Under the Surface (14 page)

“They're pretty raucous,” he said.

“That's the point, remember? Blow off steam, have fun, relax, bond over shared experiences,” she replied, checking his stock of garnishes and giving the ice tub a good shake. Bent over in the black leather dominatrix getup, her pale breasts nearly swelled out of the corset she wore. In a move as smooth and hot as the leather clinging to her body, she straightened, standing far too close to him for a public place, her leg brushing against his, one hand resting on his hip. “We're going to give that
shared experiences
thing a try later,” she said, low and seductive, then walked away.

He turned to see Tom glaring at him. “You got something going with Eve?” he asked.

“Yeah.” He added, “So step the fuck back,” for his own satisfaction.

Tom's eyes widened slightly, but he edged back to his station. Matt took a deep breath and tried to stuff the bristling cop back inside the bartender suit that was starting to feel like a straitjacket.

Finally, last call came and Natalie worked her way through the bar, ushering the stragglers out into the parking lot, calling a cab for anyone too drunk to drive. Matt helped the limo driver get the loose-limbed, completely intoxicated bachelorette party into the backseat, an innuendo-filled process that brought back not-so-fond memories of his days on patrol. At least no one puked on him.

When he came back inside, Eve came around his end of the bar, leaned one hip against his station, and watched him work. It was rare for her to slow down even for a moment until the last employee left. He wiped down his section of the bar, then looked at her.

“Something wrong, boss?”

“I've been thinking,” she said, her face serious.

Oh, thank you Jesus, she'd come to her senses and he was off the hook.
He paused to wring out the bar towel, because this close he could smell the mint and rosemary in her hair, feel heat rising from her skin. “About…?”

“My dad knows the VP of HR at Lancaster Life. They're hiring in the marketing department. Shocker, given the economy, but there you have it. I know you don't have a business degree, but sociology's pertinent to marketing, and I can vouch for your work ethic. Do you want me to see if I can get you an interview? It's probably entry level, but you'd have a career track, and benefits. You could keep some shifts here for the money.”

Jesus. She was offering to help get him a job. A better job. The kind of job a bartender with a paraplegic brother and a stack of medical bills would want.

He gaped at her for a long moment, then pulled himself together. “Thanks,” he said. “Let me think about it.”

She blinked, and he knew he'd fucked up. A guy in his situation should have been all over that, and connections were the best track to a good job. “I'm not suggesting you need to be something other than a bartender,” she said. “I just thought—”

He cut her off. “Not a problem, boss. I've got a couple of other options, that's all. I didn't want to say anything because it would mean quitting here.”

“Oh,” she said, her face clearing. “If you leave for a better job, not because I've had to fire you for public indecency, then I'm happy to see you go,” she said. “Maybe I wouldn't even have to miss you too much.”

She flashed him a smile and turned to the bar to collect the night's take. Under the bright lights, the pale skin of her shoulders gleamed, the taut muscles and line of her collarbone completely transfixing before she flashed him a smile and disappeared upstairs.

As soon as the door closed Natalie gave her two-fingered, piercing whistle. The DJ, eyes closed, swaying to a slow, relentless Euro-techno-groove, snapped to attention. Nat made a cut-it-off motion across her throat and the DJ pulled the plug. That strange, reverberating silence hung in the bar while everyone cleaned up. As the staff trailed out, Eve walked through the building, clicking off the lights and checking door locks. Tired to the point of incoherence, Matt braced a shoulder against the doorframe and watched her walk, mesmerized by the smooth shifts of her body in the leather. In that vibrating silence permeating the point of no return, his conscience battled duty.

His conscience won. “Eve. I can't.”

She took a deep breath in through her nostrils as she looked around the bar. Mario and Tom were finishing cleanup. Natalie was upstairs getting her bag. Cesar sat by the open door, watching Eve.

