Chapter 5
CARMINE
Tomorrow’s booked tight.” Clarissa started wearing jeans last week instead of skirts, ones that sit low on her hips and make her ass look like a meal I want to eat.
My cock stirs against my thigh as I listen to Clarissa—my employee—talk about tomorrow’s schedule.
“Liam’s got three back-to-back starting at ten, and your two o’clock pushed to two-thirty so I moved your three to three-fifteen to give you a buffer. ”
“Good.”
“Clancy’s eleven canceled.” She leans past me to set the spray bottle on my counter.
Her hair swings past my face, and I get a lungful of her—cocoa butter, shampoo, a sweetness that has no business being in a tattoo shop.
My hand tightens on the tattoo gun I’ve finished cleaning, because what I want to do is drop it and pull her into my lap.
“I put a walk-in hold on the slot in case we get one.”
“Good.” Two goods in a row. I know I sound like a monosyllabic fool, but there ain’t nothing I can do about it.
Last week, the speaker at Liam’s station died, and now Clarissa is plugging in the one that was delivered today, and I’m about to lose all self-control.
She bends to plug in the cord, and her shirt rides up at the back—an inch of skin, the curve of her waist, sexy fucking dimples just above the waistband.
My cock is hard as steel as I watch her.
Fuck. I shouldn’t want her, but… How am I supposed to ignore this curvy goddess?
I’ve had women in this shop—artists, clients, women who came in wearing next to nothing and leaned over my station on purpose. None of them made me feel even ten percent of what Clarissa does.
She straightens up and pushes her hair back off her face with her wrist. “You’re quiet tonight.”
“I’m always quiet.”
“Quieter than usual, then.” She tilts her head and studies my face. If she could hear my thoughts, she’d run. Or she’d climb into my lap. I don’t know which scares me more, but I’m getting to the point where I need to know, or I’m going to explode.
I set the gun in the case and watch as Clarissa drifts to the flash on the wall behind Liam’s station—the koi, the chrysanthemum. It’s not the first time I’ve watched her study the flash.
“Maybe I should get a tattoo.” She says it to the wall. Her fingers hover over the koi’s tail, not touching the paper.
Every alarm in my head goes off at once. Her skin. My hands. Hours in my chair. I know without a shadow of a doubt that touching her and not fucking her is unfuckinglikely.
“No.”
It comes out harder than I mean it to. She turns.
“No?” she asks, turning to me with a surprised look on her face. “You said my skin would take it well.”
I put my tattoo gun away. “A tattoo is permanent, Clarissa. It’s not jewelry you take off.
It’s a needle dragging ink into your skin, and it’s there until you’re in the ground.
Once it’s on you, it’s on you—and you will look at it every day and remember who put it there and how it felt. Do you understand that?”
“I know what a tattoo is, Carmine,” she laughs and rolls her eyes. “I work in a tattoo shop.”
“You work the front desk.” I stand up. Put the counter between us because the distance I had wasn’t working.
“Do you know what it means to have someone’s hands on your skin for three hours—holding you taut, dragging a line through you?
That’s intimate. Your body belongs to the person holding the machine for as long as the session lasts. ”
I shouldn’t have said hands on your skin.
My brain is already showing me what it would look like—her in my chair, shirt pulled up, my gloved hands on the bare curve of her ribs, her stomach tightening every time I wipe the line, her eyes on my face the whole time.
I grip the edge of the counter, and the metal bites into my palm.
“I’ve been looking at portfolios for three weeks. I know what I want.”
“Liam’s good with first-timers.”
“I don’t want Liam.” She folds her arms across her lush tits, and my cock threatens to rip through my jeans. Does she realize how fucking sexy she is? Is she knowingly being provocative? “I want you to do it.”
Me. She wants me to mark her virgin skin—the skin I’ve been thinking about since the day she blurted out that she was a virgin, and not just the ink kind. Feeling her pulse jump when she said that nearly made me come in my pants.
I want to be the first to mark her, and I want to be the first to touch her—to spread her out and be there while she discovers what she likes and what makes her scream in pleasure—and my cock aches in my jeans. If I put a needle on this woman, I will not survive it unless she’s my woman.
“I want to at least talk about it,” she says, not backing down.
The neon in the front window throws red across the floor between us. The little gold cross at her throat catches the light from my station lamp, and I am going to regret this.
“Fine.” I pull my stool back from the counter. Nod at my chair. “Get in the chair.”
She smiles and hops into my chair. She leans back, looking up at me, her arms on the rests.
