He could tell immediately that I needed saving.
“What’s going on?”
“You’re late.”
He smiled and shrugged, and I got lost in his eyes all over again.
“I was trying to get Winnie’s drink order,” Thatch clarified as he wrapped a casual arm around his wife.
“She’s a big fan of expensive Pinot Noir,” Wes told him casually and winked in my direction.
But when his eyes met mine, they didn’t leave. Time seemed to stand still as he stood there looking at me like there was no one else around—eyes roaming up and down my body, taking in every single little inch of skin revealed—even though we were smack-dab in the middle of a whole slew of other fucking people. Our group, the room, all of it faded away as he used a tiny slip of his tongue across his bottom lip to talk to me. It was so small, an inconsequential movement to anyone else, but he might as well have taken a torch and lit my skin on fire.
Before I could give my actual drink order, Thatch started to sing softly. “I wear my suuun-glasses at night.” His head bobbed back and forth, punctuating each word dramatically. I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing.
Wes reached up to the top of his head to pat the aviators that sat there.
“Seriously, Whitney, what are you?” Thatch questioned once he finished the chorus. “You know it’s a Halloween party, right?” he continued, looking Wes up and down. With a snap of his fingers, he pointed at Wes. “Wait…let me guess…you’re Wes Lancaster when he’s out trolling for pussy, right?”
“Robin Thicke,” Wes corrected, shaking his head with a grin. He was just amused by the rest of us, but I didn’t miss the glance in my direction at the mention of his “trolling.”
Thatch grinned. “‘Blurred Lines’?”
Wes nodded, and a sly, confident smirk kissed his perfect lips. “That’s exactly the look I was going for.”
“I see…I see…” Thatch added with a nod. “So…you’re hoping women will just rip their tops off and dance around you?”
Wes slid his hands into his pockets and shrugged. “A man can dream, right?” he responded nonchalantly, but his eyes held mine as he spoke, each word driving into me like a perfectly placed spank.
Holy hell, I needed a fan. Or maybe I was coming down with a fever.
The truth?
I didn’t feel sick. But I sure as hell felt like reenacting another night of marathon sex with Wes Lancaster.
A few hours—and drinks—later I found myself in a place I never, ever thought I would be: sitting at a table with a pregnant, naughty nun and a hooker, discussing our favorite Golden Girls.
“Blanche!” Cassie exclaimed enthusiastically, her fervor entirely thanks to personality rather than alcohol. That made one of us.
Georgia and I laughed…and laughed…and laughed. Way more than was necessary or expected, but hey, that’s tequila for you. We’d at least moved on to straight wine.
“What? Why is that so funny?” Cassie demanded, her amusement with the two of us running just as dry as her cups.
“It’s not funny, it’s fucking predictable,” Georgia responded on a hiccupping giggle, snorting so hard at the end that she choked on her own spit.
Oh, yeah. We’re pretty right now.
“You’re drunk, you bitch!” Cassie railed until it trailed into a whine. She wanted alcohol like I wanted the D. We were both sad little sacks while we struggled through the wait.
Georgia just nodded and held up her glass of wine. “Cheers, honey.”
Cassie flipped her off.
As the music switched over to Beyoncé’s “Drunk in Love,” I decided that Harley Quinn needed to enjoy the night. She needed to let the fuck loose and dance her little booty-short and fishnet-wearing ass off.
And that she…was me.
So, that’s exactly what I did without saying another word to anyone.
Because sometimes, you just didn’t need anyone else. You just needed to feel the music and let it consume you. Sometimes, you just needed to forget about what people thought and not worry about whether you looked like an idiot out on the dance floor.
Sometimes, you just had to let go.
As I walked toward the dance floor, I heard Cassie ask, “Win? Where are you going?” but I didn’t slow down.
I just turned around and grinned at her, and then made my way to the center of the dance floor. The beat moved through me like a wave, and as I finally caught it, I shook my hips and raised my hands in the air.
