by Anne Calhoun
She finished her mouthful of salad before she answered. “Anyone can play or perform. You put your name in with Kent,” she said, nodding at the emcee. “He introduces each act, and then you perform.”
“How do you know people are any good?”
“You don’t. This isn’t about being good enough to have a paying audience. It’s about having the courage to get up on stage and perform.”
Ben looked around, then shifted his chair again. “Everything all right?” Rachel asked.
“Fine,” he said, then he shot her a wry look. “Next time you pick a table, go for one that’s against the wall, or at least at the perimeter. I’ve got this thing about sitting in the middle of a crowd.”
And they were right in the middle of the crowd. She’d snatched up the seat because it was the best place in the room to watch the performers. Craning her neck to scan the room, she asked, “Do you want to move? I see a table at the back.”
“Yeah,” he said.
They settled into another table at the back of the space. The performances started not long after Rachel finished her half of the Thai chicken sandwich. After that, she ate absently, focused on absorbing a series of poets and musicians. An hour later the emcee gave the audience a break to pick up dessert or more wine.
“What do you think?” she asked, conscientiously trying to be a good date.
He collected their dishes on the tray and slid it under his seat, then leaned back and draped his arm over the back of her chair. “It’s okay. Tell me why you like coming here.”
She considered this for a moment, working through answers in her head. “I like watching them,” she said. “I can tell that some of them are scared, but being brave. Some of them are so confident I’m envious. Emotion is so close to the surface here. They’ve chosen the song or the poem or whatever because it’s meaningful, so there’s that. Then there’s all the emotion that goes into going up on stage and performing. Fear, dread, anxiety, hope, pride, shame, humor, everything.”
He was silent for a moment, then said, “I don’t get it.”
People were returning to their seats carrying desserts, wedges of the cafe’s specialty carrot cake, crème brûlèe, or truffles. She used the increased noise and activity to cover the length of time it took to gather her thoughts.
“Everyone thinks the worst part about being at Elysian Fields was the superficial things,” she said, keeping her voice low. “Not being fashionable, or keeping my hair long, or not going to college, or not having sex. And it was bad . . . although I didn’t know that until later. What I did know is that any time I felt sad, or angry, or hurt, I was chastised for it. Anything but a joyous countenance is considered being disrespectful to parents or authority figures. Even a sin. Everyone assumes I left to have sex, to choose my own husband, to direct my own life. And I did. But I left because I’d been disciplined when I felt anything else. I wanted to feel. To have experiences that made me feel.”
She shook her head in frustration. It was impossible to explain to someone from the outside who’d always lived with a wide range of emotions available to them. “I wanted to go to things like this, with someone like you. I wanted to get angry, sad, happy, pleased, hurt. It’s so simple, and yet it’s so complicated.”
He didn’t respond as the first act of the second round, two brothers who played guitar while one sang, took the stage. It slowly dawned on Rachel that Ben had moved them not only because he didn’t like sitting in the middle of crowds. He’d distanced them from the stage. She watched emotion ripple under his skin, watched him try to hold it back. She was in no position to name what he felt, but the look in his eyes broke her heart.
When the emcee called the next break, Rachel looked at her mother’s slim gold watch, something she wore only for special occasions. “We should head back fairly soon,” she said quietly.
Ben glanced at his phone, then looked at her, eyebrows raised. “It’s not quite ten,” he said. “You want to go back to my place.”
Another question phrased as a statement. “Yes, please.”
He took her hand and they rose, making their way through the crowd to the parking lot exit. She expected him to drop her hand once out in the warm night air, but he didn’t.
“This is a pretty tame group,” he said, looking at the orderly crowd. “You want to see people pushing to the edge, you should try No Limits on a Saturday night after Texas wins.”
The bar again. She smiled. “Or I could just have sex with you.” One corner of his mouth lifted as he held her door for her. When he got into the driver’s seat, she asked, “Do you play an instrument?”
She asked because while he’d maintained a facade of indifference for most of the performances, when guitar players took the stage, he changed. The poker face, the mask hardened, protecting something. There were no longing wistful looks, just the sense that he was forcing himself to not give anything away. She recognized that particular demeanor, the look of a person trying to ignore a hole in their soul. She’d lived within it most of her adult life, pretending not to care about things that mattered to her, pretending that a life lived in service to the Lord and denial of the self was enough.
“Ben?” she said quietly when he didn’t answer.
He flashed her that slashing smile, warning of unbearable pleasure and danger. “You ready to feel?”
“Yes,” she said. “Please.”
Chapter Fourteen
Ben rolled his shoulders to work out the tension brought on by sitting through a painful reminder of what could have been. It wasn’t difficult to imagine him and Sam up on that stage, if things had worked out differently. At the same time he wracked his brains to come up with something that would make Rachel Hill feel something.
It wouldn’t take much, because Rachel still looked like she’d taken a tackle on her blind side every time she had an orgasm. Every time he had an orgasm, for that matter. She took none of this for granted, and when you didn’t need new and different to get a kick out of sex, what should he do?
What did she want?
No fucking clue. Or was he just clueless about how to give her what she wanted?
