Dangerous Tease (3 page)

“Perfectly fine. Getting felt up by the gamblers is just one of the many perks of being a drink bunny.”

“Sounds like a shitty job.”

She snorted and picked up her glass, its condensation cooling her palm. Sure, it was a craptastic job, but the tips were huge and she needed to make bank fast.

“
Was
a shitty job. And since jobs are just so plentiful around here, I won't have any problem finding another,” Josie said, sarcasm thick in her tone. She gulped back a swallow, the clear liquid burning down
her throat. As drawn to this stranger as she was, another in a short string of one-night stands wasn't a good idea tonight. Her emotions lay too close to the surface, bubbling and threatening to overflow.

“Good for you for quitting.”

“Oh, I didn't quit. They fired me.”

“Fired you?” His voice dropped an octave, becoming deadly serious.

“Correction. They declined to accept my change of heart
about my resignation. Tonight was supposed to be my last night, but then my world went to hell and I realized I had to keep my two awful waitressing jobs, beg for overtime and give up my dream, all to fix Cy's mess. Brothers, they really can make your life hell sometimes.” Josie sucked in a shaky breath, realizing too late she was about two seconds from crying in front of a total stranger about
the shit pit her life had become.

Forget talking to Mike later, she needed to beat feet before she turned into a blubbering mess in public. She hopped off the stool, swiped her backpack off the floor and tried her best to level her voice. “Look, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have dumped all over you, it's just been…well, you know what it's been.”

Trying to salvage her shredded pride, Josie took two
steps toward the door before a hand on her shoulder stopped her. His heat seeped into her, sparking a trail of fire from his thumb on her shoulder blade to the juncture of her thighs. Josie turned and faced him.

“I'm Sam Layton. Why don't you let me buy you a drink?”

Mesmerized by the golden hazel of his heavily hooded eyes, she could only nod her assent. Dangerous territory ahead, her sense
of self-preservation counseled, but she ignored the warning.

Sam couldn't let her walk out now even if Rebecca's Bounty had been laid out in his hotel room. The draw was immediate and undeniable, but that didn't mean it was logical or close to typical behavior for him.

His type ran quiet; academic women with hair pulled tight and shirts
buttoned to the throat. Women whose most passionate outbursts came during faculty meetings at Cather College about publishing requirements for tenure. Neither he nor his dates stuck out in the crowd like this platinum Amazon.

The mixed scent of amber and orange wafted around her, teasing his senses. Without thinking about why, he scooted his barstool closer to hers when she sat back down.

“Josie
Winarsky.” Her gray eyes stared into him. His face must have reflected his inner confusion because her Ferrari-red lips curled into a smile. “My name, it's Josie.”

“Like the song?”

She shook her head, sending the fat curls that fell to her chin waving. “Oh, I hate that song.”

“Too late now, it's stuck in my head. Josie's on a vacation far away…” Who was this person singing in a bar? Even his
own mother wouldn't recognize him.

Not that he didn't want to flirt, because Josie was gorgeous. She must’ve been almost six feet tall with legs that went on and on like an epic poem. She'd changed out of her cocktail outfit, but he couldn't stop picturing the intricate, tattooed curving vines and flowers that twisted into the shape of an infinity sign spanning from one bare shoulder to the next.
He'd been so busy watching those vines while he played poker, he'd folded on a royal flush. Only a moron did that, which, apparently, included him tonight.

The plain white T-shirt she wore now covered that tattoo, along with almost all of a tiny pink princess slaying a kelly-green dragon on her right biceps. Only the dragon's curled tail extended below her sleeve.

“What'll you have?” The bartender
in a tight black shirt winked at Josie.

“Another gimlet, thanks, Mike.”

“You got it, kitten. How 'bout you?”

“Scotch, neat.”

Mike wandered off to make their drinks, leaving Josie and Sam in the middle of an awkward silence. His shirt collar felt tight. He undid the top button. After all, he was in Vegas—he might as well live a little.

“What do you do, Sam?”

“I'm a history professor.”

“Oh, I love American history. I just read the most fascinating book about Cleveland's assassination.”

He'd yet to get to that new release, which was sitting on a stack of books on his nightstand. “Really?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Why? Do you think drink fairies with big tits only read the tabloids and TMZ?”

“That's not what I meant.” His cheeks flamed. This was why he never flirted. Foot in
mouth seemed to be his specialty outside of the lecture hall.

“Uh-huh.” She took her gimlet from Mike, the ice cubes clinking as she sipped. A red copy of her lips stayed on the glass when she put it down. “So are you at UNLV?”

“No, Cather College.”

“Where's that?”

“Dry Creek, Nebraska.”

Her face darkened and her spine stiffened.

What the hell had he done now?

Desperate not to sink into
silence again, he grasped for a conversation topic. The black ink script on the inside of her left wrist caught his eye. “What does it say?”

Her brows squeezed together in a question before she smiled softly and held out her wrist to him.

Sam brushed his thumb across the blue veins visible under her porcelain skin. Electricity jolted against his fingertips, tingling its way up his arm. His lungs
tightened and his cock stirred. From his position, the words were upside down. Without letting go of Josie's wrist, he stepped down from his stool and turned so that they faced the same direction, with her directly behind him.

They were so close, her breasts rubbed against his back. “Sam…”

The single syllable brushed against the back of his neck and his body reacted as if she'd caressed his
dick instead of only speaking his name. He wouldn't, couldn't, let go of her until he read the tattoo. He had to know what it said.

Adventure is worthwhile in itself.

“Amelia Earhart.” He lifted her wrist to his mouth, kissing the words as her pulse jumped under his lips. Surrounded by her amber scent, touching her soft skin, tasting her warmth on his lips, the out-of-character action seemed
perfectly logical.

