Sweet (True Believers #2)(47)
Author: Erin McCarthy

Our three glasses filled, Zeke handed one to me. Riley took his and we lifted them. “Cheers!” I said.

Zeke just nodded and raised his glass to his lips.

I knocked my glass into Riley’s. It was meant to make a sweet little chink sound. Instead, I overestimated my strength and half of his shot sloshed over the glass onto his hand. “Oops. Sorry.” I leaned over and licked his hand. “Trade me.” I switched our shots and then drank the halfsie one down.

He drank his in one tilt, wrinkling his nose. “You want something on the jukebox?”

“Well, yes, I do.” The vodka was warming me down into my inner thighs and I wanted to dance with him. After I got a little closer. I leaned over to his stool, hands on the bar top, feet on the footrest bar, and kissed him.

He kissed me back, hand firm on the small of my back, gradually shifting down onto my ass. He broke away. “Every woman in here hates you right now.”

“Why? Because I’m kissing you?” That was a little arrogant on his part. Not that it was untrue but yeesh. I glanced around and saw that of the ten people in the bar, nine were watching us. The men were all in their fifties except for one and they were all gawking openly. The women were of the big hair, blinged butt jean variety and they were shooting me glares. What did I do, besides have a hot boyfriend?

Riley patted my butt. “No. Because you have legs that are a mile long and the shortest pair of denim shorts in the history of the world on and you look smoking hot.”

“Oh.” Well, that was okay then. As long as he thought I looked hot. I licked my lips. “Thanks.”

“You’re killing me.” He stood up. “Come on, let’s play pool.”

We did. Or rather, he did, and I tried, but all I succeeded in doing was almost taking my own eye out. But it had the added benefit of forcing him to lean over me and help me with my strokes. No one in the bar bothered us, and I decided I liked it there, in the dark, smoky quiet. Everyone was disregarding the no-smoking law and just puffing away, and while I didn’t love the smell, I liked the haze.

Dark and seductive, that’s what it was.

The jukebox took negotiation. “No way in hell,” Riley said to a pop song.

I flipped and pointed.

“Lame. No. Over my dead body.”

“You pick one then,” I told him, pinching his arm.

“Hey. You can’t just pinch me.”

“Yes, I can.” I did it again.

He laced his fingers through mine so I couldn’t touch him anymore and grinned. “You are asking for it.”

“You say that all the time,” I murmured, “and nothing ever happens.”

“You say that like you want something to happen,” he said, eliminating all the space between us.

My lips parted.

He bent, his expression intense. When he kissed me, he nipped at my bottom lip and I closed my eyes. I wanted him so much, the alcohol making my body feel liquid and hot, and I shifted so that his thigh was between my legs, my hips bumping against him.

His eyes darkened, the corner of his mouth tilting up. “I’m picking the song.”

He did and it was something I’d never heard of. It sounded like it was a f**k-me song masquerading as a love ballad from the seventies. Or rather a love ballad from the seventies masquerading as a f**k-me song. Something like that.

Riley pulled my arms up to rest around his neck, and right there, in the skeezy bar, with Zeke and bullet-bra-wearing women watching, he slow danced with me. He actually had good rhythm.

I sighed. “This is better than prom.” My date had been Tweeter Brinkley and he was nice enough, though with a serious sweating problem. But he had been in love with Chelsea Zane and had spent the whole night following her around while I had gotten drunk in the restroom with Kylie. At one point, I pulled out my hair extensions and wrote on my arms with a Sharpie brilliant things like Seniors! Prom Blows! And Troy Trojans . . . because she rode the wrong horse. My parents were not amused the next day, even though I insisted I had been held down forcibly against my will.

“I didn’t go to prom,” Riley said.

“You didn’t miss a damn thing.”

“What I was missing was you,” he said.

My breath caught. Everything inside me melted. I had never felt more female in my entire life than I did right then and I felt softer, languid.

Like I was falling in love.

“Let’s go home,” he said as we swayed to the song that was now my favorite song ever, because it had created this moment.

“You always have the best ideas.”

Riley pulled me toward the bar. “What do I owe you?” he asked Zeke.

“It’s on me,” the bartender said, drying a glass in his hand. “Thanks for the entertainment.”

They fist bumped.

“Got everything?” Riley asked.

“I left everything in the car.”

His hand rubbed my knee during the three-minute drive home, and I wouldn’t have thought such a simple thing could be so erotic, yet it was. It just went in slow circles over my bare skin and it felt as sexy as that slow dance.

As we went down the hallway to his bedroom, Riley paused once to kiss me, cupping my cheeks with his hands. “God, you’re so beautiful.”

Not only did I feel beautiful with Riley, I felt like a nicer, better person, softer, like melted butter. Maybe it was the vodka, maybe it was dark hallway or our whispered voices, the boys all asleep, but I felt like I was going to crawl out of my skin if I didn’t get to have sex with Riley in the next five seconds. When he stripped off his shirt, after carefully closing his door and locking it, I yanked off my shirt and tossed it on the floor. I took my bra off, too.

He turned to me and actually jumped a little. “Holy shit, Jess.” His voice was strained.

“What?” I undid the snap on my shorts and started to take the zipper down.

“Slow down.”

“No.” I wanted to feel his skin on mine.

But Riley pulled me down onto the bed with him before I could finish taking off my shorts and he kissed me deeply, with tongue, so that I groaned, hips arching to meet his erection.

“Not tonight, honey,” he told me, breathing hard, his eyes agonized.

I froze in the act of humping his crotch, astride his body, my br**sts scraping along his chest. “What do you mean?”

“I mean we’re not having sex tonight. I don’t want our first time together to be when you’re shitfaced.”

It was like a slap. Hot humiliation rushed into my mouth, a thick bile, and I sucked in a few deep breathes, suddenly feeling like I was going to be sick. “I’m not shitfaced,” I protested. “I know exactly what I’m doing.”