One Wild Night (3 page)

That someone isn’t me, and the sooner we
both understand that, the better.

“I’m sorry,” I say, interrupting her lecture
on the importance of treating the poor with dignity. “I have to get
going.”

Shannon blinks. “Oh. Okay.” She lets out a
noise that is half sigh, half nervous laugh. “But we’re having such
a good time.”

“No, we’re not,” I say, knowing honesty is
the best way to make sure she gets the message, and my mother never
tries to set me up with anyone, ever again. “You seem nice,
Shannon, but I’m not interested. Not even a little.”

Her jaw drops. “I… I can’t believe you just
said that.”

I lift one shoulder. “I know. I’m rude.
You’re better off without a guy like me.” I pat her bare knee, not
surprised to feel nothing when I touch her, not even the slightest
spark of attraction. “I’m sure you’ll make some frat boy very happy
when you go back to the university next fall.”

Shannon surges to her feet, hair flying as
she turns to go only to spin back when she realizes she’s forgotten
her purse. “You’re a jerk, Gabe Alexander, and you can rot in heck
for all I care,” she says, the anger flashing in her brown eyes
making her marginally more attractive.

But only marginally.

“Drive safe.” I lift one hand and watch
Shannon storm away, weaving in and out between the dark black
booths lining the balcony, with the swiftness of a girl who drank
virgin margaritas all night.

Virgin drinks with Mother Theresa. So far,
this evening has been so G-rated it’s left a saccharine taste in my
mouth.

“Whiskey,” I say to the cocktail waitress
when she tries to drop off the check—mistakenly assuming I’ll be
leaving with my date. “Double. On the rocks. The best you’ve
got.”

She nods, setting the feathers on the
ridiculous hat
Elevation
makes its female staff wear bobbing
before she walks away.

I settle back into the booth, the tension
easing from my shoulders. I suppose some people might be more tense
after pissing off their date, but I’m happy to have reclaimed my
night. Shannon will be fine. I’ve done her a favor, really. Some
girls have to be burned a few times before they wise up, get over
their “saving the bad boy” fantasies, and go looking for a nice
guy.

Bad boys are a waste of a woman’s time. Most
of us are past saving, and the rest have zero interest in Happily
Ever After. Hell, I have zero interest in Happy For Now. I just
want to feel alive, to look into a girl’s eyes and see something
that’s going to keep my mind off all the things I refuse to think
about for an hour or two.

The thought is barely through my head when I
see
her
, the blonde in the gold tank top and the painted on
jeans thrashing in the center of the dance floor below. She dances
like a woman possessed—arms up, head tossing from side to side,
hair flying, hips swiveling with a sensual abandon that has the men
surrounding her twisting their necks to get a better look at her
ass, but she doesn’t seem to realize she’s causing a commotion.

Or if she does, she doesn’t care. She isn’t
dancing for the people watching. This dance is about her and the
music. She’s feeding off every pulse of the bass, every eerie note
the female singer croons about castles in the sky. The girl dances
like this moment is all there is, all she needs, all she’ll ever
have, and I know right then—I have to have her.

A second later I’ve dumped forty dollars on
the table and I’m out of my booth, moving smoothly down the
circular staircase to the dance floor, my double shot of whiskey
forgotten. I ease off the last step and head straight for my girl,
not surprised when the men and women in my way sense me coming and
instinctively shift out of my path.

Over the past few months, I’ve stopped
giving a shit about almost everything and I’ve started fearing
nothing. One thing I’ve learned in that time is that average folks
are scared of people like me. Humans are hard-wired to possess a
certain degree of fear. Fear keeps us safe from predators. Fear
keeps us out of the path of oncoming traffic and our fingers out of
the flames. People who aren’t afraid are dangerous, unpredictable,
like a field full of landmines you’re better off not trying to
cross.

But I have a feeling my tiny dancer is the
kind who enjoys danger.

I reach her as the bass line is escalating,
thumping faster and faster, becoming a desperate, hungry pulse that
fills the club and reverberates off the walls. Her hips keep time,
wiggling in tight circles that make it impossible not to imagine
her blond curls tumbling around her bare shoulders while she rides
me, faster and faster until we both explode.