“Then we have a problem, Chad,” she said, quiet and even to put his instincts on full alert. “I like you. I like talking to you. I like listening to music with you. But I'm under a lot of stress right now. I need sex, and if you're not willing, then I'm going to make a couple of calls.”

She wasn't threatening him, just being Eve. She knew what she wanted, and how to get it. “Don't do it,” he said over the sick lurch of his stomach. He was her friend, and he knew it, even if she didn't, but that friendship he found himself hoping would hold through the inevitable betrayal hung in the balance right now. “It's not that bad, boss. Let's get dinner and we'll talk.”

“Sure. After you bring all that intensity you're locking down inside to bed with me.” She looked him straight in the eyes, and he felt the emotions sear along his nerves to the tips of his fingers, down his thighs, tightening him. Her gaze flicked to the hand resting on the bar, and he followed her glance.

The hand was clenched into a fist. Worse, one of the scabs had cracked open. Blood trickled from his first knuckle into the hollow of his hand.

He consciously relaxed it. When he looked back at her, those ocean-deep, ocean-dark, ocean-dangerous eyes had softened with understanding.

“I think we both need this,” she said, very, very quietly. “You might eat what's bothering you, but I think it's eating you alive.”

He felt he'd taken a leg to the backs of his knees, sweeping his feet out from under him and knocking him flat on his back. The thought of her walking over to Tom and with a few smiles and a choice comment or two, suggesting he hang around after close while Matt walked out the door and got in his Jeep made him sick to his stomach. Not just because he'd go home alone and nearly out of his head with lust but because he knew, he
knew
he'd driven her to that point. The last thing they needed was another man in the mix, when he could be that man.

Rationalize much?

“Say yes,” she said, low, intent, thinking she understood exactly why he was hesitating, thinking he was a good guy, trying to do the right thing by her, not afraid to nudge him a little.

You can't. You can't say yes. You can't say no either.

There was no clear right thing to do here. She'd already hate him. Might as well eat something else and keep Tom out of it. She'd need a friend afterward.

Yeah, you're a saint.

“Yes.”

Her gaze searched his, then she said, “Lock the front door for me.”

For a brief moment the emptiness he felt when he woke settled into his mind. Chad crossed the dance floor, glanced out over the parking lot to make sure it was empty, then kicked up the stopper bracing the door open. Chad secured the bolt and repeated the movements on the second steel door. Chad watched Eve return from locking the storeroom door. Chad watched her cross the dance floor and hold out her hand.

But Matt Dorchester took Eve Webber's hand and followed her up the spiral staircase into her office.

 

CHAPTER EIGHT

Matt waited while Eve unlocked the door leading to her apartment. The air was dark and close, heating around them as she fumbled with the key. Goose bumps lifted on Eve's bare shoulders. Without thinking he put the tip of his index finger to her spine, tucked between her sharp-edged shoulder blades as she struggled with the sticky lock. A hitch in her breathing, then the bumps disappeared into smooth flesh.

“Cold or nervous?” he asked.
Find an angle. Make her stay dressed, make her rethink her determination to get you in bed.

Christ. If he were anyone else, he'd find this hilarious. Alone in the dark with the sexiest cocktail waitress in Lancaster, and he was trying to make her put on more clothes and keep her hands off him.

“Neither, now,” she replied, looking over her shoulder through the tumbled mass of black hair gleaming in the red light from the
EXIT
sign over the office door. Inside the apartment she shed her bag and laptop on a small table by the door and walked into the kitchen to turn on the light over the stove.

“Water? Soda?” she asked as she opened the fridge.

“I'm fine.” He sat gingerly on the arm of her love seat, and refined his strategy as she poured herself a glass of red wine. He would not undress. He would not unfasten, unzip, unbutton, or unhook anything on her. He would keep her hands off him, focus entirely on her. He would not walk through the open bedroom door to his left. He would stay on the love seat that was too small for any real trouble.

Who was he kidding? He'd gotten into plenty of trouble in smaller spaces. Like the front seat of his Jeep.

