Craving BAD: An Anthology of Bad Boys and Wicked Girls

by A. J. Norris

  “I love you,” he said as he pressed even harder into me. I heard his breath start to come in gasps until he followed me over the edge, pulling me tightly against him.

  “See, there was plenty of room,” he murmured in my ear.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  It took some maneuvering and my elbow to Ryan’s gut, but we managed to get dressed again, and snuck back to our seats. No one said anything, much to my surprise, and I couldn’t help but think that ten and a half hours was a long time. Maybe we could visit the bathroom again.

  “So,” Ryan said, taking my hand and kissing it.

  “So,” I replied, smiling. “Tell me about your life in Tokyo.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything.”

  About the Author

  Always the avid reader, Sarah Fischer found it frustrating that there were so few books following the struggles and joys that a typical college student faces. While recovering from surgery, she decided to write one. Elton Hall Chronicles: First Semester is based on real events that happened to Sarah and her friends over the years. When she isn’t unveiling long held secrets or working as a government drove, Sarah likes to go to the movies with her husband and spend time with her three furbabies.

  Facebook:

  https://www.facebook.com/sarah.elizabeth.129

  Twitter:

  https://twitter.com/SarhAlexander7

  Wicked Proposals

  By Jamie Zakian

  Tessa squeezed past men in thousand-dollar suits, careful to avoid their grabby hands as she walked across the main floor of the Pink Kitty. This would be the last night she’d have to strut around the crowded bar of a strip club in only a thong. The overweight man she’d just dismounted had been the final lap she’d grind against while trying to look sexy and not bored.

  “Heading home, Lola?” a woman called out. Tessa turned toward the bar. The cute blonde bartender lined up shots on the neon-trimmed glass bar while looking at Tessa.

  “Yep,” Tessa said. “See ya tomorrow.” She waved at the bubbly blonde, who she’d never see again. Lola had been her persona for this job, but Tessa wouldn’t need to be that girl after tonight. Tonight, the last week she’d spent playing a ditzy orphan would pay off. Tonight, the damage she’d done to her hair by dying it jet black, would finally have purpose.

  The Pink Kitty had become quite trendy this past year. People flew in from all over the country—to Vegas—just to get a dance from the exotic, uninhibited women of this club. That, however, wasn’t the reason this establishment became her target.

  Tessa walked into the dancer’s dressing room. While the other women puffed up their cleavage and changed into even skimpier thongs, she hurried into her street clothes. The thump of speakers died out between songs. This was it. She had precious moments between songs, when the dressing room cleared for maybe two seconds, and she used them to sneak into the closet.

  In an hour, this club would close. The dancers who twirled around a golden pole would leave, then the bartenders, bouncers, and finally the owner, Blake Pierce. She didn’t know Blake or any of his family members personally. That wouldn’t stop her from clearing out the safe in his office, which sat right up the stairs outside this dressing room. Blake and his brothers were the heirs to the Pierce empire and her family’s sworn enemy.

  Tessa sat on the floor in the closet and wedged herself behind an ironing board. The safe wouldn’t have much, but every penny of Pierce cash was worth double normal currency in her book. Riches weren’t the objective, vengeance was. The feud had started long before she was born, but destroying the Pierce family had been her mother’s lifelong mission. Now that her mother was dead, it was up to Tessa and her sister to fulfill the vow to take down the powerful family that ruined their own legacy.

  A smile crept across Tessa’s lips. Sneaking into a Pierce family’s supposedly secure abode and swiping their bounty was what she lived for, what she and her sister had been raised to do. She settled back against the closet’s wall, pulled her cell phone from her jean pocket, and opened the solitaire app. The thump of music echoed through the walls. She only had to wait out five more songs. Then, exactly one hour and twenty minutes after those five songs, she’d be in the clear to raid that safe.

