by Jill Monroe
“Don’t stop,” she urged.
Tony toyed with her. Teasing then stroking the sensitive bud between her legs until all she could feel, breathe and hear was Tony. She lived for the next touch of his fingers. Her heart beat with the rhythm of his fingers. Then his hand moved lower and he delved inside her moist heat. Prickles of sensation pummeled her, and she held on to his neck with what little strength she had left.
“You’re so wet. How could I have taken it?”
“Taken what?”
“Not being able to rip off your panties and bury myself inside you,” he told her, his voice guttural with need. Then he increased the speed and pressure of his strokes.
With her eyes squeezed tight Hayden leaned into his hand; the only sense she cared about right now was touch. A feverish bliss spread from her core to every tensed muscle and jazzed nerve ending she possessed. Her legs stiffened and Hayden hissed in a breath as she toppled over the edge of sensation, climaxing in wave after delicious wave.
Tony gently spun her around in his arms, and she settled her cheek against the soft cotton of his button-down shirt. His heartbeat raced beneath her ear, and she managed a weak smile, knowing her pleasure at his carnal attentions had made his body react.
“That was without a doubt the most thrilling thing I’ve ever done in public,” he whispered, his voice tight with unspent desire. Even the gentle slide of his breath against her ear elicited a tidal wave of shivers.
There should have been a moment of acute awkwardness in a situation like this. After all, the man had made her fly apart shoved up against the wall in a club while people on the floor below were setting up for the evening.
But Hayden’s whole body felt sated and relaxed and too good for her to worry about what to say or how to act with the man who had driven her to this satisfied state with the caress of his fingers.
“I could listen to the sound of your moans every day until the moment I died.”
She smiled and hugged him tight.
He snapped his finger. “I am a filmmaker after all. I could record you and listen to them anytime I wanted.”
She reached for the hem of her top and gave it a few fluffs so it wouldn’t resemble something that had been smashed against a wall. “Yeah, sure. Maybe make it your ringtone, even.”
Even in the dark, she couldn’t miss his narrowed eyes.
“Kidding. No,” she told him flatly.
“Hello?” a voice called from outside the door.
6
“DAMMIT,” SHE MUTTERED, frantically trying to smooth her hair.
“It’s probably the manager. The waitress must have told him about us. I bet he just realized two people came up here and haven’t gone back down yet.”
Hayden might not feel awkward with Tony, but she’d be all kinds of uncomfortable if a stranger found out about her intimate encounter up here. Maybe being caught wasn’t as enjoyable a fantasy as she’d suspected. “You think there’s a back way out of this place? Maybe we can sneak out.” She grabbed his hand. “C’mon.”
But he was like a boulder that refused to move. “Hey, it’s all right. So they found us making out up here. No big deal.”
She’d forgotten that Tony wasn’t exactly a stranger to getting caught breaking a few rules. “We did a lot more than make out.” She had the tingling aftershocks to prove it. “Texas may be big, but it’s uncanny how we seem to run into people we don’t necessarily want to see. He’s going to know someone I know, and then everyone will know. I’ve worked too hard, sacrificed too much to lose it now, and what just happened in there dances way past the indiscreet line. Behavior like that makes employers wonder whether I can make good judgment calls.”
Tony ran his fingers through his hair and straightened his shirt. “Don’t worry, you look great. He won’t suspect a thing,” he whispered.
Her back straightened at the rush of shivers his soft words evoked. “He will if you keep whispering at me like that.”
The doorknob turned and a young guy with fashionable beard stubble, gelled hair and a loosened-for-effect tie popped in and flipped on the light switch beside the door. “There you are. Tanya said you two were up here. Did you find what you were looking for?”
“Yes,” she stammered, blinking against the harshness of the light after being shrouded in darkness for so long.
“Almost,” Tony responded a second behind her.
She bit the inside of her lip to keep from smiling. There’d be no almost for him the next time they were alone. She’d make sure of it.
“Then I guess you’ll be on your way then,” the manager said, opening the exit door wider.
So polite, and yet he was delivering a clear message: Get Out.
“You wouldn’t remember us from last night, would you?” she asked. Of course they hadn’t been throwing around Benjamins then or buying a car to paint like a ladybug, but they could have done some other crazy thing here that the club’s staff wouldn’t forget anytime soon.
Except the manager shook his head. “My night off, but the bouncer was here. He would have seen everyone who came through our front door,” he said as he jerked his head toward the stairwell, clearly ready to get them out of his club. Not as polite.
They dutifully followed the manager down the staircase, across the flashing dance floor and back through the draped hallway. A big, beefy guy who had probably played offensive line in high school and college was chugging what appeared to be a protein shake while watching the Cowboys play on a small screen over the front door. The TV was probably a security monitor during business hours.
“These are the people Tanya was telling us about. As they were on their way out, they wanted to ask if you recognized them from last night.” Then he glanced at them. “I’ll leave you to it,” and he returned to the club.
The bouncer angled his head from left to right as he stood behind his stand. “Oh, yeah, I remember you.”
