Chapter Six
Six
He was back at the bar. Because there was nothing else to do. As of today, he was officially a divorced man, and he’d been without sex for five years.
And earlier today he had been about a breath away from taking little Miss Prim and Proper down to the ground and fucking her senseless.
And he had already resolved that he wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t be that.
His postdivorce celebration would not be with Faith Grayson. With her wide eyes and easy blush. And uncommon boldness.
He couldn’t work out why she wasn’t afraid of him. He had thought... A little, soft thing like her... The evidence of a knife fight and talk of prison, jokes about orgies... It all should have had a cowering effect on her.
It hadn’t.
No, by the end of the interaction she’d only grown bolder. And he couldn’t for the life of him figure out how that worked.
She was fascinated by him. That much was clear. She might even think she wanted to have a little fun with some kind of bad-boy fantasy, but the little fool had no idea.
He was nobody’s fantasy.
He was a potential nightmare, but that was it.
He flashed back to the way it had felt to wrap his hand around her wrist. Her skin soft beneath his. To the way she’d looked up at him, her breath growing choppy and fast.
Those fingertips on his chest.
Shit, he needed to get laid.
He ordered up a shot of whiskey and pounded it down hard, scanning the room, looking for a woman who might wipe the image of Faith Grayson from his mind.
Maybe Mindy would be back. Maybe they could pick up where they left off.
But as he looked around, his eye landed on a petite brunette standing in line for the mechanical bull. She was wearing a tight pair of blue jeans and a fitted T-shirt, and when she turned, he felt like he’d been punched in the stomach.
Faith Grayson.
With that same mulish expression on her face she’d had when she’d left his house earlier.
The rider in front of her got thrown, and Faith rubbed her hands together, glaring at the mechanical beast with intensity. Then she marched up to it and took her position.
She thrust her hips forward, wrapping one hand around the handle and holding the other up high over her head. She looked more like a ballerina than a bull rider. But her expression...
That was all fire.
He should look away. He sure as hell shouldn’t watch as the mechanical bull began its forward motion, shouldn’t watch the way Faith’s eyes widened, and then the way her face turned determined as she gripped more tightly with one hand, and tensed her thighs around the beast, moving her hips in rhythm with it.
It didn’t last long.
On the creature’s second roll forward, Faith was unseated, her lips parting in an expression of shock as she flew forward and onto the mats below.
And before he could stop himself, he was on his feet, making his way across the space. She was on her back, her chin-length curls spread around her head like a halo on a church window. But her expression was anything but angelic.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She looked up at him, and all the shock drained from her face, replaced instead by a spark of feral-looking rage. “What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing getting on the back of that thing?” He moved closer, ignoring the crowd of people looking on. “You clearly have no business doing it.”
“It’s not your business...what I have business doing or not doing. Stop trying to tell me what to do.”
He put out his hand, offering to take hold of hers and help her up, but she ignored him, pushing herself into a sitting position and scrabbling to her feet.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“I know you’re fine,” he returned. “It’s not like I thought the thing was going to jump off its post and trample you to death. But it’s also clear you’re being an idiot.”
“Well, look at the whole line of idiots,” she said, indicating the queue of people. “I figured I would join in.”
“Why, exactly?”
“Because,” she said. “Because I’m tired of everyone treating me like a kid.
Because I’m tired of everyone telling me what to do.
Do you know that it was almost impossible for me to sneak away to our meeting today because my brothers need to know what I’m doing every second of every day?
It’s like they think I’m still fifteen years old. ”
He shrugged. “As I understand it, that’s older brothers, to a degree.”
“Are you an older brother?”
“No,” he said. “Only child. But still, seems a pretty logical conclusion.”
“Well, whatever. I went to boarding school from the time I was really young. Because there were more opportunities for me there than here. I lived away from my family, and somehow...everyone is more protective of me. Like I didn’t have to go make my own way when I was a kid.
” She shook her head. “I mean, granted, it was an all-girls boarding school, and it was a pretty cloistered environment. But still.”
