Texas Kissing (5 page)

I pushed my chair back and stood up. Immediately, Bull’s hand slapped down on top of mine, covering my much smaller one completely. He stood up, too. When I looked up, he was staring into my eyes. Daring me to stay.

Suddenly, a girl was beside us. She was all movement and energy:
look at me!
Her long, ash-blonde hair never seemed to stay still. Just as it settled, she’d toss her head or twist and it would start swishing and gleaming all over again. She kept shifting her weight from foot to foot, too, as if she couldn’t bear to be still, and that made her firm little breasts bounce under her strappy top, the tops of them peeking out above the sequins like two perfectly-tanned oranges. “Just leaving?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

“No,” said Bull.

The girl stared at me, then hooked a slender arm around Bull’s neck. She grabbed his cowboy hat and put it on her own head. “I was just wondering,” she told me in a voice that was syrup laced with arsenic, “because I was planning on riding the Bull.”

I just stared at her. I’d known they fawned over him...but
really?

She gave a little snort of laughter at my expression and looked over my shoulder. I turned to see the mechanical bull.
Oh.
But when I turned back, the gleam in her eye told me that both meanings were very much intended.

Well, fine. This was a good thing. I was about to leave anyway. Right?

“Bull was going to give me a few tips,” she drawled, snaking her hand across his chest and sliding it under his pec. “Weren’t you?”

Bull was still staring at me, ignoring her. But the feel of those expert, delicate hands caressing his chest was definitely having an effect. I saw him shift slightly.
His cock is probably getting hard.
And then suddenly I was thinking of his cock again.

What if that bulge wasn’t padded?

The girl looked at me, arching a perfect eyebrow as if to say, “Well?”

She’s welcome to him. She can ride that thing and whoop and giggle and then he can rut her like an animal and they’ll both love it.
That’s what my brain was thinking. But my stomach had tightened right up as if—

As if I didn’t want some other girl to have him.

I shook my head as if to clear it.
That’s nuts.
I opened my mouth to speak—

And found myself looking into Bull’s clear blue eyes again. He was willing me,
willing me
to tell her
no.

But I knew the rules. No boyfriends. No connections. No one my uncle could use to hurt me.

“The Bull’s all yours,” I told her.

She grinned a toothy smile of victory and grabbed Bull by the hand, dragging him off to the mechanical bull.
There.
I’d totally solved that problem.

She climbed up onto the bull. Like me, she was wearing jeans, but in her case the denim was so tight it looked as though someone had spray-painted her legs blue and then glued on a couple of rivets. Her friends—the crowd of girls I’d run into before—came over to watch, crowding me out.

The girl said “Five,” to a gum-chewing cowboy behind a control panel and the thing started up—slowly, at first. As I’d predicted, there was whooping. And twisting. And arching her back and—goddamnit, she was just showing off for him, thrusting out her boobs. Then she took off the hat and waved it in the air just to demonstrate that she only needed one hand to hang on.

Bull stood off to one side. “Follow it with your hips,” he told her. “You gotta know where it’s going to go next.” He glanced over at me. “Don’t let it get away from you.”

The girl was really putting on a show, lifting her ass off the saddle and grinding it in mid air. Sometimes, she’d glance at me. Sometimes, she’d check that Bull was still watching her and, if he’d looked towards me, she’d give an extra-loud whoop.

I leaned against the bar. I didn’t want to give the girls the satisfaction of walking out, so I had to wait until the ride was over. I started fooling with the stuff on the bar—napkins, toothpicks, coasters—to make it look as if I was distracted and didn’t care at all. I wanted everyone to be completely clear that the girl with the ash-blonde hair could take Bull by the hand and lead him out to the parking lot or to a motel or wherever the hell they wanted and ride
him
just like she was riding that bull, for all I cared.

I mean, he was just a cocky, arrogant idiot and I’d only had a drink with him because he saved my life, so why would it bother me anyway? Right? Right.

The bull came to a stop and the girl swung her leg over the beast and slid down, letting the momentum carry her right into Bull. She threw her arms out and opened her legs so that he had no choice but to catch her. Then she wrapped her limbs around him, grinding her groin against him. As he turned around, she gave me a victorious grin over his shoulder.

And suddenly, I was walking towards the bull.

