by Selena Scott
Jean Luc rose and stepped into the back hallway, toward his bedroom. If they were going out, which he did not want to do, he needed to go take a shower. Away from the group, he was pulling his sweaty T-shirt off over his head when he felt a thump against his stomach and an ‘oof!’
He ripped the shirt off his head and looked down to see Celia in a little pile at his feet. “Oh shit,” he murmured, crouching down next to her. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t see you.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head, her piercing catching the light and her hair flopping to one side. “That was my fault. I was reading and walking at the same time.”
She wasn’t looking at him; her eyes were pasted to the ground and it wasn’t until she rubbed her cheek over her shoulder that Jean Luc realized that she must have face-planted right into his sweaty stomach.
“I’m really, really sorry either way. I got you all sweaty.” The words made him blush and he was grateful for the dim lighting of the hallway.
“That’s okay,” she told him. “I don’t mind.” And that made both of them blush. “I was gonna take a shower anyways.” More blushing. “Oooookay. Yeah. I’m gonna go get ready now.”
She slipped past him into her bedroom. He hadn’t realized that they had the two rooms next to one another. He went straight for the bathroom and showered up quickly, wrapped a towel around his waist and ducked out of the bathroom just in time to catch Celia’s bedroom door open. She stepped out, nothing but a towel wrapped around her and earbuds in her ears.
They both nodded at one another and averted their eyes as she darted into the bathroom.
Jean Luc closed his door behind him and let out a long breath that he wasn’t totally sure why he’d been holding.
Back in the living room, Tre and Jack looked at one another with raised eyebrows. Something had gotten the third member of their trio’s heart racing. Huh.
***
Doc’s was, indeed, a real dive.
“Hope you’ve all had your tetanus shots,” Celia muttered under her breath as they walked in one after the other.
There were torn vinyl booths, dim lighting, the simultaneous aroma of lemon cleaner and sweat, a scarred-up wooden bar, and the requisite barfly locals in various stages of drunkenness scattered around the bar.
Caroline was on cloud nine. Whenever she and Peter went out, which admittedly hadn’t been for a year or two, they always found themselves at some swanky new Boston bar with sexy lighting and blue suede bar stools. There they’d order neon-colored mixed drinks that took eight minutes to make and cost $17.50 apiece.
She’d dressed up, picturing something like that, and so she wore dark skinny jeans, sky-high heels, and a drapey black top that accentuated the curve of her breasts; her hair was brushed to a high polish and she wore huge silver earrings. Oh, and her smile was about a thousand watts. Red lipstick and white teeth, she lit up the damn bar as she walked in and flounced directly up to catch the bartender’s eye.
“One Budweiser, please,” she ordered with something close to joy. “Oh, what does everyone else want?” She turned back to her group of friends, who all just stared at her, just like everyone else in the bar. The bartender, in their same general age range and not too terrible to look at, leaned across the bar and said something to her that had her spinning around, answering with a laugh and a smile.
“Somebody oughta keep an eye on her,” Jack said and Tre immediately stepped forward, sighing.
Jean Luc headed to the bar as well and Celia watched him go. She wondered if it was so that he could foot the bill, the way he’d insisted on doing with all their groceries.
Jack thought the bar was aptly named, because to his thinking, this was just exactly what the doctor ordered. They could do with a little group bonding, not to mention something to take their mind off all the waiting.
Martine snagged them a table amongst the many empty places to sit and Jack sat along beside her. His eyes followed Thea as she strolled, hands in her pockets, toward the pool tables, which were all currently occupied.
She watched for a minute before she headed back. Jack watched almost every head in the bar swivel to watch her go.
He knew the feeling.
The group assembled at the table, Jean Luc and Tre carrying multiple beers in each hand. They passed them out one by one.
