Jon-Michael showed up while the Friday night guest band was playing their last set. Sitting down at the end of the bar, he ordered a club soda, accepted it with a level look, then swiveled around with his back to the bar to watch the band.
Hayley cast surreptitious glances his way as she filled orders. She had been considering what she should do about him ever since she left him standing in the parking lot this afternoon. Face it, what he had said to her was tantamount to a threat: come to me or I will show up in your room, with or without your consent.
She didn't like being threatened.
She did like the idea of making love with him again. Liked it a lot. Of course, it sounded as if she would get that whether she went home with him or not, so perhaps he had not been threatening so much as promising.
No! Her spine stiffened. What kind of bullshit rationalization was that? She didn't care how good the sex was, he could not just blackmail her into doing what he wanted. And frankly, if she put her faith in Jon-Michael Olivet and his questionable protestations of love she was a fool looking to get exactly what she deserved. She had believed him when he had said those words years before.
Look where that had gotten her.
By the end of her shift, as she cashed out the till while Lucy and Marsha went through the close-down procedures, then got ready to go home, she was leaning toward taking a stand on the firm ground of her righteous indignation. The lights clicked off one by one around the room until the bar was the only island of illumination in a dark sea of tables and tipped up chairs.
Jon-Michael moved down the bar and sat across from her, silently watching her end-of-shift routine. He was still sitting with his elbow on the countertop and his head propped in his palm when she came back from depositing the evening's take in the safe in Bluey's office. She retrieved her purse off the shelf beneath the bar and glared at him.
He attempted to neither touch her nor turn on the charm. "Will you come home with me?" he asked in a quiet voice.
"And if I don't, Johnny? You plan to sneak into my bedroom?"
"Don't call me—" Oh, Johnny. Please. Jon-Michael cleared his throat. "On second thought, call me whatever your little heart desires. And yes, I do."
"Well, come on, then," she snapped, stalking to the door. "Why are we just standing here? Let's go, I wanna get this over with."
He swallowed a smile. For all her martyred air, he knew his Hayley. If she were truly opposed to the idea of going home with him, there was no way in hell he would ever get her to his place or himself within a hundred yards of her room at the old man's house. But he wasn’t born yesterday. He kept his amusement to himself. "I'll bring the bike around to the back. Give me a minute, then come out the back door when you hear me rev it up. We'll leave the city yahoos in the dust."
Feeling more than a little deflated by her woefully inadequate willpower, Hayley bolstered her flagging ego by assuring herself she was going to use Jon-Michael unmercifully. She was not looking for the complication of messy emotions or demands of commitment. All she wanted was straightforward, good old-fashioned sex. He had shown her what she’d been missing and then some this afternoon, but it was just sex.
She was merely going back for more.
Jon-Michael did not make her wait for it, either. They had barely cleared the front entry of his loft following a fast ride through the quiet town when he turned, slammed the door closed and crowded her up against it. "I have been waiting for this all day," he said hoarsely and rocked his mouth over hers.
Like every other time he had come within kissing range, she was immediately drawn in, lost to time and place, her senses given over to the taste and textures of him. Hands fisted in his hair, she kissed him back, and before she was quite aware what was happening, he had her vest unbuttoned and had lifted her against the door at her back. She wrapped her legs around his waist.
"God," he murmured, kissing his way down her throat to the rapidly beating pulse in the hollow at its base, "I have never known another woman with skin so soft or lips so sweet."
"You don't have to romance me with sweet talk," she panted. His mouth encircled her nipple and drew hard, and her head thumped back against the closed portal. "Don't...need it."
Releasing that nipple, he kissed a path to its mate. "Ah now, that is where you're wrong. I didn't exactly give you moonlight and roses when you were seventeen, and I think if ever there was someone who deserves a little romance in her life, it is you." He tugged his target into his mouth and smiled up at her. "Besides," he said around her nipple, "that isn’t sweet talk, Hayley, honey. It is the God's-honest truth."
Crap. He got to her; she couldn’t deny it. Even so, she managed to give him a cool smile. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you not to talk with your mouth full, Olivet?”
He laughed and went back to giving her breasts his full attention.
A while later, when her pants and undies had been stripped away and he was easing high inside her, he whispered, "Is this the reason you came home with me?"
Her arms clung tighter around his neck as he slowly withdrew and thrust, withdrew and thrust. "Yes."
He adjusted his grip on the underside of her thighs and drove himself into her a little harder. The action elicited a corresponding sound embarrassingly close to a sob from deep in her throat and he eased out, then drove in once more—almost as if he wanted to hear it again. He repeated the action. And repeated it again. "I suppose you expect me to believe it's the only reason."
She was lost to the sensations his body was busy eliciting from hers. But she blinked, pulled her thoughts together and focused on him. "You oughtta. It is the only reason."
"Liar."
She thought about that later, satiated, boneless and plastered against him skin to skin, her face in the curve of his neck. Liar, he had said. She longed to deny it categorically but...could she?
She had been mindless with pleasure but holding herself back as if waiting for something. Then he had started that low-voiced I love you, Hayley; love you, love you, love you, and she had promptly soared off a sharp-edged precipice in a red-misted, orgasmic freefall.
Is that what she had really come here for—not just screamingly good sex but the words as well? Had she come for the vows of love and the feeling of being wanted more than she had ever been wanted in her life?
No, it couldn't be. She would not allow it to be.
"Don't think about it so hard," Jon-Michael advised in a low, soothing voice as she began to tense in his arms. He held her with an arm beneath her bottom, his free hand stroking from the small of her back to where her shoulders were braced against the door. "Just accept that it's good, Hayley. It is so good between us."
"God, yes," she agreed. She tightened her grip around his neck. "It's even better than my favorite Ranch Romance fantasy."
"Your what?"
"My…never mind. It's kind of hard to explain. I just never knew it could be like this."
"Neither did I." Slipping out of her, he straightened away from the door, then scooped her up and carried her around the glass brick wall into the living area. He laid her down on the couch and joined her, reaching to pull a chenille throw from the back of the sofa and snap it out over them. Tucking her head into the hollow beneath his collarbone, he wrapped his arms tightly around her. Then he grinned up at the ceiling. "Ya know, we really ought to try this in a bed sometime."