CHAPTER ONE
JAVIER
For the record,I know better.
I know it’s not polite, proper, or possibly even legal to have your hand up someone’s skirt in the third row of a massive SUV while she bites your bottom lip and the rideshare driver stares out the windshield and blasts country radio. I know that Madeline and I should be making awkward small talk while the car crawls past all the grime and neon of Atlantic Avenue on a Saturday night, counting down the minutes until we’re at her place.
I should probably know her last name, or what she does for a living, or literally one thing about her besides her first name and the fact that she’s got bright pink hair that smells like roses and bright red lips that taste like lime. The second we made eye contact across the bar, my entire fucking brain shut down. Madeline is, without a doubt, the hottest person I’ve seen in my entire life, and the skin on her upper thigh feels like warm, soft silk.
But learning her last name would require talking, and we haven’t talked much at all past basic introductions. Not since I dared her to dance on the table in the dive bar and she saidNot in these shoes, but you can give me a show if you’d like, andthe next thing I knew we were making out in a dark corner, and she was palming me through my jeans and sayingI live twenty minutes away.
She lied, because it’s been fifteen and we’ve gone about seven blocks, and every moment we spend like this erodes my impulse control a little more.
“You said you lived close,” I tell her, digging my fingers into her inner thigh.
She squirms and her breath catches and her hand currently grasping my belt tightens. “You said you could wait.”
“I never said that. I’d remember.”
“It was implied,” she says, and her head falls back against the headrest, and her eyes lower to half-mast. Her bright red lipstick is barely smudged in one spot, and I can’t stop staring at that tiny break in a sharp line.
“I implied wrong,” I say, and she’s got one foot in its glittery high-heeled shoe on the back of the row of seats in front of us, and she rolls her hips so her panties brush my finger. They’re smooth and silky and body-heat warm, and my brain goes completely blank.
After a moment, I realize she’s staring at me, wide-eyed, chest heaving. She flicks a glance toward the driver—right,fuck, the driver, Jesus Christ—and as I move my hand, she grabs my wrist and guides it to her waist. I pull her in and kiss her again, both of us straining against our seat belts.
“I almost let you,” she murmurs against my lips.
“You almost made me,” I murmur back.
She’s wearing a cropped black tank top, and there’s an inch or so of skin showing between it and her electric-blue skirt. My hand is on fabric, then under it. Madeline makes a noise and grabs the front of my shirt, pulling me closer as my thumb traces skin and underwire.
The car stops suddenly, jostling our mouths apart.
“Dammit,” Madeline hisses when she looks around to see that we’restill on Atlantic Avenue, holy shit, though since I can see the Atlantic Fun Park out the back window we’re nearly to the southern end. “It’s twenty minutes most of the time.”
I move my thumb higher and stroke it over her—well, her bra, but it’s probably where her nipple is, and she swallows hard. I do it again, and it’s fine, it’s nice, but it’s not?—
“Take your bra off.”
“We’re in the back of an Uber,” she says, one side of her mouth already curving upward.
“I know where we are.”
Madeline wriggles, smirking, arching and pressing into the seat belt. Her eyes don’t leave mine and the smile doesn’t leave her face as she wriggles more, bites her lip, then sits back to pull the straps over her shoulders and the bra out through one armhole. She stops looking at me long enough to shove it into her purse, then grabs the headrest with her left hand and puts her right on the bare thigh, exposed by the high slit in her skirt.
“Anything else?” she asks. She sounds breathless, the seat belt over her chest pulling her shirt tight over the hard points of her nipples. I circle a thumb around the left one, dragging the fabric with me. She inhales softly, watching me.
The SUV stops again,inthe crosswalk this time, and a swarm of people move past the tinted side windows and the un-tinted back window.
She glances out at them, and I slide my hand under her shirt. Madeline makes a noise and her eyes go to half-mast again. She swallows hard, her throat working in the dark.
“Just don’t get me arrested. I’d be bad at jail.”
“At worst they’d hold you overnight for public indecency.” I pinch her nipple, making her gasp. “It’s Virginia Beach. I see worse every day.”
“I wouldn’t be any better at a holding tank.”
“Then keep still and don’t make too much noise,” I say, and try to position myself so I can use both hands. Right now, I’d give almost anything not to be buckled into a car.
