“Mia?”

As soon as I heard my name being called, reality came crashing back in. What the fuck was I doing? His fingers were still in my mouth and I could taste myself on them, the sweet muskiness of my pussy where he had just made me come. I opened my eyes and he slowly withdrew his fingers from my mouth. I could feel his cock against my hip and I chewed my lip as I looked at him. I wanted to stay. I wanted more. I wanted him to fuck me, right here and now, the haze of my desire for him rendering me stupid in ways I’d never been before.

“Mia!” The voice came again, louder and closer.

I pulled a face and pushed him away. Quickly, I reached down, pulled my panties off and pulled down my dress.

“Want me to keep them for you?”

I nodded and put my panties into his hand. “Thanks for rescuing me,” I whispered.

His large fist closed over the white cotton as he smiled softly.

I smoothed my dress down my hips and thighs. I prayed to God that he hadn’t left any marks on me when he’d been kissing my neck. I touched my lower lip and found it a tiny bit swollen where he had tugged it between his teeth.

“Don’t worry, everybody’s drunk, no one’s going to know what happened here.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

His eyes filled with amusement. “It was my pleasure.”

“I need to go,” I breathed, but before I could duck away, he leaned in and kissed me one more time. It was a short kiss, but one that whipped the breath right out of my lungs.

When he pulled back, he was grinning at me and he jerked his head back toward the bar. “Go,” he ordered. “I’ll let you get ahead.”

“Okay.” I nodded, still a little breathless. I turned and checked myself in the window as I headed back into the bar. My hair looked a little messy, but I felt glad that I seemed to be able to pass for someone who’d just gone outside to catch some air.

“Hey, where did you go?” Kayla asked when I came around the corner. She had a frown on her face and her arms crossed over her chest.

I shook my head and shrugged. “I just needed to get a little air.” I waved my hand. “It was getting a little much for me in there.”

“Were you dancing with Jesse earlier?” she asked as we headed back to the table.

I glanced over my shoulder to see if he was following us, but I couldn’t see him anywhere. “No.” I shook my head. “Must have been someone else.”

“Right.” She nodded. “Did you see Tina? She came with her new man.”

I shrugged my shoulders and she carried on talking about Tina, but I didn’t hear a word. I couldn’t believe what the hell I’d just done. I’d never done anything like that before in my life. I had only slept with like, three people and they had all been long-term boyfriends. And it wasn’t the alcohol that had gotten me loosened up either. It was something else entirely. As soon as that guy had touched me, Jesse had been there to jump in and tell him to fuck off. At that moment, something had switched in the way I looked at him. Then on the dancefloor, the heat of his hands on my body, it just seemed to be more than I could take…

“Are you all right?” Kayla asked, her brow furrowed.

I snapped back to reality and nodded. “Yeah, yeah, really, I’m fine,” I assured her. “I just…I guess I’m just a little tipsy. It’s been a long day. A very long day.”

I played out the rest of the night just leaning back in my seat. A secret little smile on my heart the whole time. None of them knew what had gone down with Jesse outside, and I had no intention of filling in the blanks for them. Who knew being bad could be so much damn fun? Now I wanted to climb Jesse’s ladder wrung by wrung.

More than a little drunk, I stepped outside the bar and glanced around to see if Jesse was still hanging around, but he was nowhere to be seen. I realized I felt disappointed. I don’t know why, but I thought he might have been waiting for me. Biting my lip, I caught a taxi home. Climbing in, I waved goodbye to all my friends. As the cab pulled away, I leaned back against the leather and closed my eyes.

I still couldn’t believe I’d done that. Any of it.

It was just soooo not me. I had never felt something like that in my life before. God only knew where it had come from either, because it felt as though he had set me on fire with just one look. I thought back to Mark, to his less than sensual attempts while on top of me when we were in bed and that irritating query “did you come?” afterwards that I would always nod yes to, before ducking off to the bathroom with my vibrator.

Heck, with just his fingers and his kiss, Jesse had done more for me in ten minutes than Mark had in the entirety of our relationship, and I had to admit that I would be judging my future partners against Jesse for a long time to come.

I slipped into the house glad my parents were already asleep and tiptoed up the stairs to bed. When I was younger, Mom had a way of knowing precisely what was going on in my head just by taking one look at me. If she caught wind of what I’d been doing tonight and with whom, there would be hell to pay.

I stopped halfway up the stairs. My God, that was some risk I took there. How could I have been so careless and irresponsible? If I’d been caught in the act, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what my parents’ reactions would have been. Dumping my fiancé was one thing, but hooking up with a guy around the back of a bar that same day? The whole damn town would have known and my mom might have had to carry out an honor killing.

I scrubbed my makeup off and climbed into the pajamas that Shelly, the maid had laid out for me on the bed. They were chosen by my mom and just about the unsexist thing a woman could wear. I guess Mom still thought of me as her pure little virgin. I slipped beneath the covers, head spinning a little bit. I wasn’t sure if it was all to do with the alcohol, or the crazy memory of Jesse.

I touched my fingers to my lips, as though I could remind myself of the feel of his mouth on mine again. His body had felt so right next to mine, as though we had been built to fit into one another. Why exactly had I turned him down all those years ago, again?

Well, back then, I had been a girl with big dreams and he had been a boy sowing his wild oats. Now I was the girl who just wanted what I could get today while he was a man with so damn much to offer such a girl. I grinned as I stared at the ceiling. Who would have thought that a day where I’d walked in on the man I was meant to marry while he was fucking another woman would finish with such a big smile on my face, but here we were. And it was all because of the mechanic. I closed my eyes and filled my head with images of him, of us, of everything that we had done together and everything that we had yet to do until sleep took me.

When my eyes fluttered open the next morning and to my great relief, I found myself surprisingly hangover-free. I certainly hadn’t earned it that was for sure, so I gingerly pushed myself upright in bed. As I stretched and yawned, suddenly the memories of what had gone down the night before flooded into my brain and I giggled to myself.

Yeah, that had actually happened.

Even if I didn’t see Jesse ever again after this, I wasn’t exactly averse to having that be my only memory of him.

“Mia!”

My mother’s voice came up the stairs and I sprang out of bed, as though she had somehow climbed inside my head and caught me thinking about Jesse. “Yeah?” I called back.

“Phone call for you!” She came up the stairs.

I went to the door, wiping a smudge of makeup that I had missed last night out from under my eye in the mirror. I opened it and she handed over my cellphone, which in my drunken state I must have left on the floor in the hallway, where I had stopped to take my shoes off.

There was a look on my mother’s face I couldn’t read. “I answered it for you.”

“Who is it?” I asked, not exactly happy that she had seen fit to answer my phone, but knowing her, she probably thought it was Mark and she was trying to get the low down from him.

“Some man called, Jesse.” She wrinkled up her nose.

My stomach flipped. I had automatically assumed it was Julie buzzing about the plans for the wedding party, or to do a post-mortem on the bachelorette night, but it never even crossed my mind it would be Jesse. My heart started pounding. So loud I was afraid my mom would hear it.

“Thanks, Mom,” I said as I closed the door. Lifting the phone to my ear, I heard my voice croak out, “Hello.”