Connor paused, calf muscles screaming as he stretched his big body to the limits. She would be such a challenge. Such curiosity and uncultivated passion kept so tightly leashed, he could practically smell her internal frustration. Given the right man and the right handling, she was a wildcat waiting to happen.
But there was something else. Some sadness hid behind her eyes. As if she suffered an aching loneliness that made her unable to decide whether to reach out or lash out. And that was what made her dangerous. Connor didn’t need shades of grey like her in his black and white existence.
The moment she’d stepped inside his bar and gazed up at him with her beguiling hazel eyes, he’d sensed something different. It made him want to cram her in his pocket and protect her from whatever it was that was so determined to beat her down.
“Connor?”
“In here.”
Alex appeared and balanced lightly against the doorjamb. “Aren’t you done yet?”
“Just finishing up.”
Connor managed to avoid Alex’s probing gaze while he stood and rummaged for a fresh shirt and pants.
“Something bothering you?”
Connor shrugged a shirt over his broad shoulders. “No, why?”
“Just a feeling.”
“You been watching Dr. Phil again? You’re sounding awfully in touch with your feminine side.”
Alex snorted. “I’ve known you long enough that sometimes I feel like we’re married.”
“You could’ve kept that little detail to yourself.”
There was a brief pause. Connor settled his black trousers on the tilt of his hips and ran a hand over the stubble on his head. It was the same routine every morning when he had to decide if he needed a shave or not.
“It’ll be nice to have another set of hands around the bar tonight, hmm?”
“Guess so.”
“She seems nice enough.”
Connor grunted, refusing to let Alex bait him into saying anything about their new waitress.
“Great ass, too. Wouldn’t you say?”
Unable to stop himself, Connor’s gaze jerked upward and locked on Alex. The beast that lay just beneath Connor’s civil exterior howled and rattled the bars on its cage. His heart hammered in his chest and blood pounded in his ears.
“She’s just a woman, Connor.” Alex said quietly.
“I know that.”
“So keep your perspective.”
Connor didn’t bother to acknowledge that bit of advice.
Alex seemed to understand that the topic was closed. “Selena is downstairs.”
“Probably wants her paycheck.”
Alex chuckled, “I think she wants more compensation than that.”
There was an unmistakable smirk on his face when Alex left the doorway. Connor made certain his pants were fastened before following Alex. Encounters that often seemed a wonderful way to start the day had a habit of reaching around to bite you in the ass when you least expected it.
* * *
“Come to get your last check, Selena?” Connor rumbled as he eased into his desk chair.
From the corner of his eye, Connor could see her prop one of her svelte legs on the edge of his desk. In the not-so-distant past, he would’ve considered the leg a welcome invitation. But at that moment it was more annoyance than anything else.
Connor chalked it up to his being annoyed that Selena would walk off the job with no notice. He refused to admit that Jessa’s sudden, earth-shattering appearance in his life had anything to do with this phenomenon.
“Have you missed me, Connor?”
“No. We already hired someone else.”
There was a brief silence in which Connor tried to gauge whether or not Selena was going to take offense to his admission. But she smiled instead. “I can’t imagine she’d replace me in…everything.”
Connor ground his teeth together to keep from giving her the satisfaction of a response.
The long leg disappeared and was replaced by Selena’s rounded ass. She settled herself on the cluttered desktop, legs propped on the filing cabinet. Selena wore one of her trademark sinfully short skirts with no pantyhose. Connor could’ve seen up her skirt all the way to her slit by shifting his gaze an inch to the left. But he didn’t. And the ramifications of that hit him harder than anything else. Any other day, he would’ve reached over and run a hand up the inside of her thigh until his fingers brushed the dewy curls surrounding her cunt. He’d have finger fucked her until she begged him for his cock. Then Connor would’ve spread her wide on his desk and given her exactly what she asked for.