Wine in hand, she strolled back into the living room to set her iPod in the sound dock and clicked through to a playlist. The sounds of Maud Ward's latest hit drifted into the air, the volume too low for him to make out the words but high enough for him to hear the melody and bass line. His brain peripherally occupied with filling in the words to the song, he savored the way she was put together. Under his gaze her body relaxed, a small smile lifting the corners of her mouth, disappearing, then reappearing as she looked over her shoulder at him. She looked happier, calmer, as if she wasn't carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders, and he hadn't even touched her yet.

She took another sip of wine, then set the glass down on the shelf next to the sound dock and walked over to stand in front of him. He reached out and set his hands on her hips, let his thumbs stroke the bare skin between the bottom edge of the corset and the waistband of her skirt. When he closed his eyes, he couldn't tell where the leather ended and her skin began except by the way her breathing stumbled.

He kept his eyes closed, because with him sitting down, the smooth, pale tops of her breasts and the sharp line of her collarbone were right at eye level, but darkness only heightened the sensation in his fingertips and the scent of Eve, mint and rosemary and a delicate soap underneath it all, rising into his nostrils. She slid her hand into the hair at his nape and bent forward, resting her forehead on the top of his head. The limitless black space in his mind blasted wide open, the heat and scent of Eve dissolving through him, opening him.

I need this.

I can't want this, let alone need this.

She pushed at his shoulders as he looped his arm around her waist, and then he was on his back on the love seat, the sweet soft weight of Eve all along the length of his torso. Their legs tangled together as he shifted back to get as flat as possible, and she pressed her mouth to his. He took her at her word and wove his fingers into her hair, gripping her skull and holding her to him for kiss after kiss, the click of teeth and the wet slide of tongues audible as the song selection changed. He was delirious, losing himself in the music and Eve's mouth, now moving over the scruff on his jaw to the spot where his pulse pounded in his neck.

She was lying between his sprawled legs, which wasn't going to work for either one of them, so he left one hand in her hair and bodily shifted her so her legs clasped his. Then he curled his fingers in body-warm leather and hitched her skirt up until it barely covered her ass, allowing her knees to drop to either side of his. Mouth open against his, she gave a little gasp and pressed her mound against his hip bone, the movement grinding against his cock. Involuntarily he gripped the curve of her ass and pulled her closer. His shirt rode up just enough to press the soft skin of her belly against his abdomen, another tantalizing reminder of what he wanted and couldn't have.

She was slowly going up in flames in his arms, breathy kisses and a rhythmic grind against him, and for a moment he thought he was off the hook. Then she stopped and looked at him.

“We are not doing this again,” she said, nearly kneeing him in the balls as she struggled upright in the tight space.

He braced his foot against the high arm of the love seat, hitching himself out of harm's way as he grasped for something to keep her there. “I like watching you like that,” he said, but she wasn't listening. With a haste he would have found hot as hell under any other circumstances she gripped his right ankle to push herself upright.

Except she didn't get ankle. She wrapped her fingers right around the Kahr in his ankle holster.

The most fundamental component of who he'd been for the last twelve years triggered a harsh automatic response. His hand flashed out, fingers clamping around her wrist so tightly he felt tendons and ligaments grind against bone.

Too late.

Her eyes went huge, and in an instant he knew there was no hope he could pass it off as a leg brace for an old injury. She scrabbled backward, inadvertently kicking him in the ribs with her motorcycle boot. He grunted and released her hand, and she completed her backward crawl off the love seat to stand in the middle of the room.

“That's a gun,” she accused, jabbing her index finger at his ankle.

He scrambled to his feet. “Eve, let me—”

“Have you been carrying that in my
bar
? There's a big sign right on the front door that specifically prohibits concealed weapons on the premises, Chad!”

Fuckfuckfuck.
Arms folded, aggressive stance, well on her way through righteous indignation, into fury. “I know, but—”

“So you saw the sign and wore a concealed weapon to work anyway? Who
does
that?”