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CHAPTER THREE (#ua9bdc36d-b843-5838-8e5f-eff5d1fa8dea)
THE SURFACE OF the bar was sticky beneath his hand as Ford placed his whiskey glass back down. It was his second of the night, and he felt like he needed to indulge in at least one more, just to get his head back on straight.
He’d been feeling off center ever since the interlude with a certain little mechanic that afternoon. Damned if he could entirely understand why.
“One more?” Even in the dingy bar that was connected to the equally dingy motel he’d had no choice but to book a room in, the bartender who approached him was still more his type than the woman who’d laid into him about responsibility that afternoon. Tall and slender, with icy-blond hair and a neat sleeveless blouse, she more closely resembled the women he dated back in the city.
Neat. Proper. Nice.
He considered for a moment, contemplated indulging some of this frustration in a flirtation with the blonde. Maybe it would lead to a nice dinner and some equally nice sex.
Before he could consciously decide, his hand covered his glass. “Not right now, thanks.”
There was a flicker of disappointment in the blonde’s eyes as she nodded and walked away, and Ford cursed himself. That was the kind of woman he should be attracted to.
Curvy mechanics with rainbow-bright ink snaking over their pale skin didn’t belong in his life. Not even for a night. And not because of that brightness...but for other, darker reasons.
Settling back on the stool where he’d been seated since the need to escape the shabby motel room had clawed at his skin, Ford blocked out the thunderous music from the old-timey jukebox and allowed his mind to pull up the image of her—of Beth Marchande.
Nothing about her made sense.
She moved like she couldn’t care less about anything but was quick to speak up when she had something to say. Confident—she was quietly confident, owning her curves in a way that stick-thin women he knew back home didn’t seem capable of.
Her hair, in that long, thick braid, was midnight black up top and twisted with bright purple below. Purple...what kind of woman had purple hair?
And yet he couldn’t stop imagining it wrapped around his fist as he thrust into her.
Jesus. He needed to get a grip or he’d embarrass himself in the middle of this dive bar.
He’d been in her presence for less than an hour, and yet he already knew he’d never forget her. She was too vibrant to ever be erased.
“Forget about it.” He’d fucked it up that afternoon by being an asshole, he knew that. It would be best to signal that sweet blonde bartender and order another drink, to forget all about Beth Marchande of Marchande Motors.
But damn it...when she’d stood there, hands clasped submissively in front of her? When she’d issued that invitation, had said she liked being told what to do, while he could just make out the outline of a barbell piercing her right nipple, pressed against the tissue-thin fabric of that skimpy shirt?
She’d pierced right through to the core of his basest desires, the ones that he tried with an iron fist to keep locked away and buried.
Lots of men with his power, his position, indulged in all sorts of hedonistic things, and he didn’t judge them for that. But after seeing his father go through wife after girlfriend after mistress, treating them all like his possessions?
As far as Ford was concerned, nice men didn’t have the urge to tie their women up. Didn’t have their palms tingle with the need to redden white skin, to leave a mark of mastery.
The tattooed little mechanic made every one of those latent desires come roaring to the surface, threatening to boil over.
That just wouldn’t do.
And yet here he was. He hadn’t been willing to be far away from the Turbo, sure, but that wasn’t the only reason that, instead of calling a car to take him home, he’d taken a room in the one small motel he’d been able to find close to the shop.
The woman had hooked him. He was interested, even if he didn’t want to be.
Bad idea, Ford. Very bad idea.
“Excuse me?” Lifting his head, Ford raised his hand to signal for the bartender again. He’d have that third drink, and then he’d go take a long, cold shower. He’d work from his motel room until his car was ready, and then he’d go, as fast and as far as he could.
Out of reach of temptation.
The volume of the music increased with the next song, something slow and sultry that he didn’t recognize. Down the length of the vinyl-covered bar, a large young man wearing work boots stumbled onto a stool and slapped a fiver down. “I need a beer, Sallie, and I need it now. There’s one hell of a show goin’ on over there, and I’m thirsty.”
“Coming right up, Ned.” Ford watched as Sallie—the cool blonde—slid a longneck across the bar to the rough-looking man. The bartender then leaned against the length of covered wood, looking off in the direction the man had come from, and the man looked that way, too. Both seemed to be settling in to watch a show.
Ford followed their gaze, and lust was an instant, heated punch to the gut.
His sexy little mechanic was on the dance floor, and she was working it.
Torn, faded jean shorts cut off high on her shapely thighs, barely covering an ass that was curved enough for a man to get a good grip on it. A white lace camisole on top revealed enticing flashes of skin as well as a black bra that held her full breasts up nice and high.
