AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Her eyes had only the time to widen before my tongue traced the seam of her lips and forced their blue ferocity closed. All the air in her lungs left in a rush, traveling from her mouth to mine and straight down the line of my throat and into my chest. I knew it didn’t work like that, the actual air that she breathed out sustaining me—the science of oxygen and carbon dioxide wouldn’t allow it—but, God, in that moment, as her tongue circled the tip of mine, it couldn’t have felt more like it did.
Hands eager, I dove into her hair, tangling the tresses among my fingers until she couldn’t easily pull free. Each flick of her tongue pushed me further, begged me to come closer, and I obliged, overjoyed to make any one of her wishes and desires come true. Her nails dug into the skin of my biceps, scratching noticeably deeper when I pushed her tongue back into her mouth with my own and ate at the corners of her lips with sucking nibbles and slight pinches of my teeth.
At her moan, my dick swelled, and the feeling of getting jostled closer was the only thing that stopped me from running my lips from throat to nipple.
Sweet fuck, her skin tasted like a dream. If I hadn’t spent the entire day in her company, I would have thought she’d showered in the juice of the sweetest fruit. But she’d only taken one shower, and it had been with me.
I pulled away slightly, but she followed, sealing her lips to mine until I was too tall to reach.
“Come on, honey,” I urged gently, running a hand through her tangled hair courtesy of the rough bricks of the building behind her and finishing with a wink. “I’ll give you more of that later.”
Her eyes narrowed, but the tightening of her lids did nothing to lessen the sparkle of arousal in her eyes.
With a tug at her hips, I pulled her off the wall and pushed her in front of me with a hand at her back to guide her.
She glanced back at it in disgust, ever independent, but I didn’t move it an inch. I’d always been a fan of affection, but I liked touching her every opportunity I got in a way that it would take more than a few dirty looks to make me stop.
When we came to a stop in front of the building, I watched as she looked up at the two-story-tall neon sign and stared.
“This is it.”
She nodded. Not in disinterest, and not in a you’re-an-idiot kind of way. No, the fire in her eyes was more proud than passive, and I had the strangest feeling of growth in my chest.
I’d obviously done my fair share in the world of business, but most of it had been born of natural talent rather than interest. This, however, was something that came straight from my heart.
It was Frankie’s livelihood, but it was my home. I felt comfortable here in a way I didn’t really even understand.
But she looked like she did. I wanted desperately to see through a window into her mind.
Maybe then I’d be able to understand if she was feeling all of the things I was feeling.
What started out as a game of pranks and a constant battle of wills had turned into something that didn’t feel superficial at all.
Somewhere along the line, the playbook had changed for me. I didn’t understand the details of how I’d gotten here, and I had no idea if anything had changed for her, but I knew to my soul that I wanted more.
Of her laughter, her attitude, her ability to keep me on my fucking toes—the way she lived her life. I was nearly insatiable for all of it. All of her.
“Come on,” I called, bringing her eyes from their exploration to me. “Let’s go inside.”
The bell over the door rang as we stepped in, and Frankie’s eyes came up from the portrait tattoo he was working on in the open station in the back. We had private rooms too, but when Frankie was working by himself, he stayed up front to keep an eye on things.
He gave an interested nod, seeing as bringing a woman here was pretty much the exact opposite of my normal routine, but then went back to it.
Come to think of it, I’d never brought a woman here. Something about everything it meant to me had stopped me.
I’d never even considered not bringing Cass here tonight.
My eyebrows pinched together involuntarily. I wasn’t quite sure why that was.
“Wow, this place is fantastic!” she spouted, her eyes bouncing from one piece of artwork on the walls to the next. Some of them were mine, but I wasn’t quite ready to tell her that yet.
“Yeah?”
She nodded enthusiastically and hiked herself to sitting up on the counter. I smiled at her no-cares attitude. No one else I’d ever met would blatantly jump up on the counter of a business without permission.
Her gaze moved around, but when it came back to me, her face was reminiscent. “I actually thought about opening my own photography studio when I was younger, but Georgia talked me out of it.”
I stepped forward and pulled her legs apart to stand between them. “Why’s that? A studio sounds cool.”
