“See you,” Cash called.
Bailey said nothing. She was too busy thinking about what Jay had just inadvertently revealed.
Cash always does this sort of thing.
It was just a small piece of the puzzle that was Cash, but a certain picture was beginning to take shape.
They sat in silence. Cash leaned comfortably back in his chair, watching Bailey in that predatory way that usually made her want to blush—but she refused to give into that impulse now. Instead, she faced him head-on, making her own leisurely perusal, revelling in her newfound freedom. All this time, she’d been catching the odd ray of his beauty, when all she really needed to do was grow a pair and bask in direct sunlight. He raked his gaze unapologetically over her chest—not that there was much to see—her hips, her thighs. And then her lips, always back to her lips. She conducted her own bold study, her focus shifting indecisively from his hands—so big and yet so dextrous, fingers stained with ink—to his broad shoulders, to the hair she longed to run her own fingers through. The air stirred, shimmered.
Then the door slammed downstairs, sending ripples through the molten heat that grew between them.
“Were you ever homeless?” She asked. The words ran into one another like train carriages, and she fought the urge to wring her hands, to take the question back and return to polite distance.
There was a moment when she thought he might tell her to piss off. But then he heaved out a sigh.
“Yep. For a little while, as a kid.”
“I see.”
“My mother, my sister and I. We were homeless for a while, nomads in between. It’s not quite how people envision it to be, or it wasn’t for us—maybe because we were a family, a woman and her kids. And my mother was terrified that social services might take us away, so she—well. She got creative. It was less homelessness, more an abundance of other people’s homes. Long rides on the night bus to places we had no business being, and then another long ride back, just so no-one could report a woman sleeping with her kids on a park bench.”
Cash didn’t stop talking so much as he ran out of words. He looked shocked at his own verbosity, and he wasn’t the only one; she didn’t think she’d ever heard him talk so much.
He drummed his fingers against the desk, reached for a pen, and grabbed the nearest scrap of paper. She knew what he’d do next, or she thought she did.
But he didn’t do it. He didn’t draw himself into a whole new world. He dropped the pen, and he looked up at her with fire in his eyes, and he spoke.
“Why were you held back?”
“What?” She frowned, confused at the sudden change in topic.
“You told me once that you were held back at school. I want to know why.”
Ah. I showed you mine, now show me yours.
Well. Maybe she owed him that.
But she wasn’t sure how to begin.
“We… Moved around a lot. My mother had a problem, I suppose. With men. Not even men—she was addicted to… Romance? Romantic love. She wanted to be adored. But adoration doesn’t last. It’s like champagne; you have to drink it to enjoy it. Keep hold of it for too long, just to watch the bubbles dance, and it’ll go flat.”
She sighed, already feeling disloyal. But something about setting these words free felt... Cathartic. After a moment, she forged on. “See, my mother was very beautiful. She had, you know… Curly hair, coloured eyes. She used to watch Disney princess films. We’d watch them together. Her favourite was Cinderella.”
“What was your favourite?” He asked, startling her.
But she smiled, when the question sunk in. “Beauty and the Beast. My mother said it was boring. And she didn’t understand why anyone would want a beastly prince.” Bailey laughed softly at the memory of her mother’s theatrical scoffs. “But she liked the songs. So we’d get to watch it often enough.
“Mother—I called her Dorothy. So people wouldn’t think she was old. She was married four times, the first time to my father, who died. In between marriages, she ran around looking for the next prince charming, you know? She was very glamorous. A jet-setter. When she was young, she worked as a croupier at a casino. That’s how she met my father. By the time he died, she was the one draped in diamonds at the gambling table—but the diamonds didn’t last very long. Dorothy had quite atrocious taste in men. So we would move and move and move—because she had to live with her latest love, who happened to hail from Portsmouth or Manchester or Cambridge. Or we would move because we found ourselves financially embarrassed, as she used to say, and we had to disappear on our debtors.” Bailey licked her lips, her mouth dry.