  A heavy silence clung to the air, weighed down Tessa’s shoulders to slow her steps from the closet. She opened the dressing room’s door and peeked out into the bar. Every light had been turned off. She’d never been in this club without the music blasting, the neon lights blinking. It was eerie to see the wide-open room so dark and bare, eerie and exciting. Her desires waited outside this dressing room door, and all she had to do was walk into the darkness and take them.

  Tessa stepped out the dressing room and looked into the lobby. A red light blinked beside the front door, which was the only light that remained. This building had an alarm system, but there were no motion sensors on the inside, only on the windows and doors. She knew this because she’d researched the security system’s model online. There wasn’t an aspect of this job she hadn’t studied extensively, including Blake Pierce.

  He was an interesting man. The guy was a genius, at least according to his college transcripts. Blake came from old money, her family’s money, yet ran a gentleman’s club off the Vegas strip for the last five years. Despite the many cameras she’d planted around his condo, and his office in this club, she couldn’t decipher his motives, but she did know what he’d be doing at this very moment. Right now, Blake Pierce would be in his high-rise condo, overlooking the strip and sipping a martini.

  “Time to get paid,” she said in a whisper. Her heart pounded as she hurried up the stairs to the office. The payment she sought wasn’t the cash in the safe; it was the thrill of taking the cash in the safe. She’d give all the money to her older sister the moment she got home anyway. Piper handled their finances, and her sister left them wanting for nothing.

  The floor creaked beneath Tessa’s light steps as she neared the office door. Her stomach whirled, mind raced. She could almost taste the frenzy that a naughty deed brought. It tasted like a crisp winter morning, like fresh mountain snow. Perhaps tomorrow she and Piper should head to Aspen with their suitcase of stolen Pierce money.

  Tessa pushed open the office door and strolled inside. Her smile dropped, and her feet shuffled to a stop when she spotted Blake. He stood in a sliver of moonlight in front of his desk, arms crossed as if waiting for her to prance through the door.

  “Lola,” he said with a blank glare. His deep voice echoed throughout the quiet room, crept beneath Tessa’s skin to chill her bones. “You’re here awfully late.”

  “I, uh…” The prepared excuse in Tessa’s head twisted to words stew as she stared at the tall man in front of her. She’d never been caught in the act before, not since she was a child. While frozen in the middle of the room, looking up at a slightly intimidating and seriously attractive man, she actually felt like a little girl. “I just—”

  “Came to hit my safe, right?” His muscles flexed beneath his shirt as he gestured to the small metal safe in the corner. “I thought you’d have a skintight cat burglar outfit on.” He scanned her blue jeans and tank top, a hint of amusement filling his dark eyes. “A torch or something. How do you plan on cracking into my safe?”

  Blake wasn’t aiming a gun at Tessa’s face in typical arch nemesis fashion, which allowed a twinge of hope to spawn in her chest. He must have no clue who she really was, or why she chose this particular establishment to rob, but she knew everything about him. According to the conversations she listened in on with her heavy surveillance, Blake valued logic, wisdom, and honesty. If she displayed herself just right, she could walk out of this blunder unscathed. Then regroup and hit a different business of his next month.

  “I know the combination,” Tessa said. There was no smugness in her voice, no gloating, just fact. His chiseled jaw clenched. The deep brown eyes that had playfully taken her in a moment ago now glared, which seeme
d to make him even more attractive.

  “I never wrote that combination down, didn’t save it on any electronic devices.”

  Tessa smirked. If only capers were still that easy. People learned from their mistakes, which made her work as a master thief much harder. It took some pretty crafty investigatory skill to do what she did. “You’re single, mid-thirties, never married. You haven’t even been on a date in the past four months.” She crept closer to the man in front of her, to get a better look at the shock on his face in the low light. “As far as I can tell, the most intimate relationship you’ve ever had is with your Persian cat. And you got her on three, twenty-one—”

  “Eleven,” he said, a hint of a smile perking his thin lips. “You’re smart.”

  “Not smart enough.” Tessa glanced around the dimly lit office, which would now be the scene of her first professional failure. “You caught me.”

