Little girl, this is above your pay grade, believe me.
Bastard.
He didn’t know what she wanted. She didn’t believe in romance, anyway. She just thought he was hot.
The world had taken too much out of her to believe in fairy-tale endings.
When things were good, she knew they couldn’t last.
The other shoe would always drop.
His thinking she was young and naive...it was offensive.
She didn’t need to be thinking about him, anyway.
She hadn’t even seen him in almost two years. He’d started some wine business up north. She had cried when he’d gone. Twenty-one years old and she’d been crying about a man who’d never seen her as anything other than a little sister. It was humiliating. But this wasn’t humiliating. This was exciting. Electrifying.
Healing, even.
“I take your meaning just fine,” he said.
“Do you want to... To dance?”
Because the woman she was tonight wanted to dance.
And the woman she was tonight didn’t care if this mystery man turned her down. Sure. She would be disappointed. But she would find somebody else. She wasn’t going to let it be singular or anything like that.
“If that’s what you want.”
He pushed back from the wall, and suddenly he was walking toward her. So tall, even in the shoes she was wearing. It made her dizzy to look up at him.
But they went out to the dance floor, and he pulled her into his arms. And she had never felt so... So delicate. So exquisitely aware of every part of her body as he pressed her against the hardness of his muscular form. She didn’t know how long they danced for. Maybe fifteen minutes. Maybe two hours. Everything started to lose meaning. And she only had that couple sips of champagne.
It was like they were the only two people. And she couldn’t see his face. But they couldn’t see each other. They couldn’t. Because it had to be like this. This fantasy. Where she was brave, and maybe a bit seductive, and not just Jessie, who was little more than Levi Granger’s sister.
She didn’t want to lose her grip on this moment. She didn’t want reality. Not even a little bit. She needed the fantasy.
But then he kissed her. She’d never been kissed before. And it was like fire igniting her body. Igniting her veins.
And she was afraid. Afraid that now his mouth had touched hers she wouldn’t be able to stop kissing him. This man whose face she couldn’t even see.
His beard was scratchy, and she loved it. She had never liked the look of a beard on a man before. And it really only added to how little she could see of his features, but she loved it all the same.
She pressed her body against his, melting into him.
And she could feel him getting hard, ready against her pelvis. “Come here,” he said.
He took her hand and led her off the dance floor, out the door at the back of the room.
And then he pulled her into a very small storage room, closing the door behind them and propping a mop just under it to keep the door from being openable.
And then he was back to kissing her. Hard and deep.
She started to undo the buttons on his shirt, without even really thinking. This wasn’t her. And not only was it not her, it was well above her level of experience.
She had thought to come to lose her virginity, but she certainly hadn’t thought about doing it in a storage room, where there wasn’t even a bed.
But she was past thinking. She pushed her hands beneath the fabric of his shirt, felt his muscles. Felt his chest.