by Amy Andrews
Raf couldn’t believe it had only been a handful of hours since he’d held her. This last hour, watching her working in that t-shirt, had been pure torture.
He wrenched away, breathing hard, one hand tunneling into her soft, springy hair, the other one cupping her neck. He looked down into her flushed face, loving her wet mouth.
His gaze dropped lower to her throat then to her t-shirt admiring the way it clung in all the right place.
The Best Beer in Brooklyn.
“God,” he muttered dropping his hand from her hair back to her hip. “I love the way your breasts look in this shirt.” His other hand drifted from her neck to her cleavage toying with the fabric. “I wanted to tear this bloody thing right off you the second I walked in today.”
“That would have given the customers something to talk about.”
Probably but right now that was far from Raf’s concern. Right now he just had to touch her. His index finger moved from the v of her cleavage to the swell of her left breast where he drew large concentric circles, starting wide then moving inwards, getting closer and closer to her nipple. His cock swelled as the nipple grew to a hard point before his eyes and her lids fluttered shut.
“Raf,” she whispered and the desperate little edge to her voice made him want to swipe everything off the desk, lay her back on it and bury himself inside her while he gorged on her nipples.
His thumb rubbed at the hard little bead and she sucked in a sharp breath. Then she swallowed and licked her lips and he dropped his hand to her hip and yanked her in tight as he lowered his mouth to the pulse fluttering in her neck. She stretched her head back to give him unfettered access which he took greedily, licking up her throat to her mouth then blasting it with all the heady lust and crazed passion that bubbled and seethed inside him.
By the time she pushed against his chest they were both breathing hard. “God…stop, Raf,” she said, pulling out of the kiss, leaning her forehead against his sternum, her hand fisted into the front of his shirt. “I have to get back.” She looked up at him. “They’re going to wonder where we are.”
Raf knew she was right but he wasn’t letting her out of here until they’d set another time to see each other. “Okay,” he murmured, dropping his hands from her hips and backing up a step, giving them both some space to get their bodies under control although his erection was probably going to need hours. “Come out with me after work again tonight?”
She shook her head, her curls bouncing around her face. “I can’t.”
“Tomorrow night?”
She chewed on her bottom lip and he wanted to step right back in and press his mouth there. Didn’t really help his erectile issue though.
“I can’t.”
“The next night?”
“I can’t just keep asking everyone to cover for me.”
She sounded defensive and glanced at the door like she wanted to bolt. It was ironic that in a city full of women he had to go and develop a thing for the most unavailable woman in New York.
It should have put him off, given him pause. But it didn’t. “You’ve only asked once,” he reminded her gently.
“And how often would you like to go out with me?”
He smiled sheepishly. “Every night.”
“Right,” she said with a nod. “So you can see my dilemma?”
“Okay…fine.” He took a breath. It was no big deal, right? He was going to be seeing her every day anyway. And given that he’d already kissed her in the basement and the office it wasn’t like they were devoid of possibilities for a little physical contact.
“When do you think you might be able to get away again?”
“Nights are hard,” she hedged. “The pub hours aren’t exactly sociable and everyone’s busy with their own stuff.”
“So, let’s go during the day. What about Saturday?” Surely she could get staff or have one of her brothers cover on a weekend? “That gives you plenty of time to arrange something and we can go to the Met? You can educate me there as well.”
A spark of something that looked awfully like possibility flared in the deep blue of her eyes and he knew he had her interest.
“I could…that might work.”
Raf smiled and nodded. “Good.”
She smiled too. “I’d like that actually. It’s been… ages since I last visited.”
Raf supposed he should be affronted that she was more excited about their destination than the company but he knew after four days of pulling her into every nook and cranny the pub had on offer, that a bunch of old paintings wouldn’t be the only attraction.
“Then it’s a date,” he murmured. “What time does it open?”
“Ten. But we don’t have to be there first thing,” she said dismissively. “We can just go for an hour or two and leave when you get bored.”
Raf chuckled. “Do I look like that much of a philistine?”
“Oh no, I didn’t mean – ” She looked at him part horrified, part flustered and so damn sexy it took all his willpower to stay put. “Not everybody’s an enthusiast is all.”
Raf realized he could probably spend hours looking at paint drying with this woman. “Ten it is. You’re making me wait four days so you better believe I want to spend all day with you.”
“Oh,” she said, straightening a little. “I’m not sure I could… get away all day.”
Raf stepped forward and backed her up again, planting a hand either side of her on the desk. “Try.” And he kissed her quick and hard before pulling away and getting the hell out of the room.
*
“Earth to Faith?”
“Sorry.” Faith shook her head. Mercy and Dawn had shown up unexpectedly about an hour after Raf had cornered her in the office. “I was just…thinking about…” Raf walked behind her on his way to the taps greeting her friends as he passed by.
“About?” Dawn asked with faux innocence as they all watched Raf’s ass.
Faith dragged her gaze away. “About the summer menu,” she fobbed.
“Riiiight,” Mercy nodded, her attention firmly glued to Raf’s rear end.
