Page 3 of Fearlessly Us

There are a lot of reasons that’s a problem, but still, when I smirk at her this time, there’s nothing fake about it. “Would you prefer kitten? Those are some sharp claws you’ve got there.”

She shrugs, giving me a cool-eyed stare. “The better to scratch you with. Margarita,” she says, breaking me out of a quick and dirty fantasy about all the places I would love this gorgeous specimen of badassery to scratch me.

“Salt or sugar on the rim?”

“Excuse me?” she asks in a way I think might actually mean fuck you.

I lean just slightly into her space, grinning victoriously when her eyes flash. “How do you like your margarita? Are you a salt on the rim or sugar on the rim kind of woman?”

“Salt,” Caitlin says immediately, before her eyes flicker with something like hesitation. It’s less than a second, a look away and you’ll miss it kind of thing. But I can’t look away from those eyes that remind me of the moon and stars at midnight, so I definitely don’t miss it, and I’m somehow sure she told me what she thought was the right answer instead of what she actually wanted.

I turn back to the bartender, who’s still standing there vibrating like an excitable puppy, and slide my empty beer bottle across the bar. “Could I get another one of these and a margarita, extra sugar on the rim?”

“That’s not what I asked for.” Caitlin crosses her arms over her chest and pops out a hip, her attitude making me want to poke at her some more. Dig beneath her cool, competent exterior to discover what lies beneath.

There are entire worlds buried inside this woman.

Like recognizing like, I think.

“I know, but it’s what you want.” I hand over her drink and take a sip of my beer, something dark and a little dangerous snaking through me when I see Caitlin’s eyes track the movement of my throat as I swallow. I try to push the feeling away, along with the desire to figure her out, because feeling anything for her is complicated—and I can’t do complicated.

Definitely not now.

Probably not ever.

“How do you know what I want?” she asks, looking down at the drink in her hand and then back at me.

“I’m an intuitive kind of guy,” I say casually, grinning when she snorts.

“You’re a football player,” she says, as if being a football player is the antithesis of intuition. But before I can respond, someone bumps into her from behind, the margarita she has yet to sip sloshing perilously close to the rim of her glass. At that exact moment, the song in the club changes to something ear-splittingly loud and her body stiffens, unease flickering over her face as she glances over her shoulder.

Hates crowds, I catalogue, as if I’m building a dossier. Probably loud noises too.

“Come with me.” My sudden desire to give her what she needs in this moment overrides all my common sense and self-preservation instincts, and before I realize what’s happening, I’m taking Caitlin’s free hand, tugging her around the bar and up a hidden staircase to the VIP section the team commandeered for tonight. It’s mostly empty now, my teammates having long since abandoned the somewhat quieter space for the raucous dance floor below. The fact that she follows me up here feels like a victory, and I try not to think too hard about why I like it so much.

“Don’t want your drink?” I ask, settling down on one of the couches and taking another swig of my beer.

Caitlin looks down at her drink and then glances around the VIP area, as if she can’t quite figure out how she ended up here. And when her eyes find mine, I can practically see her mask slip firmly back into place. “I like salt on the rim,” she says cooly, perching on the arm of the couch and crossing one fantastic leg over the other. Legs I would very much like to have wrapped around my neck while her perfect lips moan my name.

And there’s a thought I definitely shouldn’t be having.

“No, you don’t. You think you should like salt on the rim and that’s not the same thing.”

Caitlin stares at me like she’s never seen me before. “This is the first conversation we’ve ever had that doesn’t involve extraneous football players or various members of my family. You don’t know me.”

“Don’t I?” I ask, sitting up and running a finger over her bare knee before I can stop myself, cataloguing the goosebumps that scatter over her skin, the way she shivers and tries to pretend she doesn’t. I wonder what the fuck is happening. Why my body and mind are drawn to this woman who is absolutely a stranger but feels like she isn’t.

“No one knows me,” she mutters, before slamming her mouth shut, her cheeks flushing under the LED laser lights shooting across the club ceiling.

Her voice is low, barely audible over the music, but she might as well be screaming. Those four words slide straight into me, tucking themselves inside the wreckage of my heart, and I feel their truth as if I was the one who spoke them aloud instead of her. I feel it in the tightening of my gut and the clenching of my fists. The sharpness of my breath and the words that fall from my mouth before I can stop them.

“I think maybe I’d like to know you.”

Caitlin’s eyes snap to mine and I hold her gaze, the air between us growing heavy with something unnamable as my words hang between us. I don’t know where they came from, but I can’t find it in me to regret them either, even though Caitlin is the baddest of bad ideas and I am no one’s forever.

And then Caitlin rolls her eyes, the spell broken as she finally takes a long sip of her drink. She rolls her tongue over her bottom lip to lick off the sugar and lets out a satisfied hum that has a grin spreading across my face even as my cock jerks behind my zipper.

Sugar on the rim. I fucking knew it.