“You’re not drinking?” Celia asked Jean Luc, determined to get past the embarrassment of basically motorboating his sweaty pecks in the hallway earlier. That had simultaneously been the hottest and most humiliating moment of her life. She considered herself a little sad for considering an accidental hallway bump to have been some of the hottest action she’d ever gotten in her life. But come on, the guy was an Adonis. His muscles had muscles. She didn’t think anyone would blame her for playing the firm, warm feel of him on repeat for the last hour.
“No,” he told her. “Never have.”
“Really?” Tre asked, leaning in, and Celia could have kissed him. All she wanted was more information about Jean Luc without having to be the one steering the conversation. “I thought you professional athletes usually partied pretty hard.”
“Some of them do,” Jean Luc shrugged. “But me and my bro—” he cut himself off and cleared his throat. “I grew up without very much money and I still don’t like spending very much on myself. And it takes a LOT of beer to get me drunk.”
Tre and Celia laughed until Caroline tugged Tre’s sleeve and he turned to talk with her. Celia kept her eyes on Jean Luc. “Come on, these Buds were a dollar each. Money can’t be the only reason.”
He looked at her for a minute, his gray-blue eyes into her midnight blue ones. “Yeah, I’m a big guy, you know? I’d never want to make anyone feel uncomfortable, or feel like I was out of control.”
Celia’s brow furrowed, like she didn’t understand, but really it was the only facial expression she could quickly force her face into that wasn’t ohgoodgodyouareadorable.
Okay. So her little dumb crush on him was being annoyingly persistent. Who cared. Old news. She was just going to have to move on.
“Pool?” Thea asked Jack across the table.
“You gonna hustle me, Ace?”
“Probably.” She cocked her head to one side and tipped her chair back on its back two legs, taking a swig of beer. “Although something tells me you’re not easily hustled.”
He shrugged, swiped his beer off the table and stood up. “Care to find out?”
They made a good match, Martine had to admit to herself as she watched the two of them go. Tall and capable. Tough. But he was a tumble weed and she had deep roots. Martine wondered vaguely if Thea would learn to tumble or Jack would learn to grow roots.
***
An hour or so later, apparently word had made its way around town that the famous Jean Luc LaTour and a host of his good-looking friends were posted up at Doc’s. There was barely room to walk to the bathroom. In fact, two of their chairs had gotten swiped from their table just so all the crowd around them could sit.
Jack and Thea had finally gotten access to one of the pool tables and they had barely taken a turn apiece, they were laughing so hard.
“I thought you’d be good at pool!” Thea said, leaning on her pool cue and laughing so hard she squeaked at Jack’s complete whiff. He wasn’t even holding the cue correctly.
“Why the hell you’d think that?” he asked, grinning back at her, pushing his cap up off his head and making himself look about ten years younger.
“I don’t know. You’ve got the whole rambling man, cowboy, drawling thing going on. I thought you’d be good at pool!”
“Well, you’ve got the whole Western woman, shit-kicking, take no prisoners thing going on. I thought you’d be good at pool.”
The truth was, they were equally, genuinely terrible and getting a huge kick out of it. “Darts,” Thea gasped. “I’m good at darts.”
“Then go play some!” grumbled one of the regulars from where he was perched on a bar stool waiting
for the pool table to open up. He was enjoying watching Thea bend over the table quite a bit, but it was very clear that the blond man with the scar on his eyebrow had a claim on her. Something that made the man grumpy.
Thea, still laughing, shrugged and went to hang her pool cue up on the wall. She’d kind of anticipated some kind of Color of Money Tom Cruise sexily teaches her how to play kind of thing. Instead they’d both laughed and looked like fools. Oh well. When she turned back, Jack was there, crowding her in, still laughing and hanging up his own pool cue. On a whim, because it felt good, because it had tied him up in knots to see her laugh like that, and because every man in that bar was looking for an opportunity to talk to her, Jack took Thea by the chin. Gently. Just guiding her with his fingertip, really. They were still laughing when they started the kiss. But they were not laughing when he backed her up against the pool cues, gripped one of them like he was going to snap its neck.
“Oh for the love of—” the grumpy man growled at their backs. “You folks mind if I choose my damn cue?”
