Ink Lust (2 page)

He tilted his head to one side, then the other. “Check it out.”

It took a moment for her legs to move her toward the full-length mirror on the back of his door. The outline was perfectly placed. Leni caught her reflection, noticed the flush in her face. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea for her to be alone with Jamie, even though the situation was purely professional and about to hurt like hell.

For a split second she thought about leaving—just grabbing her things, making her apologies and taking him up on the offer to reschedule for a time when her sister could come with her. She looked at the outline on her side again and was reminded of why she was there. She could handle a few hours of resisting the urge—the want building toward a heated need—to get sexually aggressive with her tattoo artist and ex-boyfriend’s friend if it meant having the same tribute to their mother that Jo lovingly, proudly, wore for the rest of her life.

Odds were pretty damn good she’d forget all about what she wanted to do to him, and him to her, once he started working and the pain took over anyway.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“Let’s do it.”

He puffed up his cheeks and let out a breath that sounded suspiciously as though it was full of the same frustration she was feeling, reached into a cabinet for a pillow covered in a plastic pillowcase and dropped it onto the head of the chair.

“Come on then,” he said, spreading a clean towel over the pillow and giving the smooth black surface of the chair a pat. “Hop on up.”

Leni stretched out on her side with her back to him and covered her chest with her shirt when he returned it to her. It was going to be a long few hours.

Chapter Two

Aaron letting luscious Leni Brewster get away only reinforced Jamie’s opinion that the guy was an absolute moron. While he’d never quite been sure how Aaron managed to land someone like Leni, who seemed to have her head screwed on straight despite her poor judgment when it came to her boyfriend, Jamie knew how he’d fucked it up.

Aaron was a bullshitter of the highest caliber. Jamie had seen him hitting on countless girls both at the shop and the bars since Leonardo, the shop’s full-time body piercer, brought him around and introduced him as his band Grind’s new bass player. Jamie had been stunned to find out he also had a fairly long-term girlfriend, and then floored when he’d met and then got to know her over the past year.

He’d run into Leni out and about a handful of times—at the bar on the weekends, in the clubs were Grind played, at the shop on the rare occasion when Aaron brought her in with him. And if he was going to be honest with himself, he’d even started checking books out from the main branch of the library downtown because she worked at the circulation desk, and he got a kick out of chatting her up when she wasn’t busy.

He liked her. She was intelligent, well educated and highly opinionated about the political goings-on in the world, had a keen-eyed interest in art and was very well read.

And she had that whole sexy librarian thing going on, with her straight blonde hair almost always pulled back into a low ponytail or tidy knot, and her big blue eyes framed by those studious rectangular black-frame glasses. He saw her wearing little vintage-looking sweater sets, either with jeans or tight to-the-knee pencil skirts that invariably gave him a half chub.

And fuck if she didn’t have her nipples pierced under all that.

He stepped off the pedal and set the needle aside, shifted his hips to accommodate the stirring in his cock and decided he’d better finish up for the night.

“How you holding up?” he asked.

She’d gone into that quiet place clients invariably went after being in the chair for a long time, but he wasn’t sure how long she’d been there. Once conversation between them had lagged, he’d lost track of time and his thoughts in the work. He checked the clock on the wall. It was coming up on eleven o’clock, which meant she’d been sitting for nearly five hours.

“Leni?” He rolled closer and leaned across her so he could see her face when she didn’t answer right away. She was pale except for a bright red splotch on her cheek. He considered biting her shoulder—it was right there under his nose, all pale-skinned and looking incredibly soft—but opted for peeling off one of his ink-stained gloves and shaking her instead.

“I’m good,” she said, rolling toward him slightly, her eyes heavy-lidded when she did finally open them.

For a moment he had a very clear picture of what it might be like to have her beneath him, buried balls-deep inside of her, her looking up at him with that exact flushed, foggy-eyed expression as she came down from a screaming orgasm.

“I bet you are.” He smiled and tapped the glasses lying on the pillow near her head. “Can you see without those?”

“I can see close up without them. You’re clear but the bookcase is a little fuzzy.”

