Sweet Burn

by Anne Marsh

  He pushed again. Harder, until he could step right between her thighs. Her lips parted and he wondered what was going through her head as her tongue darted out to wet her lips.

  Arousal?

  Desire?

  Or one hundred percent pure calculation?

  He didn’t like that last one at all. The bar’s counter put her at the perfect height for his dick to press against her. Her bare feet pressed into his legs, the heat of her scalding him through those teasing denim shorts of hers. Despite their position, she didn’t look concerned. Instead, she leaned back on her arms, staring at him for a heated moment before she deliberately wrapped her legs around his waist. Power play.

  Damn, she was good.

  Or bad.

  Both words fit her and yet he couldn’t help but look down. The move sent her shorts riding up further and that was the sexiest thing he’d seen since yesterday because she flashed him a lacy hot pink thong. Last night’s panties had sported a little bow right over the heart of her and that made him wonder what today’s looked like. Pink, yes. And barely there… hell, yeah. Mimi wasn’t subtle, which was fine by him. He’d never won any prizes for understatement either. He leaned over her.

  “Talk,” he rumbled. “Tell me what’s up.”

  Unable to help himself, he rubbed a thumb over the creamy skin of her thigh, tracing the faint red marks there. His marks. He should have shaved yesterday before he’d taken her to bed—or she’d taken him—but he’d been too impatient and she’d been too demanding. She made him forget every rule he had.

  So fuck it. He’d grab the bull by the horns and address the massive fucking elephant in the room.

  Her naughty grin widened. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  Right. The question where she’d asked him if he was some kind of voyeur. He thought about it for a moment, then gave her the truth. “I’d watch you.”

  “Oh.” The small sound she made as she inhaled sharply hung in the air between them in the few inches of space he’d allowed her. Maybe she hadn’t expected that particular answer, but she got right back in the game, shooting him another come hither look as she did her best to distract him. “I don’t play those kinds of games.”

  She paused, eying him as she considered her answer. “Yet.”

  And… he had liftoff. His dick pressed against the buttons on his fly hard enough to leave an imprint. Which was what she’d been going for, he reminded himself. He liked the way she made him feel—hell, he flat-out loved it—but he’d asked her a question and she’d tossed him the pleasure bone to make him forget to care about her answer. That wasn’t happening.

  “Are you in trouble?” he repeated.

  She deliberately dropped her gaze down his body—more hardening on his part—and then her eyes snapped back to his. “One night,” she reminded him. “That’s my rule and that means that we were officially over and done with yesterday morning. Hands off and back up, smoke jumper. What I do with my life is none of your concern.”

  Chapter Three

  Mimi delivered her bombshell and then she shoved him hard enough to make her point. He let her go since he wasn’t a total bastard (yet) and she hopped off the counter and strolled away like she’d given him a weather update or the batting stats for the San Francisco Giants’ newest infielder. Granted, he had a great view of her ass sashaying away from him, denim cupping her curves as the sassy sway of her hips announced her ‘fuck you’ attitude with each step she took.

  An attitude he had a problem with.

  He packed up the tools he’d grabbed from his truck, slotting screwdrivers and pliers back into their places while he thought about that. Mimi wasn’t his wife. She wasn’t his girlfriend. Hell, if he was being honest, she wasn’t even his lover. He’d been her booty call and she had every right to tell him to leave her alone. They’d had their one night fling and things were over. He had no business giving her shit about personal phone calls or even following her.

  Mimi disappeared into the storage room. Right. Whatever phone call she’d received, she’d clearly decided it took backseat to inventorying her supply of maraschino cherries and pink parasols. He ran the various possibilities through his head while he snapped the lock shut on his toolbox. What he came up with, however, was she wanted him to think her call hadn’t mattered to her. Mimi didn’t just have one stubborn bone—she had an entire body full of them.

  Nope. No matter how casual she played things, something was up.

