Man in Black

by Melissa Shirley

  She nodded. “It gets the tips.”

  “I bet.” He had a quick vision of bending her over the counter, pounding into her. At this point, his hard-on had become a permanent feature in his jeans.

  She leaned in close, her breath steaming against his ear. “Stop gawking at me like that. It’s making me hot, and you’re gonna be able to lift the table up without using your hands.”

  He grinned. “I already can.”

  She turned away then looked back over her shoulder. “Bragger.”

  The extra wiggle in her hips and the way her dress swished back and forth worked together to bring out his inner caveman. He wanted to throw her over his shoulder, take her to his cave, and make her his. Soon. Very Soon.

  7

  Ryhan stayed in the kitchen, cleaning, hiding, trying to get her body under control. Something about Jesse Megalos had her blood pulsing through her veins in a way that made a trickle of sweat run down her spine. Her hands shook as she wiped the same spot on the table for the fourth time, and she dropped the cloth and picked up the Styrofoam containers to begin assembling his order. The paper bag tore in her fingers as she struggled to fit the packed food inside. “Shit.”

  “You okay, Ry?” Mikey Hamilton, a pimply-faced teenaged dishwasher, looked over. They’d all heard Ryhan swear before, but she usually saved it for dropping food or spilling drinks.

  “I’m fine.” She reached for a new bag. If she could just get Jesse out of her system, not wonder every single second if he did everything as well as he kissed. If she’d had a date—a real one—in the last six months, maybe she wouldn’t be walking around vibrating with need. She looked over at Mikey. “Hey, will you take care of this for me? I have to go do something.”

  Without waiting for an answer, she marched out the swinging door into the nearly empty dining room. Jesse and one other couple remained. She passed a smile to the couple then beelined for his table, grabbed him by the arm, and dragged him into the hallway by the restrooms.

  Using her body to push him against the wall, she grasped the back of his scalp and gently guided his head down to meet hers.

  “Why, Miss Connor. Whatever can I do for you?”

  “Shut up, Jess.” She pressed her lips to his, and the entire world stopped spinning. The air quit moving, and all sound stopped. She didn’t hear the clanging of silverware against plates or the murmurs of conversation around her. He tugged her closer until their bodies aligned, and she couldn’t breathe unless he gave her breath, couldn’t stand unless he held her up.

  His tongue swirled into her mouth, and she moaned from a place deep in her stomach. When he tightened his arms around her, she forgot her vow to not make a scene ever again, to live quietly without passion or excitement. With one kiss, her resolve weakened. She knew if she didn’t take him home, make him hers if only for one night, she would always wonder what she’d given up.

  “I get off work in an hour.” She mumbled the words as her real voice remained stuck somewhere between her lungs and throat.

  “Are you asking me on a date?”

  She shook her head. “While I do agree that a date would be the place to start, I think we’re past that.” Her eyelids fluttered shut. “I don’t want a date. I don’t want to get all flustered and discombobulated over you. I don’t, but I do”—her arms flailed at her side, stacked her hair, then came to rest on his shoulders—“want to. . .” Even though she wanted him so badly she could hardly concentrate on anything else, she couldn’t come up with a graceful way to ask.

  “Play field hockey? Go horseback riding? See a movie? A play? A concert?”

  She sighed. “Forget it.” She worked to disentangle herself from his arms, but he squeezed her closer.

  “Sorry.” Hardly contrite, he smiled down at her. “Go on. You want to. . .?”

  “I want to get back to work.” She squirmed to the side.

  “No, you don’t.” With one arm cradling her back, he used the index finger of his other hand to direct her gaze to his. “Tell me what you want, Ryhan.”

  His voice, a purr of its normal deep baritone, enchanted her, captured her along with his gaze and the arm still encircling her. “I want you to come home with me.”

  He groaned, closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against hers. “Sweetheart, any night but tonight, I’m yours. I need to be with my mom tonight. She had a bad day, and I don’t want her to be alone.”

