FOREVER MINE (Hazel Island #1)

Chapter One Jack Benson considered his options: get up and leave without a word or suffer through the indignity currently being hoisted upon him. "Come on, smile!" said Gigi, the woman he'd been seeing off and on for three months. "Why can't you ever smile for a picture, at least?" Jack forced himself to smile. Apparently, that wasn't good enough for Gigi, because when she looked through the photos, she made annoyed noises at every single one. Jack was a fisherman, for Christ's sake. He didn't give a shit about social media, and he sure as hell didn't give a shit about taking selfies, either. Gigi, her mouth in a pretty pout, wrinkled her nose at him. "I can't post any of these. My friends don't believe that I even have a boyfriend." Jack, lounging in his bed, sat up at that pronouncement. "Whoever said anything about 'boyfriend'?" he rumbled. Gigi fluttered her eyelashes. "It's been four months." As if time were the sole marker of a relationship. Jack had to restrain a snort. Gigi wasn't a bad sort. She was the type of woman he'd always preferred: pretty but easily bored. Because once these women got bored, they left. And that was how Jack liked things. Jack wished he had a bottle of whiskey on his bedside table. Instead, he went to his tiny kitchen, made them both two mugs of coffee, and handed one to Gigi. "Look." He cleared his throat. "I'm not a boyfriend kind of guy." Gigi laughed. "Every guy says that." "I'm not every guy." She pouted again, not even touching the coffee he'd given her. "Do you have nothing else to say?" "What do you want me to say?" Now he was just confused. Gigi quickly bounced from his bed and slipped on her clothes, shooting him daggers as she did so. "You know what I think?" she said tightly. He didn't think it wise to reply to that question, either. "I think you don't know what you want. Any guy would love to be with me, so it's not me. It's you. You're just messed up." Gigi grabbed her purse and, after she checked her hair in her compact, gave him the finger before flouncing out to her car. Jack winced when he heard her tires peeling out. He just hoped she hadn't run over his freshly planted sod. Pulling out a bottle of whiskey he stashed under his mattress, he poured some into his coffee. Then he did the same thing with Gigi's leftover mug.