When he returned, he eyed me through the windshield, and I quickly climbed over the console into the passenger seat. Before my butt hit the leather, he slammed the door.
Five minutes later, he pulled into a small gas station and escorted me straight into the restroom in the back. Inside five seconds, he had my jeans around my knees. Then he bent me over in front of the sink and fucked me.
After we both came hard, we bought sodas and took a more leisurely route to the agency with our hands clasped atop the console.
“That was fun.” I rolled my head on the headrest to glance at his profile. Bumpy nose, heavy brows, square chin. All manly muscle. I sighed.
“Next time,” he said, lowering his voice into that gravely growl I was coming to love, “don’t give me a hard-on before we make the grab.”
I huffed a breath. I wasn’t making a promise I couldn’t keep.
Mr. Big
Sukie Chapin
Thanks to my thrice-wrecked ’96 Taurus with a botched engine rebuild, I’m a master at looking cool and tough on all varieties of roadsides. This time, my POS car kicks it on a deserted country road. I’m knee deep in grass and burs, definitely not imagining the bushes rustling around me in a definitively sinister way. Yeah, no Texas-Chainsaw-Massacre thoughts running through my mind.
Lights appear in the inky darkness, and I shield my eyes. I also say a little prayer. “Please God, let this be Gabe and not a man with a chainsaw. And if it is a man with a chainsaw, I’m really sorry I stole that Mounds in sixth grade. Amen.” And although I’m pretty sure I’ve never had a prayer answered, the familiar black tow-truck stops in front of my hunk-of-junk. Hey, there’s a first time for everything.
The door opens and a muscular arm appears, familiar tattoos snaking up the tanned skin and disappearing under the rolled-up sleeve of a flannel shirt. Boots hit the ground and kick up dust, and his smile does the same, stirring the motes in my long-forgotten libido.
Okay, okay. No sense pretending. I, Daisy Mays, have a teeny-tiny crush on my mechanic.
His hair is standing up in all directions. He always has that sexy-tousled look, like he just finished doing something manly and sweaty. I like it. But that smile, man. That smile with those deep dimples and the little bit of scruff. Unf! It’s not fair, really. I can’t fight a smile like that; it’s pussy-kryptonite.
“Again?” he says, grinning and pulling tools from the backseat.
I watch his arms flex and feel a little tingle between my legs. Crap. “Jesus, Gabe, I’m so sorry.” I feel horrible for dragging him out past midnight on a Wednesday.
He chuckles and waves me off. “It ain’t no thing, Daisy. Couldn’t leave you stranded, could I?”
He pops my hood, and it’s magic time. He tells me to turn this, pump that, but Wynona just sputters, and then noxious smoke billows out around Gabe’s head.
He slams the hood and swipes grime off his face with his sleeve.
I get a peek of lean belly. The irrational urge to lick him there trickles through me, but I shove it away. This is serious business. My bank account is riding close to zero, and I owe tuition.
“Sorry, sweetheart, got to tow it.”
And to really seal the deal of my absolute shit-luck, Gabe’s announcement is punctuated by a giant clap of thunder; the sky opens up, and God rains down his tears of disappointment for my life. It pours. Steam rises off the pavement, and the smell of wet cement and crushed grass fills the air.
I climb from the driver’s seat and kick the piece of crap, not caring that rain pours into my shoes and my mascara streams down my face.
“Hey, hey. Be kind to Wynona, and she’ll be kind to you,” Gabe says over the sound of rain pinging against metal. He pats Wynona’s hood.
“Yeah, well, she’s not kind to me. She’s evil and wants to ruin my life.”
He chuckles and gets to work hooking her up. “Get in the truck,” he yells, but I shake my head, and he pins me with a withering look.
I’m not sitting in his warm, dry truck while he gets drenched. Besides, watching him is a nice distraction. Nice enough that I don’t even mind the rain so much. Damn, his ass is incredible. It fills out his faded Levi’s, and I fight the impulse to touch it.
And now, his soaked pearl-snap is clinging to his back and arms, and honest to God, the picture is pornographic. He’s like something out of some filthy video. Any moment now he’ll start popping buttons, maybe chug some water, pour it on his head, then shake his hair so all the droplets fly.