  This time, Ryhan put both hands against his chest and shoved hard, her own momentum flinging her into the wall behind her. “You made me say it so you could turn me down?”

  Arrogant. Smug. Bastard. Words hurled themselves through her mind.

  He stepped closer, this time pushing his body into hers. “No, I’m not turning you down. I’m postponing.”

  She laid her hand over her heart, willing it to slow down, and hoped her voice didn’t betray her forced calm. “Fine.” Her hands dropped to her side. “Your food is ready.”

  He stepped back, and she turned away. He reached out and snagged her hand, bringing her back to face him. “Postponed.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. I heard you.”

  “That’s not a very accommodating attitude, Miss Connor.”

  She looked up to the smile on his lips, and her humiliation melted away. “It’s all I got.”

  “You should work on that.”

  She grinned. “I’ll get right on it.”

  He lowered his head, brushed his lips against her ear and whispered, “I’m going to dream of peeling that dress off of you.”

  All the air left her body as he stepped back and walked calmly past her. Alone in the hallway, she slumped against the wall and wiped the beads of sweat from her forehead. “Okay.” Long gone, he missed her last word, but she’d been able to form a sound after he made such a sexy promise. For her, that signaled victory.

  Jesse blinked twice at his mother across the table. In all the years he’d lived with her, he’d never seen her without hair whipped into some tornado-resistant shape, her makeup hiding her age and imperfections, and her calm, cool demeanor firmly in place. In this moment, her hair lay flat against her head, and her bare face showed her age.

  “Mom?” She looked up, sadness turning her eyes dark. “What’s going on?”

  She smoothed a hand over her forehead. “I don’t know how it happened, Jesse. I gave this town everything I have, every part of me. Now I have nothing, and everyone is going to know.” She sniffed, and her eyes misted. “I’ll be a laughing stock.”

  “Mom, no one’s going to know.” Instead of meeting her gaze, he stared at the soggy fries dripping grease onto her fine, guest-only tableware.

  She pushed her plate away, the food untouched. “I’m going to bed.”

  With a slump in her shoulders, she stood and walked out, leaving Jesse with twelve foam containers and a rousing need to fix all her problems. Her smile, though he hadn’t seen it since his days of middle school, reminded him of all the good things in his life. She’d loved him so much, shown him off all over town, until the divorce wrecked her spirit, left her sitting in the dark with a snifter and a bottle of brandy. She’d stopped smiling the day his dad packed his bags and walked out the door.

  Before the desire to bring his mother happiness could take root, his phone rang. The screen flashed his father’s number, and a sigh rumbled his chest. “Hello, Dad.”

  “I assume you’re enjoying your time with your mother, since I’ve heard very little about progress in our endeavor.”

  He ignored the reproach in his father’s tone. “Yes. We’re getting along fine. I’ll be sure to tell her you’re concerned about our relationship.”

  “I trust she’s doing well.”

  “She’s doing great.” The lie rolled off his tongue. He wouldn’t betray his mother to his father. Not about this. He would allow her to hang onto her pride. “We’re actually getting ready to go out.” And the lies kept on coming.

  Malcom cleared his throat. “There is another company
circling the area, checking the land rights and the city charter for underground drilling.”

  “And?”

  “I need you to wrap this up quickly, Jesse. I want that land.”

  “Dad, I can’t just swoop in and demand she sell it to me.” He also couldn’t let his father know whose company was in the process of negotiating drilling rights. “This is going to take finesse, some time.” Although she’d spent most of the afternoon playing grab ass, Lucia Gilden wasn’t the kind of woman he could rush into a decision.

  “We don’t have time.”

  He blew out a breath. Now that he’d given his mother the biggest part of his own money, he couldn’t manage the deal anyway. His only choice was to let his dad have the land, but it nagged at him that the town would suffer if he finished this job for his father. His mother would suffer. Ryhan would suffer. The town square would be no more than barren land with an ugly well in the middle and any chance of future tourist revenue would be lost. It had been fine when his objective had been revenge, but now, he couldn’t do it. “Look, Dad. . .”