I pull the stool over and sit down, trying to convince myself and my throbbing cock that she’s just like any other client.
She is not just any client. Fuck. What the hell am I thinking?
“What do you want?”
She pulls her bottom lip between her teeth and then lets it go. “Something botanical. The wildflower Ford did on that girl’s wrist? Something like that.” She draws one knee up, shoe braced against the footrest. “Something that grows where it’s not supposed to.”
I look at her. I know she’s flirting with me, but does she really realize what she’s doing? “I can work with that.”
“Where do you think I should have it?” She looks up at me, her blue eyes wide and open.
“That’s your call. Not mine,” I say gruffly, taking a step back. This is about to get dangerous if she doesn’t let up. There’s only so much teasing I can take before my restraint snaps.
“But you have opinions.” She smiles. “So. Where would you put it?”
She doesn’t wait. She twists in the chair, reaches behind her, and pulls the back of her blouse up. Bare skin. The hollow dip of her lower back, the two dimples above her jeans. Unmarked. Skin my fingers ache to touch and my mouth longs to lick.
“Maybe here?”
I put my thumb on the dimple above her right hip. Her spine arches into my hand a fraction, but it’s enough to make me see stars behind my eyes.
“No.” The heat of her skin against my thumb, the shiver running under the surface. “You’re not a drunk sorority girl. I won’t give you a tramp stamp.” I pull my hand back. She turns around, letting the shirt drop. Her cheeks have gone pink.
She tips her chin down and looks at me from underneath it. “What about here?” She pulls the neckline of her blouse to the left—past the chain of the cross, past the hollow of her throat, until the skin below her collarbone is bare and the top curve of her breast starts where the fabric stops.
I can see the top of her breast, and I want my mouth on it.
I lean forward. Put two fingers on the flat below the bone.
Her pulse flutters rapidly under my fingertips, fast and hard, and matching the racing of my heart.
“Collarbone’s good placement. Hurts—thin skin over bone.
But the line reads clean.” I drag my fingers along the ridge, and her chest rises under my hand.
“How much?” She hasn’t moved the fabric back. She is not asking about pain.
“You’d feel every line.” I pull my hand back. She lets the blouse go.
“What about here?” Her hand goes to her ribcage. She lifts the hem with the other hand—three inches of skin. The curve of her ribs. The give of flesh above her waist where the ribs end and the body goes tender.
I put my hand on her ribs. Silky soft skin.
I shouldn’t touch her, and I know it. But she’s showing me where she wants ink, and I’m helpless. My cock is straining painfully now, and I want to slide my hand up and cup her breast and strip her shirt off and put my mouth where my hand is and taste her virgin skin.
Sleeping with an employee is a bad idea. Sleeping with a virgin is a worse idea. Sleeping with the pastor’s daughter is a dangerous idea, and one I know won’t end well.
But I can’t fucking help it when she’s teasing me like this. She’s practically begging me to ravish her like I want to. I don’t know how much longer I can sit while she plays this game and not lose my mind.
I take my hand off her ribs.
“Ribs are worse. Bony. Moves when you breathe, which makes the line harder to lay.”
“You’ve done them, though.” Her fingers curl against the hem.
“I could do yours.”
“One more,” she says.
She unbuttons her blouse, and I stop breathing. She pulls it to the side, showing me her soft, creamy stomach, and then pulling it to the side of her bra, where the underside of her breast goes from rib to curve. Goosebumps across her side.
“Here.”
I grip my knees like a vise because otherwise, I’m pulling her into my body and doing everything I want to do and know I shouldn’t.
My pulse hammers in my throat. Her skin is six inches from my hands and the smell of her fills my lungs and all I can think about is my mouth on the underside of her breast. I want to strip her shirt off and lay her back in this chair and put my hands everywhere and take her virginity right here under the neon.
“Are you doing this on purpose?”
She looks at me over her shoulder and bats her eyes at me. “Doing what?”
Her flirting is awkward, but she knows exactly what she’s doing.
I stand up from the stool.
She pulls her blouse closed and slowly starts re-buttoning it. Clarissa turns in the chair to face me; her knees apart because of how the chair reclines.
Her eyes drop. From my face, down my chest, past my belt. I know she sees how hard I am and how my cock is straining against the seam. She looks right at it, and I can feel every beat of my pulse throbbing against the zipper.
She looks for a long time, and her lips part, the tip of her tongue touches her bottom lip—slow—and then her teeth close on it. She holds it there. Her eyes come back up to mine.
“What if I’m not sorry,” she says, “about doing that to you?”