He blinked rapidly and his mouth hung slack. “Gay?” he asked, bewildered.
I wrapped the blanket he’d tossed at me around my shoulders, but this one didn’t cover me as well as the other had, so I had no choice but to have my bra on display
I knew he wasn’t gay. No man looked at a set of breasts that fondly, and then clearly displayed embarrassment for doing so. But flustering him was distracting him, so I’d keep it up as long as I could. My eyes darted to the open security box and I knew I’d have to fix that before leaving.
“It’s totally cool,” I told him, waving a hand around me. “One of my best friends in high school was gay.” I braced a hand behind me on the marble. “High school kids were such assholes, you know? So I pretended to have sex with him at a party once, behind closed doors—to get them off his back. He paid me for it. But then it became this whole big thing and then I had this,” I paused and whispered scandalously, “reputation.” I sighed dramatically and waved my hand in the air. “And it was like the Scarlet Letter in modern day. I even wore a bright red ‘A’ on my clothes.”
“I’m not gay, and you’re a liar. Easy A, right? Yeah, I saw that movie too, Jason Bourne.”
I sniffed and the blanket slipped over my shoulder. “Like I said at our meeting with all the others, we all have our role to play.” I held my arm out and bowed dramatically. “I’m the klepto, compulsive lying drug dealer.” When his eyes widened, I tsked. “Calm down, former drug dealer is my current title. Parole and all.”
“You’re on parole.”
“Duh. Hence the weekly therapy with people with whom the only thing in common we share is that we’re all some kind of whack in the brain.”
He was relaxing. It wasn’t super obvious, but I could see that the edge that’d been coiled around him upon seeing me in his bed was subdued, at least for the moment. “So you freely admit you’re ‘whack in the brain.’”
“Sure. The first step is recognition, right?” My hands were itching to grab the really fancy salt and pepper shakers on his counter. Quite the upgrade from the ones I’d swiped from work. Because of that, I curled my hands around the back of the bar stool, hard enough for the spindles to bite into my palm.
“Besides,” I said, moving away from the temptation of those salt and pepper shakers and into the living room, to see if there was anything I’d missed before. “Everyone has their shit to work through, don’t they? You sure do.” I raised an eyebrow and walked to the fireplace mantle, running my hand across it and grabbing a small trinket on the end as casually as possible.
“I’m perfectly fine.”
I laughed. “That’s a word that’s never used correctly. No one is merely fine. What the hell is fine anyway?” I moved away from the mantle to the low table behind the sofa.
“What are you doing?” he asked me, as I repeated the motion I’d made across the mantle on the table.
“Just admiring all this nice shit you have.” I pointed to the adjoining dining room. “That table you have in there. It’s Henredeon, isn’t it?”
His dark brows drew together and he followed where I pointed. “What, are you a purveyor of fine furniture?”
“Nope. Just a thief with expensive taste.”
We both realized what I’d said at the same exact moment, and his hand went to his pocket where I could see an outline of a phone. Fuck. I’d have to think fast.
“So you broke in to steal from me?”
“Of course not,” I lied, and walked to his security system. “Look, if this was a quick robbery, would I have taken the time to disconnect your alarm?” The answer was yes, more for ego than anything, but he didn’t have to know that.
“Oh, I’m sure there’s a perfectly logical explanation for the fact that you broke into my house, broke my alarm system, and hid half-naked in my bed.”
“Don’t be dramatic.” I rolled my eyes, dropped the trinket in my backpack and grabbed my screwdriver. “Look, it’ll take me two seconds. And as a gesture of goodwill, I’ll give you a little tip: don’t put your alarm panel right near an entrance. Hide that shit in one of your four billion bedrooms upstairs.” In less than ten seconds, I’d screwed the phone line and powerline back into the inside of it all and re-secured the front of the alarm system. “As good as new.”
“Mm-hmm.” He didn’t sound convinced. “Where the hell are your clothes?” His hand slid into the pocket with his phone, and I wrapped my hand around his arm and steered him into the dining room.
“Here,” I said, hastily shoving him into a chair. I walked over to the coffee table and turned the sound bar back on and pulled my phone out in the same second. I quickly pulled up the first song I could think of, Down in Mexico by The Coasters and faced X.
