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“You, too.” He opened his mouth, like he was going to say more, but then he just shrugged. “I’ll get your drink.”
Cain’s hand drifted to my knee, his thumb rubbing over my bare flesh. I fought the urge to shiver. The simple touch of his firm, masculine fingers made me acutely aware of how short my dress was. His skin was callused, as if he had spent much of his life doing manual labor.
“Darryl is trying to warn you off me.”
“Why?”
“Maybe I’m the big, bad wolf.”
“Does that make me Little Red Riding Hood? I don’t think so.” The metaphor didn’t fit. I wasn’t wandering guilelessly. I was an equal predator, if that’s what he was.
“You did wander into my lair.” He gestured around him to the bar.
“That’s not the way the story goes.” I took the drink Darryl had set down and thanked him. He’d brought another whiskey for Cain as well. I lifted my glass and sipped. The drink was sweet, crisp. “Riding Hood is going to a safe haven and the wolf is lying in wait for her.”
Those light-blue eyes flickered with something. Respect? I wasn’t sure. “Then maybe I should get in your bed and coax you to me.”
My nervousness was dissipating. Now I just felt eager, excited to get to that point. His hand was still resting on my knee and I wished I could will it to go higher. “There are some interpretations of the Little Red Riding Hood story as her sexual awakening. Her empowerment in escaping the stomach of the wolf. The color of red being suggestive of her achieving the age of fertility and embracing the unknown, as in the first touch of a man.”
Cain gave me a sly, sexy smile. “You’re not going to want to escape me. I can promise you that.”
He was good at this. I took another sip, my hand trembling slightly, not from fear or tension, but from anticipation. “I’m ready when you are.”
His eyebrows went up. “I haven’t finished my drink, and I haven’t finished getting to know you a little. Unless you want this to be a completely anonymous fuck. Is that what you want, Sophie? You want to close your eyes and pretend I’m someone who broke your heart? Or pretend that I’m the guy you’ve always fantasized about?”
I shook my head, intrigued by how he seemed to like to push and pull. He wasn’t like most men, the practiced charm, the easy flirtation. The standard cheesy lines about my beauty, true or not. It made me feel even more confident I had chosen the right man because I didn’t want a bunch of proverbial smoke blown up my ass. I didn’t want to be needlessly flattered. “No. I’m not trying to get over someone or get back at someone. I just want to get my virginity behind me. It’s become inconvenient.”
Cain’s head tilted. “You’re a virgin?”
I nodded. “So maybe I am Little Red Riding Hood.”
—
Sophie was sipping her unicorn tears and watching me with those big, dark eyes. She was the most unusual girl I had ever encountered. And she was a virgin. Maybe that wasn’t totally surprising, but what was startling was the nonchalant way she mentioned it. No big deal. Like she hadn’t just asked me to fuck her, like she was used to casual hookups and wanted to dispense with the small-talk bullshit. Yet, that clearly wasn’t the truth.
What was also surprising was how hard my cock got thinking about burying inside her sweet, tight body. Every time she spoke, every tilt of her head, she got a little hotter to me. It was her intensity, her focus, her unblinking stare. I wanted that razor-sharp attention on me.
So she wanted a sexual awakening. There are a lot of things I can’t do. Stay sober. Forgive my ex or my brother. Be someone’s boyfriend. But this? I could fucking own this. I could be the big bad wolf all damn day long. I raised my glass to her. “All the better to eat you, my dear.”
Her cheeks flushed, but given her shallow breathing, I thought it was more from arousal than embarrassment. Her tits rose and fell above that black dress, enticing me. There was something so damn sexy about Sophie. The girl I had initially thought was a wallflower was so unique I knew I was in for something different. Different was good, because I was fucking bored. And that was dangerous. Bored meant I pushed it too far, drank to the next level, itched to get in fights, and tortured myself by driving by my mother’s house and staring at that little boy in the yard, being pushed on the same metal swing set I had played on as a kid.
Fuck that noise. I owed Sophie more than a drink if she could kick those crowded and nasty thoughts out of my head for a night.
“I’m glad my being a virgin doesn’t freak you out. I debated mentioning it, because I really don’t want you to feel it holds too much relevance, and retreat from me. But at the same time I feel it’s only fair and truthfully, in my own best interest in terms of potential pleasure, to let you know.”
Definitely different. “So it’s inconvenient and lacking in relevance? You want to expand on that?” I knew she would. This girl had an explanation for everything. Her being a virgin didn’t bother me. It would force me to not be lazy. Sometimes with the tourist girls, it was too easy—they squealed with fake enthusiasm and were eager to prove they were so sexy. I barely did a damn thing and they were professing they were coming. It was a lie, but I didn’t care, because I got off, and if for whatever reason they wanted to proclaim they had the world’s most trigger-sensitive clit, that was their issue, not mine.
Sophie was going to make me work and I needed the challenge. The nudge.
She took a bigger sip of her drink. It was half-empty now. She was on pace way ahead of her one drink per hour to stay reasonably sober, so I wanted to keep an eye on that. I didn’t want her shit-faced drunk, because what’s the fun of that?
“The thing is, it wasn’t a conscious choice. I had a boyfriend in college but it was more intellectual, you know, and then grad school is demanding, and suddenly here I am, almost twenty-five, and I’m a virgin. People think it’s weird. I don’t need another reason to be considered weird.”
I couldn’t argue with that. “So you want to just bang it out, no pun intended? I get that. So then you never have to have this conversation in the future with a man you actually want to date, right?”
Her eyes lit up. “That’s it, exactly. I mean, what kind of pressure is that on a budding relationship? He’s going to assume I want to go straight to the altar and that’s not it at all. I didn’t take a chastity vow. I just got distracted by quantifiable statistics.”
That made me grin. “Fuck, haven’t we all been distracted by that at one time or another?”
