by Megan Crane
Absolutely nothing but lie there and marvel at the sight of this beautiful, dangerous man, propped up over her with his cut falling open to show off his mouthwatering chest.
“I keep wondering what makes you different from other women,” he said, and it was a low accusation, not a compliment.
“There are other virgins in the world,” she told him. Tartly. “I’m not some kind of unicorn just because you haven’t met any of them.”
He shook his head, his lips pressed together and a hot, hard gleam in his gaze. She’d found that look unnerving enough with the bar at Dumb Gator’s between them. It was nothing short of sheer madness now that she was on her back and he was looming there above her, blocking out the stars. And her breath. And the whole, wide world.
“The way you talk back,” Uptown said, as if he was tasting her again, a slow, hot slide. “The way you pretend not to see things and don’t bother to hide the fact you’re being stubborn when it’s nothing but dumb. This mix of wide-eyed and mouthy.”
“You’re used to a different sort of woman,” she said, thinking she should really do something about the fact he was lying on her like this. In a minute, she promised herself, because there were too many parts of her softening and obliging and yearning, and she’d never felt anything like it before. “Women who audition in the offices of bars with extreme sexual acts, for example. That’s not me.”
Uptown slowly lowered his head toward hers. So very slowly. She could feel her heart in her temples. Her ears. Her body was staging a full-scale riot. There was nothing but a damp, insistent greed between her legs, which she thought she should find alarming. If he came any closer, if he did any of the terrible, glorious things she could see like promises stamped all over his beautiful face, surely she would die.
One more minute, she told herself. You can die in a minute.
“I get it,” he murmured, a gruff sound a little like wonder. “You don’t know any better, growing up with nothing but your daddy’s bluster in your head. You think you’re safe.”
And then he bent his head and covered her mouth with his.
Chapter 5
Once, when Holly had been a little girl, she’d put her fingers on a red-hot grill at one of the town picnics in the park out behind town hall. She’d snatched her hand back almost instantly. And there had been a shuddering moment of staring at her fingers and the faint red marks on the tips, wondering if maybe she’d imagined the heat, the sting, or if she’d moved fast enough to avoid hurting herself. But then all that sensation had walloped her, so intense that for another sheer, dizzying slam of her heart she’d been unable to process it as pain or pleasure or something else altogether.
This was worse. Much, much worse.
Though when the sensation of Uptown’s mouth on hers penetrated her shock, it didn’t hurt.
It burned her alive.
He didn’t kiss her like this was their first time. He started in a place most boys she knew hadn’t dared work their way up to over the course of many dates over months—open mouth, greedy tongue, deep and wet and hot.
So hot she had no choice but to surrender herself to the searing, soaring madness of it.
He rolled a little more on top of her, gathering her closer to his powerful frame, and he took her over. There was no coaxing, no tentative exploration. Uptown took what he wanted, and what he wanted was everything.
She discovered she wanted to give it to him. Again and again and again.
Holly had no idea that all this time she’d been kissing the wrong people and not all that well. Because it had always been faintly awkward. Strange at first, with gradual improvements over time. Difficult to understand exactly what to do, where to put her hands, how to act while figuring out some new boy’s rhythms. She’d never quite turned her head off or lost herself in it the way people always claimed they did.
She’d always thought those people were predisposed to be dramatic about these things. Maybe it made them feel like their lives were Hollywood movies, and she couldn’t begrudge them that. But reality had always been a bit of a letdown.
Uptown was not.
Tonight—with him—she just wrapped herself around his solid, hard-packed body and let herself go for the first time ever. Lost, found, it didn’t matter. She didn’t care what he was doing as long as he didn’t stop. God help her, she thought if he stopped she might die. She trailed her fingers down his smooth leather cut, over the DKMC logo there, to the waistband of his jeans. She didn’t continue on to his butt, because maybe she wasn’t that lost or that daring, no matter the mad, revolutionary feelings pounding through her. Then she thought what the hell and shoved her hands beneath his T-shirt. She ran her palms up the length of his wide, hard back, or that part of the smooth, muscled expanse she could reach, and Uptown rewarded her with a low growl of pleasure she could actually taste.
