by Cee Smith
Three beeps preceded the message: This is an emergency announcement. Please do not leave your homes. Las Vegas and surrounding areas are experiencing a dust storm. Researchers are still looking into causes, but they warn it may be days or weeks before it is safe to leave your homes. Visibility is limited to a few feet. We repeat: Stay in your homes.
After the completion of the first warning, I fell into the couch cushions and listened to three more rounds of the same message. Somewhere around the middle of the third time hearing the warning it finally hit me. I jumped up, ignoring the protests of my stomach, and ran to the front window. I pulled hard on the cord and the blinds shot up, revealing a window of black. Maybe the message was old because it looked like visibility was zero, as the only thing that could be seen was the mirror of my lone form staring into the darkness.
I stood gazing out as if a cloud would part and suddenly I would see Mr. and Mrs. Bigsby’s garden of purple flowers, or Tamara’s dented mailbox from when Jacob accidentally backed the car into it, or my yellowing lawn, deciding that today would be the perfect day to water the grass. Except all I could see was my living room reflected in the glass.
“What’s going on?”
I froze upon hearing an unfamiliar male voice behind me. I could see the bottom of his bare legs reflected in the glass. I discontinued pulling the blinds shut and ignored the tremor running through me at the sound of another person in my home. A home where I live alone.
I felt my breath hitch as I turned to look at the man standing in the archway between my living room and dining room. He filled up the opening of the space with his wide chest and tall stature. There was only a few inches between the top of his head and the top of the archway, which was easily a foot and a half taller than me. He looked like some Greek statue with his chiseled chest and bulging thighs. His physique could rival an MMA fighter’s, and with that thought, I was suddenly trembling again.
“Who,” I swallowed, my throat once again catching on the bit of saliva that settled against my throat like cement. “Who are you, and what are you doing in my house?” I was impressed that I was able to hold it together long enough to string not one but two full sentences together.
The giant took a few steps toward me before halting mid-step. He raised his hands up and his foot fell back a step. His short brown hair looked tousled, but that was the only thing that looked sleepy about him. His eyes were bright like Granny Smith Apples, his lips were full, and when he spoke, his mouth spread wide, curving up from his square jaw.
“I know it was good, but I honestly can’t say that I’ve ever fucked a woman so good she got amnesia. I guess there’s a first for everything.” His smile was disarming in that perfectly charming way a man can sometimes look at you and make you want to cream your panties with a flash of gleaming, white teeth. If I weren’t so nervous by his sudden presence, I would be stunned by his casual arrogance and words that made my ears hot with embarrassment.
“I, uh, we…um…” I didn’t even know what to say. My feet shifted with nerves that urged me to press my hands between my legs to assess the contents of my nether region. My body was aching, but I thought it was the usual pains after a night of hard drinking. Upon second thought, however, the pain seemed to be localized to the inside of my thighs and my stomach muscles.
“Does that mean round two is off the table?” he asked with a smirk. He rubbed down his abs absentmindedly while he spoke, and all I could think about was sitting astride him with that view beneath me. What is wrong with me? This man is a stranger in my home, and all I can think about is the impressive body that’s fully displayed for my viewing pleasure?
I shook those thoughts from my mind and concentrated on the PSA that was still filtering from the screen to his right. He followed the path of my vision, and soon we were both fully engulfed in the message. His body dropped down into the corner of the sectional as if it was just another Saturday morning spent in the comfort of his own home.
“I generally like to know the name of the woman whose taste is still on my tongue the next morning, and seeing as how I’ll be a houseguest for oh, I don’t know, possibly the next few weeks, I’m thinking now would be a good time to ask.”
He didn’t turn to look at me as I groaned behind him. This was going to be a long few weeks, and though rude, I made my way back to my bedroom for a brief reprieve so I could gather my thoughts on what the hell happened the night before.
---The Night Before---
Properly sandwiched between Kerri and Piper, I felt Kerri shift forward. The gleaming wood propped up her already well-endowed bust better than any bra could. My eyes bulged as her cleavage sat atop the bar like an empty glass waiting for the bartender to refill. The ends of her shiny black hair dipped between her low-cut blouse, contrasting with the gold sequins that cascaded down the front of her shirt like a gleaming garland on a Christmas tree.
The bartender finished making a drink before he slid back to our end of the bar.
“Ladies,” the bartender said. His ashy blonde hair clung to his lightly bronzed forehead, making him look like a kid barely old enough to drink, let alone bartend.
“Matthew, I think we need something a little stronger for our girl here.” Kerri giggled like she just told a joke, and the kid’s smile brightened a little more at having been let in on something that even we couldn’t identify.
