by Lindsey Hart
“I get what you meant.”
“No, I realize now that what I just said was really fucking shitty. I mean- err, really terrible. I shouldn’t make jokes about your nether region after what my sister said.” Her face flushed hot, even though she was used to crude shop humor. There wasn’t a single thing that she hadn’t heard or even said over the past years. “I- I very much doubt that she was correct if that helps.”
Rhett’s eyes darkened dangerously.
Shit on a stick. That look on his face sent a straight shiver of desire right to her own nether region. Everything tingled and burned, including her damn ovaries. She felt so very… female at the moment that she was mad at herself. Her hands nearly strangled the steering wheel.
“Uh- okay. This isn’t helping. I’m sorry, okay. I’m sure you have plenty of chances of meeting a nice girl in the future and having nice babies. I know from my parents that you’re obviously well off, so you must be smart enough to have got this far. By the way, you said it was just your mom. I’m assuming she raised you as a single parent and you didn’t inherit that money. And you’re uh- really good looking.” Her entire body heated up a thousand degrees. She could practically feel herself ovulating. And dying of shame and embarrassment, but she sensed that if she didn’t tell Rhett the things she was blabbing on about, he’d take that stupid dick comment personal. What guy wouldn’t? “You’re young too. You’ll meet someone who appreciates all those things. It will be like a breath of fresh air and you’ll never take them for granted after what my sister did since you’ll realize all they have to offer. It’s like the good after a lot of bad. The sun after too much rain.”
Silence. Shitty. Awkward. Silence. “That’s very poetic,” Rhett finally ground out.
Bella’s palms became slippery and wet on the wheel. “Yeah. English major, remember?”
“Where are we going anyway?”
She didn’t dare look at him again after she’d just said all that stupid, mushy crap to try and make him feel better. Why was she even so worried about cleaning up Sarah’s mess? Oh, right. Because she was the one who found her sister’s poor, withered, sad, devastated, puking fiancé looking like a piece of discarded trash. It struck a nerve with her since it was how her family had always treated her. Like she was a mistake, something to be thrown away, a horrible accident with completely haywire set of genetics that they were meant to be ashamed of.
One look at Rhett’s horribly sad eyes and she knew just how he felt. She’d been there too. Part of her was still that little lost girl who would have done anything for her parents’ and sisters’ approval, and she hated herself for it.
Bella’s eyes scanned the road and on impulse, she changed lanes, cutting off two other cars, and screeched to a stop in front of a liquor store. “Here. We’re going right here.”
Rhett stared hard at the sign before he turned his eyes quizzically to her. Bella turned back around. The pain all over his face undid her.
Annndddd, he was just so fucking hot it was absolutely wrong.
How could her sister have cheated on this guy instead of with him?
If Rhett was hers, she’d book them a damn hotel room and tell him to meet her there, just so she could pretend they were strangers, do some illicit, really bad fantasy and cheat on each other with each other. Fucked up, but so, so, sexy.
She’d never claimed to be a saint.
Or anywhere close.
So, sue me.
“Don’t you think you’ve seen enough vomit for one day?”
She slowly shook her head without turning around. “Not nearly enough. I think we both could use a drink. We’ll go back to my hotel room, drink our pain and bad memories away, sleep it off, feel like shit in the morning, and move the fuck on. Deal?”
More awkward silence. The car was full of it. Then Rhett cleared his throat and said in his panty-melting tone. “Sounds good to me.”
CHAPTER 4
Rhett
“To the Berns. May they burn in hell.”
Bella grinned. The empty bottle of whiskey sat on the table between them. They’d taken turns, passing it back and forth between them. It wasn’t until the thing was down to its last leg that Rhett actually took the set of plastic hotel cups, unwrapped them, and poured them each a healthy three ounces that finished the bad boy off. He offered a toast, and since he was shitfaced on an empty stomach, it came out all garbled and slurred.
“I’ll drink to that.” Her words were equally as slurred.
Rhett would have felt bad, normally, for doing this. But he’d just been through one shit day. The worst that he could remember in a long time. He’d just found out his fiancée was two-timing him, been accused of having a small dick, fled the church, driven around aimlessly while the sister of the woman he was supposed to marry, tried to help him feel better in the most incredibly strange way. He was insulted half the time, but honestly, he did feel a little bit better. Or maybe that was just the whiskey, seeing he was now back in her hotel room, hiding from the world, and had just consumed that whole bottle.
A record for him, since he didn’t normally drink and especially not anything hard. A few beers were usually his limit.
Bella was actually handling it far better than he was. His head swam and he had to throw a hand out onto the table top to keep from falling out of his chair. The odds of him throwing up again were definitely very good.
Pathetic. No wonder my fiancée left me.
Or I left her.
Whatever.
They both downed what was left in their glasses. The whiskey didn’t even burn Rhett’s throat anymore. It was amazing, how as he got more drunk, he tasted it less. The amber liquid might as well have been water for all he noticed.
The chances of him having just given himself alcohol poisoning were pretty good. And it still felt better than how he’d felt back at the church.
That was the great thing about whiskey. It numbed all of the shit he didn’t want to think about right out.