Thea broke the kiss off and without looking back, tugged Jack toward their table. They both let out long, low breaths when they got there. Jack sat her down in a free chair with a light squeeze to her good shoulder. “Beer? Beer? Beer?” he asked Caroline, Celia, and Martine who also sat at the table.
He got three nods and a fourth from Thea. He shook his head as he walked away from the table of good-looking women. He swore every single male eye in the joint was pointed toward that table. Except for Tre and Jean Luc. Who were standing shoulder to shoulder talking to a curvy blonde woman and a girl with long, brown hair.
He clapped them on the shoulders as he passed and introduced himself to the women, more out of habit than anything.
“Our boys made some friends,” Martine said as she watched them.
Celia snapped her head to look and then immediately snapped back to face front. “He made a friend pretty quickly at the grocery store the other day, too.”
“Pays to be famous,” Thea said, watching Celia closely.
Caroline craned her head to see better. “Do you think they want to have sex with them?”
Thea and Martine laughed. “Who with who?” Thea asked.
“What?” Caroline shook her head, realizing that her question could have been taken in a lot of different iterations. “Oh. The men. With the women. Tre and Jean Luc. Not Jack. Obviously Jack wants to have sex with you.”
“Free country,” Thea said, shrugging. And she meant it. Though if she really thought Jack was about to use those particular freedoms to have sex with one of those high school graduates, his dick was about to have a very frank conversation with the toe of her boot.
“I think that they probably do,” Caroline said, answering her own question. “They’re very pretty girls.” She turned back to the group. “I’ve always liked trying to figure out stuff like that. In bars and restaurants. Trying to figure out exactly who wants who and who’s mad at who and who used to date, that kind of thing.”
“Sounds fun,” Celia said, looking around the bar to give it a shot herself, purposefully away from where the men in their group stood talking to those girls. “Though when I’m in bars and restaurants I’m generally talking with somebody.”
“Oh.” A light in Caroline’s eyes just sort of flickered out. “Right. Well, my hu— Peter is a really social guy, always meeting new people. So, when we go places he’s usually talking with them, I guess.”
Celia and Thea’s eyes connected for a second. They both got the same vision of adorable, vivacious Caroline sitting alone and lonely in a bar while her husband talked to other women. There was something off about the way she talked about her husband. She usually spoke with such unbridled joy. And then whenever this Peter guy came up, she just kind of extinguished.
They all had lives back home that had nothing to do with the one they were living here, Thea reminded herself. She shouldn’t judge Caroline’s marriage based on what she was observing here. She wouldn’t want anyone to judge her life at the homestead by her willingness to be here. Suddenly loneliness completely swamped her. She missed her big white house.
She missed her two horses. She missed the chickens. She missed the daybreak over the distant mountains. She missed falling into her woodsmoke-smelling bed at the end of the day. And more than anything, she missed her grandfather. What the hell would Chet Redgrave have really thought of all of this? She was sure he hadn’t had any idea of the goose chase he’d sent her on. And what, specifically, would he have thought of Jack Warren? It made her ache with sadness that she’d never find out.
Thea rose and pulled her phone from her pocket. She stepped out the front of the bar and called Ray at home. They spoke for a few minutes and he gave her a full update.
“I can’t thank you enough, Ray.”
“Thea, that’s enough now.” He’d told her it was alright damn near twenty times.
“But all this extra time that you didn’t account for. You’re gonna be stretched so thin at home and—”
“We’ve been through that, Thea. I’ll hire on some help if I need to. Your dime. As it is, I’m enjoying being busy. And it’s good for Loretta to miss me a little. You take your time. Have yourself an adventure.”
She hadn’t explained to Ray why she’d needed the extra time, but she’d gotten the distinct impression when they’d talked before that he thought she’d met someone. That a man was the reason she wasn’t hurrying back home. And wasn’t it?
She said her goodbyes and clicked off the call.
“Everything alright?”
