by Andrews, Amy
His eyes roved over her flushed face. “Sticky, too.”
He said sticky like it was a good thing. Like he wanted to get sticky, too. Like he possibly had a plan for helping her get more sticky. Blood rushed to her breasts and her thighs. And her head. Man, it rushed to her head. Intoxicated with sugar and very bad ideas, it spun on the biggest sugar rush ever. She could barely breathe for the heat and the sweat and the sticky cobwebs multiplying in her lungs and other parts of her body.
“Er, hello? Can you hurry up, man? My kid’s about to go on stage.”
The voice behind them dragged Sal back from the edge, and she drew in a much-needed sugary breath. She shoved the next two sticks at him, which were huge due to her inattention. He took them, but his gaze said later and her body said sure thing.
…
Half an hour later, Abi showed up, for which Sal was eternally grateful. The heat and sugar were definitely addling her senses—something she couldn’t afford so close to Doyle, who was pink fairy floss laced with crack cocaine. Not when she hadn’t had any in a really freaking long time.
She was pretty damn sure if they DNA-tested the bags of fairy floss, they’d find traces of her DNA from the drool she’d been barely able to contain. Between the sugar and Doyle, she was a salivating mess.
“Go,” Abi said to both of them. “The pet show starts in fifteen minutes.”
Sal looked down at herself. She had wet patches on her shirt and her fingers were sticking together. She needed to wash her hands and face and slap on some deodorant before she was fit for company. “Is there some place I can go clean up?”
“Main office area is open. Use the staff loos. Doyle knows where it is.”
“This way,” he said.
Sal took a deep breath, preparing to go out into the throngs again, but if she stuck close to Doyle and concentrated on getting to the office, then she’d be fine. Which is exactly what she did, shadowing his back, not looking to the sides, not distracted by the noise and the color and the squeal of excited kids. Just Doyle and his back.
His big, broad back. His shoulders as wide as handlebars narrowing down to solid hips and an arse that she knew for sure she was going to picture licking sugar off tonight. He was wearing navy work shorts—they both were. And Kennedy Family Practice T-shirts.
But he was still looking all neat and pressed, whereas she looked like a hot mess.
There were people behind the main counter as they walked into the icy air-conditioning of the office. No one paid them any heed. Well, they didn’t pay her any heed. Doyle was a different matter.
But he marched on, oblivious, down a hallway, only stopping when he came to a door with an education department–issued sign that said toilets. “Here,” he said, placing his hand up high on the paneling and pushing open the heavy swing door for her, revealing five stalls and a fresh pine scent.
“Thanks,” she said as she ducked under his arm.
She didn’t expect him to follow. She didn’t even know he had until his hands landed on her shoulders a few seconds later and she was spun around and backed up against the door.
Sal’s heart just about banged a hole in her chest as his dark gaze, gooey like molten brownie mix, roamed over her face, lingering on her mouth, dropping down to her throat. Her insides melted at the frankly sexual look. “Doyle?”
“I’ve changed my mind,” he said, his face lowering to her neck, his nose pressing to the soft underside of her windpipe where her pulse thudded thick and heavy as he nuzzled and inhaled the essence of her.
His tongue flicked into the hollow at the base of her throat and Sal gasped as her head fell back against the door. She grabbed hold of his shoulder, her legs suddenly feeling about as substantial as spun sugar. She shouldn’t be doing this, but he’d been making her dizzy with need since he mentioned the word “sticky.”
“About what?”
“Fairy floss is my new favorite smell.”
His hot tongue licked up her neck. She whimpered and her eyes rolled back as she pulled him closer, pressed herself along the length of him.
“I’ve been wanting to do this for the last hour,” he groaned as he nibbled along her jaw.
He reached for her hand and she watched him through sex-drowsed eyelids as he brought it up to his mouth, the pads of her fingers resting lightly against his lips.