I was just loose enough that I didn’t need to look around the room, wasn’t waiting for someone to join me—all I needed was myself and the music. Two songs in, as irony would have it, the catchy opening beat of “Blurred Lines” started to play. I laughed to myself and shook my hips even harder, the cool kiss of the air-conditioned—thanks to an early roasting room packed full of bodies—space touching skin that rarely even saw my bedroom.
But I put that out of my mind and made eye contact with an older gentleman across the dance floor, and he seemed amused by my dance moves enough to bolster my confidence. If he’d done it differently, in a creepy way, I probably would have wilted. But it wasn’t like that at all. His eyes were kind, and his body language said he could tell I was having fun.
And then, as my eyes moved across the crowd, Robin Thicke himself seemed to appear from nothing.
It actually took me a minute, thanks to the impairments of alcohol, but eventually, I figured out it was really just Wes Lancaster dressed as Robin Thicke.
And that was even better.
He moved toward me slowly, with a sexy little smirk on his lips. Transported by the music and the moment, I couldn’t do anything but keep dancing and watch him get closer.
It took both forever and no time at all, but as the wait burned inside me, the heated connection of our gaze became too much. I’d barely turned away before his chest was to my back and his hands were on my hips, his body following my movements, and I could feel my body moving as it sought contact with each surface inch of his.
His warm breath near my ear, I swore I heard him take a deep inhale as if he was savoring the smell of me.
I doubt he smells so much like peaches, he’d said.
On instinct, I leaned my head against his shoulder and let him take the lead. His hands skated easily down to my hips, and then back up again, skimming the sides of my belly. I sucked in a breath involuntarily.
His hands felt like heaters against the cool of my skin as his fingertips gently slipped beneath the half-shirt and caressed me. Goose bumps danced across my stomach like glitter.
His voice was rough, so close to the edge of control I had to close my eyes tight against the onslaught of arousal as he whispered in my ear, “I couldn’t let sexy little Harley Quinn dance by herself.”
He grabbed my hand, spinning me out away from his body and then pulling me back to him so that we were chest-to-chest, gazes locked, and hips still moving seductively together.
The corners of his lips curled so completely that they grazed the corners of his eyes. Open and free, Wes Lancaster looked at me like I was everything. Not everything he’d been looking for or known he wanted, but like I was everything. Happiness and pain, love and hate, all the words he’d ever spoken and all the ones he never would.
I was lost after that.
Completely consumed by him.
It was just Wes and Winnie. Robin Thicke and Harley Quinn.
There weren’t any questions about what we were or recriminations from the complicated answers those questions might mean.
As we danced there, the music switched over to a sexy, electronic remix of a Disclosure song I loved, “You & Me,” and everything seemed simple.
I wanted him. Now and again and over and over after that.
My hands went to his shoulders without a conscious command, my fingertips brushing at the soft hair of his neckline, and our locked gazes intensified. Heated. Moved from maybes to definites and then some—wanting. Begging. Pleading.
“I want you,” I whispered when the ache in my abdomen became unbearable, and our breaths mingled so completely it felt like there was only one.
Wes sank his hands into my hair and tilted my head to the side, his soft lips brushing back and forth at the sensitive spot behind my ear. “I need you, Win,” he said there, his ardor consuming my entire body and soul.
Moving quickly, he grabbed my hand and pulled me away from the dance floor, through the crowd, and down a darkened hallway, back into the corner where absolutely no light touched any surface. My legs churned in their effort to keep up with him, but I didn’t say a word.
Hidden there, just out of plain sight, I wrapped myself around him like a second skin, and our mouths attacked one another, kissing and licking and biting and sucking frantically until nothing else mattered anymore.
“Leave it,” I whispered as her phone rang from her tiny purse that lay discarded on the floor, groaning and pushing her deeper into the wall before sucking the peak of her nipple into my mouth.
We were in the trenches of my favorite two-person activity, and I had absolutely no desire to add a third—especially knowing whoever was on the other end of her phone wasn’t a model for Victoria’s Secret.
Relax. I’m mostly joking.
I’d been working diligently at the removal of each and every piece of her clothing for the last five or so minutes, but we were so desperate to keep our mouths on one another, the process had been slow going and she’d yet to have the chance to reciprocate.