Her pulse quickened. A clue, a clue, a clue! It was almost too much not to dance around and high-five. What did football players do? Give a smack to the rump? No, spike the ball.
“You didn’t want to take off your wristbands and put on ours.”
And just like that, her excitement was doused. “But we did put your wristbands on. I’ve seen a picture.” This could be the wrong club after all, but everything pointed to Lavish. “What kind of wristbands did we have on when we came in?
“Like those plastic, can’t-take-off kind you’re given at the hospital when you’re admitted with a concussion or an MRI or something.”
“Did we mention why we were at the hospital?” Tony asked.
“You think one of us got hurt last night?” Hayden asked to Tony. “Maybe we met at the emergency room.” That might be why the tattoo hadn’t hurt yet. Perhaps some long-lasting pain relief medication. Nothing on her felt sore, but then how could she really tell?
“That would be a story,” Tony replied.
The bouncer only shrugged.
Tony returned his attention to the burly man. “But we eventually took the bands off, right?”
“I had to cut them off, but yes.”
“Do you know if we took them with us or, uh...” she let her words hang. What a ridiculous conversation.
“I tossed them in the trash.”
This conversation was about to get even more ridiculous. “Where would that trash be now? In a Dumpster out back?”
The bouncer squatted and looked under his desk. “You’re in luck. The janitor hasn’t pulled it yet.”
Hayden sprang around and joined him behind the desk. “Hey,” the bouncer bellowed.
“Really? I’m scaring you? You’re like two and a half of me.”
“My place.” He made a wide circling motion encompassing the area behind the desk. “Your place.” Then he made the same wide circling motion where Tony still stood.
She suppressed a heavy sigh. “You’re right. That was rude of me. I’m just pretty desperate to find those bands.”
He crossed his thick arms. Those muscles couldn’t be real. Men didn’t bulk up that big unless they’d taken something. “How can you be? You didn’t even know about the hospital bracelets three minutes ago.”
“The information that’s on them is what we’re desperate for. We’ve been trying to piece together what we did last night.”
His lip lifted in a smile. “Oh, so you don’t remember. Don’t doubt it. They must have let you out of the hospital way too early because you were flying high on something.”
The manager laughed at that, announcing his return. The waitress from earlier, Tanya, right behind him.
Hayden and Tony passed a quick glance. Another clue. So nothing was slipped into their drink here. They had come here already under the influence of whatever.
“Could you do us a solid and let us look through the trash?” she asked.
“No.”
“Seriously? You didn’t even pretend to think about it.”
“Yeah, I’m just messing with you. Be my guest.” The bouncer stepped aside so she could go behind the desk, this time with an invitation. A small office-size trash can filled with receipts and who-knows-what else waited for her on the floor.
She squatted beside it then glanced up at the manager. “You serve food here, right?”
He nodded.
“Then I’m sure you have some latex gloves in the kitchen? Maybe another trash bag?” she asked with a forced smile.
“I’ll be right back,” Tanya offered.
“So who’s winning the game?” Tony asked the bouncer while they waited. Was that small talk or was he interested? Perhaps something to file away for Project Getting To Know The Man You Plan To Romp On Later. Growing up in Texas, it was difficult not to like football, so she stared at the little screen right along with them.
“Not us. Damn running backs.”
Tanya hurried to them with the gloves and another trash bag.
Hayden thought about asking if Tony would like trash duty, but then, he’d made her explode in his arms just a few moments ago. Plus she’d done her fair share of dirty work the past couple of years trying to pay for school; so unfortunately, trash detail rested firmly in her wheelhouse. She snapped the gloves in place and crouched down next to the trash can. With a flick of her wrists and a whoosh she opened the extra trash bag, and then sank her hands into the trash.
“Gross.” The bouncer laughed.
Hayden glanced up to see Tanya and the manager staring down at her, laughing along with the bouncer.
“Have none of you ever watched someone dig around in trash before?” she asked, which just made them all laugh harder. Okay, she must appear pretty ridiculous, and she smiled at Tony for a moment then she refocused on the task in front of her. A new person wearing a janitorial uniform joined them, too. Whew! They’d cut it close.
With techniques an archeologist on a dig in Greece’s ancient ruins would have been impressed by, Hayden lifted a ballpoint pen, dozens of cash register receipts and scrunched-up napkins from the garbage and stuffed them into the new trash bag.
There! Close to the bottom rested two plastic hospital bands.
“Found them.” Yeah, take that, trash! Cue the guitar riffs and anthemic chorus because she felt a power song coming on.
The first band had a black ink blot, most likely from a ballpoint pen explosion, that obscured the name of the hospital and its address. Useless. Hayden tamped down a groan of frustration. She grabbed the second band, and although there was ink smeared across the hospital’s name on this one, too, the address was clear.
She lifted the band in triumph for all to see. “Same address as where my phone is located.” Hayden stuffed the rest of the trash inside the bag, carefully slid off her gloves and tied the trash bag shut.
“You wouldn’t mind taking that out to the Dumpster out back for me, would you?” the janitor asked.
She and Tony stared at him, but he only shrugged. “What? You’ve already done most of it.”