“So you were homeless too,” Cash said.
She blinked. “No. No, we never were.”
But he looked at her steadily. “Doesn’t sound like you ever had a home.”
She stared for a moment, her mind turning that statement over and over.
And then she said, “I have to go.”
And she felt his eyes on her as she fled.
Chapter Ten
Over the course of the next few days, they reached a kind of uneasy truce. Neither mentioned the secrets they had shared. Cash continued to stare at Bailey with hunger written across his face, and she continued to pretend not to notice.
But at least now, they spoke. And sometimes he showed her a flash of the light-hearted banter, of the sweet charm, that she’d gotten to know at the coffee shop. In fact, she’d started to think of him as a cup of coffee: black, with a shot of gingerbread syrup curled up at the bottom.
Someone just needed to stir him up and make him sweet all the way through.
Almost two weeks after she began working at Fallen, he spent three hours with a regular customer of his, Gareth; an older guy who seemed to be going through some sort of midlife crisis, and definitely had the money to fund it. She often overheard Cash gently steering him away from some of his more radical tattoo ideas, presenting him with classic, neo-traditional options that suited him aspect way better—notwithstanding the diamond stud in his droopy ear.
Cash walked out of the studio with Gareth, shaking the other man’s hand with a grin on his face. Bailey knew that grin by now; it was the expression of pure elation that always took over his face when he’d just finished a tattoo. If she didn’t know any better, she’d think he got off on torturing people.
But in reality, he was addicted to the thrill of creating. She understood because she recognised it. Oh, she wasn’t a creator—she couldn’t draw or write or even cook for shit. But that thrill of joy, of pure pleasure, was something she knew well. She tasted it for herself every time she sank into a fictional world—be it Harry Potter’s or Merlin’s or one of the Disney princesses she still geeked out over to this day.
Not that anyone needed to know about that.
She stifled a jaw-cracking yawn as Cash walked his client out. But as soon as he waved the man off, Cash was turning back to her, an intimidating frown on his face.
“Why are you so tired?” He asked sharply.
Gem, who was making tea for herself and Jay at the machine in the corner, looked at Bailey with her brows raised. Cash didn’t usually speak in quite so… Emphatic a tone.
With a frown of her own, Bailey shrugged. “I’m not. I just—”
“Yes, you are. You’ve been yawning constantly for days.”
“Um…” She looked over at Gem for assistance. The traitor gave her a wink before scurrying out of the room.
Drat.
Cash stalked over to the front desk, resting his forearms against its black surface. The tinsel strung along its edge was squashed against his T-shirt as he leaned forward, peering at her closely.
“You have dark circles under your eyes,” he finally said.
She pursed her lips. “It’s impolite to comment on a lady’s appearance.”
A slight blush flooded his cheeks, and she almost melted. How could someone so infuriatingly gruff be so damned adorable?
But then the blush faded, re
placed by a knowing smirk. “What if I told you that you’re beautiful?”
That tore her humour in two. She felt her jaw drop; then she snapped it shut so fast, she was sure he must have heard her teeth click.
“Don’t take the piss,” she gritted out.
He frowned. “I’m not. I mean what I say, and I say what I mean.”
“I bet,” she muttered acidly. “Listen. Beauty is like a firework: it shines. You stare. And then it’s gone. Mentioning it is just as pointless.”
He pulled back, his teasing air gone. Of course.
Bailey wasn’t like her mother, and never had been. She couldn’t take a compliment. She couldn’t make a man feel like he was ten feet tall. She had no desire to do so.
But still, she mourned the loss of his smile. And so she said, “My boiler’s fucked.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“My boiler’s fucked. Heating won’t work. Too cold to sleep, so I spend all night in the library at uni.”
“Seriously?”
“Oh, yeah. It’s exam season; it’s open 24 hours right now.”