“Do you know how indecent it is to have a hard-on in the middle of a primary school fair?” he muttered, grinding against her a little so she could feel the thick, hard length of him.
His eyes were more like black lava now than brownie mix as he held her gaze and sucked her index finger into his mouth. Sal moaned as his hot tongue swirled around and around, watching her the entire time. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the place where her finger and his lips joined. She wanted to press her lips there, taste her sweetness on his mouth.
He drew back on her finger and it slid out. “You taste so good,” he muttered. “I knew you’d taste this good.”
And he sucked in her next finger and repeated the intimate removal of sticky sugar, taking his time with the hot swirl of his tongue, lapping and swiping. His teeth grazed the sensitive pad of her finger and she felt it everywhere.
In her nipples and her belly and between her legs.
Lust bloomed between them as he took another finger, turning the sugar in her system to liquid, her blood heating it into molten toffee, smothering everything in its path with thick, viscous desire.
Sal couldn’t bear it a moment longer. She couldn’t bear to have his mouth on her and not kiss him. It didn’t make any sense—she hadn’t wanted anyone like this in a long time—but it thrummed through her body like a drug.
She leaned forward, her ring finger still buried in the hot cavern of his mouth, and pressed her lips to his, opening around the intrusion. He opened his mouth on a groan, her finger slipped out, and his tongue slipped in, sliding and swirling and lapping, exploring and tasting and melting her with every delicious swipe.
“Fuck,” he groaned against her mouth, “I want to lick you all over.”
And he went back for more.
The abrupt knock on the other side of the door scared the bejesus out of both of them. He pulled away at the same time Sal pushed at his chest. In those first confusing seconds, with her body crying out for more and their combined heavy breathing rivaling a hurricane, Sal forgot where they were, but a second knock brought her around.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
She was in a restroom. In a primary school.
God. The germs. The possibility of being caught by some stray kid. Or a teacher.
Busted in the loos with a boy.
There was a first time for everything. She just hadn’t thought she’d be in her twenties when it happened.
“One moment,” Doyle said at the third knock. He kept his hand firmly on the door above her head, effortlessly preventing it from being opened as the person on the other side started to push.
“Go and wash your hands,” he said to her. “I’ll wait for you outside.”
Sal moved to do his bidding. Anything to get away from him and what they’d done, to put some distance between their bodies that still radiated yearning in little arcs of electricity, because Sal was pretty damn sure it wouldn’t take much to be on each other again, and damn the bozo with the knocking fetish standing in the corridor.
Sal looked at herself in the mirror as she heard the door open. She should have been concerned as to who it was and what he or she might think of her and whatever the hell had been going on in here, but the sight of herself wiped any of those thoughts from her head. She didn’t even register the middle-aged woman entering a stall behind her.
She looked utterly ruffled. Her blond bangs sat flat and sweaty against her forehead, the eyeliner she’d applied to look all professional-pet-show-judge was smudged, and her mouth looked like it had gone ten rounds with Casanova.
And lost.
Or won.
Depending o
n one’s perspective.
She looked down at her hands, at the fingers he’d had in his mouth. Damn it, that man was good with fingers.
Hers and his.
God, how was she supposed to keep him at a distance, convince him she didn’t want what he was offering, if she kept letting him do indecent things to her?
She glanced up at her disheveled reflection. You’re fine. You don’t need him. Don’t lose the plot.
A toilet flushed and Sal realized she hadn’t even turned on the tap. She reached for it and a big dose of get-your-shit-together as she stuck her hands under the water.
…
Ten minutes later, Sal was excruciatingly conscious of being accompanied by Doyle around the large circle of hopeful pet owners and their animals in varying shapes and sizes in the middle of the school assembly hall. She didn’t think he was paying much attention to the animals if the hole his gaze was burning through her shorts was anything to go by.
Her butt felt on fire. Hell, everything in the vicinity felt on fire.