  “Jesse. I. Want. That. Land.” The biting full stop of each word, the demand behind each syllable, reinforced the statement.

  Jesse bit back the urge to tell his father to come get it himself. After all, his father had taken him in when no one else wanted him. “I know.”

  “I’m counting on you. I want to retire and give you your company back. Don’t disappoint both of us.” With a click and no goodbye, his father ended the call. When the phone immediately rang again in his hand, he didn’t spare a glance for the ID and instead punched the answer button. “Dad. I’m working on it. Now let me do my job.”

  A melodic chuckle rang in his ear and ended on a hiccup. “Jesse, it’s Ryhan.”

  After a long pause, he looked at the phone, and put it back to his ear. “What’s wrong?”

  “What?”

  “What remarkable thing did I do today to deserve a call?”

  “Huh?”

  “Why did you call?”

  Ryhan blew a breath through the phone. “Right. I called you.”

  He imagined her skin flushed, her mouth parted, and her shirt open just enough to give him a flash of her milky skin. “Do you need a minute?”

  Another long pause. “I lost my job tonight, so I have some free time tomorrow, and I was wondering if you want to hang out?” She hiccupped on a sob. “Not hang out. Wrong word. I mean, have sex.” Her voice wavered, and she sobbed almost quietly. “With me. . .have sex with me. . .maybe.”

  He almost swallowed his tongue. “You lost your job and that makes you want to have sex with me?”

  “Yes. I mean, no. I just. . .I don’t know. But it sounded like a good idea when I called you.”

  His brain shoved his hormones out of the way to find the smaller headline in her story. “Wait. You lost your job? Why?”

  “It’s nothing. It’s—it’s nothing.”

  “It sounds like something.” More hiccups and some sniffles told him it was a lot of something.

  “It’s not.” This time, she sobbed a little louder.

  “Where are you?” He gripped the phone tighter. If someone hurt her. . .

  “You broke my cell phone.”

  Not information that quelled his urgency. “I’m sorry about that, but I need to know where you’re at.”

  “I’m at home. I have to call from home because I can’t call from anywhere else. They took out all the booths, you know, where Superman changes his clothes. They’re all gone, so there’s nowhere I could call you from except home, since no one wants me anywhere else.” Her words tumbled out on one breath then hitched on another.

  Alarm spiked in his veins. “Where do you live?” Her crying tore at him. “Baby, tell me where you are.”

  This woman distracted him—her eyes, her hair, her heart—in a way that ached deep in his bones. A single thought raced through his mind. Find Ryhan and make her safe.

  “I have to go.”

  And for the second time in two calls, silence fizzled from his phone, and for the second time in one day, a crying woman was counting on him. Some therapist somewhere would have loved to get his hands on Jesse’s hero complex, and maybe one day he’d get the chance. But for now, Jesse had a mission.

  He snatched his keys off the table. Just going for a ride. A little jaunt around town sounded like fun. Jaunt? Even his thoughts mocked him as he stormed out of the house and to his car. “Okay, get your head out of your ass and put your keys down. She’s not yours, and you shouldn’t be out trying to rescue her.”

  Even as he spoke the words aloud like some damned fool, he clicked the ignition to life. First, he stopped at Grover’s. The attendant there, with the vague disposition of a CIA movie operative, wouldn’t tell him anything. He acted as though keeping it a secret Ryhan even worked there was a matter of national security. When Jesse passed the diner, one of the nameless women he’d met at the planning meeting was sitting on a bench while a furry poodle sniffed the ground in front of her. He pulled over and put his window down.

  She clutched her chest and gasped, whipping a purple can from down the front of her shirt. “This is mace.” The label read Aqua Net. She stood, then leaned over to look inside the window, the dog squirming in her arms. “Oh, Jesse. You frightened me.”

  “I apologize. I’m hoping you can help me. I’m looking for Ryhan Connor? Do you know where she lives?”