“Yeah? Are you having some kind of ladies night out?”
“Yeah,” Kerri said, lifting her hand to cover the right side of her mouth, the side closest to me. “My friend needs to get laid. We’re trying to help her.”
“Kerri, I-I’m not that drunk. We can all hear you,” I added, pulling her hand away from her mouth.
Piper scooted in closer, leaning over the front of me to add her two cents.
I knew if I were a little more sober, I’d be beet red with embarrassment and looking for the nearest exit. They had a hard enough time convincing me to come out in the first place.
Kerri and Piper were already friends when I first started working at Henderson and Fitz Legal six months ago. We bonded over our obsession with soy lattes and bad reality shows. They knew I was relatively new to Vegas and hassled me endlessly about joining them for a night out on the town. They wanted to do it up Vegas style and teased me, saying for someone in my mid-twenties, I sure acted like I was pushing forty—which was probably a bit closer to Kerri’s age.
Piper was in her mid-thirties. The quieter of the two, she was newly single and getting her groove back with the help of Kerri. I, on the other hand, had to have had a groove to get it back.
I hadn’t been in a long-term relationship since Chase in college, and that went up in smoke the moment I caught him in bed with some girl from his econ class—you know, the friend he swore up and down that that’s all she was. Well the joke was on me cause I fell for it. I wasn’t scorned by the experience. It just so happened that I never really found anyone that I was comfortable enough with to think of as more than a friend, and now that I was at a new firm, I spent much more of my time trying to get ahead.
“Shhh, shhh.” Piper pressed her finger to her lips to silence. I didn’t know who she was shushing, but that one finger couldn’t contain the spit that sprayed past her lips. “We’ll have three shots. Make it a double for this one,” she said, clutching my shoulder. I think she was doing it more to hold herself up than in a gesture of solidarity.
“Maybe we should dance or eat. We’ve only been here an hour and my head feels sloshy.” My head seesawed from left to right as I talked to them, confirming the drunk feeling that had pervaded my body and mind. I usually didn’t drink like this. In fact, the last time I got even remotely drunk was actually on my 21st birthday.
Kerri continued looking at the bartender—young enough to be her son—who was making our drinks. I caught him giving her a cocky wink before he placed the shots in front of us.
“To a memorable night,” Kerri said, raising her glass like an offering. The conte
nts sloshed over the rim and down her forearm, but she didn’t seem affected by her drunken display. Piper and I raised our glasses, not nearly as enthusiastically, before bringing the chilled rims to our lips and tossing back the contents. I watched Kerri pound back her drink before licking the drops from her forearm like the cat that got the cream. The burn of the alcohol wasn’t as strong as I had anticipated, and my stomach basked in the afterglow of alcoholic decadence.
Piper grabbed my hand, bouncing her way through the throngs of other sloshed patrons working off a long workweek. Kerri followed close behind, and soon we were dancing in a semi-circle to the sound of music that had the contents of my stomach rising and falling like bars on a synthesizer.
I always loved how alcohol made me feel less self-conscious about dancing in public. I was actually able to cut loose and spend more time looking at the people I was dancing with or alongside, versus staring at my feet and checking to see if my bottom half was moving to the beat. Kerri stuck to a simple two-step while Piper moved around in circles, reminding me of those old ribbon-dancer commercials. She looked almost childlike in her joy.
We danced like that through a few songs before I interrupted them with my need for a glass of water. They followed me back to the bar, and we weren’t there for two minutes before Kerri was shouting over the music, “Fuck me sideways, Piper, would you look at that.” She pointed to a man standing on the other end of the bar. He was slouched over the bartop with a tumbler placed between outstretched forearms that made my knees weak with their apparent strength. Following the line of his body, I could see that he was extremely tall, and his button-down shirt looked like if he flexed too hard the buttons would pop, pebbling across the counter and floor like M&M’s bursting from the package.
He wasn’t a man I would typically go for. He was a little too tall, a little too muscular, and maybe a little too handsome. He was someone to gawk at on the cover of magazines, someone to press you so deep into your mattress he would leave an outline of your body. It’s awful to think, especially from someone who considers herself to be a feminist, but he was someone to objectify. Maybe that was why I found it hard to look away. This man was like one of those white tigers or albino lions; they’re so rare and majestic that you can’t help but be enthralled by their beauty.
Glancing around at the people nearest him, I noticed he didn’t seem to pay any attention to the various women and men who were ogling him in obvious fascination.