She’d been given a clipboard with twenty-eight assessment sheets, each correlating to the number on an animal, to help her decide on the winners. She had to choose the cutest animal and the one with the most personality. And break the hearts of twenty-six children who came here thinking their pets were special but would each go away thinking they were either ugly or without personality or possibly both.
The pets were all sitting or standing on pedestals with a flat top except for the ones that were too big, and those either sat or stood beside their owners. They were all surprisingly well behaved, although a couple of the cats were paying way too much attention to the caged budgie for her liking.
“Potential hazard, three o’clock,” she said out the side of her mouth to Doyle.
“Noted.”
God. Even that one word did funny things to her belly, scraping like the coarsest grade sandpaper against her skin and nipples, puckering them into tight, hard pebbles, yearning for the warmth and suction of his mouth.
Sal almost groaned out loud at the image in her head and forced herself to stop thinking about her nipples and what his voice was doing to them and concentrate on the job at hand—twenty-eight kids all hoping their pet would be the fairest of them all.
There was a real mixed bag of animals, from Sebastian the duck, who had brilliant green feathers under all the brown and sat quietly quacking, to Percy, a stunning chameleon who watched them pass with those freaky three-sixty-degree eyes, as if he’d seen their dirty necking session in the staff loos from here.
From Angus the mouse, who was given a wide berth by Doyle, to Willow, the pet tarantula.
Fred the goldfish swam around and around his castle like it was just another day in the asylum. And Angelina, the guinea pig with fur that looked like it had been gelled and blow-dried just for the occasion, nibbled placidly on grass.
As well as assorted dogs and cats, including Fluffy the poodle and Archie, Harry’s kitten.
But by far the most interesting subject was Wilbur, a pink galah who whistled as she passed by and danced on the bar in his cage like he was auditioning for Australia’s Got Talent. The medium-sized parrot puffed out his pink breast feathers and ruffled his gray wings as Sal stopped to watch the show.
“He likes to dance,” a little red-haired, freckle-faced boy told her.
“Does he talk?” Sal asked him.
“Yes, but…” He looked over his shoulder at his mother. “Mummy says we shouldn’t encourage him.”
Sal looked at the woman, who appeared to be about her age and was clearly embarrassed. “You don’t want him to talk?”
“Trust me, Wilbur’s words aren’t…” She looked around them and dropped her voice a little as she continued. “Fit for polite company, if you know what I mean.”
“Ah.” Sal nodded. She did know. Some of the dirtiest mouths she’d ever come across had belonged to parrots.
She looked at Wilbur, who was about level with her in his cage and was watching her with his birdy eyes. “Are you a naughty boy, Wilbur?”
Wilbur bobbed up and down a couple of times then said, clear as a bell, “Show us your tits, show us your tits.”
Sal was momentarily stunned, and there were a few gasps and laughter nearby as the mother hissed, “Wilbur!” but they got lost in the low chuckle and the even lower, “Well said, Wilbur,” coming from directly behind.
The mother glanced at Sal apologetically. “I’m so sorry. His previous owner was a long-distance trucker, used to go in the truck with him all the time apparently. Plus I think he might have Tourette’s. Can birds suffer from that?” she asked.
Sal laughed. “No, I don’t think so.”
“I’m so sorry,” she apologized again.
“It’s fine,” Sal assured.
Fifteen minutes later, Sal had spent time with each animal and their hopeful owners and she and Doyle were looking at the assessment sheets and discussing the different merits of the entries.
“I hate this,” she said quietly as she dithered over choosing the two winners.
“Relax, it’s not some national Best in Show competition,” he teased.
“Easy for you to say; you’re not the one passing judgment on a kid’s best friend.”
“The personality one has to go to Wilbur.”
“The ability to be vulgar does not equal personality,” she said waspishly, the muscles in her belly remembering his low well said, Wilbur.
He chuckled. “Not necessarily, no. But I think in Wilbur’s case it definitely does.”