  “Well.” He took off his pinstriped blazer, draped it over his leather chair. “I’m smarter.” He unbuttoned his shirtsleeves and rolled them up, the way one would before they were about to get their hands dirty.

  Tessa curled her fingers into fists. The man who inched toward her had the body of a cage fighter and the stare of the devil, but she was a black belt in taekwondo. It seemed like an even match in her eyes.

  “So, is this the part where you tell me the police are on their way then try to…” She lifted her hands, drew air quotes with her fingers. “…detain me?”

  “No.” Blake clicked on the desk lamp, gestured to the empty chair opposite his desk. “This is the part where we sit down, discuss a proposal to carry out the biggest heist in America.”

  A flurry of emotions ran through Tessa—shock, exhilaration, hesitance—but the one that caught her off guard was lust. Blake Pierce was hot, in a mysterious could-be-a-psycho-killer kind of way, but her pulse had never raced for him. At least, not until now.

  “You have my attention, Mr. Pierce.” Tessa dropped into the wide chair, yet kept her guard up. This could be a distraction. Fortunately, the back wall of this office was a one-way mirror that showed a full view of the dark club below. If a hint of police lights flashed, she’d throw the chair under her ass out the window behind her and climb down the fire escape.

  “Blake,” he said, sitting in his chair behind the desk. “I think we should be on a first name basis. Don’t you?”

  He stared at Tessa as if waiting for her to announce her real name, which she had no intention of doing.

  “Sure, Blake,” she said through a snicker. All she needed was this guy’s plan, then she and her sister could pull it off themselves. “Well, let’s hear this big proposal.”

  “I’d like you to be my wife,” he said, with an actual look of sincerity on his face.

  A laugh flew from Tessa’s mouth so fast she couldn’t stop it if she wanted to, which she didn’t. “The big heist is my freedom?”

  “No. And yes.” He didn’t seem amused. He seemed very serious, which wiped the smirk off her lips.

  Tessa rose from her chair. She narrowed her stare on the man who had enough money to buy anything he wanted, except for her. “I’m not on the market.” She spun on her heel, flipped her hair over her shoulder, and headed for the door.

  “Not even if I told you you’d be the first lady?”

  “First lady?” Tessa stopped in the doorway and turned her leer to Blake. “Of what?”

  “Of the United States of America.”

  Chills ran beneath Tessa’s skin, though she didn’t know why. “Are you insane?” she asked, which she thought was a legitimate question considering the conversation they were having after he caught her trying to rob him no less.

  “A little.” He sat back in his seat, obviously waiting for her to return to her chair. So, she did.

  Blake clasped his fingers together. He actually looked presidential in his wide chair, behind his glossy oak desk. “I’m throwing my hat in the 2020 election. I have money, connections, power, but I also have Asperger’s syndrome. I can’t tell when somebody’s deceiving me, plotting against me, not like you can. You could spot a con from a mile away, then flip it back on the person before they could blink. You’ll know who to blackmail, and how to hit them where it hurts.”

  “You don’t know that.” Everything Blake said was true. Tessa could do all that, and more, but his assumption was based on a failed safe cracking. She found that rather annoying, and highly offensive. “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “Really?” He opened the top drawer of his desk, pulled out a thick file, and handed it to her. “Tessa McCormack. Born May 29, 1992, to a Ms. Sandra McCormack. Your mother was a prominent socialite in New York City until her family’s businesses crumbled.”

  The way he said it, so nonchalant, stung Tessa. Blake must not know it was his grandfather responsible for the crumbling of her family’s businesses.

  “Your mother then moved to the suburbs, raised you and your older sister, Piper, as straight-A students. At least, in the public eye.”

  Blake placed a photo on the desk in front of Tessa.

  “Here you are in 2010, stealing a golden crown from my family’s display at the Metropolitan Museum.”

