I looked back at the bartender who was making me another gin and ginger and he shrugged. "Maude is the town psychic," he explained.
I shook my head, looking down at my drink for a second before I glanced back up at his sweet, utterly forgettable face. "So I should be worried?"
"Petrified," he corrected, shelving the gin. "She's never wrong."
"Yeah, well," I said, stirring my drink. "I don't believe in psychics."
"Since when does believing in something make any difference?" he asked, walking away.
I had no clue how long I was there; there were no clocks in the bar and my cell phone was forgotten on the nightstand at the inn. All I knew was my shoes were off and one of my earrings was missing and the entire damn place was swirling at a sickening pace. The throwing up would commence at any moment and no matter how wasted I was, I knew that that was something I preferred to do without witnesses. I grabbed all the money out of my wallet and tossed it on the bar, making my way to the front door barefoot and unsteady.
Outside, the spring air felt amazing against my impossibly hot skin. I glanced down the street toward the inn, the lights on, looking utterly inviting. And I knew with blazing clarity that I would never make it back there in time. My stomach felt like it was clenched in someone's fist and they were having way too much sadistic fun by wrenching it in circles. My entire body had broken into a cold sweat. I stumbled around the back of the bar, intent on throwing myself into the woods to get sick.
But a door swung open and a hand reached out and gragged my bicep, pulling me backward.
"Listen, asshole," I said to no one in particular, too queasy to even think about turning my head, "if you don't want vomit all over you, I suggest you let me go right now."
"Well I'd prefer to not have to clean up your puke out here," Dane's voice said, sounding almost amused. Which I found annoyingly inappropriate.
"Not that it is any of your business, but I am going to puke in the woods," I said, pulling against him.
"Yeah," he said, pulling me back toward the building and toward a set of stairs. "I have a better idea."
He dragged me up the the second floor, into what I assumed was his apartment given the still un-drywalled walls. He pushed me toward a door, reaching in and flicking the light on in a bathroom.
I hurled myself inside, reaching for the door which he was holding open.
"I've seen plenty of people puke, baby," he said casually.
I grabbed the door and slammed it, twisting the lock. "Not me," I said, dropping down next to the toilet and waiting. It wouldn't be long. I was dripping with sweat and still unbelievably cold.
Two rounds of vomiting later, I was still sitting there, my head cradled in my hands, when there was a knock at the door. "You alright?"
"Just leave me here to die," I groaned.
There was a chuckling sound. "There's mouthwash in the cabinet," he supplied before I heard his footsteps moving away.
I crawled toward the cabinet, dragging myself up toward the sink to gargle and splash water on my face, before making my way back toward the pristine white tile floor and sinking down onto it. I was spent, too weak to even think about getting up and walking back to the inn. I laid there, looking around at the bathroom Dane had decorated and seeing him in it all.
The dark blue paint, the masculine light fixtures and hardware. It looked like him.
Which only made me hate him all the more for being able to accomplish something I was so wholly inept at doing. Stupid, arrogant, skilled, sexy Dane Broderick.
Sexy? No. No he was not sexy. Nope. No way. I did not think that. At all.
I closed my eyes against the harsh light and before I knew it, I was asleep.
Seven
Cordelia
I woke up on the bathroom floor feeling disoriented. I jumped up quickly, looking around with a feeling of panic before I remembered where I was. I was in Dane's bathroom. Because I had gotten gloriously sick from tequila and gin. I glanced out the window, noticing it was still dark and finding that completely unhelpful. I couldn't have been at the bar any later than seven-thirty.
So it could be anytime between then and four am.
Great. Just great. Hopefully no one would be at the front desk when I got back. The last thing I wanted to have to do was explain the loss of time.
I rinsed my mouth with mouthwash again, washed my face, fixed my hair, and adjusted my boobs back into their bra. As if the late hour wouldn't be bad enough, I was missing my sweater, my shoes, and jewelry.