“You want to see how far we got before I cover you up?” he asked, reaching for the bottle of soapy water.

“Of course I do.” She put her glasses on and adjusted the shirt that had been slipping while she’d gone into her Zen place.

“We got pretty far.” He wiped her off carefully, then waited a minute to see if she was still going to bleed anywhere before he snapped off the other glove, dropped it into the garbage can and helped her sit up.

It was a big piece that was as long as she was from just under her armpit to her waist and close to eight inches wide. He’d gotten the outline, the shading and quite a bit of the color on her since she’d sat so long. All she’d need the next time she sat was another layer of color and maybe a touch-up after that, depending on how well she healed.

She swayed against him when he helped her to her feet. For a moment she leaned on his chest, the arm still covering her tits and her forehead the only parts of her touching him while she got her legs under her. Jamie wrapped a steadying arm around her naked back, held her free arm with his other hand, and damn if she wasn’t even softer than he’d imagined she would be.

“Sorry.” She looked up and leaned back. “I guess I’m a wimp after all.”

“I’ve worked on body builders that couldn’t sit longer than an hour or two,” he said, still holding her arm as she moved toward the mirror. “You made it five, sweetheart.”

“Wow,” she breathed, looking at her brand-new forever art in the mirror. “I know it looks just like Jo’s, but wow, Jamie.”

“It’s different when it’s you, isn’t it?”

He took in the picture they made in the mirror, her fair and him dark—the stuff romance novels and good porn were made of—and shook his head at himself.

The ink was barely dry on his single-signature mortgage and here he was thinking all kinds of dirty thoughts about Leni. Although it wasn’t as if she was just any random female acquaintance of his. She was Leni—that beautiful enigma who managed to somehow be bookish and scorch-your-fingers hot at the same time.

And it wasn’t as if it hadn’t taken months to get Amber into the bank to sign off on the mortgage.

He taped a temporary dressing over his work and busied himself with cleaning up his table while she tucked her bra in her purse and pulled her shirt back on. Out of the corner of his eye he caught it when she swayed again as she tried to stand.

“Shit.” She sat down hard on the edge of the chair and touched her fingers to her temples. “This didn’t happen to Jo.”

“How long has it been since you ate?” he asked, getting a can of Coke out of the small refrigerator in the corner.

“I don’t know.” She took the soda when he held it in her line of sight, thanked him.

“Jo didn’t get light-headed because she probably listened to me when I told her to eat before she came in. I’ll take you home. Just give me a minute to finish here.”

“I’ll be all right,” she said, sipping.

“You’re not driving like this,” he insisted.

She gave him an arch look over her shoulder but didn’t argue with him.

That was more like it.

“Do you drive all of your fainters home?” she asked, leaning back when he raised the head of the chair for her.

“Only the ones I think I might be able to take advantage of once I get them there.”

He went back to cleaning up without letting her know he was joking. He’d never driven any of his clients home. Leni being, well, Leni, he wasn’t opposed to making an exception for her.

“Most first-timers don’t come in alone, by the way.” He changed the subject. “And those who do get all swoony at least have someone to call.”

“I have someone I can call. Several of them, in fact.”

“You also have me, and I’m on my way out the door in a minute, so sit tight.” He gave her another look. “All right?”

It didn’t take him long to get his room back in order. The shop was quiet except for the receptionist sweeping the empty waiting area when they came out of the hall. She gave them a wave, reminded him of his first appointment on Tuesday morning and locked the door behind them as they stepped out.

Leni was quiet on the short ride to her apartment. She didn’t refuse when he offered to help her upstairs and inside. He made her a piece of toast while she ate a banana, chatted with her about the painting above her couch and scanned the huge number of books she had while she started to come back to herself.

Her place was warm, decorated in earthy greens, browns and golds with splashes of deep purple here and there. A rather heavy Indian influence touched everything from the patterns in her throw pillows to the baskets and candles that seemed to be everywhere, to the Buddha statue on top of one of the bookcases.

“Would you like a beer?” she asked after she’d regained some of her normal color.