Her mannerism, the way she was dressed, and the sultry look in her eyes all tagged her a highly fuckable woman, begging like a bitch in heat. It was a wide-open invitation to a man like Connor, to any man. He couldn’t take the bait. He couldn’t even muster the urge. A pair of wide hazel eyes haunted him.
“Here’s your check, Selena. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.”
Connor stood, setting his jaw in an aggressive jut before stalking out of his office. Behind him, Selena’s mouth opened in astonishment.
Connor didn’t look back, couldn’t look back. He kept going straight past the walk-in freezer and the cases of liquor stacked to the ceiling. When he reached the bar, he opened the cash register and began to count.
Seconds later, Selena appeared and walked out the front door. She didn’t look back, either. Apparently, she understood his message all too clearly. Connor only wished it were half as clear to him.
“That was different.” Alex commented when the front door shut with a muffled thump.
“Don’t start.”
“Oh, I wasn’t going to.”
Connor grunted.
“But you’d have been a helluva lot more pleasant company if you’d have let off some steam in her pussy.”
“Not interested.”
“Since when?”
Connor didn’t miss a beat, “Since now.”
Alex remained silent for an entire five-minute span of time. “If you’d have given Selena a quick fuck, you’d be able to charm your way under Jessa’s skirt, Connor. With this attitude you’re going to have to use a caveman club to get between her thighs.”
“What makes you think I’m interested in the new waitress?” Connor deliberately avoided using her name.
“You can’t even say her name, mate.”
Connor shoved the fives back in the drawer and pulled out a huge wad of ones. He started to count. But he couldn’t even remember what number he was on. “Jessa. Her name’s Jessa. Happy now?”
“Sure, whatever.”
Connor threw the ones back in the drawer and slammed it shut so hard the machine gave a jarring ring. “Don’t use that tone with me,” he snapped.
“What tone?”
“The one that says you don’t believe a word I say!”
Alex stowed a bottle of Stolichnaya on the shelf and turned toward Connor. “Look, you’re the one with the rules. Me? I fuck whatever walks through that door and enjoy them all the same.”
Rules! His damn rules again. He’d lived by the rules for years and years, since prison and the hell-bitch that’d put him there. It was the reason he couldn’t look at Jessa. Couldn’t get attached, couldn’t give a shit what it was that tortured her on her off hours.
“Why the hell did you hire her, anyway?”
Alex looked miffed. “She’s a hottie in disguise, man. I sure as hell wasn’t going to let her walk away when she said she was looking for a job. I figured she might be up for a quick fuck after hours. You know, the usual way we do things around here.”
“I don’t want you to fucking touch her,” Connor growled.
Alex lifted his hands in surrender, “Told you, man. You gotta keep your perspective. Go calm down. Get a grip on your temper and maybe you can find a way to get her out of your system before you have a breakdown or something.”
Connor didn’t comment on Alex’s ridiculous suggest
ion. But he left the bar before he said something he would really regret later on. No matter how badly Alex ran his mouth, he was still Connor’s oldest friend. In fact, he was probably Connor’s only friend. They’d known each other since grade school, long enough that Alex knew all Connor’s secrets, even the one he kept hidden from everyone.
His feet carried him back up the narrow staircase. He hadn’t eaten, but the kitchen wasn’t his destination. The clock on his bedside table said ten minutes until eleven. He’d told her to arrive around noon. Just a little over an hour and she’d be there again, in his bar, working for him.
What was it with her? The why of it completely escaped him. Connor had felt such intense attraction only once before in his life. It had brought him nothing but trouble and eventually led him to disaster. Since then he’d been cool, the definition of detached. He was known throughout the city as someone who knew how to show women a good time. He could make them so hot that they begged him on hands and knees to sink his cock deep inside their warm bodies. But the lust went one direction. They wanted him. Connor did not slip the leash on his self-control or his insatiable lust.
So what’s the deal with Jessa?
He strode to the narrow window and looked out. But a view of the cobbled downtown street wasn’t what he sought. Somewhere out there she was getting ready. Perhaps taking a shower and choosing her clothes while wearing nothing at all. The thought gave him a raging hard on that threatened to burst from his pants.
