I exhaled a gusty sigh, imagined my scattered thoughts—and overly excited hormones—leaving my body along with a current of hot air. I could set my glands aside and do this. I knew, I’d done it before, after all—countless times before—and was certain that I’d do it again.
Baddie or not, incredibly sexy man or not, I had a job to do.
Adjusting my shirt so that a full inch of my lace edged bra was visible, I began my saunter across the bar. Normally I ignored the catcalls and whistles wrought by my appearance, fully aware that they had little to do with me or my prettiness quotient and everything to do with the amount of skin that I showed. Tonight though, the whistles chipped away at the icy barrier of my consciousness and threatened to break my stride—the stride that was already shaky.
Something about this man pulled at me, and pulled at me in a way that no man had since my last disaster of a love affair, and I didn’t want to pick him up. Well, I did, but not in this way. Not as a mark, not knowing that he was what he was.
A cheater, or a man showing signs of leaning that way. The unfaithful.
The unforgiveable.
Another whistle cut through the buttery thick depths of my reverie, and this time it strengthened my resolve. Distaste coated my tongue, bitter and dry, and I had to actively refrain from wrinkling my nose.
It was always the beautiful ones, the sexy ones, the charismatic ones. They figured that the world was their playground, and women their overeager playmates and toys. Toys to be discarded once the slick shine had worn away, to be replaced by something brand new in its crisp, stiff box.
I’d get him, I told myself as I did my best not to wobble on the three inch heels that held up my already tender arches. I’d get him good, no matter the fact that just a glance his way had the bitter disgust melting to chocolaty smooth lust on my tongue.
I’d get him, and save the woman who had requested the pick up the anguish that would surely come if she got any further involved.
The crowd around the bar where he leaned, nursing a sweating bottle of Molson Canadian, was three deep. Since it was mostly made up of men, I arched my back and breathed heavily enough to make the revealed flesh of my breasts, ghostly pale in the dim light, quiver.
As I’d suspected, I slid right on through. Maybe the men had meant to let me ahead of them, maybe they hadn’t, but with their goggling eyes all but attached to my tits, they lost focus and found that they had no say in the matter. Then I was at the bar, close enough to him to feel the warmth that seeped through the golden skin of his arm, and I forced away all thoughts but those pertaining to the job.
I got paid, paid very well, to do so.
“What can I get ya?” The bartender was a woman and looked weary of her job and the world in general. Ignoring her, I bit my lip coyly, shifted fractionally towards the man, and perused my choices.
“Mmm… Sex on the Beach, please.” I nearly gagged over the words of the painfully obvious choice, but I’d learned that every potential opening that could be taken in this job, should be.
The bartender, whose nametag read ‘Sheila’, began to mix. I could feel his eyes on me, watching with idle curiosity as a beverage the color of a summer sunset was placed in front of me, but the expected lame remark never fell from his lips.
No matter. I wasn’t that easily discouraged. Digging into the miniscule leather purse that I wore strapped to one shoulder, I dug out a crisp bill, laid it carefully on the bar even as I lifted the frosty cup of sweet liquid to my lips.
“I can’t change a fifty, honey.” The bartender pushed the bill back my way. “Biggest I can take is a twenty.”
“Oh, no.” I wanted to roll my eyes at the fake dismay that I forced to coat my voice. “But it’s all I have, and I’ve drunk some already.” I set the now three quarters full glass back down on the sticky varnish of the wood and willed embarrassment to flush my cheeks. “Oh shit, oh shit.”
“I’ve got change.” Triumph flooded my system when he finally spoke. Turning to face me, he dug two crumpled twenties and a torn ten from his pocket, swapped them for my fifty. “I’m getting out of here, anyways.”
Shit. This wasn’t how this was supposed to go. He was supposed to be held spellbound by the copious amounts of cleavage spilling from the siren red sweater, not look as if he could care less.
Though our client would undoubtedly be happier if I failed to pick up her potentially cheating boyfriend, I had never failed before. Again, I didn’t think that this was any indication of Angelina Jolie-esque hotness on my part, but more of the image that I did my best to portray.