“Anyway,” Faith said, suppressing a rather unreasonable urge to blind them. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“We called an emergency booth meeting,” Mercy said finally looking at Faith.
“We?”
“Dawn and Zel and I.”
“Zel?”
“Yes,” Mercy said and then, as if to confirm it, the front door opened and Zel strode in.
Faith wasn’t sure exactly what they wanted but she could guess. “I’m working,” she said.
Mercy looked around her at the dozen or so customers.
“Raf,” she said, raising her voice but not taking her eyes off Faith, “you can watch the bar while we have a word with Faith, right?”
He excused himself from his customers and walked their way in an unhurried fashion. “Of course,” he said, his smile as wide as the Hudson River. “No worries.”
No worries. She’d heard Raf say that a couple of times now. Mostly she forgot he came from the other side of the world but he sounded so Australian uttering those two little words.
No worries?
He had no idea how these three women could make her squirm.
“Drinks?” he asked them.
“A bottle of champagne,” Mercy said without hesitation and Faith blushed under the sudden scrutiny of Zel and Dawn.
Raf just smiled. “One bottle and four glasses coming up.”
“Three glasses and a virgin mojito,” Zel corrected. “Usual booth, Faith.”
“Sure,” Faith said, “I’ll just make the mojito and bring the drinks over.”
Her friends ambled to their usual booth. “They want to know all the gory details, don’t they?” Raf asked, his voice coming from a place tantalizingly close to her ear as he scooped ice into a metallic bucket.
“Yup.”
He embedded a cold champagne bottle into the middle of the ice. “You going to gi
ve them a blow by blow?”
Faith squeezed her thighs together as she grabbed for the mint thinking how much the word blow was turning her on right now. “Maybe.”
He grinned at her, utterly unperturbed that she was about to talk to her girlfriends about intimate details of their sexual hijinks last night. Such a player.
“Don’t forget to embellish,” he said as he placed three glasses, upside down in the ice and passed it to her. “Make sure you give me an extra inch.”
Faith laughed. “If I give you an extra inch they’re going to think you’re some kind of mythical creature.”
He shrugged. “That works for me.”
Faith shook her head at him; warning signals flashed in her brain even as her chest filled up with a bubble of happiness. Last week she hadn’t been able to see past the increasingly smothering sensation of being left behind and today anything seemed possible.
He was some kind of mythical creature.
Chapter Eight
‡
“So,” Mercy said, jumping straight in as Faith sat down and Dawn poured cold fizzy champagne into three flutes. “I take it the date went well.”
Faith took a sip as three pairs of eyes looked at her expectantly. Over the last year she’d sat and listened to all their stories feeling happy for her friends while desperately trying to suppress a dark jealous streak and today she felt light enough to string them along a little.
“Yes.”
“How well?” Dawn pressed.
“Oh…you know,” she said with deliberate vagueness.
“Tiptoeing-into-the-apartment-at-five-thirty-this-morning-minus-the-three-condoms-I-gave-her well,” Zel jumped in.
Mercy gasped, covering her mouth, her eyes sparkling merrily. Dawn raised her glass and tapped it against Faith’s. “Well done, my friend.”
“Thanks,” Faith said with a smile.
“So,” Mercy murmured, slipping a sly glance in Raf’s direction and back again, “is he…?”
Faith smiled as she thought about that extra inch she didn’t need to fabricate. “Oh yes.” Yes he was.
“And does he…?” Dawn inquired.
Know what to do with it? “Double yes.” Rafael Quartermaine knew exactly what to do with it.
“So…did you guys arrange to go out again?” Mercy asked.
Faith nodded, chewing her lip. “On Saturday. To the Met.”
“Huh, smart man,” Mercy teased. “He’s sure worked out how to get into your panties.”
Everyone laughed but Faith sobered quickly as she turned to Dawn. “Do you think Finn will be up for some bar work on Saturday? Are you guys doing anything? I know it’s kind of short notice and – ”
“Of course we’ll do it,” Dawn said, cutting her off.
Faith wanted to feel relieved but by the same token, Finn was a highly-sought after classical musician. He’d trained at The Juilliard and worked with world famous orchestras. She didn’t want to drag him away from something important. “Are you sure? I’ll be gone all day but I’ll make sure we’re back by six.”
Finn could sling a beer as well as the rest of her brothers who had all worked behind the bar as they were growing up, but it had been a number of years since he’d worked it regularly and Saturday night was one of their busiest.
“Positive,” Dawn confirmed. “He needs the break from composing at the moment. It ruins him. He needs the everyday.”
Faith nodded. She’d seen how Finn’s music could consume him. “Megan will be on from lunchtime as well. The main thing is to check on Pop every now and then.”
“Of course,” Dawn assured her, squeezing Faith’s arm. “I’ll stay with Pop. Finn can work the bar. We’ll manage, don’t worry.”
Faith nodded, torn between what she wanted and what she’d allowed herself. Finn and Dawn would be fine she had no doubt but how would she fare? Would she be able to just fall back into familiar routines when Raf went back to Australia?
Would she ever be satisfied with her old life after that?
“To the Met,” Zel said, holding up her glass, yanking Faith’s careening thought processes back to the here and now. Everyone raised their glasses and clinked.
