Her chest clenched. He was trying now.
She became aware of their surroundings all at once. The laughter of a pair of men shooting pool in the back. The grinding rock music playing in the background. The clink of glasses being passed and picked up and filled again.
As much as she might like to draw out his punishment, this was neither the time nor the place to start trying to fix Jared. And a woman on the wrong side of thirty who lived with her grandmother was hardly the ideal candidate to make the attempt.
“Then you should get on your knees and beg forgiveness,” she said lightly.
He surprised her by doing just that.
Jared sank to his knees in the middle of the dingy wood-planked floor—with God-knew-what gunking up the floor—in the view of the overwhelmingly male population of the bar.
“What are you doing?” Gretchen screeched. “Oh, my God, Jared. I wasn’t being literal. Get up. Get up right now.”
A fact Gretchen had come to learn over the years—most men, when kneeling before a woman, were exactly on eye level with her boobs. Less than an inch of dead air and thin fabric separated his mouth from her nipples. And her nipples knew it, doing their damnedest to stretch out and shorten the gap.
“I’m being contrite.” Gone was the chagrin, the lost-child sadness. Now all he had was full-grown-man mischief in mind. He moved forward so that his lips hit the tip of her nipple, which peaked through her tank top. “I think I could get used to this kind of groveling. What else should I do to show you how sorry I am? This?”
As this was a clear attempt to land a highly inappropriate boob kiss over the top of her clothes, Gretchen was forced to create some boundaries. Which she did by grabbing his hand and yanking him to his feet. And then promptly leading him to the ladies’ room.
“You cannot accost me on a sticky barroom floor, Jared,” she hissed. The hissing wasn’t really necessary, seeing as how it was one of those one-stall bathrooms with a lock on the door, but a girl had to have some discretion.
“More for me to apologize about, then. I’ll get started right away.” He promptly landed another punishing kiss on her.
This one lasted for quite a while longer than the first, and neither one of them felt all that punished after about two seconds. In fact, Gretchen was beginning to feel very, very good.
Jared was a man who knew how to kiss, and he used his strength to his advantage in ways she didn’t know existed. It was an assault on all of her senses at once. His hands were in her hair, over her back, moving her closer to the tiled wall. His mouth was an intriguing mixture of hard and soft, the slash of his lips over hers as unyielding as the rest of him.
And unyielding he was. Jared’s entire body was composed of the best kind of hard-packed muscle—there was no question of his strength, no doubt in her mind that he could lift her up against the wall and have his wicked way with her right that second.
“Do you want me to get on my knees again?” he asked, pulling back and gazing at her. She probably looked like a fish thrown onto land after a particularly good haul, mouth gaping and gasping at nothing.
“We’re in a bathroom,” she said. It took only a brief glance to determine that this room, though looking as if it had recently seen the useful side of a mop, was hardly the Ritz. “I think maybe a better plan would be for us to go back out to the bar and have a conversation like rational adults.”
“You don’t look very much like a rational adult.” A glint of appreciation confirmed his words, reminding her that she still had on her roller derby gear.
Normally, it was kind of a thing for all the girls to go out afterward dressed to the hilt like the badass chicks they were. No one received more attention in a bar than a group of roller derby girls. Tiny shorts under a tinier skirt. Tights that had ripped about mid-thigh. She was every sexy college Halloween costume come to life.
He reached for her again, this time bringing his hands up either thigh, not stopping until he had her ass firmly in his hands, kneading and caressing with strong, firm fingers. Then he lifted.
Gretchen’s back hit the cool tile of the wall just as his lips crashed down on hers again, warm and insistent. There was no mistaking that he liked what he saw and felt—the hard line of his erection pressed against her was its own kind of force. She would have liked to explore him, touch him, draw out this moment of intensity for as long as possible, but she had to cling to his neck to stay aloft.
And she wanted to stay aloft. Weightless, free of sensation except for the slow, steady burn where their bodies touched.
“Don’t stop, Jared,” she begged when she felt him pull away. Her breath hitched and she arched her back, forming a kind of anchor with her legs. “I’ve never really cared about being rational. It’s overrated. Especially if you keep kissing me like that.”
“I’m still going to be an asshole when we leave this bathroom, you know. All you’re doing right now is rewarding me for my bad behavior.”
Oh, she’d reward him for bad behavior, all right. The badder, the better. “Maybe I won’t let you get away with it. Maybe I have a penance in mind.”
“I’d like to hear it.”
She leaned in, kissing his jaw, taking her time working her way to his ear. The graze of his stubble felt incredible against her tongue, scratchy and raw and tasting slightly of citrus. She could imagine what that stubble—that strong jaw—would feel like against the rest of her body, exploring the nooks and crannies and sensitive spots between her legs. Oh, yes. She could exact payments.
“Not until you show me just how bad you can be.”
He stared at her for a full thirty seconds, his eyes boring holes wherever they landed. She tried not to squirm under his gaze, but she might as well have stopped her heart from beating. Everything about this man made her want to wriggle and writhe and stand up in the middle of the room to do a victory dance.