I shake my own head.
I’m not usually a cat in heat, but something about Gabe gets me going. Maybe it’s how gruff and no-nonsense he is, or it’s that body or the fact that he’s rescued me exactly twelve times in four months. Whatever the reason, I’ve got it bad.
“Please get in the truck,” he hollers again, this time with more conviction.
Lightning blazes across the sky, illuminating him in a way that should be illegal. People shouldn’t look that good wet. “No thanks,” I yell back.
He makes a frustrated sound. “Then get what you need out of Wynona before I load her up.”
That he remembers my car’s name is pretty damn cute. I might be a little flattered. I might try to read too much into it, too. I bat that away and open Wynona’s trunk.
“What’s all this? Making a break for the border?” Gabe asks, appearing beside me and pointing at my collection of bags.
I don’t want to tell him I have four suitcases of high-end sex toys. I really don’t. “Work stuff.” Hey, sex-toy-seller is too a real job. It pays for grad school, and that’s what counts.
“Heavy,” he says, grabbing bags.
“Paperwork.”
He gives me a funny look, his handsome face kind of squinched up, one dimple super-pronounced while the other disappears altogether. His eyes are warm brown, but in the dim light of the roadside, they look black and deep, but I know they’re smiling.
He finishes loading Wynona, and then turns to me, my keys in his hand. “Here,” he says and sends them sailing in my direction. “Grab your house key…“
But the rest of his words die on his lips because somehow, out here in the middle of butt-fuck-Egypt, Texas, a sewer grate just happens to be in the road, and the flying keys bounce off my open palm and directly into the bottomless pit. We both stare at the spot that just swallowed my hope.
“Well,” he says, hands on his hips. “That happened.”
“Son of a mother.”
I hit my knees, prying up the grate. Gabe’s beside me, and we lug off the cover and peer into nothingness. He shines a light down there, ever the Boy Scout, but the water rushes so fast that I can’t see a thing.
I sink back on my heels, defeated. Gabe heaves the grate back into place and stands. I look up at him, utterly spent, soaked to the bone, broke, exhausted, and in need of some alcohol, an orgasm, and a warm bed, not necessarily in that order.
He holds out his big, warm hands, and I place my smaller, cold ones in his. Lightning streaks across the sky, and I catch a glimpse of his face. Empathy and a heaping tablespoon of knight-in-shining-armor, all dressed down in threadbare jeans and oil-stained boots.
He pulls me to my feet, and my shoes squelch their way to his truck. He opens the door for me like he’s a gentlemen and we’re on a date to a nice restaurant, instead of drenched and screwed on the side of the road. When he starts the car, the last strains of my favorite song boom from his speakers, and I lay my head against the headrest.
“We’ll figure it out,” he says, his deep voice comforting.
I chuckle, no real humor behind it. “I don’t have a spare to my house. Or car.”
He pats my knee.
Despite everything else, I feel the touch in other, more intimate places.
“We’ll figure it out,” he says again, then pulls a beat-up sweatshirt from the back seat and lays it in my lap.
“No, no,” I say. “You’re cold, too.” I push it into his lap, but he plops it
back in mine. Now it’s smudged with grease and rain. His hands are always a little stained with oil, and for some reason, that’s just as hot as everything else about him. He fixes things. With those hands. Those talented, talented hands that take broken parts and make them okay.
“Put it on, Daisy,” he says, his tone not inviting any resistance.
But of course I resist. “No, you.” He pins me with a look that roots me to the spot. And, oh man, spots respond.
“Put it on, now. You’re freezing, and I can see…everything.” He makes a swirling gesture with his hand around the vicinity of my breasts. “And it’s distracting me.”
I glance down, and indeed, my white shirt isn’t leaving much to the imagination.
“A lot,” he adds for emphasis.
I sigh and take the sweatshirt. “Alrighty, then.” I pull it over my head. The shirt’s warm and smells like him.
He’s quiet as he drives, listening to the radio, sometimes humming along. He doesn’t seem to want to talk.
Instead, I think he’s giving prickly-me some time to de-prickle. And it’s working. All I’m thinking about is that he was distracted by my breasts. Gabe. Distracted. By my breasts. “Were you still at the garage this late?” I ask after a few miles.