He started noticing other things instead. Like how pretty Bella was sitting across from him. How the sunlight coming in through the curtains on the large window illuminated her gorgeous hair so that it looked almost blue from certain angles. How her lashes were so thick and long. How her lips were full and pinker than before. How her smile dazzled him. How when she leaned forward, her dress gapped just a little bit, giving him a view of her creamy skin and a peek at the swell of her breasts. He was a gentleman normally and would have looked away, but not this time. His eyes remained transfixed like the drunk asshole he currently was.
“Up here.” Bella reached out, set a warm finger underneath his jaw, and tilted his face upward. She didn’t seem bothered, offended, or flattered. “You were talking to my boobs.”
He tried to slur out an apology, but his tongue was thick and heavy in his mouth and all he wanted to do was lean forward and taste Bella’s sweet looking lips.
He’d wanted to do that when he was still sober.
The urge was practically punching him right in the face and he couldn’t stop himself from awkwardly leaning in.
She didn’t pull away. God, she was delicious. Glorious. Her mouth was like being a sinner and somehow stumbling into heaven anyway. Her lips were so, so soft. Petal soft. Her tongue was honeyed perfection and when it parted the seam of his lips and thrust into his mouth and found his, he was gone. Finished. Done.
Whiskey was responsible for so many bad decisions. So many regrets. But they’d come later. Later he could deal with it. At the moment, whiskey or not, bad decisions or not, all he wanted was Bella.
***
Rhett’s heart pounded out of his chest. Strange bright flashes clouded his vision, while his eyes opened, and the room began to spin violently, compliments of half a bottle of whiskey he’d downed in record time.
His first instinct was to stick a leg out of bed and plant his foot firmly on the floor. He’d done that when he was sixteen and been drunk for the first time at his best frie
nd’s house. Matt’s parents were out, and they had a bar in their basement. They’d sampled a few bottles, again of the hard stuff, and got completely tanked. It was late and Matt had the idea that they should just sleep it off. The only problem was that Matt had bunks in his room. Thankfully, Rhett got the bottom one. He was able to stick his foot out and that helped with the spinning. It didn’t help with the fact that Matt pissed himself on the top bunk and it might have dribbled down onto Rhett’s face in the middle of the night.
No wonder he never really drank anything other than a casual beer here or there. His first drunk story was horrendous.
Bella stirred beside him, trying to get close. She rolled towards him and placed a hand on his chest. Her touch set off a series of sparks in his blood and what do you know, his happy stick really liked that. Which was astounding, given that they’d just- and it was the best of his life- and that he was thoroughly drunk. Wasn’t whiskey supposed to a boner’s worst enemy? Apparently, his cock didn’t get the memo.
His mind whirled as Bella’s raspy breaths echoed in his ear. It was amazing. He’d never seen- or felt- someone come like that in his whole life. Er- from what he could remember. Which wasn’t much. The black holes filling up his mind were dicey at best.
Still, from what he could remember, those few minutes here and there, an image of a hard, dark nipple, the taste of her on his lips, all of her, it was the best he’d ever had. Because he’d been kicked below the belt, because he was at an all-time low, a dark, slithery thought crept into his head. Maybe it wasn’t just that they were drunk. He knew now, in hindsight, that Sarah had faked it. He wondered if he’d given her a real orgasm at all over the past few years.
It didn’t say a lot about his skills.
Or his brains, given that he hadn’t known it until after the fact.
Here he was, bound and determined to stop being so damn gullible. So easily taken. Here he was, with Sarah’s sister. He’d just- they’d just…
He pulled away, more disgusted with himself than anything, as his head cleared. Some of the whiskey induced fog rolled away and he realized what he’d actually just done. His stomach dropped out and rolled and he had to swallow hard to keep all that whiskey down where it belonged.
“Did you just…” he rasped as he rolled away, taking the sheets with him to cover his still hard cock with. “Fake it?”
“What?” Bella’s eyes widened and her kiss swollen lips parted. “What the hell did you just say?”
Rhett shook his head. God, I’m so stupid. “The screaming. The- the- the biting, the over the top hip rocking- the dirty talk... You didn’t have to do this just because you felt sorry for me. I didn’t need a pity fuck. It’s your sister who is the horrible human being, not you.”
“A pi-pity fuck?” Bella stammered. She rolled off her side of the bed and planted her hands on her hips, totally, gloriously naked. What a picture she made, her eyes glaring daggers, her lips parted so she could get angry, rapid breaths out, all that ink glowing in the late afternoon sunlight streaming into the room, her glossy hair covering her breasts, but everything else on full display. “Okay, maybe you’re drunker than I thought.”
Maybe he was too. All he could recall were those snippets, and they were indeed too over the top. Even still, he wanted round two, damn him, and that made him angrier with himself.
With her.
With everyone.
“Yeah. A pity fuck. You obviously faked it. You didn’t have to do any of that. I’m a grown man. I can handle rejection. I can get over it without your help.”