Hayden had to laugh. “Sure, but you’d really make my day if you told me a phone has been turned in.” Tony’s might not be with hers. There was still a chance it could be here.
But everyone shook their heads at her hopeful question. “A phone would be long gone by now,” the manager said.
She stood and pumped into her palm a glob of hand sanitizer from the bottle left for patrons at the bouncer desk. Gloves or no gloves, she still wanted to wash her hands, and she was pretty sure they’d worn out their welcome here at Lavish, so there’d be no using the restroom.
The Dumpster stood in the same parking lot as their car. “I can’t believe you still took that out for them,” Tony said as he opened the passenger door for her a moment later.
“It was the least I could do. They did give us our biggest pointer so far.”
“It was a pleasure to watch you work,” he told her, then kissed the tip of her nose before she got in the car.
Her nerves began to shoot off again as they neared the address on their bands, but it wasn’t a hospital or clinic that waited for them—it was an inconspicuous medical office. Affixed to the wall rested a sign stating PharmaTest with its hours of operation. Closed today. And tomorrow, but Tony tried the handle anyway. Locked up tight.
She felt like stamping her foot. “Oh, we were sooooo close.”
“But at least we have some answers. We weren’t drugged, at least not maliciously. PharmaTest sounds like one of those volunteer drug testing facilities.”
“That makes sense. I used to volunteer a lot for those trials because until recently I didn’t have health insurance and these drug testers will sometimes give you a full checkup along with some cash. Usually I get sorted into the placebo group. Not this time—full side effects. It’s been a while since I volunteered for a trial, but I still can’t believe this wasn’t one of the first things I thought of.”
“Well, whatever they gave us messed with our memories, so a side effect could be our short-term reasoning abilities.”
“Did you just make that phrase up?” she teased.
He chuckled. “Maybe. It makes sense that I came here, too. I’ve been tossing around the idea of a documentary on big pharma and the testing cycle and trials behind our meds. Thursday night I must have stopped in here to conduct some field research and ended up volunteering.”
“If I hadn’t needed a bit of extra cash to buy my graduation gown, or if you’d decided to stop at some other research facility, we might never have met.”
But Tony was somewhere else. Distracted.
“What color is your car?”
“Yellow. Why, do you see it?” She scanned the lot behind her until she spotted her beat-up hand-me-down sedan in the lot across the street from PharmaTest. “Tony, that’s it! Have you ever laid your eyes on anything uglier or more beautiful than that?”
“I’d say Ladybug, but...”
“Ladybug was a work of art,” she defended.
But her current car? Hayden had always had a love-hate relationship with it. Of course she didn’t look down on reliable transportation, but with its distinctive yellow color, her friends loved to joke that she should hire herself out as a taxi to earn extra cash. She grabbed his hand. “C’mon, maybe we locked our phones inside.”
The parking lot was close enough to the offices of PharmaTest that it would register as the nearest address on the mapping application.
She dug into the pocket of her jeans as they ran toward her car, tugging out her keys. She opened the driver’s side and then reached across the seat to unlock Tony’s door. He eased in beside her. “You check the glove box while I look in the console,” she suggested.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing here, either,” she said, letting the lid drop into place. “The phones must be inside the testing office.”
They had their answers now. At least most of them. What she didn’t know was what happened next.
“So Monday...?” she began slowly. Trying to prompt
him.
“Monday,” he agreed.
Here’s the point where she should put the romping part of Project Getting To Know The Man You Plan To Romp On Later into effect, but she was suddenly shy. She wasn’t sure where to look or where to put her hands.
And dammit if Anthony Garcia wasn’t acting the gentleman again and giving her space and time to decide what she wanted to do next. This sexy man beside her had reached for her or tried to kiss her every time they were alone, and now they were damn close in the tiny confines of her car. Yet the man kept his hands to himself.
And stop cursing him, she told herself, because he was actually being very respectful and she should damn well appreciate that and not be frustrated.
Only she didn’t want him to be a gentleman.
Well, there was only one way to get what she wanted; she had to lay her cards on the table. She licked her dry lips and glanced his way. “Tony.”
His gaze bored into hers.
“I may not remember how we got together last night, but I know why. You are, without a doubt, the most incredible guy I’ve ever met. I’m glad whatever happened to us last night happened. Maybe it let me put my guard down so this could happen.”
She stroked the side of his face, the prickly stubble sending thrills through her. “This would be a lot easier if you kissed me,” she admitted.
“Ask me to kiss you,” he urged.
Instead she took the initiative, as she had with their first kiss to jog their memories. She drew his mouth to hers and kissed him. Long and slow and savoring. Heaven. Booyah—she could do old-school ravishment, too. His mouth parted beneath hers and Hayden pressed herself to him as close as the center console would allow. The heat and scent of him wrapped around her, honing her need of him to a fine point.
“I don’t want to stop,” he muttered.
“Then don’t.” But he’d already pulled away from her. Rubbed his chin. She’d witnessed that move enough times to know that was his go-to thinking action. Then he gazed at her, his eyes half-lidded, the pupils molten.
“Not like this, Hayden. I want a bed and you and...”