That was it. No more alcohol for me. No freaking way. Not if it made me that stupid. I pulled my other earring out and tucked it into the pocket of my jeans, taking a deep breath and going to the door.
A part of me was expecting to see him, judging by the dread in my belly. But when I walked out, the room was dark and he was nowhere in sight. I felt a rush of relief as I turned the bathroom light off and made my way to the door. His apartment was bigger than I thought it would be. It must have been over the bar and the store next door. Big enough for a two bedroom and a part of me actually wanted to know what his plans were. Would every inch of the place scream of him like the bathroom did?
I walked out onto the landing and made my way carefully down the stairs, looking for any kind of sign as to what time it could be, but in a town as sleepy as Stars Landing, everything usually shut down around eight at night anyway. I stepped off the last step, moving around the railing.
"Feeling better?"
My hand flew to my throat where it felt like my heart had lodged itself. I swung around to find Dane leaning against the building, my cardigan draped over his shoulder, my heels hanging from his fingers. My instinct was to say something snippy, but he had been nothing but good to me and I wasn't going to be a ungrateful shrew about the whole situation, no matter how much my headache was banging behind my eyes.
"Yeah, thanks for letting my use your bathroom," I said, keeping a safe five feet between us.
"Here," he said, reaching the cardigan out to me as I started to shiver slightly. I reached for it, slipping my arms in. "And I found this," he said, pulling my earring out of his pocket, "in the bottom of a shot glass. Care to tell me how it wound up there?"
"I would if I could," I said, taking it and putting it in my pocket with the other one. "But I don't remember."
"Don't look so angry with yourself," he said, shrugging. "Everyone needs a good blackout drunk every once and a while. What were you drinking about?"
"Bad day at work," I hedged. It was part of the truth.
"Have anything to do with you calling Em a... what was it?" he smiled, running a hand over the scruff on his face. "A 'insufferable, indecisive shrew'?"
I made a groaning sound, hanging my head. "Oh, god. Don't remind me."
"You got quite a set of lungs when you're riled," he said, pushing off the wall, dropping my shoes on the steps.
"What are you doing?" I asked, watching wide-eyed as he made his way slowly toward me, his eyes looking full of challenge.
"Seeing if I can get you riled."
"Well," I said, trying to take a deep breath, but my chest felt tight. "Just keep being yourself. It shouldn't take long for me to start screaming at you."
"Not that kind of riled, baby," he said, his voice dipping even lower than it usually was as he stepped right in front of me. His boots touched my bare toes and I fought the urge to move away. If there's one thing I learned about wild animals, it was that when they corner you, you never, ever run. Dane Broderick was a wild freaking animal.
"Never heard of personal space, huh?" I asked, knowing my voice sounded breathy.
"Oh, I know a lot about personal space," he said, his hand reaching out to stroke my hair behind my ear.
"Not," I said, flinching when I felt his fingers on my neck, "what I meant."
"Really?" he asked, his hand sliding around to cup the back of my neck. "Because that's what I heard."
"Then you're hearing what you want to hear." His fingers were starting to rub at the tension in my neck.
"Yeah," he smiled, "that sounds like me."
"I need to get back to the inn," I said, trying to ignore the pleasant swirling feeling in my belly.
"Mmmhmm," he said, pulling me forward. "Just one thing first."
He was going to kiss me. Holy hell on a cracker... he was going to kiss me. And I wasn't going to fight it. Because I wanted him to. Oh, dear lord how I wanted him to. Which was ridiculous. He was an asshole. He was a cocky, obnoxious manwhore. Which was not, was absolutely not my type at all. In fact, he was the complete opposite of the men I usually went for: cultured, mature, clean cut. Men who courted me like they were supposed to. Men who waited until the third date to kiss me. Men who followed the damn rules.
Dane Broderick laughed at them.
His eyes were on mine as he pulled me up against his chest and I had a flash of the memory of him holding my hips in the bar fly across my mind. His chest was all hard lines as his other hand wrapped around my hips, turning me quickly, then shoving me up against the brick wall of the bar.