Josie slid her arm from his grasp and he reluctantly returned to his stool. But she didn't leave or scoot farther away.

“How did you know?” Her long fingers stroked across her wrist.

“My dissertation was about Earhart's impact on Midwestern women's perspectives of early twentieth century feminism.”

She arched her brow. “An unusual topic for a dude.”

“You haven't met my
family. If you aren't comfortable with strong women, you won't last long.” He fell deeper into her orbit at the sound of her alto laugh. “How about you, what's your story?”

“I'm a waitress, remember?”

“Bullshit. That's a job, it's not who you are. Come on, if you can't spill your secrets to a total and complete stranger whom you'll never see again, whom can you tell?”

A lightness loosened
her tense shoulders. She leaned in closer. “Sort of an
I'll tell you mine, if you tell me yours
, eh?”

Blood rushed in Sam's ears before heading south. “Exactly.”

She laughed and began telling him about growing up in Vegas with her mom, dad and brother. As she talked, she played with the simple gold chain around her neck that dipped down into her creamy cleavage. The sight of her fingers tangling
in the delicate necklace entranced him, taunted him with visions of her touching him. He had no clue how long he sat in a desire-induced daze before she caught him.

“Sam, did you hear a word I just said?” She laughed, a low, throaty sound that ratcheted up the lust fogging his brain.

He had no idea where she was in her story when he'd stopped listening. “You caught me.”

“And I was just telling
you the story about how a nude modeling gig during art school turned into a crazy all-night orgy.” Her teasing tone gave away the statement as a whopper.

“I'm really sorry to have missed that. Can you tell it again?”

She tossed back her head and laughed, sending her platinum curls bouncing.

For the next few hours they talked about their families, debated American political history, discussed
her painting and laughed at the escalating—and doomed—flirtation between Mike and the trio of bachelorettes. Somehow their barstools moved closer and closer until their legs touched from ankles to hips. While his higher mental functions were focused on talking, the rest of him reveled in the softness of her skin, the way she chewed on the short straw from her gimlet and the top curve of her breasts
peeking out from her V-neck T-shirt.

She wet her lips with a swipe of her pink tongue and his cock almost broke through his zipper. Her fingers brushed against his biceps and he had to force himself not to toss her over his shoulder and race up to his room. Wondering if that soft spot where her hip dipped in to meet her waist tasted as sweet as her wrist was about to drive him crazy.

“Am I
boring you?”

Caught in fantasy land again, he shook his head.

Her hand dropped to his thigh, searing his skin through the thick denim of his jeans.

“Not at all.” He squeezed the words out from between gritted teeth. “Just momentarily distracted.”

Her gray eyes sparkled and even though her fingers stayed closer to his knee than his crotch, he swore she knew exactly how uncomfortably distracted
he'd become.

“Whatcha thinkin' about?” She leaned in, giving him an excellent view of her bountiful cleavage.

He sputtered out the first thing that came to mind. “Your tattoos.”

“Oh yeah?” Her hand traveled north. “Let's go up to your room so I can show them all to you.”

J
ust kissing Sam's lips and tasting the smoky peat-flavored scotch lingering there wasn't enough. Josie needed to touch him. Everywhere.

Now.

They'd barely made it through the door of his hotel room before she’d wrestled his shirt tails free of his waistband. She slid her fingers underneath to tangle in the dusting of mahogany hair leading to the button on his jeans. His abs
jumped under her touch. Need flared to life between her legs. Their lips locked together, forcing out every thought in her brain. He electrified her body, every cell alive with wanting.

This is what she needed: to escape in the arms of a stranger and forget about the sword hanging over her head. No emotion. No ties. No happily ever after. Just hot, heady fucking.

The hotel room door thunked
closed and Sam pulled away, the inches separating their lips seeming like miles. Their chests heaved in unison, her diamond-hard nipples tenting underneath the soft cotton of her T-shirt.

His finger sketched a meandering line down the column of her neck, pausing for a moment at her frantic pulse point before continuing along through the deep valley between her heavy breasts.

The gimlets couldn't
take credit for the firestorm of sensation. It was all Sam. His deliberate pace became blissful torture. She pressed his large hand against her overheated skin.

His fingers dipped under her V-neck, resting on the uppermost swell of her tits, but didn't move; their stillness more erotic than if he'd reached farther down to caress her straining nipples.

Sam swung her up in his arms as if she
were a tiny, delicate thing. Hardly anyone challenged her dominant, bitch-please attitude, but he marched across the room with her as if he had every right and tossed her onto the bed. The change was freeing. She sank back into the soft, thick comforter, ready and ravenous for him. All of him.

He stood by the side of the king-size bed, watching her with a hungry look that emphasized the tiger-gold
of his eyes. His long, strong lines tempted her to grab a pencil and make a quick sketch of a man starving for something more. Something hard and rough. But the throbbing between her legs overruled her artistic instinct. Later, she'd paint him half-dressed and hard. Everywhere.

He made quick work of the buttons on his conservative pale-blue shirt, revealing a sprinkling of brown hair tinged with
dawn's orange. Her gaze traveled down to his cock pushing against its denim prison. Time for a jailbreak.

She rose to her knees and reached for his jeans, her tongue tasting the indent above his hipbone. If her history professors had looked like him in college, she would never have skipped class. Her fingers, clumsy with lust, fumbled with the stiff button while her mouth explored the hard plane
of his stomach. Despite spending the past few hours in the Paris Casino's smoky bar, he smelled of warm leather, cinnamon and something she couldn't place at first.

It hit her at the same moment she wriggled his button through the hole—a new book, cracked open for the first time.