He turned his head and covered her mouth with his. He wanted to devour her. Feel every inch of her. Hear more of those throaty purrs.
As if fulfilling his silent wish, she groaned. The soft sound was filled with so much desire, Wes’s lust jerked against his control. Restraint snaked a fine tremor through his body.
“Kiss me back, baby,” he whispered against her lips. “Let me taste you.”
He’d let this infatuation go on too long, and he was way the hell too far out on a limb here. He had to pull back.
Then her head tilted. Her mouth opened. And she stroked her tongue against his. Sensation filled his mouth—wet, smooth, slick. The thrill slid down his body and filled his groin. He couldn’t keep the growl of pleasure and relief from rolling out of his chest.
Finally.
Fucking finally.
He dove in, took greedily. Too much. Too fast. But he couldn’t stop. She was sweet. And sultry. And succulent. She was everything he’d ever dreamed.
Rubi pressed one hand against his cheek. The other curled into the shoulder of his T-shirt. And all the tension drifted from her body. She relaxed against him, bringing her deeper into the kiss. Into his mouth. The purely unique taste of Rubi flooded his senses.
Delirium.
He fisted her hair, soft, silky, thick. Pushing against the brake pedal, he lifted his upper body farther over the center console. Her lips slid across his, her tongue spiraling and teasing his in crazy sexual ways that made Wes think about how he wanted to move inside her body. He was rock-hard, his c**k throbbing to the quick beat of his heart. He couldn’t think. He only knew he needed her closer.
He slid his hand down her back and leaned in, wrapping her small waist with his forearm. Her body was tight, her curves perfectly placed to fit him. He lifted her until the full swells of her br**sts pressed against his chest. Her fingers slid into his hair. Tingles spread over his scalp and shot down his spine, adding pressure across his hips.
Ah God.
Wes let his hand roam down her back and over her ass cheek. Her ass felt as good as it looked, supple and taut. He squeezed the flesh then lowered his hand to the back of her thigh. When the skin of his hand met the warm skin of her thigh, Wes groaned into her mouth and pulled her closer.
This was not delirium. This was f**king euphoria.
He was about to pull her over the damn console and into his lap when she sighed into his mouth and reined in the kiss, lazily pressing her closed lips to his.
She finally broke off with a murmured, “Good God…” She pressed a hand to her temple. “I should have known you’d be a master with that mouth.”
His heart thundered. His breathing labored. She tried to ease back into her seat, but he tightened the hand at her thigh. He kissed her jaw, her neck, scraped his teeth along her throat. Pleasure vibrated beneath his lips, and the sound pounded Wes with iron fists.
“All right Golden Boy.” Her voice was light, breathless. “You’ve kissed me thoroughly stupid.” She tugged gently at his hair. “But nothing else is happening here. Let’s not get crazy.”
He pulled his mouth from her skin and pressed his forehead to her shoulder, trying to clear his mind. She eased her thigh from his grasp.
Let’s not get crazy.
Fuuuuuck.
He laughed at his own stupidity. Did he really think Rubi would do him right here in the convertible? On a public road? In the middle of the day?
A man could dream.
“See me tonight.” He dropped another slow kiss to her shoulder. “After work. We can do dinner, drinks, a club… Anything you want. Just us.”
She didn’t respond. But didn’t pull away. Just kept her hand deep in his hair, her fingers restlessly worrying the strands. When she finally eased back, she shook her head. “No, Wes.” Her voice was deliberate but soft. A tone he’d only heard her take with Lexi. “I thought we understood each other.”
He tried to focus on the affection in her voice, not the rejection in her words, and reached for her hand, threading their fingers. “Oh, we definitely understand each other.”
“I’ve obviously pushed my teasing too far. I thought…you know…you understood it was just harmless flirting.”
He tightened his grip on her hand. “You know it’s more, Rubi.”
She smiled, but the expression was sad. “It can’t be. I’m sorry.”
He wanted to shake her and tell her to knock it off. “You did not just kiss me like a friend. Or a flirt. You kissed me like you want me.”