Thea turned and there was Jack, leaning against the brick of the bar, his dingy hat tipped back on his head and one of his tennis shoes cocked up on the wall behind him. His jeans were worn enough to be almost paper thin and his shoulders stretched his T-shirt to the limit. The slice across his eyebrow winked silver in the fading light of the day.
Yes, she was woman enough to admit it to herself. It was definitely a man that was keeping her from returning home.
Thea walked straight up to Jack and took two handfuls of his shirt, yanked him down and to her.
They instantly creased into one another, flattening and pressing and holding. They swayed there, completely uncaring about the audience of smokers in the parking lot, or the cars flipping on their headlights on 68.
Jack’s tongue swept into her mouth and Thea knew it was searching for its mate. She gave it to him. He grunted as he tipped her head back and slow-slid his lips against hers. He made everything so soft and blurry. She was very aware that this man was a master at taking and giving at the same damn time.
“When we get home,” she panted as he dropped his forehead to hers and his green eyes stared into her blue ones. Apparently she didn’t have to finish her sentence.
“Yeah,” he nodded. “Hell, yeah.”
“We’re gonna need condoms,” she told him, knowing that she hadn’t thought to bring any with her.
“Lots of them,” he replied. His mouth landed on the pulse point in her neck and he nipped his way up one side and down the other. “Gotta pick some up in town before we head back.” He paused; he couldn’t not make sure that she knew. “The boys are gonna know, sweetheart. What we’re up to.”
“Do I look like I give a shit?” Thea asked, swaying when his hand found its way under her shirt to the small of her back. With one hand skimming over the curve of her voluptuous ass and one knee pressing between her legs, she wondered if she was supposed to feel this way. Like she was slowly lifting off from earth.
“Do you have any idea what I’m gonna do to you?” he asked into her ear.
“Tell me.”
“No, seriously, I was asking for ideas. I’m kind of a make-it-up-as-I-go-along type of guy.”
She laughed and rolled her eyes at him. Somehow his humor intensified her desire for him instead of lessening it. “I know what I’m gonna do to you.”
The laughter immediately dissolved in his eyes. “
What’s that?”
“I’m gonna make you forget your name,” she told him, leaning forward and wiggling against him.
His mouth was back on her neck when a voice interrupted them.
“Lovebirds!” It was Martine, five steps away. “You good for another round? We’re thinking we’re gonna leave in half an hour.”
They pulled away from one another, knowing that if they didn’t cool down now, they were gonna end up doing it in the dirt at the back of the bar. Which would have been fine by Thea but Jack had other ideas.
They joined the group back at the table and Thea let herself be pulled down into Jack’s lap. She passed the time by smashing her ass against his cock, giving a little wiggle here and there. “I know what you’re doing,” he whispered in her ear.
“Good,” she told him.
When the group was good and loose, and commending Jack on his idea to go out and cut loose for the night, they decided to quit while they were ahead. It was only a twenty-minute walk from the house and they’d hoofed it there, not wanting to drive two cars. They were over half the way back when Thea stopped midstep to swing back in the direction of town.
“Oh, shit!” It was gonna be a fifteen-minute walk back. “Jack, we forgot to stop at the drugstore.”
His mouth dropped flat open. How in God’s name could he have forgotten to buy condoms when he had Thea Redgrave ripe for the taking? How much of a fool was he? He could have kicked himself. Fine. It was fine. He’d go back himself and run the rest of the way home. Meet her there. “I’ll go back.”
The group had stopped to see what was holding them up. “Drugstore’s gonna be closed, Jack,” said Celia. “It’s past eight.”
Jack and Thea looked at one another in horror. They’d gotten real worked up at the bar and were really gonna need to bang this thing out. Immediately.
“What’d you need?” Celia asked. “We might already have it at the house— oh.”
The look on Jack and Thea’s faces answered her question perfectly, without words, and she found herself completely embarrassed for having asked. Yeah. She was pretty sure there weren’t any condoms at the lake house.