She could taste him.
He held her face between his hands, keeping her exactly where he wanted her while he did what he liked, and she wanted him to keep doing it forever. He switched up the angle, taking the kiss deeper, dirtier. He ate at her mouth as if he could taste the distinct flavor of every shudder that shot through her body. He rubbed himself against her while he did it, big and sexy and impossibly bold. There was nothing the least bit shy about him or the focused, intent way he pursued the most sensation—the deepest kiss, the hottest drag of his mouth against hers, his hard chest a provocative ache against her suddenly wildly sensitive nipples. He made her head spin and her pussy clench to match, until she was rocking herself against the big thigh he thrust between her legs with the sort of heedless abandon she’d have thought was a lie—and an embarrassment—only a few hours before.
Something huge and dark was coming at her, she could feel it from far off. Sensation barreled through her, as wild and heedless and impossible as he was, and she moaned against his mouth as she threw herself toward it and writhed against him, trying to get there. Uptown pulled back then, his own breath hard between them, looking fierce. Almost furious.
“Don’t you dare come against my leg,” he growled at her, as if something that took so much work under normal circumstances was about to spontaneously occur there and then. Holly blinked and considered the blazing, raging heat between her legs and that massive thing she could feel bearing down on her with a certain exhilarating inevitability. Hell. Maybe it was. “The first time I make you come isn’t going to be like we’re two fucking teenagers on a school night before curfew, fully clothed, pretending we’re not doing exactly what we’re doing.”
He wasn’t mad, despite his harsh tone. She knew that with the same bedrock certainty that she knew she was about to come from this, from rocking herself against his thigh when her previous experiences with orgasms had involved her own guilty hand beneath her bedcovers and the odd pool jet.
“Lucky teenagers,” Holly whispered, her lips nearly touching his.
He muttered something that sounded like a curse, then kissed her again, deeper than before. Wilder. And she couldn’t stop herself. She didn’t try. She pressed against him, desperate and mindless and needy—
Then he rolled away, leaving her gasping.
She was dizzy again, and this time, she wanted to spin out into it forever. She wanted to fall off into the night and get swallowed up in the sweet, thick Louisiana dark, until she was flying again the way she had on the back of his bike. She was already more than halfway there. So close to that tantalizing oblivion that she could sense its shape already. She could feel it licking between her legs, coiled tight in her belly, making her breasts feel full with the same greed.
And more than all of that she wanted the weight of him again, pressing her down against the railroad ties, changing her and reshaping her that easily.
Holly didn’t question the fact that she was different now. Forever changed. Possibly marked eternally by that kiss. She just knew it was true.
She sat up slowly. Carefully, as if she expected that slick riot inside of her to
express itself like cuts and bruises all over her skin, indelible scars to mark her as his for all time. As if she wanted nothing more than to wear this night forever, like a tattoo.
Uptown was sitting a little apart from her, his hands in fists on his thighs and his brooding attention on the river below. Holly could feel his tension. She knew, somehow, that he was as close to exploding as she felt. But she imagined it would look different when a big, tough outlaw biker did it.
And she didn’t have words to explain, even inside her own head, how much she wanted him to explode all over her.
“Did you really come out here as a teenager?” And if it cost her to sound so conversational, so unbothered by what had just happened, so very much the way she usually did, as if her lips didn’t feel swollen and she wasn’t wet and unsettled and shaken straight through—but she pushed that aside. “It seems a little conventional for someone who also utilized the family tombs behind the church in broad daylight.”
“If conventional was what it took, I gave it a shot,” Uptown said, after a long moment when she thought maybe he wouldn’t reply. She kept her gaze trained on his big fists with all his dangerous rings gleaming in the faint starlight. “I’m all about results, princess. Whatever gets me where I need to go.”
She didn’t get the sense he was talking about sex. Or not only about sex.