Bull

Kirsten—or Kristen, or was it Krystal? It definitely started with a K—squirmed her pussy against me. But my gaze was fixed on Lily as she strode towards the bull.
What is she...she’s not going to—

She pushed through the crowd and stepped right up to the bull. At the last minute, she seemed to realize she had a napkin in her hand and shoved it into her pocket. “I’ll give it a try,” she said, looking me right in the eye.

I swallowed. My mouth had suddenly gone dry. “You sure?” I didn’t want to see her get hurt.

She didn’t answer, just jumped up onto the bull. Or tried to. It’s higher than it looks and the soft, squishy safety mats on the floor don’t help. A few of the girls tittered as she tried to hook her leg over. I turned and glared at them and they went instantly silent.

Lily got herself in position and sat up in the saddle. Her face had gone pale—it probably looked a long way down, now she was up there.

“What number do you want?” asked Pete, whose job it was to run the thing.

I saw Lily look at the girl in my arms. I’d completely forgotten I was still holding her. I opened my arms and Kirsten or Kristen or whoever the hell she was slithered down and stepped back, glowering. “Five,” said Lily.

I stepped forward, gently nudging Kirsten out of the way. “Three,” I corrected.

Kirsten glanced at me. “Yeah, that’d be better for a beginner.” She smirked. “I’ve had a lot of practice.”

Lily looked her right in the eye. “I don’t doubt it.”

I saw Kirsten’s smile collapse.
Damn,
this girl had a mouth on her.

“Five,” said Lily again, firmly.
Aw, hell.
She was stubborn as a mule, too. Pete shrugged and hit the button and the bull started to move.

Lily

How hard can it be?
All I had to do was hang on and—

The bull started to dip and sway under me. I discovered there was a surprising lack of things to hang onto. Everything was smooth and slippery. It was almost as if someone had designed it to throw people off.
What kind of fun is that?!

The bull turned, still moving as slowly as a kids’ ride, and I saw the crowd of girls smirking at me. Waiting for me to fall.
What the hell am I doing up here, again?
The bull suddenly lurched to the other side and I slid.
Whoah shit.

When the girl with the ash-blonde hair had ridden it, she’d been all light and airy and sitting up in the saddle, waving Bull’s hat. I was...not like that. I was glued in place, clinging on with both hands to whatever I could find. And, as it started to move faster, things started to sway beneath my blouse. I’d come dressed for a drink, not an aerobics session. It was okay when you were a slim, willowy thing, but when
I
started being thrown around—I could feel my boobs beginning to bounce and wished I’d buttoned up my blouse a little higher. I heard a round of low chuckles rise from the girls and felt my face go red.

But when I found Bull in the crowd, he was looking at me in a very different way. His eyes were locked on me—not just on my face but drinking in my entire body, watching as I lurched and flailed and tried to hang on. He wasn’t laughing at me. His gaze was burning into me, devouring every inch of me in way that made my groin tighten.

The bull sped up again—
that’s got to be the top speed, please let that be the top speed—
and I tilted way over to one side, my jeans sliding on the smooth surface—

Suddenly, Bull was beside me. “Use your legs,” I heard him say. “Press your thighs around it. Just like riding a horse.”

I snapped my head around to stare at him, unsure if it was another one of his lines. But he just nodded at me.

“I never rode a horse,” I muttered.

He blinked at me disbelievingly.

I gripped the bull with my thighs. That made everything feel...different. I didn’t slip around so much but, because I was now locked in place, every jerk and turn of the beast was transferred right into my body, whipping me around.

“You gotta ride it,” Bull told me. “Shift your weight around.”

“
She’s got plenty of that,”
muttered a red-haired girl to her friends.

Bull spun to face them “Why don’t you
SHUT THE FUCK UP,
Becky?”

Becky went pale, her mouth still open. The giggles died on her friends’ lips.

I’d gone even redder than before, humiliation threatening to overwhelm me. There’d been girls like that in New York, too. One of the few things I
didn’t
miss. But in New York, no one had ever stuck up for me.

I started to shift my weight, following the bull as it moved. My ass started to lift out of the saddle just a little, in a clumsy parody of the girl who’d gone before me. I knew I probably looked ridiculous, with my oversize ass and my boobs bouncing around, but I was starting to get it—

And then, quite suddenly, the bull spun to the side and I was tipping sideways. I just had time to register my legs losing their grip and then I was falling headfirst towards the ground.