My mouth opened with a surprised yelp and he swooped downward, crushing his lips against mine. I had a second to think, 'oh my god. Dane Broderick is kissing me!' before I slipped into the sensation and all conscious thought slipped away
Like the man itself, there was nothing shy or tentative about this kiss. His teeth sank into my lower lip, pulling roughly for a second before his tongue slipped into my mouth to toy with mine. I heard myself whimper as my hands moved up his back, resting below his shoulder blades and pressing, holding him against me. His hands moved from up my body, over my belly and the sides of my breasts, across my shoulders, until they both grabbed my face. I would say cradled, but he fucking grabbed me.
I bit into his lip and he made a low growling sound, breaking his lips from mine and trailing them down my jaw and neck. He stopped in the dip where my neck met my shoulder, running his tongue along it and I swear my legs almost gave the heck out. I felt my pulse in my wrists, my neck, my temples, my heart pounding too hard. The skin underneath his touch sizzled as desire pinged off every nerve ending.
Dane's hand slid from the side of my face, drifting downward lazily and grabbing the swell of my breast. I tilted my head back, groaning at the contact.
How long had it been since I let myself have this? This utterly overwhelming sense of want and need. The happily drowning feeling. The urge to get lost in the hands and lips of another person. Had I ever been so completely swept up in a moment?
His teeth bit into my shoulder, making me gasp as his hand moved upward, grabbing my tank top and the cup of my bra and pulling them both roughly down. The cool night air felt shocking on my skin and my nipple hardened immediately as he tilted his head to look down.
The palm of his hand slid over the peak, rough from work and I arched into the sensation. His other hand moved to my other breast, pulling it free until both his hands grabbed the soft mounds and squeezed hard. Painful. It was absolutely painful, but in such a unreasonably good way that I felt my fingers curl and dig into his back.
"Like that, huh?" he asked, moving his hands until his thumbs and forefingers rolled the hardened points between them gently for a moment before crushing down hard and making a gasp rush out of my mouth.
The sound of his voice broke through some of the haze of desire and I felt myself taking a shaky breath. "We should stop," I said, but it lacked any kind of conviction.
"Probably," he agreed, leaning downward and looking up at me, his mouth poised over my nipple. "But we're not gonna," he said, taking the peak into his mouth and erasing any kind of doubt or thread of control I had left. His tongue stroked over the sensitive point, and I went momentarily dumb. No thoughts, no nothing. I was just a puddle of desire and need so intense it was terrifying. His head shifted, his hair brushing over my wet nipple as moved across my chest to the other peak.
He kissed his way up my chest, the center of my neck, before taking my lips once again, gentler but with just as much desire as I was feeling. He pulled his face backward, his hand sliding down the center of my body, reaching for the button of my jeans and then the zipper.
"Open your eyes," he said as his fingers toyed with the waist of my panties. It was easier said than done, my eyelids feeling impossibly heavy and I strained against the weight. "Good girl," he said and I felt my stomach flutter in a deliciously disconcerting way.
And then his fingers delved into my panties. My body jumped at the contact. The somehow both familiar and foreign sensation. His fingers pushed between the delicate folds.
"You're dripping wet for me baby," he said, his finger slipping upward to stroke small circles over my clit.
My hands moved to slam down on his shoulders, half holding myself up with his body as I let out a strange garbled groan. Desire was a strange thing, how your mind, your entire body could focus on one point of your body. How every thought disappeared and all you are is a pile of nerve endings poised, just waiting for something. Waiting for the wave to wash over you.
Unfortunately, that rarely, almost never happened for me.
His finger slipped lower, poising at my entrance and pulsing against it for a minute before quickly pushing inside. My head slammed backward against the brick as he stilled inside me. "Tell me you want me to make you come," he said, close to my ear.
