When Jake came back from the bathroom, he looked distant and sat at the far end of the couch. I slid to the opposite end. Two could play this game.

“So, princess, what do you think—time for bed?” he asked me.

But it was funny. As he said it, he extended the bottle to me, as if he were asking me to stay instead.

I took the bottle, drank deeply, and then handed it back.

“Soon.”

So we sat there not saying anything, drinking and passing the bottle back and forth, inching closer on the couch each time. It was as if we were daring the other to talk first, to break the silence.

Finally, as I offered him the bottle, I spoke.

“So, you heard my story. What’s yours?”

“What d’you mean?”

His hand closed around the neck of the bottle, but mine didn’t budge.

“You know what I mean.”

He let go of the bottle and sat back. By now, our legs were touching once more. I could smell him, some deep musk that made me drowsy and yet attracted me.

“Got kicked out of the army for fighting and going AWOL a few times. Some buddy got me into bodyguarding and then doing odd jobs—beating up guys, transporting things.”

“That’s it?” I asked, and he nodded.

“What? Saw a tiny little pinprick of good in me?”

I turned away.

“No. I…well, yeah. Yeah, I guess I thought somehow you ended up here by accident, that you’d had a tough life.”

“Sorry, princess.” He patted my face. “Though I reckon you wouldn’t know a tough life if it hit you in the face, with your perfect life, perfect friends, perfect fiancé, and perfect family.”

I shrank away from his touch, my jaw clenching. Before I could help it, “my mother is dead” slipped out of my lips. Jake’s hand drooped, as did his ironic smirk.

“What?”

“She died, and it was my fault. I was five.”

Jake shook his head.

“No. No way. I mean, you were five. You were just a kid. How could it have been your fault?”

Tears were coming to my eyes, but I couldn’t help it. I spoke the words I’d never really admitted to anyone, the ones that had played over and over in my head.

“I distracted her while she was driving—made a mess all over the car with a milkshake. I was crying for her to clean me up since it was cold and sticky. She didn’t pay attention to the road for just one too many seconds.”

Jake’s face was stunned, a glaze of tears in his own eyes. I didn’t have to tell him the ending, but I did anyway.

“She drove into a semi-truck. I should have been the one who died.”

Now the tears were flowing freely. Released by the truth, they eagerly streamed down my cheeks to my chin before dropping onto the sweatshirt that wasn’t mine. It belonged to this uncaring, unfeeling man before me, this man who, right now, looked like he might not be so uncaring after all.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” he said.

I didn’t say anything because it didn’t matter. There was nothing to say to “my mother’s dead.”

“My mom’s dead, too,” he said, his voice a whisper.

Anger surged through me at his mocking assumption of my own pain, at the nerve of it. Yet when I glared into his eyes, I only found my own pain staring back at me. Jake was telling the truth.

“She died giving birth to me. She tried to have a home birth since we couldn’t afford the hospital bills. Dad hated me for it till the day he died. He beat me—hit me and yelled at me. I was thankful when I was ten and a heart attack took him.”

Those pine-green eyes were swimming with tears. Now I was the one saying I was sorry and he the one saying nothing because there was nothing to say. Our hands were clasped now, but he wasn’t done yet.

“The next few years were a merry-go-round of foster homes. Nobody wanted the angry kid who wouldn’t listen to anybody. Families didn’t want me, schools didn’t want me. Hell, I didn’t want me. Late at night under the covers with my little dinosaur flashlight, I’d switch the beam from one of my classmate’s photo to the next, wishing I were them, any of them—Brian or Corey or even Evelyn, anyone but me. Because anyone but me was loved, had a family, mattered. Not me.”

He was squeezing my hand so hard it was going white.

“Jake,” I whispered. When he didn’t respond, I touched his chest gently and repeated his name.

Coming to, he released my hand and took a deep breath.

“Shit. Sorry, Alice.”

I smiled. It was the first time he had addressed me by name.

“I’ve never told anyone that before,” he said quietly. “The big spiel.”

“Me neither,” I said.

He clasped my hand again, and I couldn’t bring myself to let go. To let down this poor, broken man. To stifle my own growing attraction. My gaze slid around the room, taking in the dismal empty box and the few furnishings that almost seemed like a joke.

“Guess you don’t often have guests here, huh?”

With a chuckle, he followed my gaze and, in a faux-interested tone, said, “What makes you say that?”

We laughed together, and then he pursed his lips and said, “Though in all seriousness, I do have guests. Although we don’t come here to talk.”

I nodded. So that explained his stash of female items. The admission wasn’t all that surprising. Jake was good looking and funny—and dangerous. I took the bourbon bottle and poured some into the two glasses. As he raised his, I did the same.

“Here’s to that,” I said as I clinked his glass—too hard, sending bourbon sloshing over the side and onto his shirt.

We froze, caught each other’s eye, and burst out laughing.

“I hate wet clothes,” Jake said nonchalantly as he pulled off his T-shirt.

Now I was face to face with the snake on his chest; it was black, thick, and poised to strike. But I was too drunk and was reminded of another snake farther down, and so when Jake lifted my chin so I was looking into his eyes, I kissed the lips that were waiting for me.

I kissed them and everything slid into everything else. What had been destined since the first second we’d laid eyes on each other. Our hands slid over each other and then under one another’s clothes, and soon we were unzipping and pulling off the in-the-way garments. His body was a collection of muscles, all tensed as his big hands slid up and down my sides and under my bra to squeeze my breasts.

“God, you’re hot,” he murmured, throwing his lips over mine and pushing his tongue inside my mouth.

I ran my hand along the band of his underwear. There was something else I wanted inside me. Needed.

As Jake fondled my breasts, my pussy throbbed for what my hands reached for. The hard thing that was all too happy to be let out of its cotton boxers. The huge shaft that was ready for me.

Now it was his hands’ turn to slide under my underwear, yank them down, and find what they had been looking for.

“So wet,” he groaned as he slipped his fingers inside me.

I grabbed his dick and started pumping.

“So hard,” I breathed into his ear.

We were moving together, his fingers and mine, his lips on my breast, my fingers up and down his back—everything was pulsing to the same rhythm, the same breathless beat, the same irresistible want that had to be sated.

Finally, as his fingers twirled inside me and my pussy let out desperate shivers of want up and down my body, the word burst out of me: “Now.”

And it was as if he’d said it, or his body anyway; his hard dick thrust into me, his own “now.” It was so hard and so good that I was sent sprawling backward on the couch as I moaned, sending the bourbon bottle clattering to the floor. Mid-thrust, Jake froze.

Staring at it, he muttered, “Shit.”

And something in me remembered a thought I’d had, an earlier me who hadn’t really known this man, who’d been less drunk and more clearheaded and less horny. It had been about being careful because this man was dangerous. And yet my pussy was trembling; too late had been ten minutes ago.

“Now,” I said again as my pussy clasped his dick eagerly.

But Jake shook his head, looking away as he said, “I’m sorry.”

He pulled himself out of me and, as I sat up, walked away.

At the foot of the steps, he still wouldn’t look at me.

“I’m sorry Alice, but this isn’t right. Not for my job, and definitely not for you. I’m sorry.”

And then he left me there, wet top to bottom, because now I was crying again, too.