In that chair, he looked impossibly long, all muscular and serious. He was staring at me with completely unconcealed impatience, but he hadn’t moved from the seat yet.
I dipped my hip and brought it back up, bouncing on the ball of my foot to the intro of the song. He blew out a breath and made a move to stand, but using my foot, I gently pushed him back into the seat. “No,” I said softly before backing up and shaking my head along with the beat of the song.
Slowly, I made my way toward him, swaying my hips back and forth to the beat. I put my hands on my hips and rubbed my hands over my low belly, drawing attention to the expanse of skin there.
“What are you doing?” he asked, eyeing me warily.
Not answering him, I did a circle around him in the chair, rubbed my hand through his hair, messing it up a little. Smiling to myself, I waited for his hands to smooth it back into his “on purpose” messy style—which he did seconds later.
“Lucy,” he said, and tried to stand. Again, I pushed him down.
When I’d completed the circle, I straddled his lap, my body facing away from his as I braced my hands on the arms of the chair and lowered my ass until it brushed against the front of his pants. Rocking back and forth to the beat, I tipped my head back, my hair spilling over both of us, my cheek inches from his neck. I threw myself into the music, rotating my hips slowly back and forth, before I pushed off and back to standing.
This wasn’t my first lap dance, but it was the first lap dance where I’d actually found the guy attractive. With his hooded eyes and his mouth in a line, it became a mission for me to see the change in him, to see him feel affected by me. Because even though confidence drove my movements, there was a small tremble in my blood. This was turning me on, too.
With my back to him, I quickly bent over as the bridge hit and the bongo drums kicked on and bounced my ass to the beat, shaking my hair out all around me. I whipped back to standing, walked a few steps away—to give me a breath and to get out of the cloud of lust—and spun around, facing him.
His face was redder than it had been when I’d begun, and I watched him swallow hard as my hair came to rest around me. I stalked toward him, placed my hands on his knees, and then spread them apart roughly.
“Are you having a seizure?” he asked drily, but I knew he wasn’t unaffected by my dance moves. If my gaze lingered too long between his legs, I’d see proof of his attraction to me growing larger by the second.
“No,” I whispered in his ear, and rubbed my bottom lip along his earlobe, releasing hot bursts of breath across his skin.
“Are you sure?” he asked, but his voice had a different depth to it—a kind of darkness that betrayed him.
“I’m shimmying. It’s sexy,” I said indignantly, but didn’t want to lose my momentum. I ran my nose along his jawline up to his other ear. “Now shut up.” Damn him for smelling so good that I nearly forgot what I was doing.
His jaw ticked and I mentally congratulated myself for affecting him. The hands on his knees glided up his thighs to his waist, and I hooked my fingers in and leaned in, my mouth just bypassing his, blowing air along his neck to his ear.
I heard a sharp intake of air and threw myself even more into my performance, gripping his waist as I did a vertical worm move over the front of his body.
“Lucy,” he said, through gritted teeth.
“X,” I said, letting his name hiss off my tongue. “This is what I came here for. Don’t you feel it too? That indescribable connection we share? I felt it the very first night.”
He swallowed. “You came here for this?”
“Yes,” I whispered, and slid my hands up the back of his neck and pressed his face into my chest, silencing him from speaking any further. Glancing down, I caught sight of the watch I’d first noticed when I’d met him. I knew that watch alone could pay Ron off—and if that was all I could make it out of here with, it was something, at least. I just needed to get his shirt off.
I pulled away from smooshing his face into my chest and he looked directly up at me, his breathing coming in harsher now.
“Shhh,” I whispered, running a finger down his lips and dragging the bottom one with my fingertip.
I kept dragging my finger down, over the angle of his chin, down to the top button of his shirt and swiftly undid it.
“That’s better,” I whispered as the song picked up beat again. Before he could say anything, I’d undid the rest of the buttons, exposing a line of skin and muscle.
I found myself distracted by all that skin, and drew my hands across each line of abdominal, over his belly button and down the dark happy trail that disappeared into his pants.