“Jesus, isn’t he something,” Piper said as her tongue missed the straw of her water. I couldn’t help but laugh when I thought about it. We were just another group of onlookers swept up in some magic spell this man seemed to be casting on anyone with a pair of functioning eyes.
Returning to my water, I resisted the urge to turn my full body to face him as my friends had done. Kerri bumped my shoulder, putting more strength in the movement than I think she intended, but enough to get my attention either way. When I turned my head, she simply nodded in his direction and said, “Honey, if you weren’t looking, I’d honestly think you were gay. Although I must say, that right there is probably more man than you could handle. You have to ease yourself in before you take on that mountain. Climb a few slopes first.”
I guess it was safe to say that my trying too hard not to look affected by him was blatant, and my friend wasn’t going to let me off that easily.
“I need the bathroom,” I said, looking around for a hidden hallway that typically concealed the bathrooms in places like those. I spotted a darkened area with a sign for the restrooms posted on a half-wall littered with other ads for various clubs and deejays.
The trip to the restroom was slightly sobering, but that was nothing compared to what awaited me when I stepped outside of the bathroom.
The man from the bar.
He was just a few steps from the partition, facing the entrance to the hallway as if he was waiting on someone. When I was a mere few feet from him, his face broke out into a remembering smile, leaving me stunned in its wake.
I glanced around, checking over my shoulder. I always hated that feeling that someone was looking or smiling at you, only to turn around and find that they weren’t looking at you at all. Except, when I turned around, there was no one that was directly facing him, which led me to believe that that smile was without a doubt intended for me. This mountain god is looking at me. Like he knows me.
“I saw you earlier, you know.” He tossed his words out as though they were something to say in passing, not to open a line of communication, but what did I know? I was drunk and he was gorgeous. Under ordinary circumstances, I’d be scurrying back to the bar urging my friends that I’d had my fun and it was time to go, but my mind was working slower, incapable of processing what was happening. All I could do was cycle through the deep rasp of his words and acknowledge how even the hairs on my arms were affected by him.
“You were dancing, with your friends…” He moved closer, his large hands gripped the sides of my waist. His fingers, long and thick, stretched across the dip in my back until they almost met in the middle above my ass. My breath hitched, as his face dropped down next to my jaw so he could speak directly in my ear, “Are you here celebrating something?”
“No.”
“So if I steal you away, I won’t be ruining someone’s birthday or anniversary, will I?”
“No.”
His face feathered against my jaw, his smooth skin gliding across mine like warm honey dripping from a butter knife. His breath tunneled into my ear, sending shivers to my core. He captured my earlobe between his lips, and the intense eroticism of the moment did more for my racing thoughts than the soft lips and suede tongue that grounded me within that very moment. I’d never had a man so blatantly demonstrate his desire for me.
The fact that I didn’t know his name was barely a passing thought as his lips suckled my ear. He followed up with a lick to my throat and it was like we were two mammals drawn in by some animal magnetism that was bigger than us—the desire to mate that was suppressed in humans still existed between us.
A gust of wind pulled up between us, and I noticed that he’d stepped away. He broke away from me yet intertwined his fingers with mine as he led me to the front of the bar. It wasn’t until I was nearly upon my friends’ location at the bar that I tugged against his stronghold, which was leading me to the exit.
“Wait. My friends,” I said releasing my hand from his. He took a step to the side and waited patiently as I took in the shocked expressions on both Kerri’s and Piper’s faces.
“Holy shit,” Piper whispered.
“You’ve got balls, honey, I’ll tell you that.”
I looked from Piper to Kerri, and it suddenly hit me: I was about to exit with a man I didn’t know. But he was just the kind of man this kind of thing would happen with. He looked too remarkable, too suave, like this wasn’t his first time doing something so reckless. It was definitely mine.
He must have noticed something on my face when he looked back at me because he nodded subtly, and before I knew it, he was pulling something from his wallet and handing it over to Kerri. Kerri took a quick look at the thin piece of paper that easily fit in her palm and gave me a slight push toward the man who stood with his palm held out for me to take. Something about their exchange made me feel like I was an escort and Kerri my Madame.
I didn’t need any other push, and soon I was sitting in the passenger seat of his sports car. The make and model of the car slipped my mind as all I seemed to take in was how I could feel the timbre of his voice vibrate through my seat—thrumming between my legs—as he asked where I lived. I must have told him my address because soon we were both buckled in and fast on our way to my place, twenty minutes west of the strip.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
&n
bsp; Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Epilogue
Extended
Acknowledgments
Soundtrack
About The Author
Sneak Peek (Shut In)