  He strode after her. She was bent over a box of restaurant supplies, digging out cocktail napkins. She straightened up with an armload of plastic packages when he came through the door and held her find out for him to take.

  “Take these to the bar.”

  Her Royal Highness needed to think again. Clearly, he’d given her the wrong impression by trying to help her out some. He wasn’t hers to order around. In fact, it was safe to say that the only orders he’d ever taken had been from Uncle Sam or the jump team lead. Instead of helping her out, he leaned against the doorframe.

  “Start talking,” he said.

  She glared at him, clutching the stack of napkins to her chest. He’d bet she was considering chucking the lot at him. “There’s nothing for us to talk about.”

  Her storeroom was a disorganized mess. While he waited for her to give him his answer, he shoved off the wall and walked over to the nearest shelf. Mimi had stuff piled in lopsided heaps, including a rainbow of fucking straws, picks and stirrers. The same shelf also housed an entire carton of juice pourers, extra glassware, plastic beer pitchers, and five bottles of cocktail bitters, and that wasn’t counting the cases of booze stacked up around every wall. If Armageddon hit, she could stay in business for at least a year without resupplying. They could stay happily drunk off their asses while zombies took over the world.

  Without saying a word, he started tucking straws back into the box from which they’d spilled. He let the silence stretch on. Mimi didn’t like quiet. Her bar said plenty about her.

  Chaotic.

  Colorful.

  Closed for business.

  “Mack.” His name came out half sigh, half sharp exhalation. He didn’t need a user manual to know Mimi was mad at him. He’d pushed her buttons and now she intended to make him pay. That was fine. They’d get where he wanted to go eventually. He was even more stubborn than she was.

  “I’m listening.” While he listened, he reached the back of the shelf and started stacking condiment trays.

  “Don’t be difficult,” she ordered.

  Mimi liked giving orders. She was good at it too, running the bar floor with the precision of dispatch calling in the coordinates for a fire. At night, she tended bar and had a couple of part-time girls serving on the floor. Ma’s was a smooth, tight operation beneath the happy discordance of too many people talking and too many tunes on the jukebox. She would have made a fine general or field team commander and, in that context only, he’d have been happy to serve under her.

  He liked spending time with her, but that didn’t mean she ran him or his life.

  “We had sex.” The scent of her perfume washed over him as she moved closer. Not close enough. “It was great.”

  Now they were getting somewhere.

  He turned his head and gave her a level look. “I’m not fishing for compliments.”

  “And I’m not into repeats.” She propped her hands on her hips and stared up at him. He’d bet she hated having to look up. Being of the shorter persuasion, Mimi usually wore heels of some sort, but not today. Her cowboy boots gave her barely any lift at all.

  “You made that clear.” He just hadn’t agreed with her.

  She looked at him like she wasn’t sure what to say next. “Okay,” she said. “So we’re both on the same page. We had a chemistry thing and we took care of it.”

  “And then you snuck out.”

  She didn’t so much as blink. “I left.”

  “Without saying goodbye, and while I was in the showe
r.” Never mind that he’d gone in there to give her the space to leave.

  She shrugged, Miss Nonchalant. “There was no point in making things awkward.”

  He stuck a box of spare bar mats on the shelf next to the pourers. The items went together, even if he and Mimi didn’t have matching definitions of awkward.

  “Maybe I wasn’t done,” he suggested.

  He knew the rules of one-night hook-ups and part of him (a certain stand-to-attention part) was on board with that. Great sex. No strings. And yet… here he was, back in her bar and wondering if there was anything else he could do for her. With her. To her. Yeah, especially that part. He wanted to fix the sad, lonely look she got sometimes when she thought no one was looking. He wasn’t sure anyone else saw it but he’d been there, done that.

  “One night,” she repeated firmly. “I thought you were good with that.”

