Every time he got his hair cut at the Curl Up & Dye salon in town, Chloe, the owner, flirted with him. Once he’d suggested they get together sometime, and she’d said she would love to, but it had never happened. Maybe he should’ve taken it a step further and actually asked her out, but something held him back. He suspected that flirting with guys as she cut their hair was part of her professional gig, and she probably wasn’t into him at all.

Women were as vexing to him in his thirties as they’d been in middle school, when he first started to notice the way they looked at him and his brother. He’d been told on more than one occasion that they were good-looking guys. Well, he was, anyway. Alex was kind of ugly when it came right down to it.

Paul laughed at that thought. Some things never changed. He and his brother had been busting each other’s balls for as long as they’d been talking. But Paul gave thanks every day to Alex for coming home to Gansett when things started to get really bad with their mom. Paul had never been so happy to see his brother, who had given up an awesome job and a satisfying life in Washington, DC, to come home to help him run the family business and manage their mother’s illness.

Alex had been extremely unhappy about the changes he’d been forced to make—until he met Jenny and became the happiest bastard on the island. Not that Paul would begrudge his brother the happiness he deserved. However, he couldn’t help but look on with envy from time to time, especially with the lovebirds nesting—among other things—in the room next to his until their house was finished.

Paul had never been more thankful for earplugs and headphones since Jenny moved in with them. Some things a brother just shouldn’t have to hear. He’d trained himself to sleep with music blasting in his ears. The alternative was listening to the two of them go at it constantly.

He couldn’t recall the last time he’d gotten laid, so that was contributing to the general malaise that gripped him lately. Living with the gleefully engaged sex fiends had only made him more aware of how long it had been since he’d had sex. How pathetic was it that he couldn’t even remember the last time? Between dealing with his mom’s illness, running the business and serving on the Gansett Town Council, it was all he could do to find the time to sleep and eat every day, let alone think about sex.