No. Nope. No way. I wasn't that girl. I wasn't the girl comfortable enough in her sexuality to use dirty talk. I could barely muster the comfort level to be able to make any kind of noise at all, let alone speak. There was no way in hell I was going to be able to repeat that. I was barely comfortable to think of an orgasm as an orgasm or a climax... I cringed inwardly at the idea of calling it coming.
"Tell me or it stops right now," he said, his finger turning inside me and crooking to stroke over my G-spot once.
"I want you..." I started, but couldn't make myself go on, no matter how badly I wanted it.
"To make you come," he encouraged, nipping into my earlobe.
"To make me come," I whispered. It was barely audible to my own ears, but he heard me and his finger continued its stroking.
I leaned forward, resting my head in the crook of his neck. His free hand wrapped around my hips and held me there while his finger drove me upward. Close. So close. My breath was coming out fast and frantic, my hands digging into his back.
"That's right," he said, his breath hot on my ear. "Come for me, sweetheart." I wanted to. God, how I wanted to. I was closer than I had been in an uncomfortably long time. I took a deep breath, hearing my internal doubts sneak in past the desire, past the need. I just needed to relax and let myself have a god damn orgasm like any normal woman did. Women who didn't completely psych themselves out of it.
If there was ever a time to climax, it was with six and a half feet of gorgeous, skilled, tattooed, man there wanting to give it to you.
But even as I told myself to calm down and let things happen, I knew they wouldn't. It wasn't going to happen. The tension left my nerve endings, sending me back into my normal state with the sensation of being doused in ice water; or being slapped across the face to snap you out of hysterics. My breathing evened out as his finger continued its teasing, expert exploration. Were I any other woman, I'd have been spiraling into a soul-crushing orgasm right then.
It wasn't him. It was me.
And, like always, I felt really bad about that fact. And also way too insecure to actually be an adult and tell him what the problem was. So I had to do what countless women have had to do at some time in their lives:
I had to fake it.
Not that it was something I should be proud of, but I was really, really good at faking it. If you're a woman who isn't capable of orgasms, and not a disinterested old spinster, and you liked the company of men... you had to learn. There was really no way around sex in relations with men and it helps breed inti
macy in relationships. And I could get turned on. Perhaps more easily even than most women. So the lead up was something I enjoyed. I was always ready for them when they crawled up the bed and braced themselves between my thigh; when they finally pushed inside me, I was slick and inviting. But from that point on, I got nothing out of it. And since no man wants you laying there like a dead fish, I hitched my breath, I squirmed, I
moaned.
For them, it was real. For me, I put on a good show.
I pushed my face against Dane's neck, closing my eyes and breathing in his scent as I made my breath come out more quickly, as I let out breathy groans... gaining in intensity until I made my breath hitch and let out a choked moan, slamming my hands down on his shoulders as I tensed my body for a second and relaxed.
And I was done.
Dane's finger stopped moving inside me and he released me, sliding his finger slowly out of me and then out of my panties. I leaned against the wall, watching him with heavy eyes as he brought his finger up to his mouth and slipped it inside, tasting me.
My eyes fell from him, reaching to refasten my jeans then push my breasts back into my bra and pull my tank top back into place.
"So," he said, his voice sounding odd but I couldn't place why. My eyes went to his face, finding one of his brows lifted. "Why the hell did you fake it?"
I felt like someone had kicked me in the stomach. No one had ever accused me of faking it. Never. Maybe some of them had known, but they had had the decency to not bring it up.
But, then again, I should have known I couldn't expect decency from Dane. "What?" I asked, trying to screw my face up to look genuinely perplexed.
"Baby, I might be a lot of things... but I'm not stupid. And I probably know a woman's body better than most of them know their own. For example," he said, reaching down between us, "when you come for real, this," he said, pushing his hand between my thighs and making me gasp, "pussy will tense and clench around my finger. And since the longer I stroked your G-spot, the less your hot little cunt grabbed at me... it's a pretty safe bet that you are a big fat faker."
The Stars Landing Deviant Page 5