  He sure used to be, back in his younger, wilder days. The long-ago Mack would have jumped happily into—and then out—of bed with a woman like Mimi. That was then, though. This was now and their one night had been backsliding on his part. He’d made a rule for himself—no casual sex—and he’d done Mimi wrong treating her like she could be a casual thing. He’d done himself wrong, too, because he wanted more than just sex, no matter how good that sex was. Maybe that was just because was older and he’d learned more than a few things over the years, but he suspected it was more than that.

  But Mimi wasn’t a keeper. She didn’t want to be kept. He’d dated a girl like that in high school. Fancy Jane had been wild to the bone, like a bird he’d discovered trapped in the garage one summer, banging and banging on the windows until it stunned itself enough for him to scoop it up, feeling the pitter pat of that heart about to burst with fear and need beneath his fingertips. He’d got the bird back outside… and it had flown straight back into the window. Fancy Jane, the high school bad girl, had had plenty in common with the bird. He’d taken his turn with her, enjoyed her, bought her beers and held her when she cried and raged. Eventually, she’d slept with someone else and that had been his cue to leave. And he had gone. He hadn’t asked why she’d done it and he hadn’t stuck around. Fancy Jane had been pregnant by seventeen, married by eighteen, alone again by nineteen and then he’d stopped asking. For Fancy, sex had been just one more way to beat herself up and he suspected Mimi would have recognized a kindred soul in her.

  All of which meant he should let her take her box of cups or napkins or whatever it was she’d come in here to get and let her go back to the bar.

  Alone.

  The problem was, he didn’t seem to be able to do that.

  ***

  “What’s wrong with my being concerned?” Mack asked his question like it was perfectly normal—and maybe it was in his universe. He also had that small smile on his face, the one that made her do far too much melting inside. Why did Mack have to be so nice? He was a big bruiser of a man, broad-shouldered and almost too large to jump out of the DC-3 the Strong smoke jumpers used. The first time she’d seen him, all she’d noticed was his hard face and the wealth of scars decorating his body. Now, she knew he had those marks because he was the kind of guy who rushed in to help out. He threw himself into the fight literally.

  She didn’t need his help. She fought her own battles.

  “I’ve got this.” She looked down at the stack of napkins in her arms. She always did. She took care of her own shit, stood and fell by herself.

  He watched her silently for a moment, another one of his annoying habits. Instead of rushing to fill a silence or answer an accusation, he thought things over with methodical preciseness. “But I’d like to help. You don’t have to do everything by yourself.”

  She’d done exactly that since she was twenty. So, no, she didn’t need Mack’s help. He was, in fact, superfluous and should get going.

  “I’m not leaving until you tell me,” he pointed out. That was another thing about Mack. Not only was he a fixer, but he was stubborn. He didn’t give up easily. No. Scratch that. He didn’t give up ever. He was first in, last out, and that was saying something, given the overabundance of heroes working the jump team.

  Something tightened in her chest. To her own surprise, she gave in. “That was the Oakland D.A. calling me.”

  She slapped the stack of napkins into his hands. If he wanted to help, he could help. She definitely did not notice how deliciously hard his chest was or how good he smelled as she pushed past him and back out into the bar. She had no idea what it was about Mack Johnson that made her sit up and take notice, but she’d never been able to ignore him.

  And she’d tried. God, she’d tried.

  He followed, right on her heels. “Why do they have your number?”

  She pointed to the counter behind the bar, indicating where he could drop his load. “Because we have history, okay?”

  Maybe he’d leave it at that, jump to the obvious conclusion that she was every bit the bad penny, the bad girl and wild child that she was. He set the napkins down and gave her The Look. He was going to wear the thing out and she could have told him she was immune. She didn’t care if he was disappointed, upset or even in a raging tear over something she might or might not have done. That was just business as usual for her.

  “I’ll rephrase. Why are they using your number?”

  “I could have an arrest warrant. A record as long as your arm.”

  “You could,” he said agreeably. “Why don’t you tell me all about it?”

  “It wouldn’t bother you?”