“I don’t know anything about you.” It was easier to make herself sound cheerful when she could see it was working. Slowly, carefully, he uncurled his fingers. He took a deep, long breath that she could feel beside her as well as hear. “As far as I can tell, you appeared fully formed exactly as you are. Part of the club, obviously very dangerous, and still trailed after by every last female in south Louisiana.”
“I grew up right here in the parish,” he told her after a moment, and she could tell the threat of that explosion had faded. She didn’t know how she felt about that. Pleased? Regretful? Terrified it would never happen again? “But not the way you did. I went from my mama’s shitty trailer to my grandfather’s old fishing shack out in the bayou. Back and forth, depending on how messed up my mama’s life was at any given time. Then he died and it was just her bad decisions and the shitty trailer and all the assholes she let share it.”
Holly let out a breath, which was how she realized she’d been holding it.
Uptown slid her a look she couldn’t quite read, though she could feel it in her gut. “You think that tells you all my deep, dark secrets? You think if you hear a few cleaned-up stories you know me?”
Holly thought he was like the bayou that murmured all around them in this part of the world. Secrets sunk deep into more secrets. Shifting and mysterious, as treacherous as it was seductive. Not for everyone, the stark beauty of the swamp. Some couldn’t see it at all. Some were afraid of it. Still others found it no more than a curiosity on their way to another party in New Orleans. Something to check off the tourist list with a plantation tour and some beignets. But those the swamp caught, it kept.
She knew better than to tell him that.
“I don’t think I know your mama,” she said instead, as if they were at a garden party instead of up high on an old bridge out past the town line, wrecking reputations and crossing boundaries.
“You wouldn’t.” He didn’t look over at her then, but everything seemed to get darker. He didn’t clench his fists again, but the line of his shoulders seemed wider. Harder. Or as if he was building a kind of wall with his own body, his mood was that intense. “Unless you spend a lot of time with junkies. And I don’t think you do.”
“No,” she agreed. Then she considered it for a moment and realized she’d lied, because when it came to her mother and her pills she always lied. She always had, protecting the family name or her mother or a twisted combination of both, maybe. And she didn’t know how to stop. “Not that I’m aware of, anyway.”
“You’d be aware. There’s no pretending it’s something else.” He shook his head. “The thing about heroin is that it takes its sweet-ass time killing you. Long after you ruin your life and the lives of everyone who ever gave a shit about you, there you are. Still hustling. Still jonesing. Still hitting up your kid for cash, still selling whatever you can get your hands on. Still claiming you’re gonna get clean. Lying, turning tricks, sleeping rough. But you don’t die, even if everything you were or could have been died so long ago no one can remember it anymore. It’s slow-motion suicide.”
Holly didn’t know which one of them was more surprised by that outburst, him or her. His bitter words seemed to cling to his shoulders, bolstering that wall, making him seem farther away when he was right there beside her. She wanted to reach out to him. She wanted to put her hands on him, to offer him comfort, but she didn’t dare.
And it turned out that was how she stopped lying about her mother. Because it was the only way she could reach out and touch him.
“My mama pops pills like they’re Skittles,” Holly offered. She’d never said that out loud before. Not to anyone. Not even the people who knew her mama and could see for themselves how loopy she was on the odd days she actually made it out of her bedroom. But he’d said “slow-motion suicide” and she knew what that looked like. What it felt like to watch from the sidelines, helpless and grim. And here on the old railroad bridge an hour or so before dawn, with a dangerous man she hardly knew right there beside her, she admitted to herself that she felt just as bitter about it as Uptown did. And that she always had. Her mama had abandoned her without actually going anywhere, leaving all her responsibilities for Holly to handle whether she wanted them or not. “Percocet, mostly. Vicodin on special occasions. With a Valium and white wine chaser. She used to try to get out of bed sometimes and pretend to be involved, but that was a long time ago. A long, long time ago.”
The way he looked at her then made her skin pull tight, then prickle.
