Trading Down (Winner Takes All, #1) (2 page)

He seemed to approve. “And what would that be? This ‘different’?”

“I don’t know. What do you think? What do you see me doing?” It was said in all innocence, but...

...the eyebrow. Raised. The twinkle in the eye; the flash of white teeth. The tease in his look.

“Yeah yeah,” she said. “In your dreams, buddy. In your dreams.”

Maybe that was it: the moment when that connection thing between two strangers became something more, or at least something with the possibility of more.

In your dreams
.

Y
ou can tell a lot about a man from the way he treats the people beneath him.

Cassie had worked in bars, restaurants and hotels the length of the Eastern Seaboard. She was used to seeing things from the other side, seeing how she was treated, or mistreated, or simply ignored.

This guy, this stranger who said his name was Denny and that there was nothing more of interest about him... sure: nothing of interest about him in his tux and his roll of hundred dollar bills. Anyway: this guy, he’d treated her like an equal, or at least as if she was someone who could hold his interest for more than the time it took to order another drink. He’d flirted and joked, and seemed to enjoy himself. She was used to that, of course. She was young and slim and she knew she had the kind of looks that pressed buttons for a certain kind of man. A bit of the chat from a lonely customer was nothing new. Hell, she got that every night from Finn and Old Bub.

But his true colors showed when the door flew open again and they had an unseasonal rush of customers – two families down from Bangor. After he’d got over that initial, weird as Hell moment of rabbit in the headlamps fright, he whirled into action, moving two long tables so they could all sit together, helping them with their chairs and their coats and joking about the wild night out there, just as if he’d worked here the last two seasons too.

§

That first reaction, though...

As the door was pulled open a blast of cold, wet air rushed in, and the howl of the gale cut through any attempt at conversation. Everyone turned to look at the dark figure standing in the doorway, wrestling with the door.

Denny stopped mid-sentence and twisted in his seat at the bar. His hand reached instinctively inside his tux, even though Cassie knew he wasn’t carrying. She’d seen him undressing: he was packing nothing more deadly than a tasty six-pack.

As Denny’s eyes skipped around the room, looking for alternative exits, the newcomer turned and shouted into the rain and then a bunch of laughing, giggling people pushed in past him and stood shaking themselves down underneath the moose head Lou insisted on keeping on the wall. It looked like three – no four, there was a baby tucked away inside one woman’s coat – generations of a family, determined to get out and make the most of being together, despite the near-hurricane blowing outside.

Then Denny leaned across the bar to Cassie and said, “Looks like you could use some help.” With that, he downed the rest of his bourbon and stood, then strode over to help the first guy wrestle the door shut.

It was over in an instant, that first reaction, the flash of fear... the indecision between fight or flight. But that reaction had definitely been there, and Cassie was reminded again of her initial impression that this enigmatic stranger looked like trouble.

§

“Well, I’m dressed like a waiter, so I guess...”

He’d taken drinks orders as the newcomers took their seats, laughing and joking with them like an old hand, and then, while Cassie got the drinks he went back to take orders for food. 

All the time this was happening, Lou stood in the kitchen doorway with his arms folded across his barrel chest, and a bemused look on his face.

“Hey, Lou,” said Denny, waving an order book in his direction, “you’d better get that griddle going. That’s a whole lot of steak.”

Briefly, it was as if Denny had known him for years, then Lou snatched the order, turned on his heel and mouthed to Cassie:
Who the fuck...?

§

“Well
that
was fun.” Denny raised a fresh glass of bourbon and chinked it with Cassie’s.

That bow tie hung loose around his neck again, his shirt opened two buttons down, his tux draped over a nearby bar stool.

“Looked like it’s not the first time you’ve done that.”

He shrugged. “Long time ago,” he said. “Student days. It’s how I paid my way.”

“Through...?”

“MIT, then I did my MBA at Harvard Business School. Looks good on the résumé.”