  He shrugged. “I won’t know until you tell me, but where I grew up we don’t jump to conclusions about people and what they may or may not have done.”

  “Where did you call home?”

  He had a hint of an accent that came and went, smoky with a sometimes singsong lilt at the end of words.

  “Louisiana. I grew up in the bayou. I’ve got cousins still there.”

  A bayou bad boy. Lucky her. “What made you come out here?”

  “I’d be happy to tell you my life story later, boo, but right now I’m waiting for you to do some explaining.”

  Right. Because normal people didn’t have the Oakland D.A. on speed dial.

  “I participated in a case a few years ago.” When she hesitated, he made a go on gesture. “As a witness.”

  The bar fire the previous summer had netted her an insurance payout. The check hadn’t been live-in-the-lap-of-luxury-forever money, but the dollars were more than enough to bankroll more than a few years traveling in Asia. Instead of rebuilding here, she should have picked up and gone. She wasn’t the kind of person who stuck around, and the universe had clearly been handing her a sign. If she’d gone then, she wouldn’t be dealing with the D.A.’s mess now.

  “What did you see?”

  “I had a street shop. I did tattoos for walk-ins in a fairly gritty part of Oakland. It was probably more a question of what I hadn’t seen by then.”

  Inner city Oakland wasn’t pretty. It was colorful and vibrantly alive, but it was also plagued by blight and violence. Multiple gangs vied for supremacy, fighting their wars block by block while generations of immigrants, artists and first-time home owners tried to get on with their own lives and stay out of the path of the bullets. She’d loved it.

  “You were a tattoo artist?” He reached out, running a thumb down the side of her neck, and that simple touch sent a jolt of heat through her. Bad body. “Explains the art.”

  “I did flash tattoos. Quick ink. Whatever people walked in and asked for.” She crossed her arms over her chest and looked up at him. She wanted her boots on. She itched from all this sitting still. She also needed a hard, fast ride on her Harley, taking the mountain’s curves a little too fast and tight.

  “What happened to your shop?”

  “It closed. Businesses do that.” That topic was off-limits. “I got a lot of people coming in and out. Some were getting their first ink, others had so many tats that we had to get creative to find bare ski
n for me to work on. I did everything from names—boyfriends, girlfriends, kids—to memorials.”

  Sooner or later she did the cover up work as well, when the relationship fell apart, but the ink remained. The memorial tattoos stuck around, except that it had gotten harder and her when she started recognizing her walk-ins, adding a new name to the growing list of the dead etched into their skin. Oakland’s streets weren’t easy and too many people made mistakes or were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  “You were good.”

  His certainty gave her a little pulse of pure pleasure. “Absolutely. I loved tattooing.”

  “So why did you stop?”

  For so many reasons, the Oakland District Attorney being merely the visible tip of the iceberg that had crippled her ship.

  “I had a guy come in. I didn’t know him, hadn’t seen him before. He said he wanted to commemorate a shooting. He had a couple of cell phone pics of the victim.”

  He watched her calmly. “That was normal?”

  “Pretty much. I mean, I would have passed on seeing the dead guy, but my walk-in also had pics from the funeral home and…”

  Yeah. The look on Mack’s face said it all.

  “You inked him.”

  “That was my job. I liked keeping the electricity on and the landlord happy, so I inked what the guy wanted. He had space on the back of his left shoulder. I put it there, gave him the flyer about post-tattoo care. He paid cash and left.”

  Mack stared at her.

  She shrugged. “I’d had stranger requests.”

  “You can tell me about those later,” he muttered. “When did you realize that there was a problem?”

  “The guy came back in, two months later and he wanted me to cover it up. Usually, the guys inking girls’ names and faces, they come back fast. The girl moves on, they move on, but the tat’s still there and the next honey is asking questions, so I give them a new design and everyone’s happy. Memorial tattoos tend to be keepers. How can a dead person piss you off?”