Seduce Me Tonight (4 page)

His hand cracked across my face before I even had time to blink. It wasn’t hard, less sting than shock, but it shut me up. I gasped, or maybe he did, and we sat there blinking at each other. I instinctively raised my hand to cup my cheek, but he pulled it away and put it on his bulging crotch.

‘That’s what you want, isn’t it?

I nodded, swallowing hard. ‘Yes.’

‘Want me to fuck you, little slut?’

‘Oh God, yeah,’ I groaned. I pulled off my raincoat, stifling under the weight of it. Still kneeling in front of him, I stripped my gown over my head. ‘Fuck me.’

‘I’m not done yet,’ he said.

This time, I was prepared for the slap across my cheek. Same spot as before, so I really felt it this time. Felt the heat in my face, the throb of the sting corresponding with the throb between my thighs. I stared at him, naked except for my soaking wet panties, thinking I didn’t even know who he was. Thinking I loved him, wanted him, needed him. Thinking, if he stopped now I would die.

He grabbed me by my hair and pulled me down to the floor with him. ‘Little bitch,’ he growled, dragging me across his lap by my hair and smacking my ass hard with his other hand. ‘You fucking little bitch, driving me crazy all this time.’

I whimpered, my ass burning with every hard slap. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know how to tell you!’

He flipped me over on my back and palmed my pussy through my panties. ‘Your pussy is so fucking wet. You love this.’

‘Yes,’ I gasped. ‘I do.’

‘Good,’ he said, roughly stripping me of my panties with one hand while he got his pants undone and his cock out with the other. ‘So do I.’

He was in me with one quick thrust. I gasped at the onslaught, the sudden sensation of fullness. He sat up, taking me with him, so that he was on his knees and I was wrapped around him as he buried himself inside me. He caught my hair in one hand and pulled it back until my neck arched painfully. Then he slapped me again – not my face this time, my breasts. First one, then the other. I gasped at the sensation, my nipples tingling in pain and pleasure, my clit throbbing, his cock hitting just the right spot.

I came, moaning, crying, as he slapped my face, then my breasts, then pinched my nipples hard, once, twice, all the while whispering filthy, nasty things to me. Telling me what a whore I was, what a fucking slut, what a nasty, dirty girl. I eagerly agreed to all of it as I came on his cock. I even gave him a few more words to use, which only made him fuck me harder.

As my orgasm ebbed, he lowered me back to the floor gently – gently, after all he’d said and done to me – and covered my body with his. He fucked me with hard, steady thrusts to get him where he needed to go, to bring him to where I already was. His breath coming in fast pants, his cock swelling inside me, his balls slapping my ass. Brian. Solid, dependable Brian. My boyfriend, my love. I wrapped my arms and legs around him, holding him to me, clenching my pussy around him, surrounding him with my passion.

‘Fuck your slut, baby.’ I whispered the words like a love poem again and again. ‘Fuck your little whore. Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me. Fill me with your come.’

He came with a bestial moan. Body tense as he arched up over me, he thrust into me one last time before putting his full weight on me, our hot, damp bodies pressed together in a way that was so familiar, after an experience unlike any we had ever shared.

He whispered something in my ear, so soft I couldn’t hear him.

‘What, sweetheart?’

‘I said, I love you,’ he whispered again. ‘I love you, I’m in love with you, I’ve never loved anyone more than I love you. Whatever this is, however fucked up we are, I love you. You need to know that. You need to believe it.’

I cradled his head against my shoulder, shifting my hips so that I could bear his weight for as long as he needed to lie there. ‘I do, Brian. I know it. I really do. And I don’t think we’re fucked up.’

‘No?’

I pulled his head down and kissed him hard. ‘No. We were made for each other. I have never loved you more than I do right now.’

And as I said the words, I realised how true it was. It didn’t matter if everyone else thought we were fucked up. I didn’t believe that any more and I would make sure he didn’t believe it either. He was mine, I was his and whatever ‘this’ was, it was our story and ours alone.

And that was all that mattered.

Leo started coming in my bar a couple times a week after he got out of the police academy. He was a baby-faced rookie with silver-rimmed glasses and a shiny utility belt not even broken in yet. He looked like a kid playing dress-up in his daddy’s uniform. He’d sit at the end of the bar and order a club soda. Thirty minutes later, he’d give me a nod, throw down a five and be gone.