  “Come along, Juju.” She lowered the mutt to the ground and, with a snap of diamond-studded leash, huffed off muttering something about movie making harlots ruining the good name of the town. As though a light in his head clicked on, he knew exactly what had happened with Ryhan and her job.

  He leaned back against the car seat and looked up at the starry night sky. Ten years and nothing in this town had changed. The same striped awnings protected every doorway on Main Street. The same checkers tables sat in the square occupied by the same old men from dawn till dusk, old men hiding from their bitchy old wives who cast judgments like verbal stones on seek and destroy missions. Instead of examining why he cared about how the town treated Ryhan, he pushed the thoughts aside, trying to figure how he would find her.

  He shifted his gaze down, and there, in the window, she sat with her back against the glass, her shoulders sagging and shaking. She moved away from the window, and the light dimmed. Before Jesse could second-guess his decision, he’d shut off the car and crossed the street into an old brick building and climbed a rickety set of steps to stand in front of a single door in a narrow hallway.

  The knob hung at an angle from a single screw, and he gently pushed the door open. “Ryhan?”

  “Go away.” A pillow sailed by his head. “I don’t want to see anyone.”

  In the darkness, he crossed to her voice, his knee knocking into a mattress. “Then we’ll leave the light off.” He sat, facing the sounds of her sniffles. “Why so sad?”

  “I got fired four times today, and if I see Juju on the street, I am to immediately turn the other way and not try to make contact with her.” She huddled further under a blanket. “So far this evening, I’ve been called a whore, a bad influence, the ruination of the diner, and Grover, whose name isn’t really Grover—it’s a total lie—asked that I make all future gas purchases somewhere else. Where else? We have one gas station in this town. I mean, not that I have a car, but I might get one someday, and where will I get fuel?”

  The anguish in her voice drew him in, and he wrapped his arms around her, snuggling her against his chest. “It’s okay, Ryhan. You’re going to get through this.” He ran a hand down her spine, bringing it back to feel the steady thump of her heart.

  She sniffed and looked up at him, her eyes shining with more tears than her lids could hold back. “How?” Her one-word response threw him off. Way off.

  “Well, let’s see.” He didn’t comfort women. Crying women scared him, made his hands shake and his eyes blink rapidly until they burnt. “First, we’ll get you up and d
ress you like a fairytale princess, you know, before the zombies get her.”

  She sniffled and dabbed at her eyes with a finger. “Then what?”

  “So, I’m doing the whole thing?” He kissed the top of her head and tucked her close enough into his side that her body curved into his and her arm wrapped around his waist. “Okay. After we battle the zombies to save your dress, we’ll line up all the mean people in this town who did you wrong today, then we’ll grab some popcorn and watch the zombies suck the life out of them until there’s nothing left but a big puddle of ugly muumuus on the ground in front of us.”

  “That sounds like the perfect day.” The smell of lavender tickled his nose as she pressed closer. “Can we get ice cream after?”

  “Any one of the thirty-one flavors.” Lying in a bed, holding this woman as she cried into his shirt shouldn’t have had his heart racing or his hands itching to touch her skin. He shifted his body, needing the space to pull it together and not use her mood against her. She brought him back with a gentle tug, her lips gliding along his Adam’s apple.

  “Oh, Jesse.” She moaned against his skin, and his stomach dropped out his left pant leg. “Just for tonight?”

  Her wide yawn nuzzled her chin against his throat, and his loud gulp split the silence of the room.

  “Jess?” Her hand slipped lower to his belt, and her lips flitted at his collar.

  He turned toward her as her lips blazed across his jaw before landing on his. Sadness burned in her touch, along with desire and something else—desperation maybe—that sucked the breath out of him. “Ryhan, tonight, let me hold you. We can work everything else out tomorrow.”

  She pulled back, and at her whimper, he stroked a hand down her hair.

  “Come on. Let’s just relax and nap a little.” She opened her mouth, presumably to protest, and he put a finger over her lips. “You can thank me later.”

  “It’ll be a big thank you.” As she nodded off, she murmured, “With ice-cream.”

  8