Judging by the expressions on the faces of
the two meatheads in matching polos hovering behind her, the jocks
were having similar thoughts, but when I move between them and the
object of their desire, they step back. Their lizard brains can
probably tell picking a fight with me wouldn’t end well, even if my
biceps aren’t the size of watermelons.

Not sparing my competition another thought,
I shift my focus to the girl’s flying hair and undulating hips and
let go. I let go of everything—the residual irritation from the
time I wasted with Shannon, the burning in my gut from my latest
fight with my parents, the heavy gray weight of the undeniable
things I drag around behind me every minute of every day, and the
frustrated ambitions that hover around me like a poisonous fog. It
all vanishes, leaving nothing but the girl and me and the
music.

I’ve been dancing less than a minute when
she turns—pivoting toward me and moving in close—and I know she’s
felt it, the draw of two like-minded creatures, a pull a hundred
times more powerful than the opposing poles of a magnet. Some may
say opposites attract, but when it comes to human nature, like
craves like.

My girl shifts closer, so close the hair
flying around her face lashes the bare skin below the sleeves of my
tee shirt, leaving a pleasant stinging sensation behind. The smell
of her—cedar and soap and darker, smokier things—fills my head,
ratcheting up my awareness. It’s an unexpectedly masculine smell,
but I like it. It suits her, somehow. She might be smaller than
almost every other girl on the dance floor, but her ferocity is
evident in every hip swivel, in every confident thrust of her thin
arms into the air.

By the time she fists her hand in my shirt,
pulling me to her, I’m already halfway to being hard. Her curves
pressing against me finishes the job, but she doesn’t pull away
when my erection brushes against her belly. In fact—from what I can
see of her pink lips between the flashing lights and the hair
swirling around her face—I think she smiles.

A suspicion of a smile is enough for me to
wrap my arm around her waist and lift her slim frame, shifting my
jean-clad thigh between her legs.

She stiffens slightly as I urge her closer,
until every roll of our hips sends my thigh into intimate
connection with her heat. Her fingers claw into my shoulders and I
catch a glimpse of her full bottom lip trapped between adorably
jagged teeth. She sighs and throws her head back, giving me a
glimpse of her pale throat and a jaw so delicate I could fit it in
one hand.

Her head snaps back up a moment later, her
hair flying around both our faces, and I feel the last of her
resistance vanish. She gives in to the moment, to the music, to the
way our bodies fit so perfectly together it’s as if God made us to
dry hump on the dance floor of the only semi-cool club in northern
South Carolina.

I pull her closer, driving my fingers
through her hair as our foreheads touch. Her nails dig into my skin
so hard I can feel it through my tee shirt, her breath is warm and
sweet against my lips, and the soft sound she makes as I tighten my
fist in her hair is enough to make my skin go fever hot all
over.

I suddenly can’t wait another minute to be
alone with her. The music that was fuel for the fire is now a giant
gnat buzzing around my head, keeping me from being able to hear the
sexy little breaths my girl is making as our dance gets
progressively more erotic.

“Let’s go somewhere,” I say in her
ear—perfect seashell ear so sweet looking I can’t wait to trace
each curve with my tongue. “Get out of here.”

She shakes her head as she pulls away,
giving me my first good look at her face. “I can’t, I…” Her words
cut off, replaced by a shocked expression I’m sure mirrors my
own.

And I don’t shock easily. Not any more.

But finding out the wild, uninhibited
stranger, who’s been grinding on my leg in public, is the most
uptight good girl I’ve ever met—a girl so good she nuclear bombed
her entire life to enable her ghetto family’s bullshit—is shocking
stuff.

Still, I recover before she does, and
smile.

“Caitlin.” I shout to be heard over the new
song, a hip-hop number less pulsing than the techno number before
it. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

“You still haven’t seen me,” she says,
swallowing hard. “This never happened.”

I smile wider. “Oh, come on. You seemed to
be enjoying yourself. I was. Sure you don’t want to come back to my
place?”