Guilt darkened her eyes. “I shouldn’t have.”
“Rubi.” He didn’t know why this was so important to him, but he needed to hear the words. “You want me.”
Her fingers flexed beneath his. “You say that like it’s a secret. Yes, I want you, just like the other two-dozen women on the set today. You’re so damn hot, you singe my brain cells. As much time as we’ve been spending together, it’s a miracle I can think at all.”
His frustration cooled. He released her thigh, skimmed his hand up her back, and cupped her jaw, lifting her face until her eyes met his again. Sexual intensity raged through his body like a f**king lightning strike. “I want to burn out every last cell in your body, not just your brain. But I’ll start there. See me tonight.”
“Wes—”
“If you don’t want to go out, we’ll just stay in, and I’ll get a head start on shutting down every circuit you own.”
Something shifted in her eyes. Or maybe it was her expression. He didn’t know what or why, only knew it signaled trouble.
“Is that what you’re looking for? A casual f**k?”
His head jerked back, the harshness of her words, said in such a soft, sultry voice, taking him off guard. “No.” He suddenly understood. “I mean, of course I want sex, but I want this too. Us. Together. I want…all of you.”
Her expression closed up. “That’s what I thought. Which is why the answer is no. We’ve talked about this, Wes. One kiss isn’t going to change the way I operate.”
“It wasn’t one,” was the first idiotic thing to come out of his mouth. “And it does change us.” His brain clicked back on and darted to her earlier words. “Wait. Would you see me tonight if I’d said that’s all I wanted? Sex?”
“Probably not.” She looked out the windshield and combed both hands through her hair, taming the wild strands. “But I would have had to think about it longer.”
Wes stared at her like an idiot. What the hell did he say to that?
“We should get to the restaurant.” She pulled her purse back into her lap.
“We’re not getting anywhere.” Judging by the way Rubi’s shoulders crawled toward her ears, he needed to soften his voice. “What. The. Fuck?”
She turned toward him, her gaze direct. “There’s a lot of good between us. A lot. And your friendship means everything to me. More than you can understand. I don’t want to screw that up.”
Friendship.
The deathblow.
“I hear you, Rubi. But I’m not listening.” He kept his voice level and low. He wanted his determination to reach her. “Because I know it’s not true.”
She opened her mouth to argue. Wes pressed his index finger against the supple swell of her lips and kept his eyes there. “And I know you want more than friendship with me. I see it every time you look at me. And I sure as hell felt it in that kiss.”
She pulled her head back with an expression that Wes knew usually preceded a battle. Before she started an argument, he sat back and turned the engine over. “But, I’m giving you a break since”—he cast her a sidelong grin—“I did just kiss you stupid.”
“Wes Lawson, you piece of—”
He gave her a talk-to-the-hand gesture and glanced in his side mirror before pulling back out onto the road. “Don’t say anything you’ll regret, precious.”
Four
The way Wes pushed her Aston to its limits on the second half of their drive helped her bank her frustration, but guilt and confusion continued to gnaw at her belly. By the time they’d reached the restaurant, a familiar dark hollowness had settled in. The emptiness was intensified by the fun, the high, the connection they’d shared on the first half of the trip…and then lost.
Which symbolized her greatest fear—acting on their attraction and losing what they had.
She should have just kept her mouth shut and played the whole thing off as nothing. But that toe-curling kiss had really screwed with her mind. She’d kissed more than her share of men, but Wes’s kiss… Wes’s kiss had been real. Filled with real emotion. Real passion. Wes’s kiss had touched Rubi deep in her body—in a place that had nothing to do with sex.
And that scared the shit out of her. Because she was f**king defective.
Wes pulled to a stop along the curb in front of the Crossroads restaurant. He clicked his seat belt free, gripped the top of the windshield, and used the frame to pull himself up. Rubi would have to be dead not to notice the roll of all that muscle in his arms and shoulders. Or the way his T-shirt rode up and showed a few inches of that washboard belly.