“And you stayed on in the Boston area after that?” Boston must be a good three hours’ drive from here; longer on a night like this.

He nodded.

“So what brings you here, walking the highway in a tux and Italian patent leather shoes in the ass-end of nowhere?”

“What was it you said earlier? ‘Bad luck and worse choices’? Something like that.”

He fixed her with those steely blue-gray eyes.

Sometimes you just want a man to reach across the bar, take your face in his hands, and kiss you like you’ve never been kissed before. Even if he’s a complete stranger. Even if he’s a complete stranger who looks and smells like trouble, and who every instinct tells you to fend off with anything that might come to hand.

Cassie pulled herself up. Denny looked like the kind of man who could do that to a girl, but not tonight.

Tonight, every so often when his guard briefly dropped, he was the guy who had flinched at the opening of a door, whose first reaction was to reach for a gun that wasn’t there and whose second reaction was to cast around for possible escape routes.

“What are you running from, Denny?”

He dropped his look, eyes fixed on his glass, the hands wrapped tight around it.

They were alone in the bar now, the doors locked up when Finn had finally played ‘Big Shot’ for the last time and then, muttering to himself, had headed out into the night. Lou had long since closed down the kitchen and headed down to the trailer he called home.

“What does anybody run from?” he said. “The past. Memories. Mistakes. A couple of guys with guns and a particularly limited range of small talk. You know how it is.”

Trouble
.

It was as if she was a magnet, drawing it to her wherever she went.

“You serious about that last one?”

He shrugged.

“So there was a girl? That’s what you said before.”

“Sure there was a girl. A manipulative, scheming bitch.” Then: “It was nothing. Just some fun that one of us took too seriously. She never made any secret of being a manipulative bitch, after all.”

His glass was empty, but not for long.

Cassie topped her own up, too, and took a long slug. “Was there nothing good about her?”

There were always at least two sides to a story. Somewhere back in another life there was probably a guy in a bar saying the same kinds of things about her.

“She was beautiful, she was fun, she had an IQ of 160 and she was screwing my best friend. I’ll give you a hint: one of those was a lie.”

“So that’s what made you run?” She regretted her words instantly: such a clumsy choice of phrase.

His look hardened.  “No,” he said steadily, “if you really must know, it was that that made me drink, and it was the drink that turned me to gambling, and in the meantime my best buddy turned against me and as he just happened to be my business partner too he managed to cheat me out of everything I had... And so here I am: alls I own is what’s on my back and in my back pocket, and I’ll tell you something, that roll in my back pocket isn’t rightly mine either.”

“So when you say there’s two hoods on your tail it’s true?”

A shrug, again. “Might be one, maybe three, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you one more thing before I head out onto that highway again and see where I end up: you don’t want anything to do with me. I’m trouble. Deep trouble with a capital D. So right now, despite you looking at me with beautiful eyes I could just lose myself in, despite the way you lean towards me when I talk, the way you moisten those god-damned kissable lips, despite how kind you’ve been to me... Despite all that, I’m going to get up from my seat and say ‘Thank you very much, ma’am, for your hospitality’ and I’m going to walk out that door and out of your life.”

Sometimes you just want a man to reach across the bar, take your face in his hands, and kiss you like you’ve never been kissed before. Even if he’s a complete stranger. Even if he looks and smells like trouble.

But sometimes you have to do it yourself.

She put a hand to his jaw, felt the rough rasp of his stubble, and then she leaned in, pausing only when their lips were almost touching.

Trouble
.

His lips met hers, tenderly, delicately at first, and then they were pressing, parting, tongues probing, touching.

Now he took her. Standing so that his bar stool tumbled away behind him, he leaned over the bar and coiled an arm around her shoulders, holding her, turning her so that she looked up into those steel eyes. His other hand found her side, coming to rest on her ribs, and then running down, following the narrowing of her waist, the swell of her hip.

She pulled away, holding him with only her eyes.

She came around the bar, came to stand before him, and put a hand to his chest, the hardness of his ribs.