“No way in hell,” she says, her mouth going
tight around the edges, the way it did when she’d turn in her seat
during study hall and demand that my friends and I shut up, because
“some people need to get their homework done before work,
assholes.”

Back then, she was so uptight it was easy to
ignore how pretty she was, but now that I’ve seen her dance,
smelled her intoxicating scent, and had her breasts flattened
against my chest as she writhed against me, I don’t want to ignore
it. I don’t want to let Caitlin walk away without finding out if
there’s more wild child hiding beneath her chilly exterior.

When she spins and hurries away without so
much as a “fuck you,” I follow, stalking her across the dance
floor.

I’d never pursue a girl who legitimately had
no interest, but I know Caitlin wants me, and I want to feel her
fingernails digging into my shoulders again, this time with no
clothes between us. I want to feel her breath hot on my lips as she
calls my name when I make her come, and come, and come again, until
neither of us can hold a thought in our heads and there is nothing
in the world but how good it feels to fuck.

Hot, sticky, sweaty, no-holds-barred fucking
until the sun rises tomorrow morning.

I have my share of addictions, but this is
my drug of choice—the hunt, the rush as I see how fast I can get
the woman of the night naked and willing. It usually doesn’t take
long. Ten minutes, fifteen—maybe an hour if she’s one of those
sweet, Southern types who still gives a shit if a guy thinks she’s
a “bad girl.”

As far as I’m concerned, there is no such
thing as a “bad girl,” simply girls who’ve embraced their sexuality
and refuse to feel shame about it, and those who haven’t. But, if
we
must
call women who like to come with a variety of
consenting partners “bad girls,” then I’m a fan.

Bad girls are one of my favorite things
and—despite what I know of Caitlin’s past—every second of that
dance assured me she’s my kind of woman. I’m the one pursuing her
across the dance floor now, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find
myself handcuffed to her headboard by the end of the night.

In fact, I’d enjoy it.

CHAPTER THREE

Caitlin

“
It’s the first drop that destroys you,
there’s no harm at all in the last.”
–Irish proverb

Sherry is grinning as she leans into the
bar—granting the bartender, who brought her band aids for her
blisters, a better view of her cleavage—but her smile vanishes the
moment she sees my face, confirming I must look as shaken as I
feel.

“What’s wrong?” she shouts, plunking back
onto her stool hard enough to make her breasts threaten to bounce
out of her top.

“Nothing.” I shake my head. “I just want to
get out of here.”

“What?” Sherry squints, as if that will help
her hear me.

It’s quieter by the circular bar than out on
the dance floor, but still way too loud. Every thump of the bass
rips through my head, pounding what’s left of my brain, after I
realized I was dirty dancing with Gabriel Alexander, to mush.

Fucking Gorgeous Gabe, one of the many
privileged assholes I wasn’t sorry to see the last of when I
dropped out of Christoph Academy, kissing my scholarship goodbye.
As far as actions went, Gabe wasn’t particularly memorable. Sure he
was spoiled, entitled, goofed off during study hall, and had no
clue how hard most people have to work to scrape by, but he wasn’t
any more obnoxious than the other private school twerps.

No, what made Gabe stand out was how damned,
crazy, stupid beautiful he was. The boy has cheekbones that would
make a super model jealous, jagged brown hair that falls in edgy
waves over his forehead, and piercing blue eyes so pale they seemed
to glow, to burn with an icy fire that promises wicked and
delightful things. And the rest of him is nothing to sneeze at
either. Even back in high school, he had a body that inspired
giddy, heart-littered graffiti in the girls’ bathroom, but now…

Now, he is sex in two-hundred dollar blue
jeans. He is built like an athlete and moves like an animal, so
completely uninhibited it makes even me feel reserved in
comparison.
Me
, who doesn’t have a shy bone in her body when
it comes time to hit the dance floor.

I never feel more alive than when I’m
dancing. If I weren’t juggling two jobs and have kids to take care
of, I’d be at a club every night. Dancing is my drug, my rush, the
only thing that takes me out of my head and connects me to that
deep, primal part of myself I keep locked away most of the
time.