“Bailey. I meant, seriously, you can’t sleep in your own home?”
She shrugged, uncomfortable with the intensity of his stare. “Student landlords. Notoriously shoddy. But they’ll get around to it.”
He pushed his hair out of his face irritably. “Fuckers. You should have told me. I’ll come over and fix it for you.”
“Um. What? You can do that?”
“Of course I can. I’ll nip home and get some tools at lunch, yeah?”
She blinked.
“And I’ll come over after work, if that’s okay?”
“Ah… Yeah. Okay. That—that would be amazing.”
And that’s how she ended up sitting behind Cash Evans on his terrifyingly huge motorbike, whipping through the city like something out of a U.S. blockbuster.
She had a pair of wooly gloves stuffed into her coat pocket, but she hadn’t wanted to put them on—the thought of losing her grip on Cash and flying off the back of his bike was not a welcome one. Her fingers were stiff with cold as she laced them over his belly, her arms wrapped tightly around his waist—but that wasn’t enough to distract her from the wave of sensations crashing over her.
Slicing through the air at this speed felt like something close to magic, like living within the wind itself. If Cash hadn’t insisted that she wear a helmet, her locs would be billowing out behind her like May Day streamers. The powerful thrum of the engine between her legs was only beaten by the irresistible pull of the body pressed against hers. Could he tell that she was drinking this experience down like hot chocolate on a winter’s night? That her firm grip was less fear and more a fascination with ridges of muscle she swore she could feel right through his leather jacket?
She was playing with fire, here. She knew that. She just hadn’t expected it to burn so good.
Bailey’s student accommodation was a block of flats situated above a pizza place and was largely occupied by post-grads. So there were no wild parties going on as she let Cash into her pathetic little studio room, fighting embarrassment. There was no shame in her circumstances; she worked hard, she studied hard, and her flat was perfectly tidy. That’s what she told herself as he stepped into the room, his eyes taking in the whole thing with one sweep.
She followed his gaze as she shut the front door. A kitchenette stood on one side of the room, the tiles on the floor transitioning to wood as it turned into a meagre living-cum-sleep space. Her bed was pushed against the far wall, by the window, with a series of pretty screens stationed around it for some modicum of privacy. The screens had belonged to her mother. They were one of the few things of hers that Bailey had kept.
Another was the little jewellery cabinet that sat on the rickety drawers in which her clothes lay. Aside from all that, the largest piece of furniture in the room was the table that separated the kitchen from everything else, on which piles of books and her crappy old laptop sat. At least the bathroom was separate, like a tiny ensuite. Still, it wasn’t the greatest place she’d ever lived.
She turned to look at Cash, unsure of what she’d see in his face. But she shouldn’t have worried.
“You like Christmas,” he chuckled. A few steps of his booted feet took him to the cheap little Christmas tree she’d already put up and decorated. Lights hung along her window and across her bed, though they weren’t turned on.
“Yeah,” she said. “Doesn’t everyone?”
“You’d be surprised.”
She headed to the kitchenette. “Tea?”
“Please. Where’s your boiler?”
Bailey showed him the little boiler hidden away in a kitchen cupboard, and he put his toolkit on the counter and got to work.
“My mother took Christmas very seriously,” she said as she stirred in the milk—a little for him, a lot for her. “It was the one time of year I knew I’d have her undivided attention.”
“What about your birthday?”
She smiled. “That was her celebration, actually. Since she pushed me out, and all.”
“Really?” He stuck his head out from the cupboard. “Never heard anything like that.”
“I took it as a compliment.”
He gave a chuckle. “I can tell you watched a lot of Disney as a child. You have an unnaturally positive outlook on life.”
She brought his tea over with a smile. “Maybe. But it’s served me well. Anyway, who says I ever stopped watching it?”
“You don’t have a TV here.”
“I wish I did. But alas… All these books are expensive. I used to watch on my laptop, but it’s so old now, I can barely write my assignments on the thing.”