I know all the cops from the Third Precinct. They come in during their shifts to check on me and shoot the breeze while pretending not to notice the array of shifty characters sharing the bar with them. They come in after work dressed in their civilian clothes so they can throw back a few shots before heading home to their wives or girlfriends or Playstations. They’re good guys, most of them. They treat me with respect and keep an eye on the place when I’m not around.

I’m no badge bunny, but I’ve taken a few of them home. Usually the single ones who’ve had a rough shift and would rather sit on a bar stool all night than go home to an empty apartment. I’ve done my part as marriage counsellor and sex therapist, too. Being a cop is tough on a relationship and wreaks havoc on the sex drive. Sometimes a man just needs a good no-strings fuck to remind him that he’s alive, that there’s something worth living
for
. Call it my pro bono contribution to society. Not that any of the wives or girlfriends would thank me.

I never thought of Leo like that. He just looked too damned
young
for me to go dipping my fingers in that particular pie. He came in one night with a look I’ve seen on a hundred cops’ faces before. That bleak, empty-eyed stare of a man who has seen something he wishes he hadn’t. It’s a hazard of the job and it fades with time, but a little bit of their soul gets replaced by a hard edge of cynicism in the process.

He claimed his usual seat at the bar and gave me a wobbly nod of acknowledgement. I sidled up in front of him, wiping down the already clean mahogany bar.

‘Bad night?’

He nodded, studying his hands as if they contained the secrets of the universe.

‘What was it? Homicide?’

He jerked his head up. ‘How’d you know?’

I shrugged, almost embarrassed by my own nonchalance. Everything I knew about police work was second-hand information. I’d feel differently if I’d been the one standing over the body. ‘Seen that expression before. First one, huh?’

‘Yeah. Never seen a … dead person … before.’

‘That sucks,’ I said, filling a beer glass with seltzer. ‘What’s your name, kid?’

‘Williams,’ he said. ‘And I’m no kid.’

‘Yeah, I know. What’s your first name?’

‘Leo, ma’am.’

‘Well, Leo, I’m no ma’am. My name is Kayla,’ I told him. ‘This is my bar.’

‘Yeah, I know. The guys told me.’

I wondered what else the guys had told him. Cops talk. They’re more gossipy than a bunch of housewives drinking the kitchen sherry. I knew more about their lives than their own families did.

I fished a couple of maraschino cherries out of the container under the bar and dropped them into his glass, sending little tendrils of syrup spiralling down into the carbonated seltzer. I pushed the glass in front of him. ‘There you go.’

He held the glass up to the light, studying it. ‘What’s with the cherries?’

‘For your first homicide. You broke your cherry, kiddo.’

He rewarded me with the first smile I’d ever seen on his face, which served to reinforce how young he looked. ‘Thanks. You just made my night.’

I felt something spread through my belly the way the cherry syrup spread through his glass. ‘Any time,’ I said, putting more meaning into the words than I intended.

I left him alone to drink his cherry-flavoured soda, but there wasn’t quite so much tension in his shoulders as there had been when he walked in. That made me feel good. Bartending is about more than serving up drinks – it’s about understanding people and what they need. Or maybe I’m just trying to justify having the hots for a young cop.

After that, we were on a first-name basis. Some nights, he’d walk in with that familiar dejected expression and say, ‘It’s cherry time, Kayla.’ Then, if the bar was slow, he’d tell me what he’d been through that night. Sometimes he’d wait for me if I was busy and that gave me a little thrill, even though a part of me believed he only saw me as his bartending therapist.

I was there when Leo made his first suicide call and I listened without comment as he described the knife wounds on the woman’s wrist and how she looked almost happy in death. He told me about his love of animals and the first time he had to put a bullet in the head of an injured deer hit by a car. I dared to pat his hand when he told me about his first experience with a car full of drunk teenagers, half of them dead on the scene after a collision with a tree. That one brought tears to my eyes, thinking about my own two sons.

They weren’t all traumatic events; some were good career firsts. His first search warrant, his first drug arrest, the first court case he won. Other firsts were just plain embarrassing and he’d relate them in hushed tones, looking over his shoulder to make sure none of the other guys overheard his shame. Some things he could laugh at, like the first time he caught a couple going at it in the backseat of a car. That one made him blush and his blushing turned me on.