“Technically.” He glances at me, and in the dim light of the passing street-lamps, he looks dark and dangerous. But I know better. “I live over the shop.”
“Can you hear the garage phone from upstairs?”
He shakes his head and purses his lips, like he’s about to share something he’s not sure he should. “You didn’t call the garage.”
“But that’s the number—”
Then it clicks.
“Ooooh,” I say, letting the end trail off and down the road with all my assumptions.
“Ooooh,” he says back in the same tone, nodding.
“You gave me your cell phone number? Why?”
Gabe shrugs those broad shoulders, and I itch to touch them. “Because I wanted to.”
I’m quiet, mulling over that little nugget. But I can’t make it add up. Gabriel Torres is that hero from romance novels who rides a Harley and breaks girls’ hearts with his penis. He’s the type of guy who goes for Ginger.
And I’m most definitely Mary Ann.
“How’s the thesis?” he asks, yanking me back to now.
“Thesis?” I ask, my brain momentarily overloaded with paradigm shift and lust. “Oh, yeah, that. It’s good. Almost done.”
“Robert Frost treating you right?”
He remembered, and I’m doing that reading-too-much-into-it deal again. “Yeah. My one true love.” I wait a beat then ask, “How’s your niece? Did they put tubes in her ears?”
He grins, all those dimples again, like crack but for faces. “She’s good. They didn’t have to do the tubes.”
“Your brother getting to see her more?” His relationship with his brother and his family is complicated. Lots of back and forth, and it tore Gabe up.
He tilts his head a little and raises his brows. “Actually, he and his wife are back together, if you can believe it.”
“After all the drama? Really?”
“Yeah,” he says, nodding. “But they’re really happy this time. Them being happy is good for Tatiana.”
“I’m glad to hear that.” I never had a family unit like that. Mom’s back in Missouri, and I’ve been on my own since I was eighteen. Moving from boyfriend to boyfriend, she wasn’t the type to settle down and raise kids. I try my damnedest to be nothing like her. Her behavior made me careful and jaded.
“How’s your mom?” Gabe asks, like he’s reading my damn mind.
“She’s okay. Broke up with Billy, but there’s somebody new. Says she’s moving to Tampa with the new guy.”
Gabe nods.
I’m hit with the fact that he knows more about my life than my closest friends. Hell, I’ve spent more time in his truck or garage than I have with anyone else in ages. And, for some reason, I tell him stuff. I chalk it up to the silly crush. My libido must trigger some hormone that loosens my tongue. Yeah, that’s it.
“Daisy?” The way he asks, I know I’m not going to want to answer.
“Huh?”
“What’s really in those suitcases?”
I sigh, because why the hell not? “Sex toys. Lots and lots of sex toys.” Gabe laughs because he thinks I’m joking, and I really wish I was. Selling dildos and vibrators to drunk, cackling, grabby women isn’t the most dignified career.
When I don’t join in, he sobers. “Oh. Really?”
“Yep. I sell sex toys.” I pump my fist weakly. “Woo-hoo.”
“Do you test them out?” He realizes the can of worms he’s opened just as the first wriggly pink head appears over the rim and tries to smash the lid back on. “And that is none of my business.”
I shrug. What the hell do I have to lose? He’s already admitted to looking at my boobs and giving me his number. Lord knows, I want him more than I’ve ever wanted anyone in my life. Might as well discuss sex toys. “Some of them.”
“What’s your best seller?”
“Hands down, Mr. Big.”
Laughter explodes. “Mr. Big? What the hell is that? Wait, I don’t want to know.”
I laugh too, now. “Oh, sure you do. Mr. Big is the Rolls-Royce of dildos. Nine inches of anatomically correct purple pleasure. Made of easy-to-clean silicone and manufactured with a suction cup for shower play and a curved shaft for g-spot stimulation. He’s also grape flavored and ribbed for your pleasure.” I finish my sales schpeal with a cheesy grin.
Gabe bites his lip to keep from laughing. “Don’t tell me anymore. I don’t need to know,” he says, and then melts into hilarity.
I shrug. “Suit yourself, but you’re missing out.”