Willing. Eager.
Horny.
Stall him, Hannah, I told myself frantically as the nearly comatose faced bartender rolled her eyes. Pushing the ten her way quickly, I beamed a crimson slicked smile up into the face of my rescuer.
“Thank you so much.” The layer of sin that had hit me when I first laid eyes on him wound a sinuous tendril through my hard heart and down into my quivering stomach. I tried to remove it, to unwind its undulating length from where it seemed to stroke inside me again and again, but it retreated only the slightest amount.
Focus, Hannah. Focus.
“You’ve got to let me buy you another beer as a thank you.” I signaled, a bit forcefully, I’ll admit, for the bartender to get one before he could refuse. I caught the roll of her eyes again as she popped the crimped cap with a metallic clang, slid the amber bottle across the bar and pocketed the cash.
Surely, with a fresh, cold one sitting in front of him, he wouldn’t be rude enough to refuse.
“Uh, thanks.” If I found the awkwardness with which he accepted the drink endearing, I’d just have to deal with it. If I found that the bob of his Adam’s apple made the moisture dampen the lace that rode between my thighs, I’d just have to deal with that, too.
“Really, I feel so stupid. I don’t know what I was thinking.” I didn’t much care for playing dumb, but it opened the way for conversation and allowed me a chance to study him more closely. The thick shag of his hair was darker than the pale sunshine that it had been in the picture, and the eyes were more intense, shining a truer shade of blue. Also, the snapshot had failed to impress upon me the lickable planes of the lean face, the width of the toned chest.
The tightness of the denim clad butt.
The lust inside me curled around again, causing nerves to swirl greasily, around and around. I couldn’t remember ever being so sexually drawn, so much so that every breath he took nearly made me forget what I was doing there.
Trying to get him to leave with me. Trying to prove what a cheating liar he was, so that the woman paying us a heck of a lot of money could either rest easier at night, or could move on along with her life.
“Excuse me?” Startled by the soft touch on my shoulder, I snapped out of the brittleness of my train of thought, focused my dark green eyes to the depths of his blue ones.
“I said, thank you. You didn’t have to buy me a drink. I really didn’t do anything.” There was that awkwardness again. It covered him from top to toe, and all the yummy space between, and made him look completely out of his element. Completely, though if his girlfriend’s suspicions were correct, he most certainly wasn’t. Thinking about it just made me mad again.
Drawing my anger in, I directed its energy to the curve of my lips and the flutter of my eyes. This guy wasn’t cute, not inside where it counted, anyways. His actions made him ugly, and I’d do well to remember that.
I drew a finger playfully down his chest, the interest that I wanted to display crystal clear.
“Sure you did,” I told him, exhaling breathily as I spoke. His eyes flicked as if bidden to my breasts, then back up just as quickly, and raspberry stained his cheeks.
This guy was good. Feigned embarrassment after looking at my eagerly displayed goods? Ha. All part of his game, I was sure.
Unbelievably, he moved back, away from me, just a bit. Clutching his beer like a life preserver, he looked over his sh
oulder quickly, as if searching for someone to come and rescue him.
What was his deal? For a moment a flicker of doubt flashed, lightning bright. Was he not attracted? Did he not like breasts? Or was he maybe just that faithful to his girlfriend?
As if reading my thoughts, he looked me in the face again, not even a hint of interest in his eyes. I wasn’t sure what to do with that reaction, having never encountered it before, at least not while working, presenting myself as I did.
The bartender chose that moment to drop my change over the heated skin of my left hand. It reminded me of the money that I would be paid for being there, and I realized that, before I could in all good conscience say that my job here was done, before I could say that no, Joshua Brentine, boyfriend of our client Cady Conly, was in fact not going to leave with me, I had to make one more thing abundantly clear.