  It was her face, clear as day, with a light smile on her lips as she boosted the infamous crown. It had no special significance to anyone but Blake’s grandfather. That crown was going to be her mother’s big score, until the woman died in a car accident, probably on her way to steal the damn thing. To honor her mother, she did the job special. Dressed in black, wore a knit cap and all, while her sister talked her through it on their comms. It was masterful, and the start of something special.

  “And here you are in Ohio.”

  Another picture landed in front of Tessa. This one of her and Piper in elf get-ups, cleaning out a safe in a department store on Christmas Eve, was a memory she’d like to forget. Though, they had scored half-a-mil that night from the Pierce family’s flagship department store. It was a very merry Christmas indeed.

  “In Miami, LA, Chicago, New York.”

  The photos kept bombing the desk. All stills of her, boosting art, clearing out safes, lifting diamonds. Most of the jobs weren’t even related to Pierce Enterprises. There should be no connection to her and those jobs, not one Blake could find. “How did you get all of these?”

  “Money can buy anything, even a presidency. Mr. Trump taught us that.”

  “That’s probably true, but how did you connect me to each of these heists? I burn my fingerprints off before and after every job. There’s no way you’d know where to even start looking.”

  “That’s why you’d make a great first lady. You’re just an everyday woman, to the public anyway. Even I almost didn’t recognize you at first, with that black dye job. But when you sat in front of me, in this office, to interview for a dancer’s position, it clicked.”

  A lump formed in Tessa’s throat, blocking the flow of air. He had put the pieces together, discovered her mission to destroy his family.

  Blake pointed at a picture of Tessa holding a diamond bracelet in front of her eyes. “Your last job, in New York. That was my brother’s diamond store. You hit it four months ago, so your face was still fresh in my mind.”

  The tension in Tessa’s shoulders lifted. Blake was clueless, just how she liked her marks.

  “I have to confess,” he said as a light shade of red rose in his tanned cheeks. “I watched the surveillance video of you quite a few times. It’s like watching a ballet when you pull a job, the way you glide across dark rooms, your gentle hand movements when you swipe other people’s possessions.”

  Tessa was furious. Not at Blake for discovering her true profession and finding a way to use it to his advantage, but at her body for being turned on by his scheming mind. If the man said one more devious thing, she’d likely climb over his desk, crawl in his lap, and give him the ride of his life.

  “What do you say, Tessa McCormack? Will you help me steal the White House?”
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  The throb that surged throughout Tessa’s body spiked. He’d said that one thing, and it ignited a scorching heat to ravage every stitch of her skin. She barely had control, not of her quivering lips or her naughty thoughts.

  Her gaze remained locked on Blake’s callous face as she rose from her chair. Just like in her fantasy, she climbed atop his desk and crawled across its smooth surface. This wasn’t like her. She jumped on opportunities to steal, not screw. But everything felt different with Blake. She’d spent countless hours watching him on surveillance videos, listening to his deep voice on wiretaps. It wasn’t because she needed to for the job. She had wanted to study him, see what made the unusual man tick. Now that she knew it was power, her body ached for him.

  Papers crinkled, a cup of pens fell to the floor as she swung her legs over the side of the desk to straddle Blake in his wide chair. The shock in his eyes lasted only seconds, replaced by a stare of hunger.

  When strong hands gripped onto Tessa’s ass, her heart jumped into her throat to cut out her heavy breaths. Before logic could return to her mind, override her body’s wants, she kissed him. All the air in the room seemed to sizzle away as their lips glided along one another. She’d kissed many men in her life and quite a few women, but none of those kisses had come with electric shocks the way Blake’s had.

  Tessa pulled back from Blake’s tight embrace, leaned away from his rock-hard chest. She didn’t know whether to pull off her tank top or run out the door. She’d never experienced such an intense rush of passion from any other person before.

  “Everything you do is sexy,” Blake said in a whisper and tingles spread beneath Tessa’s skin. “Even the doubt in your eyes right now is sexy.”