He maneuvers the subject back to a safe-zone, my classes, and we chat for the remainder of the drive.
“So you can’t get into your house?” he asks as he pulls into the garage.
“Nope,” I say, popping the ‘p.’
He cuts the engine and turns to me. “You take my bed. I’ll crash on the couch. We’ll figure out the rest tomorrow.”
Sounds simple enough. Simple and dangerous, but hell, who am I to complain? Not like I have anyplace else to go. I nod and unbuckle.
The garage smells of oil and concrete as I follow Gabe to a narrow stairwell, my bags banging against the walls. At the top, he swings open the door and waves me in.
His apartment is small but neat—an efficiency with a bed against one wall and kitchen against the other. In the middle floats a small island of low bookshelves covered in rows of books. Paperback, hardback, graphic novels—they’re all represented. A small, breathless “Wow” escapes my lips.
Gabe crosses to the kitchen and grabs a tea kettle of all things.
I laugh. I can’t help it.
“What? My books?” he asks.
“No. I mean, yes. I didn’t expect that. But the tea kettle is what really did me in.”
He shrugs those big shoulders and grins, not the least bit bothered by my poking. “I like tea.”
I nod and take a look around the place. Nothing feminine here. Black leather sofa, dark furniture, big-ass TV.
“Want some?” he asks.
I turn, finding him watching me. “Sure.”
“Wanna grab a shower while it boils?”
“Sure,” I say again, but what I really want is something else. But how to make that happen…
I drop my bag, and when it hits the tile floor, the cheap latch pops open and out tumbles none other than Mr. Big himself, in all his phallic glory.
Well, that’s one way to do it.
Gabe makes a small sound that might be a laugh but could just as easily be a sound of horror. Who really knows? Despite my comfort level with fondling these devices of female pleasure in front of strangers, my cheeks heat. This is different. Gabe is different.
I stoop and shove the purple-pussy-eater back in my bag and sta
nd, clearing my throat. I force my gaze to meet his, and he’s trying to keep it together, to not laugh. But he can’t really help it, and now I can feel the heat of my flush in my ears and neck. Jesus. “Yeah, so, about that shower. Cold, right?” I say.
He laughs harder. “Wanna bring Mr. Big?” he asks, gesturing to my bag and its weapons-of-pussy-destruction.
“I’m good, thanks.” I slink behind him to the bathroom, face aflame.
Gabe starts the water, places a clean towel on the sink, and tests the temperature.
Pretty damn cute. I pull off the sweatshirt, and Gabe watches, his gaze eating me up for a fleeting moment before his gentlemanliness takes the wheel again. He’s staring at me, and I’m staring at him and all I can think is kiss-me-kiss-me-kiss-me.
But then the kettle whistles, and he backs out of the bathroom. “Shampoo’s in the shower. Yell if you need anything.” And he disappears, closing the door behind him.
I make quick work of my hair and washing, avoiding the urge to let my fingers linger between my legs. I’m excited. More so than I’ve been in…forever. When I’m finished, I wrap the towel around myself.
The bathroom door makes a soft snick sound as I open it, and Gabe looks my way. His gaze travels over my bare shoulders and the knot I’ve made in the towel over my breasts. It lingers there, then shimmies down my body, over my hips and bare thighs. He clears his throat and looks away, but his gaze skates back to me. “Clean clothes are by the door.”
Then he turns back to the stove like he can pretend he didn’t just check me out. Like he can pretend that there isn’t enough sexual tension in his apartment to blow the place to bits. I don’t reach for the clothes.
He notices.
“You should put those on, Daisy. It’s cold.” He keeps his gaze trained on the tea.
I still don’t touch the clothes. Instead, I move toward him.
“Daisy, honey, for the love of God, put on the clothes.”
He sounds so exasperated with me, and I love the way “honey” drips off his tongue like the sweet syrup itself, thick and warm and sticky. Hearing it makes me want him more, this man who keeps rescuing me. The one I tell things that nobody else knows. The one who fixes broken things and has a house full of books and remembers that I’m working on my thesis, because I want to write, too.
Blue Collar (A Boys Behaving Badly Anthology Book 2) Page 25
