impersonation of a starfish on the floor in front of me.

  Brody nods, shutting his eyes against the bright, bright lights. The days are getting darker more quickly now, and the artificial lighting makes everything worse.

  “We’re not going to talk about it. Typical Amber.”

  I bite down, clenching my jaw hard. I ignore the flicker of pain in my chest, the little stab of hurt at the reminder of a past we shared, that could have brought us into the future, together.

  But we just weren’t meant to be, and that’s the way the cookie crumbles sometimes, and I’m not about to pick up the crumbs. I have some dignity.

  What dignity? You’re so lonely, you looked up how to get a platonic cuddler to help you fall asleep just last weekend.

  And then Vick and Max came over and we had a cuddle pile and watched sad movies and bawled our eyes out. It was great, super cathartic and everything.

  “Are you ready to begin?” I ask, prompting him to answer me, the kind of answer I requested, not a commentary on what was.

  Brody nods, then lets out a pained sigh when I place my hands on his left leg and get to work slowly opening the hip flexors, working painstakingly slow to keep the injury from getting worse, concentrating on the feel of his leg and the socket I’m working on.

  I can’t afford to be distracted by his beauty, by the way that if I glance over at his face, those icy blue eyes are slits. My brain skips over to an old scene, an old favorite memory, where Brody and I gave our virginities to one another, on my eighteenth birthday.