He twisted toward the patio, where Jax and Lexi sat at a table, holding hands and Rachel turned her glass of water in circles.
“Chamberlin,” Wes called, his demeanor jovial and light, as if nothing had happened between the set and the restaurant. “You’ve gotta drive this thing.”
He hopped over the side of the car and strode around to open the passenger’s door. Maybe she was making too much out of this. After all, it was just a kiss. But then he curved his arm low around her waist and guided her into the restaurant, and she knew their unspoken hands-off policy between friends had been broken for good.
At the table, Wes released her only to pull out her chair. His chivalry was nothing new; he was always a gentleman, to both friends and strangers alike. But there was a new air of determined ownership about him that both excited and unnerved her.
Rubi met Lexi’s and Rachel’s suspicious gazes as Wes tucked her next to the table before sitting beside her. As if the two women had planned it ahead of time, they both cast curious glances at Wes, then back to Rubi, brows raised. Rubi returned a don’t-start glare to each before picking up a menu and staring at it without reading.
She worried the inside of her lip, her mind bouncing all over the freaking place. She suddenly felt as helpless to control Wes’s feelings as she did his driving.
Rubi scanned the table and the half-filled patio beyond. Half-finished iced teas sat in front of Lexi and Jax where she leaned into his body, looking blissfully content in the circle of his arm. Which only made Rubi feel even more freakishly abnormal. She returned her gaze to the menu with a sigh.
In her peripheral vision, Rubi saw the waiter approach. Wes ordered a beer.
She redirected her gaze from the menu to his face. “Are you driving again after lunch? You probably shouldn’t drink.”
The look that heated his eyes shot butterflies into Rubi’s stomach. He reached out and gripped the back of her neck in an affectionate squeeze. A warm, sexy smile lifted his mouth in that lopsided way that made her desire burn hotter. “No more driving for me today. And no more worrying for you, as adorable as it is.”
She did worry about him, dammit. She didn’t look at the waiter when she said, “Cosmo, please.”
Wes’s hand slid off her neck, leaving it cold…and empty.
“Moving away from your Sexy Bitch?” The waiter’s familiar voice held an edge of humor, and Rubi immediately knew who was serving them. She reserved a certain drink for each club she visited—one of her quirky compulsions.
A sense of equilibrium crept in. She pulled off her sunglasses and smiled up at the head bartender of Stilettos, a club she hit when she was feeling particularly unsettled…or, okay, desperate…and needed something quick and dirty.
She stood and gave Roméo a hug. “Hey.”
His black hair was still long, his lip and eyebrow piercings subdued with simple silver studs. “Haven’t seen you for a while. You look…”—his dark eyes darted to Wes, then back to Rubi, and his smile turned sly—“tousled.”
She ignored the innuendo. “Why are you working here?”
“Picking up some hours. Bills, you know?”
No, she didn’t know. Money she’d always had, and would always have traded any day over the last twenty-five years for real parents. But she did know all about financial struggle through Lexi, so she nodded.
She introduced everyone around the table. The men shook hands.
“I’m on at Stilettos tonight,” Roméo said to Rubi. “A lot of people have been asking about you. You should come by and say hi.”
As soon as the club’s name was hanging in the air, dread settled in her gut. She lowered to her seat, her gaze searching out Lexi’s, and Rubi found her friend already staring at her with the same alarm in her eyes that danced in Rubi’s gut. But then…this might be a good thing. A way to illustrate to Wes that she wasn’t really what he thought or what he wanted.
“Stilettos?” Rachel said. “Really? Isn’t that a sex club?”
Roméo seemed to find this amusing, his grin growing. He shrugged, as if that didn’t fully describe the club—which it didn’t. “That’s what it’s known for, yeah.”
“Sounds good,” Rubi said. Couldn’t hurt to get rid of some of this pent-up frustration. “I’ll stop by.”
Rachel gasped and reached across the table to cover Rubi’s hand. “Can I come? You can pretend you don’t know me.”