Reaching down, Connor unzipped his fly and freed his cock. It lay hot and hard in his palm. Gripping his shaft tightly in one hand he tried not to focus so intently on the mental picture of a naked Jessa. He tried and failed.
Connor’s hips bucked as his hand slid up and down his hard shaft. A tiny drop of pre cum beaded on the head of his cock. Sliding one thumb through the hot liquid, he spread its silky warmth over the crown. His brain conjured up the image of Jessa. He wanted nothing more than to feel her tongue lapping at the bead of moisture. Her mouth sliding down his shaft as the crown of his cock disappeared into her throat.
Someone groaned. Had it been him? The muscles in his belly clenched as his balls tightened. His other hand gently cupped them. He used his fingers to knead their straining weight while he tightly gripped his shaft. Connor’s feet shifted further apart to give his imagined lover better access to his body.
Did she want him? Did her body crave his as he did hers? What strange thing had happened between them? From the first time Connor had laid eyes on her curvaceous figure he’d wanted to strip her naked and taste every inch of her with his tongue.
Connor’s thoughts intensified, willing her to think of him. To imagine his hands upon her body, his mouth suckling her breasts, lapping the sweet cream of her pussy and spreading her cunt wide before he pressed deep inside and buried his cock balls-deep in her heat.
His cock pulsed as he pumped it quickly with long smooth strokes. His black eyes drifted shut. Balls drawn up tightly, his hips convulsed as a thick stream of white cum shot upward. It smeared across his belly and bathed his hand in semen, but he didn’t stop. The silkiness of his own cum mimicked the imagined feel of Jessa’s hot pussy. His pace increased and his legs went rigid in order to keep his body vertical. Each thrust brought another pulse of hot cum.
Would she want what he wanted? Would she taste his skin, lap up the residue of his cum and then hold him in her hot little hand until he was ready to do it all over again? Uptight and reserved, but ready for so much more. Connor couldn’t have explained it, but he knew that she would suck him dry and demand more. And he’d give it to her. Give her anything she asked, because he would never be able to refuse her.
Chapter Five
It took Jessa four-and-a-half hours to get ready for work on that first morning. The first two hours were spent in bed trying to decide if she was actually going to get up and go. And it wasn’t the mad hangover keeping her in bed, either. She lay there and tried to recall the last time she’d had absolutely no real or imagined reason to get out of bed.
It would’ve been so easy to keep up the pretense of a busy charity worker. But sooner or later, those people would realize that Will had left her. And there could be nothing worse than that. She wasn’t ready for their false sympathy and prying. Hadn’t the charity work always been a cover up anyway? It’d been one of those things Jessa did to avoid the emptiness of her life.
She’d done everything right. She was on the right committees, associated with the right people, donated to the right charities, and said, thought, and did the right things. How had she wound up so utterly unnecessary?
And that’s basically what she was. But if she didn’t go to this new job, she was going to feel obligated to spend the rest of the day searching for another one. If Will was going to stop paying bills at the end of the summer, she was going to have to find some way to support herself. So she might as well make a few tips and see what it was like to be back out in the workforce.
With a thick sigh and what seemed like monumental effort, Jessa levered herself out of a bed that had become strangely unfriendly and padded into the closet. It wasn’t hard to imagine herself hiding under the covers all day. Hard to admit, but not hard to imagine. She was thirty-eight years old. The rational part of her brain was certain she was too old to work in a bar. Whether or not that was the case, she was too old to flounce around in a micro miniskirt and a crop top. Besides, middle-aged society wives did not wear miniskirts.
They wore pantsuits, a wardrobe choice that would not help the tip situation any. It’d been long years since her college days waiting tables. But if memory served, percentage of skin showing directly influenced percentage of check left as a tip.