Finally, as if realizing she meant business, he nodded once and slid her feet to the floor.
“What are you doing?” she squealed.
“I have always wanted to use one of these things,” he said, reaching into his pocket. At first, she thought he was making some kind of bizarre reference to the contents of his pants, but he pulled out two quarters and plunked them into the stainless-steel vending machine mounted on the opposite wall. Aha. The nesting place of seedy bar essentials: tampons and flavored lube and aspirin and the always-important condoms.
“You’ve never had skeezy bar bathroom sex before?” she asked, watching him make his selection with way too much consideration for the task at hand. Rainbow or ribbed for her pleasure. It didn’t make a damn difference to her. At this point, she was one nipple tweak away from her pleasure either way.
He glanced over his shoulder as he turned the dial on the machine. “I’ve done tents and jungles and sand dunes and one incredibly cramped time in a tank, but no bathrooms. Why? Have you?”
Only once, but he didn’t have to know that. “You are looking at the bar bathroom expert of Pennsylvania. You want a tip?” She didn’t wait for a response, instead slowly turning and placing her hands on the wall, pat-down-style. Spreading her legs and arching her back, she gave him a clear view of the ruffly bottoms of her roller derby undershorts. “This position is my favorite.”
“Well, shit.”
She whirled. Oh, no. He was not getting away with this two times in one night. “What? If you tell me you’re going to leave again, I swear to you—”
“It gave me mints. What kind of a condom machine gives you mints?”
Gretchen fell into a startled laugh when she saw the pained expression on his face, a tiny box of mints held aloft. “Safe sex and good oral hygiene go hand in hand. Maybe the bar is trying to perform a public service.”
He scowled. “Are you implying something?”
“You taste amazing,
Dr. Fine,” she said, reassuring him with a slow, lazy smile. She licked her lips in what had to be the least subtle gesture of her life. “I can’t wait to sample the rest of you.”
“Fuck these mints.” Jared tossed the box into the tiny bathroom wastebasket, feeling oddly proud when they made a loud clang. There would be no wasting another second of Gretchen watching him with that look in her eyes, challenging and angry and forgiving all at once. He had two more quarters, which he pulled out of his pocket with more than a little trouble. He was running out of room inside his pants.
He stood surveying the machine carefully. Condoms were clearly mints, and he wasn’t about to make that error again. Since mints were situated to the right of the merchandise he actually wanted, his best bet was to try for a tampon and see what happened.
As he debated the merits of ripping the damn thing off the wall and smashing it open with his bare hands, Gretchen came up behind him and twined her arms around his waist. “It’s like sexual Russian roulette.” She laughed, her mouth close to his ear. He loved it when a woman paid attention to his ears. Desire shot spiked and hot to his groin, which was already doing a fine job of spiking and heating up all on its own. “You choose the wrong chamber and there will be no guns going off in this room.”
“That’s a hell of a lot of pressure to put on a man.”
Her hands moved lower. Fingers grazed over the top of his jeans, sending jolts of sensation through him. In a more rational frame of mind, he might say that this entire thing was calculated. Gretchen with her righteous fury and ruffled panties. A poorly lit bathroom stall. A condom machine taunting him from afar.
He was two fucking quarters away from reaching salvation.
“If there was one thing for sure I thought I could say about you,” Gretchen murmured, “it’s that you can handle the pressure. Choose wisely, doctor, and choose fast. I can’t wait to feel you inside me.”
Screw it. He tossed the money into the furthest option from the condoms, where the machine indicated he could get a pair of his and hers temporary tattoos. He was either leaving this bathroom a satisfied man, or he was leaving with a unicorn tattoo and one hell of a hard-on.
For what had to be the first time in his life, luck was on his side. “Oh, thank God.”
Gretchen snatched the foil square out of his hand. “That is not who you’re going to be thanking in about five minutes.”
He watched with an almost detached interest as she yanked on his fly. She was rough as she freed his cock from the confines of his jeans, her hand wrapped around the breadth of him as if about to put a car in park.
She looked up. “Wow. I think I owe you an apology.”
He groaned. “If that means you changed your mind, you’re going to need to let go. Or squeeze. About twenty more times.”
Her lips parted in an enticing smile. “I meant about the tiny feet comment yesterday. I see no correlation here, my friend. No correlation at all.”
That was it. Jared prided himself on being able to control himself in virtually any situation involving a woman and sex, but the moment she started audibly admiring his package, all bets were off.
He waited just long enough for her to roll the condom over the length of him, her nails scratching gently as she went, before whirling her to face the wall. Once again, her legs spread and back arched, but this time, he was close enough to run his hands all over the body parts in question.
He took his time tracing the line of the snake around her thigh, visible under the sheer netting of her tights. It seemed so long ago that he was imagining the snake’s head where it disappeared. Rougher than he intended but all the better because of her sharp gasp of pleasure, he pulled the ruffled hotpants down.
