Feeling like my brain was fritzing out and overheating, I touched two fingers to the warm flesh at the slight dip of his hip. His skin was damp, but so hot it felt like it was burning me, and… and there was already the clear outline of a large bulge in his barely there swimming briefs. My stomach took a nervous roll to the left and then came back to center. I forced myself to look at his face like a normal fucking person and smile.
“Yeah. Take me to your room?”
3
Jamie Shannon
“I’m the luckiest areshole this side of the Atlantic, to spend a night with ya,” I said to Forrest, and he gave me an eye roll as I stuck out an arm for him, and a spark of that man I’d met before returned. He’d been so feisty that first day I’d laid eyes on him—giving Killough of all people what for—that I hadn’t been able to get him out of my head. I didn’t like to see him sitting there sad, either, and that was a shock. It had been a long time since I cared, one way or another, about how a potential bed partner felt.
He rested his hand on my arm, exploring his hold on me like it was new and maybe special for him. It did funny, good things to my insides to be treated like I was so important. These days I didn’t often waste my time on men who needed romancing, not when the chances were they’d get harsh a week or two in when I disappeared with no reason given, or I couldn’t tell them what I was up to on most nights of the week.
Even I had to admit that long, unexplained absences were suspicious to a lover. I certainly wouldn’t take that sort of shite in the other direction from someone who was supposed to be mine.
That’s what made Forrest perfect, in part, because he already knew the score about the Killough Company. Add his hotter-than-sin body, angel face, and puckish attitude to the vast convenience of him already knowing some hard-to-explain facts, and I was ready to drop a few grand to spend the week doing things guaranteed to send us both directly to hell.
“Did Rourke have ya on retainer?”
He cast me a look, lips firm and eyes judging me. “No.”
Blinking in mild shock, I rested my hand on his when he went to pull away. “I’m surprised you’re tetchy about it.”
He ducked his head in a sweet way I hadn’t expected from him, and I was intrigued at this side of the man. “You’re right. Uh… no, no money passed hands there.” He glanced along my body, and I felt unreasonably pleased to see his gaze linger on my groin. If a man who’d seen as many bodies as he had liked to look, then I was doing something right. Trying not to get a big head, either one, I led him along and around the pool, for all the world like we were on a date and I hadn’t discovered him wallowing in his troubles.
“And how much will tonight run me, angel?”
He grimaced. “There’s already an Angel here at the Virtue. I’m no angel.”
Smiling at his misdirect and taking it for what it was—if I had to ask, I couldn’t afford him—I pressed my hand to his where he held my arm. His breath caught. My belly grew hot at the raw reaction from him, something I would have thought his years working would have driven out of him. Or was he that good of a whore that he could spark my blood with innocent sounds? Fuck if I cared. “You’re a wee devil, yeah?”
That earned me a small chuckle, and I wasn’t sure quite why I felt like I’d won a difficult round of poker, but the triumph had me buzzing and high.
“Where’s your room?” he asked as I held the door for him. He moved his hand to the bulge of my bicep and squeezed as we went back through the threshold into the building. He seemed mesmerized by my body, sending small looks at my face every few seconds.
“Just here.” He followed my lead, occasionally darting stray glances around us from the corners of his eyes, almost like he was worried. That had me on the lookout, too, but he kept distracting me with light touches, sliding his fingers to different spots on my arm and caressing my muscles. Farther along the hall ahead of us a door flung open, and a man walked out of a room laughing loudly. Forrest flinched with the sound, a barely there reaction, but I felt it in the way he gripped me a tad tighter.
“Ya steady there?” I asked, concerned again. I didn’t like to see him worried, not at all.
He nodded and gave the most pitiful, trembling smile, and an imbecilic impulse I hadn’t felt in a very long while took me over.Ach, did he have my make, or was he just this timid once you got him alone? I always went more for the brash and bold these days, it was easier, but there was something about a man who needed me for this or that.
“Come on, now. Give us a smile, eh? I’ll tell ya a tale for one.”
“Really?” he said, perking up. “What kind of story? Bullshit one?”
“Course not.” I shook my head and tapped my finger to his cheek. He smiled again but pulled away from me. “There’s the button.”
“The what?”
“Everyone’s got one. Ya press it and they laugh.”
He rolled his eyes. “You’re full of it.”
“Maybe, but yadidsmile.”
Forrest let out a long sigh that might have been amused.
“You’ve been round, but I bet ya never heard about the time Killough—”
“Sir?”