Black leather boots with high spiked heels wrapped the length of her calves and all the way over her knees. He could imagine her with nothing but those boots on, hands clinging to his headboard as he moved, hard and fast, between sweetly spread thighs.
She was gorgeous. Not his type at all, with the crazy hair and the tattoos spilling over her collarbone and arms. But on her, it worked. He shifted uncomfortably and noted that it seemed to work just fine for him, too.
“Damn.” Ford couldn’t hold back the groan as Beth shifted, stepping into the light, and he realized that she wasn’t alone. No, she had a woman at her front, a man pressed to her back and her eyes closed, her expression dreamy as she rocked between the two bodies, every movement sensual and sure.
The man behind her was dark and swarthy, and Ford might have thought to be jealous if he hadn’t been so fascinated with the way the man fisted Beth’s hair and pulled her head back. What he’d seen of her today said that she’d protest being forced to do anything, but her lips, shiny with red gloss, opened with a moan that he couldn’t hear but that resounded in his head regardless.
The woman in front of her, a redhead in a tight dress, rubbed her breasts against Beth’s own. Ford shifted on his stool, his cock hardening fully as the woman dipped her head and licked a slow trail down Beth’s neck.
Damn.
As if he’d spoken out loud, Beth’s eyes fluttered open. Lifting her head, she looked across the bar, over to where he sat, aching...and right into his eyes.
Earlier today her eyes had been the color of the afternoon sky, but now they were sapphire fire, the flames licking along his skin. His gut tightened as she smiled lazily, then slowly, sensually disengaged herself from the tangle of limbs.
Behind her, the couple continued their dance, but Ford didn’t care—his eyes were on the woman who was crossing the room toward him with slow, deliberate undulations of her hips.
“Fancy meeting you here, Sir Lassiter.” She stopped well into his personal space, and that vanilla perfume made his mouth water and his jaw clench.
“Sir?” He arched an eyebrow and tried really hard not to do what he wanted, which was to reach out and place his hands at her waist, to slide her shirt up and feel the warmth of her skin beneath.
“Mmm, you seem like a sir.” Beth smiled and inched closer, stepping right between his spread thighs. He felt his expression darken—she knew exactly what she was doing, what she was asking for.
“What makes you say that?” His instincts told him to tug her flush against his body, to press her to him so she could feel exactly what she was doing to him.
He did not.
“You seem all proper and noble...like an aristocrat. A knight. Sir Lassiter.” Beth nudged forward just a whisper, and he felt the curve of her hip press into his inner thigh.
His mouth went dry.
“Like you’re trying so hard to do what you think is right. But tell me something.” Tilting her head back, she looked up into his eyes, searching. “Why is denying yourself something that you want, that we both want, the right thing? I know you feel it, too.”
Her open question gutted him. He’d been in the boardroom with billionaires, with sheikhs, with sharks, and he’d bested them all.
The little woman who smelled like cupcakes? She was bringing him to his knees.
“I—” He started to explain, but she cut him off, stepping back, her sudden frown breaking the spell.
“I see.” Her lips pinched together in a mockery of a smile. “I’m not the kind of woman you want to get involved with, right? Not even for a night. Let me assure you, that’s your loss.”
Wait...what?
“Wait just a damn minute.” When Beth would have turned, Ford did as he’d imagined, catching her by the waist and hauling her back into the vee of his legs. This time her pelvis connected with the steel length of his erection, and he savored her sharp little intake of breath. “What do you mean?”
“I think it’s pretty self-explanatory.” Beth regarded him coldly, though she didn’t back down. “My hair, my tattoos... I’m far too wild for you.”
“Oh, do you think so?” The way she was looking up at him, so certain she was right, was a challenge, and he felt something inside him roaring to life to meet it.
She thought he was turned off because she wasn’t his usual type? Well, he couldn’t deny that she was not at all the kind of woman he was usually drawn to, and his instant attraction to her puzzled him more than a bit.
But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was what she made him feel.
“I don’t give a damn about the color of your hair or the ink on your skin. Got it?” The need to prove that she wasn’t the problem was quickly overriding his sense of restraint, the only other thing that had held him back from accepting her sweet offer that afternoon.
“I don’t know you, yet you make me want things I’m not comfortable wanting. Make me feel things I shouldn’t.” His hands at her waist squeezed, hard, to emphasize his point, and he savored her resultant shudder, which ratcheted up his own excitement.
“Why would you be uncomfortable wanting something if it doesn’t hurt anyone else?” She was watching him again, lids heavy over those big eyes. “Or maybe you think that it is hurting someone?”
He kept his stare on her face, absorbing every nuance of her expression, which was open, honest.
Something told him that Beth Marchande wasn’t going to be disgusted with the demands he might make of her.
“Sometimes a little bit of hurt is good, Sir Lassiter...especially when I’m begging you for it.”