When he saw her on the bunkhouse porch, dressed in white and looking like something out of a country music video, he’d forgotten the basics of driving, like braking before he ran into a building, and had to slam on the brakes to stop the truck in time. As he got out of the truck, anticipation had overwhelmed him and he’d flashed back to the nights when he used to pick up a girl, eager for the night to get started. When he’d tucked the rose she held the whole way into town into her soft, loose French braid, a hint of perfume and warm skin drifted from her nape to his nostrils. The comment about the cooking asphalt was a lie, intended to cover the odd hitch of his heart.
When was the last time he was eager to go out with a woman? Hell, nowadays he wasn’t even eager to get laid. It would happen, and if it didn’t, his phone held a long list of numbers to text in search of a warm, willing body. He knew when he’d stopped feeling. He knew why. For over a decade he’d set up his life on autopilot, substituting adrenaline for emotion.
The woman beside him wanted both. For good reason. People went without sex all the time, but to punish this beautiful, alive, curious woman for any emotional expression outside joy and contentment was like locking up the falcon she resembled.
That’s what she reminded him of—a bird of prey, tawny eyes, a dozen shades of gold and brown like feathers in her hair, fierce and beautiful and strong. Capable of locking talons around a vulnerable creature and carrying it away.
She’d chosen him for the way he made her feel physically, nothing else. From the very beginning she’d chosen him because he wouldn’t care. She knew who he was. What he was.
Great. She likes you, and you brought her flowers and went on a date with her, asshole. You’re confusing thing
s, not her. She’s going to think that’s a relationship.
No, she wouldn’t. She’d get emotional support elsewhere. Maybe from Rob Strong.
Another emotion surged in Ben’s gut, as unfamiliar as the anticipation. It took him a second to recognize jealousy. Rather than relieved, he was jealous at the thought of Rachel turning to another man for help or guidance, or even just a listening ear.
How are you going to feel when this is over?
He battled green all the way to his apartment complex, where he parked and walked around the hood to open Rachel’s door for her. He put his hands on her knees just as she slid off the passenger seat, shifting his hands up her thighs, lifting her skirt as his fingers curled around the firm curve of her ass. After the first date she wore plain cotton underwear, something he hadn’t seen on a woman since he went to college. No thongs or boy shorts or cheeky panties. Plain cotton briefs. Usually white.
The sensation of warm cotton on warmer skin sent heat flaring along his nerves and hardened his cock. He shifted her along the truck as he stepped into her body and aligned them from chest to thigh. She wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face in his shoulder, her breath quickening against his chest. He slipped his finger under the cotton, then gently parted her soft folds and found slick heat. In response she widened her stance ever so slightly and made a soft noise.
“I like the skirt,” he murmured. The scent of the single rose in her hair melded with the heat rising from her bare shoulder, almost crowding out the electrified scent of rain. He wanted to crawl all over her, growling, nipping, nuzzling, until she opened to him and let him in. He worked his free hand into her hair, weaving his fingers into the braid and flower stem, tugging her head back so he could look into her eyes.
Heat rose in the golden brown depths, transforming them into aged whiskey. When her soft pink lips parted, he couldn’t help himself. He bent and kissed her, lightly at first, using heat and the merest pressure to tempt her to open to him, then touched the tip of his tongue to hers. She shuddered from head to toe when he did, and he edged her panties down a little farther to the tops of her thighs. He turned his wrist and purposefully sought her clit, swollen and slick at the top of her pussy. Circled it. Kept his touch as light as the pressure of his tongue on hers, soft, tempting, seducing. Emotion trickled along his nervous system, more notable for what this lacked than what infused it. The music at the club had lowered his walls. After a night at No Limits he was jacked up like a prizefighter, ready to fuck, unbreachable defenses up against whomever he was with. Tonight music made him vulnerable, and Rachel slipped into his bloodstream like a drug.
His heart pounded against his rib cage as he watched her succumb to the pleasure. His cock throbbed in response, and he rubbed against her hip in time to his finger’s movements. Blood hammered in his ears, his breathing a distant rush while hers echoed soft and breathy against his neck.
A car pulled into the lot, the lights sweeping across the truck in a wide semicircle as the driver parked in front of the opposite building. Rachel pushed at his shoulder, so Ben withdrew his hand and stepped to the side, using his body and stance to block inquisitive gazes. She shoved her skirt down, then tugged her panties back into place through the fabric.
“Upstairs,” he said even as she said, “Can we go upstairs?”
She hurried up the stairs in front of him. When they gained the relative privacy at the top of the stairwell he plucked the rose from her braid and spun her, then slid it into the cleft between her breasts and buried his face in her collarbone as desire swamped him. He could do this. He could let emotion swamp him, drown them both.
The scent of the rose and Rachel’s skin was stronger here, the flower crushed by his cheek and releasing its scent into the dark, secret valley between her breasts. He backed her into the door and tugged at the skirt with one hand as he tried to free his keys from his pocket with the other. “I want to fuck you so bad,” he said.
