“Because I already have a job.”
He looks at me for a long time. Then he picks up his knife, lines it up next to his fork. “Think about it.”
“Sure.”
CHAPTER 5
CARMINE
Tomorrow’s booked tight.” Clarissa started wearing jeans last week instead of skirts, ones that sit low on her hips and make her ass look like a meal I want to eat. My cock stirs against my thigh as I listen to Clarissa—my employee—talk about tomorrow’s schedule. “Liam’s got three back-to-back starting at ten, and your two o’clock pushed to two-thirty so I moved your three to three-fifteen to give you a buffer.”
“Good.”
“Clancy’s eleven canceled.” She leans past me to set the spray bottle on my counter. Her hair swings past my face, and I get a lungful of her—cocoa butter, shampoo, a sweetness that has no business being in a tattoo shop. My hand tightens on the tattoo gun I’ve finished cleaning, because what I want to do is drop it and pull her into my lap. “I put a walk-in hold on the slot in case we get one.”
“Good.” Two goods in a row. I know I sound like a monosyllabic fool, but there ain’t nothing I can do about it.
Last week, the speaker at Liam’s station died, and now Clarissa is plugging in the one that was delivered today, and I’m about to lose all self-control. She bends to plug in the cord, and her shirt rides up at the back—an inch of skin, the curve of her waist, sexy fucking dimples just above the waistband. My cock is hard as steel as I watch her. Fuck. I shouldn’t want her, but… How am I supposed to ignore this curvy goddess?
I’ve had women in this shop—artists, clients, women who came in wearing next to nothing and leaned over my station on purpose. None of them made me feel even ten percent of what Clarissa does.
She straightens up and pushes her hair back off her face with her wrist. “You’re quiet tonight.”
“I’m always quiet.”
“Quieter than usual, then.” She tilts her head and studies my face. If she could hear my thoughts, she’d run. Or she’d climb into my lap. I don’t know which scares me more, but I’m getting to the point where I need to know, or I’m going to explode.
I set the gun in the case and watch as Clarissa drifts to the flash on the wall behind Liam’s station—the koi, the chrysanthemum. It’s not the first time I’ve watched her study the flash.
“Maybe I should get a tattoo.” She says it to the wall. Her fingers hover over the koi’s tail, not touching the paper.
Every alarm in my head goes off at once. Her skin. My hands. Hours in my chair. I know without a shadow of a doubt that touching her andnotfucking her is unfuckinglikely.
“No.”
It comes out harder than I mean it to. She turns.
“No?” she asks, turning to me with a surprised look on her face. “You said my skin would take it well.”
I put my tattoo gun away. “A tattoo is permanent, Clarissa. It’s not jewelry you take off. It’s a needle dragging ink into your skin, and it’s there until you’re in the ground. Once it’s on you, it’s on you—and you will look at it every day and remember who put it there and how it felt. Do you understand that?”
“I know what a tattoo is, Carmine,” she laughs and rolls her eyes. “I work in a tattoo shop.”
“You work the front desk.” I stand up. Put the counter between us because the distance I had wasn’t working. “Do you know what it means to have someone’s hands on your skin for three hours—holding you taut, dragging a line through you? That’s intimate. Your body belongs to the person holding the machine for as long as the session lasts.”
I shouldn’t have saidhands on your skin. My brain is already showing me what it would look like—her in my chair, shirt pulled up, my gloved hands on the bare curve of her ribs, her stomach tightening every time I wipe the line, her eyes on my face the whole time. I grip the edge of the counter, and the metal bites into my palm.
“I’ve been looking at portfolios for three weeks. I know what I want.”
“Liam’s good with first-timers.”
“I don’t want Liam.” She folds her arms across her lush tits, and my cock threatens to rip through my jeans. Does she realize how fucking sexy she is? Is she knowingly being provocative? “I want you to do it.”
Me. She wants me to mark her virgin skin—the skin I’ve been thinking about since the day she blurted out that she was a virgin, and not just the ink kind. Feeling her pulse jump when she said that nearly made me come in my pants.
I want to be the first to mark her, and I want to be the first to touch her—to spread her out and be there while she discovers what she likes and what makes her scream in pleasure—and my cock aches in my jeans. If I put a needle on this woman, I will not survive it unless she’smywoman.
“I want to at least talk about it,” she says, not backing down.