‘They didn’t even care that they were sitting there naked,’ he said, naïve incredulity in his voice.

‘Lust makes people do crazy things.’ I thought back to some of my antics, not all of them in the distant past. ‘Lust is the devil.’

He shrugged, as if he didn’t have a clue. ‘I guess.’

We had an easy camaraderie that wasn’t quite like what I had with the other guys in the precinct. There was no swagger to Leo, no macho bullshit to peel away like layers of an onion. At night, after I locked up the bar and headed home alone, I thought about Leo in ways that would surely make him blush. Naked, sweaty, hard. Part of my heightened lust was the fact that I wasn’t taking anyone home any more. Not for a lack of trying on their part – I just wasn’t interested. I tried not to dwell on the reason I wasn’t interested.

Then one night Leo came in looking like a man who’d lost his best friend. The lines etched into his exhausted, stricken face aged him by ten years. The bar was hopping more than usual that night, so it took me a good five minutes to make my way down to him.

‘Hey, what happened?’

‘Dead kid. Five years old,’ he said, as if giving a report. ‘Wandered off and drowned in the lake.’

‘Fuck. I’m sorry.’

He bent his head. I thought he was crying, but then I saw that he cradled something on his lap. ‘It was his,’ he said, holding up a bedraggled orange and white kitten in his big hands. ‘Parents said he was in the yard playing with the cat, last they saw. Thought the father was going to strangle it, so I took it.’

His words were punctuated by rough strokes of the cat’s fur. That little furball was all that was holding him together but a kitten wasn’t company enough to fight off his demons once the lights went out.

‘Let me get Quentin to close up shop for me and I’ll get you home.’

‘Oh, I’m fine,’ he said, a little too loudly.

I ignored him and walked to the other end of the bar. I snagged Quentin as he went by on his way to serve a round of beer to a bunch of rough-looking bikers. ‘Can you close for me? I’ve got something I need to do.’

Quentin looked from me to Leo. He’s been with me for seven years, as rough around the edges as some of our customers, but he’s a decent bartender and had become a good friend. ‘Got yourself another rescue?’

‘Something like that.’

He winked, but there was no humour in his knowing expression. ‘Just watch yourself, girl. That one’s liable to break your heart.’

I laughed. I knew about lust – lust could twist me six ways to Sunday. But love was for other people, and so was heartbreak. I hadn’t had enough time to fall in love before I’d fallen pregnant and love wasn’t a privilege I’d had as a young wife or a single mother. I hadn’t been heartbroken when my abusive ex-husband took off with one of my barmaids ten years ago and left me to finish raising two rambunctious boys. Love sure as hell wasn’t a luxury I could afford now. The idea of this sweet young kid breaking through my protective barrier, much less breaking my heart, was ludicrous.

I shook my head and made my way back to Leo, who was trying to keep a hold on the mewling kitten. ‘C’mon, rookie. Let’s get you home.’

‘I haven’t had my cherry soda yet.’

I knew he was in shock, so I humoured him. ‘I’ll make you one at home.’

I guess that’s when it dawned on him that I wasn’t taking him to his house. ‘Oh,’ he said, long and slow, drawing it out like a deep, relieved sigh. ‘OK.’

Out in the parking lot, I sized him up. ‘Are you OK to drive?’

He nodded.

I wasn’t convinced, but I let it go because I only live a couple miles from the bar. ‘Good. Just follow me.’

My house is on a quiet dead-end road. It’s not much, just a little two-bedroom bungalow. The place had seemed cramped with two six-foot teenagers eating me out of house and home, but now with them gone – Ty off to the Army and Nate off to college – it felt huge and lonely.

I waited to get out of my car until Leo’s truck pulled in on the gravel driveway behind me and he shut off his engine. He met me at the front door, the kitten tucked in the crook of his arm.

‘Hey,’ he said, as if we hadn’t just seen each other at the bar.

He was nervous, I realised. That didn’t surprise me, really. The short drive had given him time to think and nervousness was cutting through the shock. What surprised me was that I was nervous, too.

‘Come on in.’

I let us into the darkened house and turned on the lamp by the window, filling the room with a peaceful amber glow. I could feel Leo close behind me, his grief so large it felt like a third person in the room with us. The kitten let out a wail and that seemed to break the nervous tension between us.