She laughed and shrugged before rolling her eyes. “It probably had something to do with the fact that I wanted to call it Let Me Shoot Your Kids.”
Frankie and I laughed. Cass and I both turned to look at him now that we knew he was listening. His green eyes sparkled, but he feigned concentration on his work.
“What about you? A tattoo parlor and a… Jesus, what do you do?”
I shook my head and smiled. “A financial consultant.”
“That means next to nothing to me. I’m assuming there are numbers and money involved?”
“Am I like the Chandler Bing of the group? No one knows what I do?”
She shrugged shamelessly. “At least you’re taller.”
“Oh yeah, thank God I’m taller,” I joked.
“So how’d your business portfolio become so diversified?” She bounced her brows as if to say, See, I can speak work jargon.
“Well, I went to college with the idea that I needed to do something respectable.”
“An interesting concept for you,” she teased.
I pushed forward as though she hadn’t spoken, but I smiled and squeezed at her bare thighs.
Fuck, her skin was like quicksand. I could get lost in it for hours. I shook my head slightly to bring back my concentration.
“And, well, it turned out I was really good at it. Kind of a savant with numbers.”
“An idiot savant,” she said with a smile.
“Right,” I agreed.
“It’s starting to make more sense now,” she said and smiled, but I didn’t take the bait.
“Once I started to make a lot of money, I got bored.”
She shook her head and swung her legs at my sides. “Oh, man, that sounds familiar.”
“You too?” I asked to which she answered earnestly, “Always.”
“Well, I had the cash to invest in things I was interested in. A lot of property and small businesses trying to get off the ground, that kind of thing.”
“So you opened this.”
“Nope,” I corrected with a smile. “Frankie opened this place. I just stepped in as an investor about four years ago.”
“You’re obviously more than a silent partner, though.”
I shrugged. “I liked it. And Frankie liked having the help.”
“Sure did!” Frankie yelled from the back, again confirming shamelessly that he was listening to every word we said.
Cassie smiled, lips and eyes and the apples of her cheeks all falling victim to her amusement as her hair flipped effortlessly over her shoulder. She pushed me back slightly so she could tuck her foot under her ass and leaned onto her hand, and I couldn’t help but notice that she looked comfortable here.
“Get us some fucking food, T!” Frankie called from his station.
Cassie joined in enthusiastically. “Seriously! And make it a pizza, pineapple and ham.”
“I don’t get a say in this?”
The two of them glanced briefly to one another before turning back to me and speaking in unison. “No.”
I grumbled, but what I didn’t do was tell them to fuck off. It was just us, no clients to speak of, and I was liking being with both of them.
Knowing it’d take nearly a year for a pizza to be delivered to this location at this time of night, I considered going out to get it myself. But all it took was one glance at Cassie’s face, relaxed with genuine interest and wonder as she hunched over Frankie showing her the inner workings of his tattoo machine, to know I wasn’t going fucking anywhere.
Kline and Wes knew nearly everything about me—my wild teenage antics and Margo’s death. But neither of them knew I’d been apprenticing to actually become a tattoo artist.
I wanted to tell Cassie, though. So much so I had to fight the urge to just blurt it out.
Grabbing my phone off the counter, I reached for my wallet from my back pocket, but when my fingers met the seam, I knew immediately something was wrong. I patted at the fabric in shock, but that didn’t change the outcome.
“Fuck!”
“What?” Cassie asked, jumping up from her spot next to Frankie and coming toward me.
Over a goddamn decade in this city, and I’d finally been pickpocketed. All because my brain had been more concerned about the bump in the front of my pants than keeping the one in the rear.
“What happened?” Frankie called with a crease in his brow as the corners of my mouth started to turn up.
It was completely possible I was actually losing my mental stability. I’d just been taken for the first time in my life. I’d have to get on the phone immediately to cancel all of my shit, go to the DMV for a new license, alert the doorman of my apartment, and never, ever get back the cash I’d had in there, and still, I was smiling. Because when I thought about how distracted I’d been, how irresponsible it was to let my guard down like that, it made me think about why I’d done it—and the way her lips had followed mine like they couldn’t get enough.