“And if there was a dirty mouth award, then he’d win it hands down, but I don’t think we should encourage the use of profanity in front of minors, do you?”
God, she sounded like she had a stick up her arse. But it was imperative she didn’t encourage Doyle, either—keeping him at a distance felt like the only weapon she had against him when he seemed to sneak through her every other defense as if they were made out of fairy floss.
Look where him getting flirty with her had led earlier…
“No, ma’am,” he said, shaking his head all businesslike, but his lips twitched and she knew this wasn’t the last she’d hear about Wilbur and his bawdy request.
Sal rolled her eyes. “Okay. I’m ready. Let’s do this thing.”
“You’re going to flash me in front of all these people?” he asked innocently.
“Ha! No, funny guy. But I may well smack you with this clipboard.”
An interesting heat flared in his eyes, and for a moment she thought he was going to say something that rivaled Wilbur’s last statement, but he seemed to change his mind at the last moment. He pointed to a nearby podium. “Microphone’s over there.”
After a short speech where she stressed that every animal was special in its own way, Sal announced Angus the mouse as the cutest, ignoring Doyle’s raised eyebrow, and Sebastian the duck as the animal with the most personality. There were no immediate tantrums like she’d dreaded and everyone applauded and congratulated one another.
“Thank you,” Doyle mouthed at her from across the circle.
Sal nodded slightly in acknowledgment, her mind drifting to their sexy, sugary kiss as the uncouth suggestion of a pink galah circled slowly round and round her head.
Chapter Nine
Sal went home after the pet show. Harry wanted Doyle to stay and go on some rides with her, and Sal assured him she’d be fine to walk home. It wasn’t that far, and frankly, she was grateful for the reprieve.
From a park full of children and him.
She was hot and sweaty again by the time she arrived home. The cool relief of the air-conditioning hit her as soon as she walked through the front door of the practice, and she shut her eyes and wallowed in the bliss of it for a moment.
The waiting room was only about half full, and with everything under control, she wandered upstairs to douse herself in a cold shower, washing away the sugar and the sweat and cool her overheated core that had no
thing to do with the outside temperature. Not that it really helped. Her nipples reacted to the cold water, reminding her of how aroused she’d been as Doyle had crowded her back against that door and licked sugar off her neck.
She hadn’t wanted it to stop—him to stop—and that scared the bejesus out of her. She’d always called the shots in her dalliances with men, but with Doyle it was scary how much she wanted him to take control. How much he was getting under her skin.
Annoyed that she was still thinking about Doyle even when he wasn’t around, she shut the taps off quickly and got herself dressed and back downstairs again in record time. She headed for her office, seeking the complete soul-sucking, mind-numbing state that only a mile of paperwork could generate.
She shut the door, determined to catch up on the never-ending piles of it that came with running a business. She’d volunteered to take it over from Mack when she’d first joined the practice as a newly qualified vet because he’d despised it, she was good at it, and it had given her something to occupy her spare time. Plus she owed him.
If it had been up to her that year her life fell apart, she would have chucked her studies altogether, but he’d insisted she keep going and had helped her catch up when she’d finally emerged from the black hole she’d sunk herself into.
The paperwork’s demands of complete concentration had been her salvation many a time, as she hoped it would be today.
And it was. The profound dreariness of the quarterly tax statements managed to derail any thoughts of Doyle from her brain, giving her a much-needed reprieve. By the time she switched the computer off, she felt like she’d taken back control.
Her brain was in charge—not her hormones.
The practice was closing up as she emerged from the office, and she sent everyone home early, assuring them she’d do the cleaning and setting up for the next day, which gave her more to do, to think about. Other than Doyle.
When she finally headed upstairs again, it was close to six o’clock, and Doyle still wasn’t back. She allowed herself to wonder briefly where he was and if he’d be back for tea. Should she put something on for them, or had he gone back to Abi’s or out with some mates? He often went out on the weekend with friends.