“Are you okay?” he asked.
She looked up at him, and all the shock drained from her face, replaced instead by a spark of feral-looking rage. “What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing getting on the back of that thing?” He moved closer, ignoring the crowd of people looking on. “You clearly have no business doing it.”
“It’s not your business...what I have business doing or not doing. Stop trying to tell me what to do.”
He put out his hand, offering to take hold of hers and help her up, but she ignored him, pushing herself into a sitting position and scrabbling to her feet.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“I know you’re fine,” he returned. “It’s not like I thought the thing was going to jump off its post and trample you to death. But it’s also clear you’re being an idiot.”
“Well, look at the whole line of idiots,” she said, indicating the queue of people. “I figured I would join in.”
“Why, exactly?”
“Because,” she said. “Because I’m tired of everyone treating me like a kid. Because I’m tired of everyone telling me what to do. Do you know that it was almost impossible for me to sneak away to our meeting today because my brothers need to know what I’m doing every second of every day? It’s like they think I’m still fifteen years old.”
He shrugged. “As I understand it, that’s older brothers, to a degree.”
“Are you an older brother?”
“No,” he said. “Only child. But still, seems a pretty logical conclusion.”
“Well, whatever. I went to boarding school from the time I was really young. Because there were more opportunities for me there than here. I lived away from my family, and somehow...everyone is more protective of me. Like I didn’t have to go make my own way when I was a kid.” She shook her head. “I mean, granted, it was an all-girls boarding school, and it was a pretty cloistered environment. But still.”
“Let me buy you a drink,” he said, not quite sure why the offer slipped out.
You know.
He ignored that.
“I don’t need you to buy me a drink,” she said fiercely, storming past him and making her way to the bar. “I can buy my own drink.”
“I’m sure you can. But I offered to do it. You should let me.”
“Yeah, you have a lot of opinions about what I should and shouldn’t do in a given moment, don’t you?”
Still, when he ordered her a rum and Coke, she didn’t argue. She took hold of it and leaned against the bar, angling toward him. His eyes dropped down to her breasts, a hard kick of lust making it difficult for him to breathe.
“What are you doing here?” He forced his gaze away from her breasts, to her face.
She narrowed her eyes. “I’m here to ride a mechanical bull and make a statement about my agency by doing so. Not to anyone but myself, mind you. It might be silly, but it is my goal. What’s yours?”
“I’m here to get laid,” he said, holding her eyes and not blinking. That should do the trick. That should scare her away.
Unless...
She tilted her head to the side. “Is that what you were here for last night?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he responded.
Her lips twitched, and she lifted up her glass, averting her gaze. “How was she?” She took a sip of the rum and Coke.
“As it happens,” he said, “I didn’t go home with her.”
She spluttered, then set down the glass on the bar and looked at him. She didn’t bother to disguise her interest. Her curiosity. “Why?”