“Help?” Her eyes narrowed dangerously, and not with desire. “You have got to be kidding me. How drunk are you? Because I would think that even sloshed out of your mind, you should be able to tell the difference between a real orgasm and a woman who fakes it. I’m sorry if I’m not up to your quiet, modest, good girl standards. You should have been able to tell just by looking at me that what you see is what you get. You think that I’m going to behave like my sister and be some little fucking trophy for you? Uh- guess again.”
“That is so far over the line.”
“You’re the one who said it. You think that I- that we’re- that this is because of my sister…” Bella choked. “Well, you might be here because of what she did, but appropriate or not, I wanted to do this from the second I saw you. Actually, I know that’s completely wrong. It shouldn’t have happened. I was obviously so wrong about you. What we did might be regrettable as hell, but I sure as hell didn’t fake anything.” She stalked around the room and gathered up his clothes with far more coordination than he currently possessed. It was like for her, the whiskey had completely worn off. “If that’s how you feel, get your clothes on and go.”
“I’ll get them on,” Rhett promised. He snatched them from her hand, nearly dropped them, fumbled to recover, dropped them again, and picked them off the floor when he didn’t recover fast enough the second time. He almost toppled over and had to sit down hard on the edge of the bed. The whole room was suddenly spinning.
Turned out, being drunk on the hard stuff was pretty damn gross.
Round two of the self-pity party started playing in his head. He wished he didn’t have a front row ticket. “This was probably all about your family,” he slurred. Could she even understand him? He barely understood himself. “Everything you do is to piss off your family- the tattoos, the swearing, the job, the- all of it. You’re so damn proud of being the black sheep of the family. You get a rise out of it because you’re the one who actually needs all the attention.”
Bella’s very pissed off face swam into view. His cock pulsed. There was definitely something wrong with him. The thing should have been deflated from all that whiskey, not turned on by the fiery woman in front of him. She shook her head so hard that the dark strands of her hair flew out wildly all over the place.
“You think I- that I- did this so I could tell my family and rub it in their faces?”
Her tone made him want to feel ashamed of himself, but he couldn’t stop there. He couldn’t help himself. He was like a train, careening off the rails, powerless to keep himself from ending in disaster. Maybe if he hadn’t been so damn wounded earlier and so drunk after, he could have shut his mouth and thought rationally.
“You all have an agenda. All the Berns do. You weren’t taught to treat people like people. Guys are just things to you. Things to use for a better life and an easy ride. Things to toy with and to wound and to manipulate at will.”
“Newsflash,” Bella hissed. “I’m not my sisters or my parents. Never have been, never will.” She glared at him, the anger in her eyes biting into his insides, which were twisted in a painful knot. “There is something seriously wrong with you if you can’t tell the difference between my sister, a con artist if there ever was one, and me, someone who just wanted to help.”
“You wanted to help by getting me drunk and fucking me?”
“Last time I checked, no one forced that whiskey down your throat and I sure as hell didn’t tie you up and force myself on you. We had sex. It was good. At least, I thought it was good. I’m an adult. I was going to throw some clothes on, maybe go for a swim, come back here, order some room service, watch some TV, maybe do the whole boning thing all over again because it was pretty amazing, wake up in the morning, and tell you that I hoped everything worked out for you. I thought we were both going to move on and just-use this as a way to move forward. As a good memory. Whatever. I thought we were both capable of being mature here and realizing that sex can just be- a- a good time. It doesn’t have to be complicated or come with strings or a whole bunch of meanings. I guess I was wrong.”
“Yeah, well, I guess so. You know what?” Rhett’s fingers tightened on the sheets. He’d never had casual sex in his life. He didn’t do that, dabble in it. His mother would have been so ashamed of him to find out he treated a woman like that, like it meant nothing. He’d been raised to think that it should mean something when it happened. That maybe if it
wasn’t in a relationship, at least there was the hope of it getting there. He did not have revenge sex, hate sex, drunk sex, meaningless sex, casual sex. Ever. Period.
Maybe that’s why he was at a complete loss. Maybe he was just too damn drunk. Maybe there was something wrong with him in the worst way. No, no maybe about it. There was something wrong with him. He’d just been wounded terribly by a woman he thought he loved and had been with for seven years. She was what was wrong with him. And he’d just got hammered and slept with her sister like two minutes after the fact.
He was sorry alright.
For all of it. All his life he’d been a gentleman. He never should have done any of it. They were too drunk. She was his ex’s sister. He’d literally just walked out of his wedding hours before. The list went on and on…
It was just so much easier to do the right thing and not get into all this trouble in the first place.
When he opened his eyes, there was a finger wagging in his face. Bella’s eyes burned with rage right behind it. “You’re a prick, you know that?” She stomped off and he tracked her movements, towards the bathroom, the best he could. She was almost there when she turned and hurled one more parting shot over her shoulder. “If you have to puke again, use the garbage can or something. Oh, and one more thing. My sister was right, you know. You really do have a small dick.”
CHAPTER 5
Bella
The bathroom door was heavy, but the slam wasn’t nearly as satisfying as it should have been. Bella leaned against the cold metal, breathing so heavily that her shoulders slammed up and down against it. It felt nice against her heated skin, but the exterior cold did nothing to calm the fires of anger that blazed inside of her.