That was when he put a hand at the back of her head, fingers buried in her long blonde hair, holding her, guiding her as he turned her head and kissed up the line of her jaw. Light kisses, butterfly touches. His tongue flicked at the lobe of her ear, teasing at where an ear-ring was attached. Then he took the ring in his lips and tugged gently. That pulling sensation, the touch of his lips and tongue on her ear... it was so intense!

He turned her head again and kissed her deep, a kiss of possession, and he drew her body against his, a hand on the small of her back pulling her tight against him.

That moment, when two bodies that have never touched press together for the first time, the fitting of new geometries, the press of a hip, breasts squashing up against ribs, thighs against thighs... the slight movements, the pressing and shifting... the growing hardness against her midriff.

That moment.

That.

H
e lifted her. So easy, as if she were no more than a feather.

Placing her on a table, he pushed so that she was leaning back, and then his hands went to her little black skirt, finding the hook, the zipper, tugging it free.

When her skirt was discarded somewhere on the floor, Denny’s hand came back up, the backs of his knuckles pressing against the lace of her thong. With a steady roll of the wrist, he pressed against her softness, knuckles dancing across her, and there was an abrupt wet heat. She threw her head back and groaned, then glanced around, panicked, uncertain.

“Not here,” she said, but he didn’t hear or chose to ignore as he lowered his face to her, and started to kiss her through that black lace, his lips firm, pressing and squeezing. She leaned back, arching her spine, her head full of
This is wrong... another mistake... you don’t know this guy but one of the few things you do know is that he’s trouble
and the rest of her filled with
I don’t care
.

She eased her legs farther apart, then hooked them over his shoulders as he sat before her, his face buried.

Pressing hard against her, he started to roll his head from side to side, grinding against her with his face, working her clit with his upper lip and teeth through the lace, making those intense sensations pull together and start to transform into something else, a tightness, an almost electric stabbing pleasure.

Finally pulling her thong aside, he drove his tongue inside her, thrusting repeatedly, his lips resting on the hood of skin that covered her clit, rolling and pressing as his tongue worked its way deep inside her.

“Oh God!”

She had never been a screamer; she wasn’t a one to emit any more than a long groan at her peak before now.

“Oh
God
, yes!”

His tongue shifted so that it was gliding around and across her clit while his fingers drove deep into her, picking up the rhythm he had established with his tongue.

“Oh...”

Steady, deep thrusts, while that tongue swirled and glided and then started a rapid, fluttering, flicking that took her right to the edge and over, a sudden clenching of every muscle in her belly, in her pussy, in her thighs, an explosion of sensation, as she clamped her legs around his head, keeping him there, holding him there, as each wave of orgasm became less than the one before and, finally, she was spent.

§

“My place isn’t far,” said Cassie. “And my limo’s waiting outside.”

She had a little Nissan, ancient and falling apart, held together with chewing gum and hope. Maybe it wasn’t quite a limo, but it had lasted her two years, with a little help from Lou and Old Bub.

But on a night like this...

In the half a minute it took them to lock up, run across the parking lot to where she’d parked, and tumble into the car, they were both soaked through.

They sat there for a moment, gathering themselves, then Cassie swept her sodden hair away from her face and blinked away the water in her eyes. She turned to Denny and they started to laugh, and then they were in each other’s arms again as the wind heaved and buffeted the little car, as if at any moment they might take off.

His kiss tasted of whiskey and her, now. Such a horny, intimate flavor. And her free hand slid down his torso to that hard mountain in his lap, finding its shape, its size, its hardness.

“Your place?” he said, resting a hand on hers, and she realized he had changed again. This was the Denny who flinched at the opening of a door, and who cast his look around for escape routes. Out here in the open, he had become a hunted animal once more.

She fired the ignition and it caught third time, which was miracle enough on a night like this. Even with the wipers going full speed, it was hard to see far ahead, as she used the stick-shift to ease through the gears and head out onto the highway.