Perhaps it was earlier in the encounter than I usually liked it to be when I dropped the bomb, and perhaps it was a hint of desperation stemming from my own self esteem. Either way, I sipped at my drink; wet my lips with the liquid. Leaning forward, rising to my toes, I whispered in his ear, close enough to make sure that he could hear me over the insane roar of the crowd in the bar.
“Let’s go fuck.”
His body jerked; his hand shot out and knocked over his beer, spilling a frothy pool of pale ale out onto the already sticky wood. The yeasty smell tickled at my nostrils as I moved in for the kill.
Tilting my head up, up to match his advantage of height, I pressed my lips to his. Once, twice I invited him with my kiss, finishing with the tiniest flick of my tongue against his teeth.
I drew back to see the shock in his eyes and the smear of red lipstick on his mouth, but instead of satisfaction I was hit with a churning waterfall of need, crashing over me, flooding my lungs. My legs wobbled and I stared, stupefied, as sparks snapped in the air audibly, at least to my ears.
To my ears alone, I realized as he continued to stare, frozen, while beer dripped and dampened an ever growing patch on his jeans. Unfounded disappointment thundered through me when I realized that, for the first time ever, I was both ridiculously drawn to one of my marks, and also had failed to reel him in.
“Well.” I couldn’t even conjure up a saucy smile to indicate a flippant air of ‘you win some, you lose some.’ Setting down my now empty glass, I stepped out of the pool of beer that had gathered at my feet, dampening my toes, and slipped again through the bodies pressing close to the brass rail of the bar. I could feel my face flush, the color of summer berries, as I wound my way through the crowd in a dance that I made sure to keep sinuous, just in case he was watching me.
I was sure that he was— I’d just gone all out and propositioned him for sex, after all. But watching me wasn’t the same as leaving with me, and that meant that I’d failed.
That failure meant that the woman who’d ordered the pickup from Hush Dolls Inc. was a very lucky woman.
What I couldn’t understand was why, after such a short meeting, and such an odd, awkward one at that, I was so unsettled by the fact that that very, very lucky woman wasn’t me.
***
“They’d better have Orgasm Cake.” I winced out a smile at my friend Vivi as she waddled along behind me, recoiling slightly as we opened the door to the Snowdrift Café and were confronted by wave after wave of warm, fragrant, noisy air, melting away the uncharacteristic crispness of the August evening.
Guilt washed over me like rain when I looked at my beautiful blonde friend, who was eight months pregnant if she was a day. Though I’d never been an expectant mother myself, I couldn’t imagine that I’d be all that eager to go out in public while feeling that I resembled nothing so much as a whale, either.
But I’d been desperate to get out of the house after spending my entire day off thinking about the previous evening’s debacle. Desperate to be around people, lights, noise, action. Anything that would take my mind away from the sense of rejection that continued to clasp its nasty little pinchers into my brain.
Vivi had to be bribed out of the comfort of her little house with the promise of her favorite dense, dark chocolate fix, a specialty of the very café that had live music on Saturday evenings.
That guilt came over me again, so I hurried to find her a somewhat comfortable chair, which I had to beg a young, punky teen out of. Dragging it over to the only tiny table left in the small yet extremely popular venue, I settled Vivi in before lining up for coffee and chocolate, treats that I myself also fully intended to indulge in.
In my opinion, there was nothing like them to help force a woman’s way out of a deep, dark funk— and I was in the deepest, darkest one that I’d ever been in right then.
I settled a steaming mug of chai latte and a plate of Orgasm Cake in front of Vivi, settled myself in beside her with my own goodies. She still looked slightly unimpressed to be out in public, and with the way that her belly jutted against the poky edge of the table, I couldn’t say that I blamed her. So I forked up a mouthful of chocolate and held it to her lips, waggling my eyebrows and gesturing at the small oil fueled lamp that flickered at our tiny table for two.
“I knew I’d get a romantic Saturday night date somehow.” I stuck out my tongue suggestively as she greedily swallowed the cake and pinched her lips together to repress a laugh.
“Ssh. The music’s starting.” I laughed back, pleased to have coaxed her out of her shell, at least a bit.
