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“And you haven’t?”
“I haven’t.”
“I’ve slept with three men.”
He gaped at her. Shook his head as if he’d been punched in the ear. “Now, I had a lot of sex with those men, but it’s only been three. I’m thirty-six years old.”
“You want to cat around a little? Sow some wild oats? Because if you’re taking applications—”
“Cat around? Who says that?”
He shrugged. “Desperate men.”
She put her chin in her hand and stared at him, close enough to see the flecks of black in his brilliant blue eyes. Close enough to smell him, to taste him if she was bold enough to lean forward to press her lips to his. And she was plenty bold, but she wasn’t ready for that. She wanted more of this delicious possibility that seemed to surround Jeremiah Stone. She wanted more of the build-up, the ecstatic expectation. “When have you ever been desperate Jeremiah?”
He touched her arm, just the tips of his fingers against the fragile skin at her wrist, and the night detonated around her, lust and excitement laced the air she breathed, filtered through her clothes to touch her skin with sparks.
“I have never been as desperate as I am right now.”
Enough, she thought and leaned forward to kiss him.
Lucy was situated right beside the hallway leading back to the bathrooms and one of the last standing pay phones in the world. A cowboy stepped out of the hallway into the bar, adjusting his zipper and belt buckle, shattering their little bubble of intimacy.
Jeremiah dropped her wrist just as the cowboy wove toward them, and Lucy had the suspicion she was looking at her first customer for the night.
“Hey.” Drunk Cowboy smiled lewdly. “You that woman giving guys a ride home?”
The way he said it was slightly skeevy, a little too close to ugly innuendo, but before she could say anything, Jeremiah was up and off his stool.
“Walk on by.” Jeremiah stepped close to the man in a way that was only aggressive.
“Just asking the woman a question about her business practices.” The guy laughed and Lucy quickly leaned between the two men, smiling at the drunk cowboy.
“If Joey says you’ve had too much to drink to drive home, I can give you a ride. My rates double, though, if you’re an asshole.”
Drunk Cowboy was offended. “Are you calling me an asshole?”
“Not at all. But my friend might, so I’d keep going, just to be safe.”
Drunk Cowboy scowled at her and at Jeremiah, who bristled. The former rodeo champ saddled with his dead sister’s three children was a bad kind of powder keg and she didn’t need this kind of drama.
The man walked by and Jeremiah gaped at her. “You’re kidding with this, right?”
“I’m not talking about it with you.” She sat back down and picked up her coffee, ignoring the look he was giving her.
Finally he returned to his stool and finished his beer in one long swallow. Catching Joey’s eye he lifted his hand for another.
“Is it your intention to get drunk so I have to drive you home?” she asked.
“No, but it’s a good idea, if it keeps you away from guys like him.”
“It’s not, and you know it. You’d have to pay me to take you back to your truck tomorrow morning and miss half a morning of work.”
Joey slid him another beer and he took a quick sip.
“What are you even doing here, Jeremiah? Where are the boys?” she asked, peeved with him. All that quiet heat between them earlier was raging into a different fire and she found herself itching for a fight.
“With their grandparents.” He stared up at the ceiling, stretching his long neck so much that she saw the white skin under the edge of his shirt.
“You all right?” she asked.
His laugh was bitter and dark, like the bad coffee in her cup.
“I do not want to talk about whether or not I am all right. I don’t want to talk. I am so done with talking about myself.”
Okay, she thought, leaning away. There was a dangerous sparkle around him, something manic in his eyes. A fire kindled in her belly, something dangerous and utterly unlike her.
“You want to get out of here?” he asked, and her stomach twisted, torn between desire and better sense.
“And do what?”
His eyes glittered. “Mini golf. What do you think?”
She laughed, low in her chest, more turned on just sitting here than she’d been in years. Just the prospect of walking out that door with him, the half-formed imaginings of what they would do to each other, made her fingers shake. Her breath hitch.
Part of her wanted to play a game with him, drag this out. The anticipation was so delicious. And part of her was scared.
Scared silly to leave with him. To embark on some affair when she was such a mess. When she liked him so much.