Oh, fuck. The snake went exactly where he wanted to be right that second, wrapping over the curve of her ass and plunging into the incredible place between her legs. And the tattoo—that mysterious delight of letters that he could never quite seem to get out of his mind—was one simple directive. Score.
He groaned. He intended to do just that.
“Are you just going to look, or did you have any further plans?” She wiggled her ass suggestively.
“I have plans” was all he said. He traced the snake from about mid-thigh, following its winding, delightful, serpentine path. When he reached the hot, slick center of her, he stopped caring about how far the serpent’s tongue reached. He only cared how far he could go, and slipped a finger inside her to test the boundaries.
“How’s this bathroom sex thing treating you so far?” she asked, arching into his hand.
“It’s incredible.” And it was. He drew closer, kissing all along her shoulder and up the slope of her neck, following the tendril of ivy. Her body was a maze of color, each tattoo an exploration of the way her skin rippled and her muscles arched. It had to be on purpose, all those winding trails, all those places yet to discover.
Her skin was salty where his lips landed and smooth under his tongue. Just as she let out a low purr of contentment, he slipped another finger in. Impossibly firm and hot enough to set his own blood boiling, Jared wasn’t sure how much longer he could withstand the urge to fill her completely.
She curved into his hand without reservation, completely lost in the moment despite the flickering of the overhead light and the acoustics of the place, which were probably being magnified and played throughout the bar at top volume. In that moment, Jared decided he didn’t give a damn.
He pulled away just long enough to replace his fingers with his cock, barely remembering to breathe as he embedded himself inside her. In he went, impossibly far, a sweet explosion of warmth and raw, seamless sensation.
“Oh, fuck,” she cried.
He paused, fearful that he’d hurt her in his haste, but she threw her head back and released a sound much more on the side of pleasure than pain.
“Don’t you dare hold back now,” she warned. Bracing her hands against the wall on either side of her head, she pushed her body against his, grinding her ass so hard against him he damn near forgot where he was. “I took you for a lot of things, but a gentleman wasn’t one of them.”
He took Gretchen at her word. He gripped her hips, his hands firm where they dug into the exquisitely soft flesh of her buttocks. His thumbs would leave imprints. As before, a surge of pride rushed through him at marking this woman, at being a temporary part of the self she showed the world.
He leaned down and bit the arch of her neck. In a state of half madness, he tightened his hold on her ass and rode hard, taking his pleasure with the kind of force and intensity most men only fantasized about.
He liked to think that if Gretchen had showed the least signs of flagging, if she hadn’t kept pace with him and cried out in release just seconds before he came, that he would have slowed down and assured her pleasure first.
But he wasn’t sure it was true. The smell of her skin, the taste of her under his tongue, the whole seedy affair of ripped tights and bathroom sex—they conspired against him in the best possible way.
He dared a single man on the planet to do better.
Gretchen turned so that she rested flush against the wall and tugged her clothes back into place, her eyes never leaving his, appraising him and finding him...what? Wanting? All she ever wanted and more? He had no clue.
“Well. I believe now is the time for that drink and conversation between rational adults.”
“Now?” He could barely form coherent thoughts beyond snakes, woman, yes, yes and please can I bury myself inside you again.
“I always think best after an orgasm. And it just so happens I still need to come up with an ideal punishment for you.”
“I thought sex was my punishment.”
“Oh, that’s not even close. You really hurt my feelings tonight.” Those cat-yellow eyes dared him to argue. He didn’t. “I enjoyed hav
ing you there to cheer me on a lot more than I expected.”
Guilt tugged painfully at his chest. He shouldn’t have let his frustration with his dad and Whitney push him over the edge. He should have made more of an effort to control himself. Gretchen deserved better.
“Are we not doing the points thing anymore?” he asked hopefully. “Let me start earning them back. I like the points.”
“Of course you do. I suck at them. You’re in the negative numbers, yet you still got to see my tattoo.”
He lifted a hand to her neck, tracing the outline of the mark of his teeth along the base of the vine. “Not that one.”
She swatted his hand away. “Then you still have something to aspire to. Clean yourself up. You have some major explaining to do.”
He watched her breeze out the door, rosy and rumpled and looking very much like a woman who’d been pressed against the bathroom wall in the best possible way. He should have been on top of the world. In some ways, he was. But as she retreated from view, he realized that her opinion of his poor behavior, low though it already was, could only drop from here.
Because if he wanted her to understand what drove him out of the roller derby game tonight—if he was going to clue her in to his almost desperate need for redemption at her hands—he did have some explaining to do.
And it was pretty fucking major.
Chapter Twelve
“You got a phone call. From your parents.” As she phrased it in neither question nor statement form, Gretchen took a moment of pleasure in watching Jared squirm. “You abandoned me and walked out of a sporting event because your mother called.”
“Everything always sounds worse when you say it.”
“There’s no other way to form the words.” In fact, she was giving him a huge benefit of the doubt here. A crater-sized benefit of the doubt. “You’re going to have to do better than that.”
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