One by one, the first three musicians that squished themselves onto the makeshift ‘stage’ were almost enough to make me call it a night. One had a guitar that was horribly out of tune, the next a voice like a cat being thrown from the top of a very tall building, and the third performed a very monotone rap overtop of a bongo drum. Brushing my bark colored hair behind my ears, I leaned forward to ask Vivi if she was ready to leave— I was sure that she would be— when the fourth performer took the stage.
I was already pretty sure that I didn’t want to stay to hear him.
It was the music that made me pause first, the dark, haunting chords of a flamenco guitar that wove their way through the coffee scented steam to my ears. Then the voice— not the velvet hum that I would expect to play over the notes of the song, but a lighter, more unique flow that was nonetheless powerful enough to grab the attention.
Then, finally, the man himself.
I looked once and felt my mouth fall open like a broken window. I blinked twice, readjusting the contact lenses that filmed over the cloudy grey of my eyes.
The man standing on the inches square wood block of stage, rocking out to a Latin beat, was the source of my rejection. The reason that I was feeling low enough to drag my heavily pregnant friend out into the dark of night.
The only man who’d ever made me experience lust at first sight, and boy, was I feeling it now. That same pull that had hit me when I’d seen him the night before, through the sweaty haze of the club, latched onto me like a magnet that had found its mate. I had to fight to keep myself from making a dash straight for him, pulled along with the polarity.
“Hannah!” A sharp tug on the sleeve of my cotton sweater vied for attention against Josh, my mark from the evening before. I looked down to see Vivi’s flushed face, pinched with both embarrassment and amusement. “Sit down! You look…”
I sat, not letting her finish. I hadn’t realized that I’d stood, and now felt pretty dumb, since no one else had done so. I endured Vivi’s chuckles as my face burst into flame, praying that as few people as possible, and especially not a certain one, had noticed.
After a long moment I tilted my chin up in what I hoped was a surreptitious maneuver.
He was staring right at me, his head cocked inquisitively to the right, that look that people get when they know that they know you from somewhere, but aren’t sure where. For a brief, irrational moment I wondered if I should be insulted that he didn’t know me immediately, but then again, in place of the leather and lace that I’d worn during our first encounter, I was now clad
in cotton and denim, with the barest touch of color at my lips, on my cheeks, and elsewhere on my face.
Despite that, he remembered. I could tell the instant that he did. His eyes closed to half mast, his expression became more intense as the music swelled to a passionate, samba infused tempo.
The magnets tugged at me again, and all that I could think about was how it would feel to have my legs wrapped around his neck, and his face buried in the steaming space in between.
“Hannah.” Vivi tugged at my sleeve again, trying to drag my focus from the man to her. “I take it you know him? Who is he?” She was just asking what any good, curious friend would, but I was a bit resentful that I would have to look away from him to answer her question in a way that would satisfy.
“His name is Josh.” I flicked my eyes back to the stage. He’d looked away, into the opposite corner of the room, but I still somehow sensed that he was as aware of me as I was of him. It elated me, filled me with the emotional equivalent of helium, at least until I remembered the rest of the story, which I would have to spill to Vivi next to get her to quit bugging me.
Right. The rest of the story. The part where he was a cheater, so obviously so that his girlfriend had hired a company that specialized in catching men that liked a little extracurricular activity.
The part where, even though I’d thrown myself at him, he hadn’t wanted me. Hadn’t felt the same tug that I had, the one that was surely one sided even now.
“Let’s get out of here.” Abruptly I stood again, not caring that it was rude to leave while a musician was still playing. “You must be tired.” Vivi didn’t argue, and when I saw the thin violet shadows under her eyes, the mark of sleepless nights, I felt awful for having dragged her out just to indulge my funk over a man that wasn’t worth a second of my time.
Well, she didn’t argue, but neither was she ready to leave just at that moment. She shushed me, drawn from the details that I had yet to give her back to the unquestionably amazing music that filled the small room that danced in and out of the misty shadows and the flickering candlelight.
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