It took almost forty-five minutes to lay out a pair of snug-fitting, somewhat flattering, trendy low-rise black slacks. The cap-sleeved top was comfy, showed a little bit of cleavage, and didn’t hang over her hips or butt. It was a huge concession as far as Jessa was concerned. But she didn’t want to work all night for no money. Of course, clothing wasn’t going to matter at all if she couldn’t lose the seriously-hung-over look.
Even after a nice hot shower, the reflection in the mirror looked haunted. Dark smudges below her eyes added years to Jessa’s face. And the pallor of her skin made the sprinkle of freckles across her cheeks seem unnaturally dark.
She almost went back to bed. Nobody was going to tip the old hag a few extra bucks for a drink.
The thought of tips made her cringe. It’d been years since Jessa had waited tables. What if she folded under the pressure?
A few deep breaths seemed to help bring things back into perspective. It was a bar. And it wasn’t exactly a nice bar. It wasn’t as if they had a gourmet kitchen with a five star menu to memorize. Not to mention the unlikelihood of embarrassing herself in front of anyone she knew. Besides, Alex had seemed very nice. She might even have fun working with him.
Which brought the subject back around to Connor.
What kind of a man acted like that? He was a big sexy bastard, too arrogant by half.
But he wasn’t. There hadn’t been one trace of arrogance in the way he’d acted the night before. He’d been polite while doing his job, cordial when offering her a job, and solicitous about making certain Jessa was okay after she’d overdone it.
But what about after that? What about the highhanded way he’d justified the blatant exchange of exhibitionism and voyeurism going on in his bar? Connor had passed judgment on her without knowing anything about her. His pronouncement that she belonged in a hedonistic place like that was ludicrous.
She shouldn’t go back. Jessa had no business being in a place like that much less being employed there. She didn’t belong there. Not really. Not anymore. Perhaps once in her life, before Will, before she’d transformed herself into the perfect example of wifely restraint.
That, of course, was easily dealt with. After all, Jessa could always walk away from the bar if she got sick of Connor.
Get sick o
f Connor? Who was she kidding?
A mental photograph of Connor popped into her mind with almost no effort. Tall, heavily muscled, bronzed skin, in short he had the body of an Adonis. It was altogether too easy to recall the sexy-as-hell bow of his upper lip as it glistened with moisture. And it was impossible to forget the sensational lust she’d experienced at the mere sound of his voice.
The white cotton bathrobe was suddenly too warm. The weight of it against her flushed skin was simultaneously too much and not enough. Jessa’s breathing quickened. Heat bloomed between her thighs.
What was wrong with her? She didn’t lose control of herself like this.
Jessa tore her gaze away from the mirror’s reflection and turned on the faucet. The cold water cooled her skin. But nothing could put out the raging fire inside her body.
Nothing but a thorough fucking.
Jessa didn’t waste time reprimanding her mind on its dirty thoughts. She turned the water off and made a split second decision. It wasn’t something she did very often. Consequences were carefully weighed against gains before decisions were made and executed in the best possible manner. But this had gone far past the point of no return.
The dildo was where she’d left it, safely buried at the bottom of a lingerie drawer she never used. Jessa tossed half a dozen rarely used pairs of satin panties to the floor in her haste. The massive thing was flesh colored and covered in some kind of cyberskin that claimed a realistic feel. At that point, she was past caring.
Jessa lay on her back in the middle of the bed. One shaky hand untied the belt of her robe. The sides fell open and Jessa was more exposed than she had been in long years. The bedroom door was wide open and it was light outside. She’d been a late-at-night-in-the-dark-with-the door-closed-and-locked kind of girl her whole life.
The ceiling fan whirred above. Cool air wafted over her heated skin. Jessa’s nipples jutted into the air when her areolas puckered against the unfamiliar stimulation. Tentatively running a hand over her breast, Jessa rolled one nipple between thumb and forefinger. Blood rushed in, hardening it into a tiny point. It swelled and elongated between her fingers. The sensation was wonderful. A zing pulsed from breast to clitoris. Feeling braver, she wetted her fingers on her tongue and opened her imagination.
Phoenix Rising Page 4