No, he didn’t want a beer. He wanted the full tour of her apartment, ending with her bedroom and her naked and writhing below him. Or above, he wasn’t picky. Both and several other positions, all equally appealing, ran through his head in a flash.

“I’ll take a rain check on the beer,” he said, knowing what he really needed to do was get away before he did something one or both of them might regret later. “But if you find me some soap and a couple of towels I’ll help you get that dressing off and that new tattoo washed before I go.”

“Deal.” She disappeared down the hall and came back a minute later with a couple of towels and a half-full bottle of Dr. Bronner’s castile soap.

“Perfect,” he said when she held up the soap for his approval.

“It’s so late,” she observed once he’d gotten her positioned on the kitchen counter, perched half over the sink with a towel tucked into the waist of her jeans so the water could run freely down her side. “And on a Saturday night. I’m sorry if I’m keeping you from something.”

“Some of the guys from the shop were going to the bar tonight, but I hadn’t told them I’d go one way or the other.” He carefully pulled the paper tape from her side.

“Amber won’t care that you’ve been hanging out with me for an hour after working an extra hour on my tattoo?”

“Amber and I broke up a couple of months ago,” he said, dropping a spot of clear liquid soap into his palm and spreading it evenly over her side.

She looked up from watching what he was doing. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

He shrugged. “I didn’t advertise it.”

They were quiet while he gently worked the soap into her skin.

“Do you mind me asking what happened?”

He drew in a breath, puffed out his cheeks as he blew it back out. “It was time.”

“Mm,” she hummed. “Very specific.”

He glanced up at her dry tone and she pursed her lips, hiding a smile. The sudden urge to crush her sweet little mouth with his and the resulting rush of blood to his cock made him dizzy for a moment.

“We’ve been growing apart for a long time.” He went back to what he’d been doing. “She still wants to party all weekend long, and I’m tired of it.” He cupped a handful of water and added it to the soap. “She also doesn’t ever want kids, and I had to stop kidding myself about her changing her mind someday.”

“So you want them?”

“Oh, yeah.” He smiled. “A whole litter of ’em.”

“Really?” She sounded more than a little incredulous.

“Men want kids too, you know.” He looked up, felt an unfamiliar kick to the gut as he looked straight into her cornflower-blue eyes again. “I come from a big family,” he added, using handfuls of water to carefully rinse the soap from her side. “Being the second of seven was a great time. If I got sick of playing with my older brother Diego, I’d go find Steve or Andre and hang out with them for a while. And when my sister Tammy started bringing her friends around to the house in high school…” He blew out a whistling breath. “Instant dating pool, baby.”

She laughed softly and shook her head at him.

“What about you? Any other brothers or sisters besides Jo?”

“No.” She lifted her arm up higher, pulled her raised shirt aside, exposing the bottom curve of her breast. “And there was really no getting sick of her. We had our little spats every once in a while, but nothing major. Not knock-down, drag-out fights over clothes or shoes. No poking at each other in the car, driving our mother crazy.”

“Sounds like a real drag.” He delicately touched her side, checking for any traces of soap he might have left behind, turned off the water when he didn’t find any.

And heard the unmistakable sound of metal on metal as she lifted her shirt higher in an effort to better see her side and her nipple ring clicked against the ring on her finger again. The sound raced straight to his cock. He wanted to see them, touch them, taste them on his tongue like nothing he’d ever wanted before.

“How long have you had those?” he asked, holding a clean towel against her side without moving out of her way so she could get down from the counter.

“Three months.” Her eyes were so big, so innocent when she looked up at him.

“Why did you do it?”

A little frown flickered between her eyebrows, disappeared. “Why not?”

“I mean, did you want them for show? Are you the buttoned-up proper girl on the outside, kinky sex kitten behind closed doors kind of girl?”

He nearly groaned as he realized the untapped potential lying just beneath the curiosity in her expression. She didn’t really seem to know why she’d done something so extreme to such a sensitive part of her body. It was more than likely she’d done it for show, to be rebellious, without understanding the potential now that she had them.