“Speaking of art,” Mercy said, sliding her glass on the table and looking at Faith speculatively. “How would you like a job?”
Faith looked at Zel and Dawn who appeared as puzzled as she was by Mercy’s curious offer. “Er…in case you haven’t noticed I have my hands pretty full with this one.”
“No, no,” Mercy said, pushing her long ebony hair back behind her ear. “It’s just a little side job, one that requires your artistic flair.”
Faith sat back in the booth. Her? Do an art job? “Oh…I don’t think so. I think my creativity is long gone.” All she drew these days was the occasional Central Park landscape.
And, as of this week, Raf’s naked body.
Mercy shook her head. “Come on, Faith, I know what a great artist you are. We all do.” Zel and Dawn nodded in agreement. “I still have that portrait you painted of me that first year at St. J’s. You don’t lose that kind of talent. Maybe it gets rusty from lack of use but that’s something you’re born with. It’s God given.”
Faith shifted uncomfortably as everyone looked at her expectantly. She sipped her champagne for something to do, something to focus on as Mercy’s idea took root.
“Go on,” Dawn urged. “You know you want to.”
Faith wished she could deny Dawn’s statement but, despite myriad reasons why she didn’t need another job of any ilk, a little kernel of interest flared to life inside her.
Her muse woke up. Another step forward in taking more control of her life? She twisted the stem of her wine glass. “What kind of art job?”
Mercy smiled at her as if she’d already triumphed. “We’re launching a rosé. It’s called Rosa which is Spanish for rose. We want a unique wine label for it and we’ve hired a bunch of companies to come up with concepts and images but there’s been nothing so far that we’ve loved. Want to give it a shot?”
Faith blinked. She didn’t have the first clue how to create something like this. “Oh, Mercy…I wouldn’t even know where to start.” The thought was depressing as hell. “I know nothing about the digital technologies they use these days. I struggle with the stupid accounting spreadsheets for the pub. I have zero graphic design skills. I’m just a painter.”
“But you see, I think that’s exactly what we need,” Mercy implored, her face as animated and passionate as it always was when on her favorite subject – wine. “We need an artist. Someone who’s passionate and connected to their work, connected to us and the industry. You must have looked at a zillion wine labels over the years.”
“Not to mention how well she knows her altar wine,” Zel quipped.
Faith groaned and everyone laughed. But Mercy was right, even though she poured more beer than wine, she had seen a lot of labels and, from a purely artistic standpoint had always been fascinated by them. There were some absolutely stunning labels out there.
And some real dogs.
“We don’t want a concept that’s just some money earner for a company. We want something different and unique. Don’t worry about how the image gets from you on to the bottle, that’s the easy part.”
“So I just what…paint a picture and if you like it then you take it from there?”
“Well that’s kind of the condensed version,” Mercy said with a laugh, “but yes. And we’ll pay you for it. We’ll pay you well for it.”
“Do you have any idea what you want?”
“Not really. Something beautiful and tactile and… feminine. Because women are the target demographic. And utterly unique. Like one of those priceless paintings in the Met that you love so much. Something that makes the customer want to touch it, want to buy it just for the label alone.”
“No pressure,” Dawn grinned.
Mercy laughed. “You might already have some stuff in your sketches that could be perfect.”<
br />
The only thing she’d sketched of late was a reclined, nekkid Raf and she was pretty sure nudity wasn’t big on wine labels. Although, if the target audience was female then a bare-assed Raf would be perfect. He was after all highly tactile. God knew she’d been having trouble keeping her hands off him all damn day.
“I can email you a heap of stuff about it. Concepts we’ve discarded, the notes we’ve made on it already, the sort of things we’ve talked about. Just take a look at them and see what you think. Can’t hurt, right?”
Faith was unbelievably tempted. She was scared shitless too but something she hadn’t felt in a very long time started to simmer inside her. She looked at Dawn and Zel who were nodding at her in encouragement.
“It does sound pretty good,” said Dawn.
“Right up your alley,” Zel agreed.
She glanced over at the bar at Raf who happened to look at the same time and smile and it was like the roof had lifted off and he was being bathed in a freaking stream of glory from heaven.
Was that some kind of a sign too?
“Well?” Mercy prompted.
Faith dragged her gaze and attention back to Mercy. A worm of excitement wriggled through her belly. After years of same-old, same-old and the recent transformation of her friends’ lives, this moment felt like more than just a job falling into her lap.
It felt like a game changer. Another positive step in reclaiming Faith.
“When do you need it by?”
Mercy grinned. “We launch the wine over the summer. So in the next month or two.”
Faith gave herself permission to dream. Why not? She couldn’t do that where Raf was concerned but maybe she could do it with this. It wasn’t like it was going to interfere with the pub or looking after Pop.
“Send me the email.”
Mercy gave an excited little bounce in her seat as Dawn threw her arm around Faith’s neck and Zel raised her glass. “To a new career,” she said.
Faith wasn’t so sure about that. But it finally felt like she was living her life instead of letting it pass her by and she would definitely drink to that.
Chapter Nine