The door swung open and they stumbled into his dark apartment, shedding clothes as they went. She ripped open the snaps on his shirt and clawed it down his arms to puddle on the floor by the kitchen, then went for his belt. His vision narrowed to white-clad, panting Rachel as he tugged her panties to her knees, and gravity did the rest when he spun her around, hoisted her with one arm and bore her backward onto his bed. Two feminine gasps echoed into the moonlit air of his bedroom.
Two. That wasn’t right. In the past, sure, but tonight? No.
His eyes snapped wide open to see Rachel flat on her back, her head inches away from the unmistakable curve of a woman’s ass, resting on her heels in the middle of the bed.
There was a woman already in his bed.
Adrenaline shot through his veins just as Rachel went wild under him, shoving at his shoulders and squirming to get free. They both scrambled backward like cats jumping out of a bathtub. On the bed a woman struggled to regain her balance as the mattress dipped and lurched, her efforts hampered by her kneeling position and the handcuffs restraining her hands behind her back. The black ball gag in her mouth turned her words into garbled nonsense, but Ben got the horrified gist.
Juliette shook her hair back out of her face as best she could and stared at them, and for a long horrible second no one in the room said anything. Then Rachel clapped both hands to her mouth just as Ben found his voice.
“Jesus fucking Christ! What the fuck?”
“Lord have mercy,” Rachel whispered through her hands.
He recognized an automatic stress response when he heard one, or two. Ben gripped her shoulder and spun her to the door, then down the hall, into the living room. Away from his bed.
“Sit,” he commanded, all but shoving her into the sofa. He stood in front of her, ran both hands over his hair, then reached down and did up his buttons and buckled his belt.
“Ben,” Rachel said, still talking through her hands. Her eyes were the size of saucers. “Who is that?”
“She’s . . . Jesus . . . she’s a woman I know,” he said as puzzle pieces began clicking into place. “From No Limits. Don’t go anywhere,” he said.
Still covering her mouth, her eyes alight with horror and fascination and what might just be the saving grace of amusement, she shook her head slowly.
He spun on his heel and stalked down the hall, where he snagged his shirt from the floor, then into the bedroom. Yanking the sleeves over his arms, he looked at Juliette, and it didn’t take a psychologist to see the humiliation in her eyes. Still keeping his gaze locked above the collarbone, he fumbled in her hair for the buckle to release the ball gag.
“There’d better be a fucking brilliant explanation for this,” he said as he examined the handcuffs. He and Steve both used the brand issued by the department. These were a different brand, and his key wouldn’t open them. Trust Juliette to have law-enforcement quality cuffs but not the ones carried by the GPD.
“Where the hell have you been?”
Teetering on the edge of something meaningful with a woman who wouldn’t find this funny. On a fucking date. “Where’s the key?”
“I don’t know!” she said. “I think he took it!”
He took a deep breath. “Where are your clothes?”
“He took them, too,” she said again, and this time he heard tears in her voice.
He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and was scrolling through his contacts on his way out the door to get Juliette a towel or something, since she was cuffed and kneeling smack in the middle of all the bedding he owned when Rachel appeared in the door, his lightweight POLICE windbreaker in one hand, her face averted. “Would this help?” she asked.
Ben took it from her hand and thanked her, but she was already gone. He draped it over Juliette, making sure the jacket covered her bare ass and pulling the edges together. She turned so her long blond hair hid her expression. Ben connected a ca
ll, listened to the ringing.
“Hey!” Steve yelled over the noise at No Limits. “Did you find the present I left for you?”
“Where’s the key to the cuffs?”
“You don’t need the key,” Steve said, laughing. “Just tip her over and dive on in. Her idea, man. You can thank me later.”
Later he’d find out how Steve got Juliette into his apartment. He tried to remember if the door was actually locked or if Steve left a bound, gagged, naked woman in an unlocked apartment. He turned to the corner, doing all he could to make sure Rachel wouldn’t hear him. There wasn’t much he could do about Juliette. “Get your ass over here and get this girl out of my bed.”
“You’re done already?” Steve asked incredulously.
Steve wouldn’t hear him over the noise and Ben was too furious to find Steve’s bewildered tone funny. “Now.”
He hung up on Steve’s question and tossed his phone on the dresser, then bent his head and rubbed the headache forming above his right eye. He could unlock the cuffs, no problem. Parlor tricks every magician knew. All he had to do was ask Rachel for a bobby pin.
He squared up, snapped up his shirt, and strode out of the bedroom, into the living room. Rachel had resumed her position on the sofa, this time with her hands pressed together, her index fingers against her lips. She looked up when he approached, her gaze locked on his as he hunkered down in front of her.
“I can’t decide if I’m supposed to be amused or appalled,” she said. “What’s the usual reaction to something like this?”
“Screaming fury.” Then he added, “I’m sorry. A guy I know left her here.”
Something he prayed was humor gleamed in her eyes. “That was . . . thoughtful?”
“I need a bobby pin.”
“What for?” she asked.
“My key won’t unlock her cuffs. They’re a different brand than I use, and he took the key.”
Without breaking eye contact she reached up into that knot of hair as big as his fist and pulled out a single bobby pin.