Taking my time, holding his gaze, I drew the shirt over his shoulders, pulled his arms in so I could completely remove it from his body. Impressed by how in shape he was, I was losing focus on my mission. I couldn’t not touch him, so I did—running over the curve of his hard bicep and along the lines of his veins that roped around his forearms. It wasn’t until my gaze arrived at his wrist that I remembered my goal here.
I spun around, straddling his lap again, my back pressed to his front. His warm skin against mine was just another distraction, and I couldn’t resist tossing my head back again to his shoulder.
I grabbed his hands and put them on either side of my hips. I didn’t have to encourage him any further than that, because the first thing he did was grip me roughly, squeezing. In fact, the fierceness of his hold on me stole my breath for a second, but I remembered I couldn’t walk out of here empty-handed.
Placing my hands over the top of his, I took them on a path along my stomach, up over my ribs, and eventually grazing the lower part of my bra.
Shit. This felt good. Like, unbelievably good. His hands were warm, and more calloused than I thought. The bite of those callouses over my soft skin reminded me just how biologically different we were. Me, woman. He, man. And oh, what a man he was.
But this was my chance to get the watch. I sucked in a breath as discreetly as possible and took one of his hands up over the lace of my cups, holding his other—the one with the watch—in my hands carefully.
I felt his own chest shudder in a breath against my back, and hoped he was distracted enough for me to pull this off.
Pulling his hand away, I heard him hiss in a breath before I brought the hand with the watch up, encouraged him to cover my lace-covered breast with his palm. I covered that hand with mine and turned my mouth to his neck, just grazing my lips over his warm skin. It wasn’t a kiss, but it was the next closest thing.
He surprised me by turning his head so his eyes locked with mine. My heart thundered and I had the urge to swallow. I brought my free hand up to the other side of his neck and held his head still as I felt his fingers wrap around the top of my bra. Silently and quickly, I unlatched his watch and let it fall silently into my hand, all during the span of three heartbeats—his eyes unblinking and searching the whole time.
We were too close like this. Our lips a hair from touching. And I held his watch in my fingertips.
I turned my body, thanking Molly for the brief pole dancing lessons she’d given me once, and spun in his lap so I was straddling him face on, with my legs over the arms of the chair, my ass pressed firmly in his lap. Bracing my watchless hand on his knee, I lowered myself so my legs were practically wrapped around his waist and around the back of the chair, securing him to it, and my body hung off the seat, my hair brushing the floor.
Still moving to the beat, I reached behind myself and tucked the watch into the back of my bra. I’d need to make my exit ASAP.
Just as my eyes darted to my backpack, his calloused hands closed around my waist and yanked me up. The motion knocked the wind out of me, and, in facing him, I could see the intensity in his eyes and knew it reflected the same in mine.
Due to my legs being wrapped around the arms of the chair, my face was several inches above his, my lips at his eye-level. His hands gripped my waist, and his fingers were inches from brushing against the watch I’d secured to my bra.
My breaths were coming in harder, my chest heaving up and down as he stared at me. I wasn’t sure which one of us moved first, but before I knew what was happening, we were less than a second away from kissing. I could taste his breath, spicy and warm—like a good whiskey.
And then, it was as if I woke up under the spell he’d had me under and I scrambled out of his lap, grabbing my phone and then after a moment’s hesitation, his discarded shirt.
He was still sitting in the chair, his chest red from where I’d rubbed up against him, his eyes heavy-lidded and his mouth just barely open. He was fuck hot. And he was dangerous to me. I didn’t need this, especially not right now.
Hastily, I buttoned as many buttons as I could, grateful the shirt was large enough that it covered most of my thighs.
We didn’t say anything to each other as I buttoned up his shirt, and it wasn’t until I walked into the kitchen to retrieve my backpack that I heard him move from the chair.
I had to leave my actual clothes there, I knew that. I didn’t really have a choice. It’d be a matter of minutes before he’d realize his watch was missing. So I slung my backpack over my shoulder, and the second I felt him in the kitchen with me, I stepped out the back door, slipped on my shoes and took off in a sprint.
When I was a good three blocks from his house, I pulled my phone out and called an Uber. I looked down at myself, taking in the dress shirt, the dark shoes, and backpack. It was a weird combination, for sure, but this would hardly be the weirdest fare any Uber driver had picked up.