“Let me buy you a drink,” he said, not quite sure why the offer slipped out.
You know.
He ignored that.
“I don’t need you to buy me a drink,” she said fiercely, storming past him and making her way to the bar. “I can buy my own drink.”
“I’m sure you can. But I offered to do it. You should let me.”
“Yeah, you have a lot of opinions about what I should and shouldn’t do in a given moment, don’t you?”
Still, when he ordered her a rum and Coke, she didn’t argue. She took hold of it and leaned against the bar, angling toward him. His eyes dropped down to her breasts, a hard kick of lust making it difficult for him to breathe.
“What are you doing here?” He forced his gaze away from her breasts, to her face.
She narrowed her eyes. “I’m here to ride a mechanical bull and make a statement about my agency by doing so. Not to anyone but myself, mind you. It might be silly, but it is my goal. What’s yours?”
“I’m here to get laid,” he said, holding her eyes and not blinking. That should do the trick. That should scare her away.
Unless...
She tilted her head to the side. “Is that what you were here for last night?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he responded.
Her lips twitched, and she lifted up her glass, averting her gaze. “How was she?” She took a sip of the rum and Coke.
“As it happens,” he said, “I didn’t go home with her.”
She spluttered, then set down the glass on the bar and looked at him. She didn’t bother to disguise her interest. Her curiosity. “Why?”
“Because I decided at the end of it all I wasn’t really that interested. No one was more surprised by that than I was.”
“She was beautiful,” Faith said. “Why weren’t you...into her?”
He firmed his jaw, looking Faith up and down. “That is the million-dollar question, honey.”
That same thing that had stretched between them back at the house began to build again. It was like a physical force, and no matter that he told himself she was all wrong, his body seemed to disagree.
You dumbass. You want something harder than she can give. Something dirtier. You don’t want to worry about your partner. You want a partner who can handle herself.
But then he looked back at Faith again, her cheeks rosy from alcohol and the exertion of riding the bull, and maybe from him.
He wanted her.
And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to change that.
“I have a theory,” Faith said.
“About?”
“About why you didn’t want her.” She sucked her straw between her lips and took a long sip, then looked up at him, as if fortified by her liquid courage. “Is it because...?” She tilted her chin upward, her expression defiant. “Are you attracted to me, Levi?”
He gritted his teeth, the blood in his body rushing south, answering the question as soon as she asked it. “You couldn’t handle me, baby girl.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
“But it’s an important thing for you to know.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “That’s what you think. Again, putting you on the long list of men who think they know what I should and shouldn’t do, or want, or think about.”
He leaned in and watched as the color in her cheeks deepened. As that crushed-rose color bloomed more fully. She was playing the part of seductress—at least, in her funny little way—but she wasn’t as confident as she was hoping to appear. That much he could tell.
“Do you have any idea what I would do to you?” he asked.
She wrinkled her nose. “I would assume...the normal sort of thing.”
He chuckled. “Sweetheart, I was locked up for five years. I’m not sure I remember what the normal sort of thing is anymore. At this point, all I have to go on is animal instinct. And I’m not totally sure you should feel comfortable with that.”
She shifted, and he noticed her squeezing her thighs together. The sight sent a current of lust straight through his body. Dammit. He was beginning to think he had underestimated her.
“That still isn’t what I asked you,” she said softly. She looked up at him, her expression coy as she gazed through her thick lashes. “Do you want me?”
“I’d take you,” he said through gritted teeth. “Hard. And believe me, you’d like it. But I don’t want you, sweetheart. I just want. It’s been a hell of a long time for me, Faith. I’m all about the sex, not the woman. I’m not sure that’s the kind of man you should be with.”
She squared her shoulders and looked at him full on, but the color in her cheeks didn’t dissipate. “What kind of man do you think I should be with?”
He could see it. Like a flash of lightning across the darkness in his soul. A man who would get down on one knee and ask Faith to be his. Have babies with her. Live with her, in a house with a lot of bedrooms for all those babies.
A man she could take to family dinners. Hold hands with.
A man who could care.
That was what she deserved.