“Fuck.” Dragging his hands up her sides, over her rib cage and the swell of her breasts, Ford clasped Beth by the shoulders and tugged her forward, crushing her smirking lips to his own.
Rather than offering him a kiss as sweet as the vanilla she smelled of, she moaned beneath the pressure and opened, her tongue surging out to tangle with his.
One hand slid behind her head and fisted in the long mane of raven and amethyst hair, just as his fingers had itched to. He tugged her head to the side roughly and then dragged his lips down the column of her throat, settling over her pulse and sinking his teeth in to claim.
“Well, what’s it going to be, Sir Lassiter?” Beth’s breathy question rasped in his ear, and she shuddered when his teeth marked her skin. “Are you going to be good? Or are you going to be bad? What do you think?”
Shoving his glass aside—he felt intoxicated just from being near her—Ford stood, making sure that every plane of his body glided against hers as he did.
Her eyes glittered with the same need that he felt as he quickly pulled a fifty from his wallet and tossed it onto the surface of the bar.
“I think...” Ford deliberately wrapped his fingers around her own, drawing them up to his lips to nip. “I think that we’re going to go back to my room right now. And I’m going to find something better for that smart mouth to do.”
CHAPTER FOUR (#ua9bdc36d-b843-5838-8e5f-eff5d1fa8dea)
WHAT AM I DOING?
This woman was different. Exotic. Wild. Not like anyone he’d ever been drawn to before, and he wasn’t sure why he was attracted to her now. He didn’t do exotic, didn’t want wild.
And yet when he placed a hand at the small of her back to guide her out of the heated bar, he swore he almost felt a physical shock from just the press of his fingers to that small dip in her spine.
The Turbo had been his first acquisition on the road to success. He’d kept it because nothing had ever felt as good as that first achievement. That first marker of success that he’d earned on his own, not riding on his parents’ coattails.
Over the decade since its purchase, he’d bought and sold cars, property, investments. Had pursued some of the most interesting and beautiful women in the world. Had grown his small hotel chain into something internationally renowned.
Nothing had come even close to recapturing that thrill, the high of knowing he’d achieved something on his own.
Nothing, that was, until now.
Beth said something to the giant man standing by the door as they passed, making the other man laugh. Then they were outside, the cool air of early fall in Massachusetts as refreshing as a swim on a hot day after the beer-soaked heat inside the bar.
He watched as she shook her long fall of wavy hair back. The bright purple seeming ethereal and mysterious in the fading light.
What was going on with him? Purple hair wasn’t sexy. Full-sleeve tattoos weren’t sexy.
Except that on her, it was.
He stuffed his hands into his pockets as she looked him over. Those blue eyes of hers seemed almost to glow, full of wicked intent as she took her time regarding him from head to toe.
His body responded, dark need curling tightly in his gut. No, he had no idea why he wanted this woman so badly, but he did, wanted her with a craving that seemed primal in its intensity.
“I’d invite you back to my place, but I could tell this morning it wasn’t exactly your cup of tea.” She smirked at him, a knowing little smile that made his mouth water. She was provoking him deliberately.
That exchange they’d had earlier in the garage. The dynamic between them. Unless he’d read it very, very wrong, she wanted the very thing that he tried hard not to offer.
“Clearly you didn’t think I was serious about finding something better for your smart mouth to do.” He couldn’t help it. The needs that he was usually fine ignoring were clawing beneath his skin, begging to tear their way free to be with her.
The sharp inhalation of her breath was confirmation. An ache spread through his core.
Nice men don’t want this.
Then maybe he wasn’t a nice man.
“Coming?” Arching an eyebrow at him, Beth turned and started to walk in the direction of the motel. He couldn’t have stopped himself from following.
The small rectangle of parking lot was bordered on three sides with rooms. He’d been assigned to room twelve, and when he’d checked in earlier he’d been unimpressed by the cheap floral bedspread, the rough green carpet and the dated lighting, though at least the place was clean. Now he noticed nothing but Beth as she kicked the door closed behind them, seating herself on the edge of the bed and looking up at him with a hint of mockery in those insanely blue eyes.
He wanted to fist his hands in the long waves of her hair and taste her lips again, to touch her until she was breathless and all traces of that mockery were gone. He wanted to flip her over and bury himself inside her.
He needed to get a grip, needed to take the control back. So far she’d hinted at what she wanted but had been the one in the driver’s seat.
No more.
“Do you like wine?” The hinges on the small minifridge whined as he opened it. Earlier he’d refrigerated a bottle of the best chardonnay he could find at the tiny grocery store on the corner. He was stymied when he realized that he didn’t have a corkscrew.
Frustration mounted. He was supposed to be in charge here. Why couldn’t he grab hold of it?
