That was her father’s department.
So far, thanks to her yoga teaching gigs, she’d been able to help support her brothers in their studies—an accomplishment she truly treasured. Did it mean renting a tiny apartment under dubious ownership and zipping from class to class in a hunk of a rusty, aging Buick? Yep, it did. And she got it. The gas guzzler was the height of earth unfriendly, but her brothers came first. She’d pretty much raised them since she was twelve, and they were raven-haired, knobby-kneed, eight-year-olds. This opportunity in Ecuador was everything she’d wanted for them. And come hell or high water, she’d make it happen. And maybe, if she convinced the venture capitalist group to invest in her idea, she could pay for her brothers’ schooling and follow her dreams in the process.
Two birds. One stone.
But that was a lot easier said than done—especially with the off-kilter energy she’d been grappling with for the last wretched seventy-five days, which could be broken down into one thousand eight hundred hours. Or one hundred eight thousand minutes. Or six million four hundred eighty thousand seconds.
Not that she was counting.
Fine! She’d been counting since that monumentally awful day when a beefcake had jacked up her life force, screwed up her guiding energy, and had caused her steady vibe to go hysterically haywire.
Goodbye, balance and serenity.
And hello, raging yoga bitch.
Seventy-six days ago, she wouldn’t have believed raging, yoga, and bitch could coexist in one sentence, let alone inside a human being. But they could. Oh, they could because it wasn’t just her balanced chi that had high-tailed it out of town.
She’d lost her O.
Yes, that O.
The oh, yes, don’t stop erotically cathartic climactically superb orgasm. Once her chi had gone off the rails, her O had skipped town like a thief in the night. One day, it was there. The next, adios apex of desire. Sayonara, glorious gratification. And bye-bye, blazing bolt of heady bliss.
Had she tried to recover her lost O?
Hell yes!
Over the last seventy-five days, she’d amassed quite a stash of vibrators and clitoral stimulators. Big or small. Buzzy or pulsing. No matter how hard she tried—and she tried and tried and tried—there was no sign of her O. Not a glimpse. Not a quick catch of breath. Not a dreamy sigh to be had. She’d gone full-on Sahara downtown. Dry and deserted, if she didn’t figure out her no-go O, she wouldn’t be surprised if buzzards started circling.
And she hadn’t only relied on sex toys. She’d racked up more than a few one-night stands over the last six billion four hundred eighty million milliseconds.
Libby Lamb was a free spirit. She followed her intuition. She read her aura. She was a woman in charge of her body and her sexuality. And most of all, she enjoyed consensual sex.
She wasn’t looking for Mr. Right.
Heck no!
Her energy migrated toward Mr. Right Now.
She didn’t want a boyfriend, period, end of story.
She had her brothers, her best friends, and her yoga. Maintaining a steady guy in her life wasn’t in the cards. And if life had taught her one thing, it was that she knew better than to trust a man with her heart.
But never in her wildest dreams did she think one roaring, inconsiderate beefcake of a man could get under her skin so thoroughly and so incessantly that it would shred her chi and drive her O out to pasture. Not to mention, get her fired from a few yoga studios. Okay, not a few. Eight out of the nine studios she taught at had sent her on her merry way with a namaste followed by the slam of a door.
She couldn’t blame them. Everything set her off these days. If she caught yoga participants whispering, she’d remove her mini gong from her bag and bang it like she was auditioning for the part of a fire alarm.
If she noticed someone glancing at their phone during class, she banged the gong.
It was safe to say she was having gong issues.
Yep, that was a thing.
She’d turned the meditative healing tool into a menace to society.
She’d become the yoga version of the glowering Miss Trunchbull character.
In the past seventy-five days, she’d had a little trouble—no, a lot of trouble—keeping her cool which was why everything was riding on today.
She dropped her phone into her yoga bag and spied the golden mini gong tucked next to her mat.
She could almost hear it whispering to her.
Grab the mallet and strike like there’s no tomorrow, sister.
You know you want to do it.
Maybe if you bang me hard enough, you’ll be able to bang that British beefcake out of your head.
She blinked and looked away from the bag as the tightness returned to the base of her neck with a vengeance.
If any gal on the planet needed an earth-shattering orgasm to loosen her up and set her chakras right, it was Libby Lamb.
And it wasn’t for lack of trying.
Along with amassing an army of vibrators, she’d had a decent amount of sex.
She’d had big cocks and little cocks. Guys who went to town downtown and men who could thrust and buck like world champion bull riders. And still, her ability to meet sweet release was nowhere to be found, thanks to the muscled creep. Like a patient flatlined on the table, her love button was DOA.
Dead on arrival.
She fanned herself. It was getting warm in there—and not in the liberating, hold a plank with sweat dripping onto the mat hot yoga sort of way.
“It’ll come back. It has to. Your O is simply on a hiatus. A journey. A retreat.”
But every time she pictured her absent O, the beefcake’s image flashed through her mind. Cocky and arrogant, the taker of Os couldn’t have cared less about who he bothered or whose restorative process he’d crushed.
The worst part? She had to keep his identity to herself. That’s why she hadn’t revealed the orgasm thief’s name to her friends. It was bad enough that the guy had annihilated her chi and stripped her of her ability to reach carnal nirvana. She’d wanted to tell her friends—to spill the beans and explain precisely why she’d become a raging yoga bitch. But as much as she loved her besties, the last thing she wanted was her girls weighing in on the situation because…
They knew him.
All she could do was ride out the cosmic catastrophe and pray that her O would come home, and her chi would stabilize.
She rolled her head from side to side, then checked her watch.
Eight minutes until her appointment.
Plenty of time to see if her O had decided to return.
If it did, it was a sign.
Exhaling an uneven breath, she glanced at the door. The coast was clear. She slipped her hand past the waistband of her yoga capris and headed south. “Are you there, clitoris? It’s me, Libby Lamb,” she whispered, channeling the brilliance of Judy Blume because it was quite literally the last thing she hadn’t tried to jump-start her libido when the door to the restroom swung open in a rush of giggles and floral perfume.
“Tell me everything, Cleo. What happened when you and Eli left the bar?” an attractive brunette asked a tall blonde as the young women filed into the restroom and sidled up to the counter.
Libby froze like a petrified rabbit. Had she been busted for attempted public masturbation? Her cheeks bloomed scarlet as adrenaline set off in rapid-fire pulses through her veins. She swallowed hard, then shifted her gaze to the women. Luckily, the pair hadn’t seemed to notice that she’d jammed her hand down her pants like some creeper.