“Huh.” He sipped his tea, but his eyes never left hers. “Well. That’s a shame.”
“Yeah. Hey, do you mind if I get changed? I need to put on 5,000 layers of extra clothing if I’m gonna sit around in here.”
“Go for it,” he smiled. “You know, the boiler issue is pretty minor. I should be done in five minutes.”
“Really?” She made her way over to the bed and switched on her Christmas lights. Then she began artfully arranging her screens for maximum privacy.
“Yeah. It’s just the—”
“Don’t tell me. I won’t have any idea what it means.”
“Fair enough,” he laughed.
She watched for a moment as he grabbed a spanner from his toolbox before turning back to the boiler, his gaze intent. He was so fucking focused. Everything he did, he did completely. And she bet that intensity translated well to certain other areas of his life…
Biting her lip, Bailey shifted the last of the screens, hiding him from view. If she were acting like her mother, she’d take this as a golden opportunity and let him catch a glimpse here and there as she undressed; turn it into a dance of demure seduction.
But she was nothing like her mother. She remembered that as she turned her back on the silhouette of the man she was starting to want a little too much.
∞∞∞
Cash tightened the last copper bolt before he set down his tools and leaned against the kitchenette’s narrow counter. The knowledge that Bailey was undressing behind those bloody screens like some kind of Victorian lady sent a spark of heat to his gut that was even more intense in the frigid cold of her little flat.
But the sight of her shadowy outline moving behind those screens was too fucking much.
He watched in strained silence as she undressed, despite the voice in his head telling him that he was crossing a line—that she certainly hadn’t intended him to stand here and enjoy an impromptu show. But when the shadow that was Bailey began to peel her jeans off of her lush, rounded hips—when the silhouette of her thighs jiggled as she bent over—he lost the ability to control himself. Jesus, fuck.
Cash let his head fall back against the tiled wall. All his adult life, he’d been wary of desire. Of need. Of the addiction that one person could develop for another. And he’d thought tha
t he danced with danger every time he took a woman to bed, because his need for touch was so strong, and because he worshipped each body so thoroughly.
He’d been wrong. He’d been so, so wrong. Cash had never been in danger of truly needing a woman.
Not until now.
He risked another glimpse at the screen and caught her in profile. Her hair must be hanging in front of her face, because he couldn’t make out her features. But her body… He saw that well enough. Her tits were sweet, little upturned mounds, barely there. He bet her nipples were stiff with cold. God, he’d warm her up—if he thought she’d let him. If he thought it was safe. If he thought a girl like her would accept the little he could give.
Her belly was soft and rounded, her waist thick. Her thighs were thicker, deliciously so. She bent over to do something—pull on some sort of clothing—and plump curve of her arse almost tore a groan from his throat.
Cash closed his eyes. He had to, or he’d end up rubbing his hard dick through his jeans, and then he really would’ve gone too far.
But the darkness of his own mind offered no escape.
He strode forward and pushed the screen aside, finding her naked and gasping. His name crossed her lips, but he barely heard it--he was reaching for her, pulling her into him, his hands travelling over her shivering flesh like a tornado. First, he sank his fingers into the softness of her hips, her arse, revelling in their abundance; then he slid his palms up her ribs, cupped her little tits, brought each sweet nipple to his mouth in turn—what colour would they be? His mind rushed to fill in the gaps—they were dark, so dark, like ink. He licked and sucked until she wept, until she clawed at him and begged for him and bloomed beneath his touch. And then he lay her down on the bed and plunged his aching cock into her slick heat, his body covering hers, her pussy pulling him deeper. But he looked into her lovely eyes and realised he hadn’t even taken off her glasses—
“Cash?”
Her voice jolted him out of the fantasy.
“Yeah?” He called. Fuck. If he’d been hoping to hide the lust in his voice, he’d failed.
Merry Inkmas: A BWWM Romance Page 6