“I’ve been busy.” He sipped his rum, one arm on the table, as he watched Nadine attempt to flirt with his friend. Tossing her hair over that shoulder where her top was beginning to ride quite low. Not quite the prude she pretended to be. She had bite.
“So you’re a big city boy now.”
“Hm.” She was laughing, hugging her bare arms. Rael shot him a worried look that he returned with a stony glare. “Something like that.”
Nora’s eyes went over him, hot under the bar lights. “Whatever it is, it seems to be treating you well.”
“Still such a charmer.” His smile was reflexive, and cold. “Just like in high school.”
“You wouldn’t know,” she teased. “You didn’t go to our high school. You just played on the hockey team. Most of the girls had crushes on you.”
“Most of the girls,” Cal said deliberately, “were afraid of me.”
“I wasn’t.” She leaned forward, in a more studied approximation of what Nadine was playing at over there with Rael. “I would have followed you into the woods.”
“I’m sorry to have disappointed you,” he murmured.
Following his gaze with narrowed eyes, Nora scoffed. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised you’re spoken for. Nothing here was ever good enough for you, was it? Not for the family up on the knoll. We should all just be grateful you take the time tonoticewe exist.”
“Nora.” Cal sighed. “Stop it.”
“No, because why wouldn’t you import your girls just like you do your deer? Your great-grandfather felt the same.” She stood up unsteadily. “Screwyou.”
She lurched off unsteadily, bracing herself against one of the nearby booths. Christian shot him a sidelong look before turning back to the glasses he’d been worrying with a checkered cloth. A few people had glanced over at the sound of raised voices in expectation of a fight, but they reluctantly faced their own drinks and companions when his eyes threatened to meet their own.
I would have followed you into the woods.
This time, when Nadine twisted around to look at him, she flipped her hair back in a defiantly drunken toss that exposed her throat.
Taunting him.
Baitinghim.
And then, as if to further hammer home that claim, Deena and Rael got up and left together, leaving her there all alone. She got up, as shaky on her feet as Nora had been, walking out of the bar with a sway in her hips. Cal dropped a ten-dollar bill on the table top of the booth and left the Blue Bar without looking back.
A childhood spent almost equally divided between Ravensgate and Passer Woods had made Cal an expert in walking without making a sound. He was close enough to touchher when she stopped walking, tilting her head up to look uncertainly at the sky. Her long hair rippled like a curtain with the movement, swishing tantalizingly against the small of her back.
“You’re really walking back alone?” he demanded.
Nadine jerked, her head turning sharply to the side in a movement that looked painful. “What happened to your friend?” she retorted bravely.
“You sound jealous, Nadine.”
She took a step back from the path, the grass whispering beneath her feet. He twisted into a sharp turn that had her stumbling as she tried to keep him in sight and retreat all at once. “What are you doing? You’re making me dizzy.”
“You shouldn’t be out here all alone in the dark.”
“Why? Because you might drag me into those stupidwoods?”
What a spectacular idea.
He had herded her off the path, towards the weathered brick buildings that comprised the old civic center. The trees were alive, crickets and night birds calling from their respective shadowed depths. Cal slid fluidly into their darkness as Nadine, twisting around, whispered, “Cal?”
At his silence, she ventured closer to the building, closer to the woods. He could see her shoulder blades move, taut beneath her skin, the muscles of her back rippling as she bent to check around the wall. He dragged his fingers down her spine, pressing just hard enough with his nails to be discomforting. “What do you know about my woods?”
She shrieked—which made his cock stir with a throb—and broke out into a run. Not for town, but deeper into the woods.A laugh escaped him, low and pleased. He knew she’d heard it because her legs pumped harder. She was going to make him work for it.
Festina lente. It was an old Latin motto that meant “hurry slowly.” It referred to studied efficiency and thoroughness, but it was also the key to his pleasure, and even if he were to have instructed her personally, she could not have pleased him any more.
