Wanting It All: A Naked Men Novel by Christi Barth

toilet paper for the house. Every. Time.
    No poaching women. Whoever makes the first move has sole flirting rights until otherwise rescinded.
    No matter how drunk, if you’re going to miss an all-house activity, leave a note on the kitchen counter.
    The worst part was that Knox himself came up with that fourth rule. One week Josh skipped their workout. Nobody heard from him for more than a day. Weird, since they texted as much as anyone with thumbs and a phone. Riley had been ready to go all NTSB agent on that shit, and scour the roads for car crashes. Turned out Josh had dropped his phone in an Atlantic City toilet. Then he hit a hot streak on the tables and passed out at dawn.
    They all got it. But having come a little too close to death once, it was more of a
real
possible scenario to all of them. Enough to freak out Ry…and the others, even if they didn’t admit it. The ACSs felt responsible for one another. They’d gone through a stupid, teenage ritual of becoming blood brothers before the accident in the Alps. Those three days they spent actually bleeding together in the snow created a bond far deeper.
    Four days later Griffin missed a midweek soccer game. No note, no text. No big deal, to most people. But since Griffin was a Coast Guard rescue chopper pilot, it was all too easy for them to assume the worst. Riley wasn’t the only one pacing holes in the field with his cleats that day. Knox hacked into more than a few servers, trying to ascertain his safety. That delay ended up being a Department of Homeland Security communication blackout due to a potential terror threat that was exposed as a prank before they made it home to dinner. Which they made Griff pay for.
    Still, those incidents put together left them…unsettled. And then feeling like goddamned helicopter moms. Even more unsettling, and freaking embarrassing. So Knox added the rule to calm everyone down. It worked. Or it had, until he’d acted like a thoughtless idiot last night. They had one more hard-and-fast rule. If you broke any of the house rules, you paid for dinner at Filomena’s. The best Italian in D.C. came at a hefty price tag. It was worth it, as the pasta mamas in the front window churned out fresh ravioli and gnocchi around the clock, but was expensive enough that it kept you from forgetting a rule for at least a year.
    Knox looked over at Riley, quietly doing chin-ups in his ironed Princeton tee. No grunting. No counting the reps out loud. Ry kept everything buttoned up and under control at all times. The sweat dripping from the dark hair at his temples was probably the noisiest thing about him. “I’m an idiot.”
    “You’re a card-carrying genius,” Riley corrected with a specificity that annoyed and amused Knox in equal parts. “What you were was thoughtless.”
    “Guilty as charged.” Knox felt lower than absolute zero.
    These guys deserved better. They’d pulled him out of his friendless state of fifteen years. They’d given him the literal clothes off their backs with school uniforms they’d outgrown to help his mom save a few bucks, had him over for dinners, taken him along on family vacations. They’d taught him how to change a tire and unhook a bra with one hand and basically everything about how to be a man.
    They never got all girly and talked about it or anything. But Knox didn’t ask them to share his house—well,
mansion
—simply because there were more rooms than he knew what to do with over the four floors. He did it because he genuinely wanted to hang with Griff, Josh, Riley, and Logan whenever he could. Because they were brothers. And Madison must seriously have her hooks in him to make him forget that for even a second.
    He crossed to Riley. “Wanna take a swing at me? The offer goes for you, too, Josh.”
    After more than a few seconds of eye-scrunching consideration, Josh shook his head. “I’m content with taking a hit out of your wallet when we order dinner. Thanks, though.”
    “How about you