“Are you trying to bond with me over crappy mothers?” His voice hinted at all manner of insidious, unsettling things she chose not to identify, and now that wall he’d put up all around himself was in his dark gaze, too. And pressing hard into her. Encroaching. Making her pulse seem to explode in her throat. “On the one hand there’s the mayor’s sad, doped-up wife on her rich-lady pills. On the other there’s a junkie whore who has to score street H where she can find it. You think that makes us the same? You think we’re buddies now?”
Now was the time to say something self-deprecating and offbeat. Something to snap him out of whatever this was. Holly was good at moments like this. She’d spent her life contorting herself around her father’s many moods, obliging him and flattering him and amusing him in turn, because that had been her job as long as her mother failed to emerge from her bedroom. By now it was practically a reflex.
“God, I hope not,” she said instead of something light and airy and amusing. Because she didn’t want to contort, maybe. Not with him. Or she couldn’t do it under all that bittersweet scrutiny, which amounted to about the same thing.
Uptown studied her. He didn’t reply, so she kept going.
“I don’t want to be buddies,” she told him with a fervor that was only going to get her in trouble. She understood that. But she couldn’t seem to stop, and maybe she was already in over her head. Maybe it had been too late since the moment she’d walked into Dumb Gator’s in defiance of her father and everything he’d insisted he wanted for her entire life up to that point. She’d thought it was going to be working in the bar that wrecked everything, but no one had noticed. Maybe Uptown was the bomb she needed to destroy her tiny little life enough that she could finally leave it. God knew, that was how he felt to her already. “I have a whole lot of buddies. In fact, I’m everybody’s best friend.”
His lips twitched slightly, all the dark, bitter tension of the moment easing. Not disappearing, but smoothing out a little. “If you mean everybody with a dick, then no, babe. You’re not.”
“Really, I am. I’m a master of the friend zone. Everybody says so.”
; “That’s not actually being friends, no matter what they say. You get that, right? You’re ignoring the fact they want to fuck you by treating them like one of your girlfriends and they do it because they’re hoping you might slip up some drunken evening and let them fuck you anyway.” There was a heat in his gaze that made her feel shivery. It was much better than that wall. Than all that tension. It was better and it was terrifying and she felt it like an ache all through her body and into her bones, deep and lush. “They all let you get away with it because they’re little fucking bitches.”
“That’s not what I would have called the numerous men of my acquaintance who are, in fact, friends.”
“Nothing friendly about that kind of hide-and-seek bullshit. It’s a scam weak men run to take advantage of women who don’t want to be mean.” Uptown shook his head. “Let’s be real clear, Holly. I want to fuck you. If we get friendly, that’s great, but mostly I just want you on my cock and I don’t give a fuck if you’re mean, rude, whatever, as long as everyone’s getting off. If you say no, I might try to convince you of the error of your ways, granted. But I’m not going to be a dickless wonder, pretending I want to hang out on the couch watching girlie shit. I’m not going to fake falling asleep on you to cop a feel.”
Holly folded her hands in front of her and she turned her head so she could study his fascinating, beautiful face.
“Like I said, I don’t want to be your buddy.”
His grin was slow, wolfish and hot, and his eyes gleamed in the dark.
“Why, princess,” he said, mocking her. “Are you propositioning me?”
“Certainly not. A lady never does the propositioning. It’s crass.”
And she was out in the dark in the middle of the night with the most exciting man she’d ever met—something she’d thought about him when she was sixteen and had stumbled across the most erotic situation she’d ever seen. That hadn’t changed. If anything, knowing Uptown a little better made him even more exciting. She was out on the old railroad bridge she’d carefully avoided all these years, destroying her reputation the way she’d daydreamed about doing in high school while she was busy being sweet and chaste and good, because it was expected. Her father was very publicly and irrevocably not the man she’d dutifully tried to imagine he was, the man he’d thundered at her to believe he was, and she was bartending at Dumb Gator’s, an establishment she’d gone her whole life pretending just wasn’t there.
