House of Ink 1: First Impression

3, #BadBoyWins

3,

#BadBoyWins

Sometimes an immediate retreat is the wisest course of action.

Which is to say, sometimes you just need to run away like a scared little bitch. Especially when you're about to blow a load in your jockstrap because a hot, tattooed blond bachelor is touching you, watching your face, standing so close in the dark you might combust right there, under his cool, demanding eyes.

"You do?" Zander had asked. I did. I liked when he touched me. Of course I did. A guy would have to be mad not to want a man like that. Well, mad or straight. Same thing, in my humble gay opinion. He was...well, he was everything. He was perfection. He was all of my fantasies come to life and dropped right in front of me.

If he wanted me, there was no way I was going to turn him down.

If he wanted me. What if I was reading his signals wrong? I would have to change my name and move to some tiny European town and live out my life as a stripper in a dive bar to live down the shame.

His words turned my bones to rubber, my heart into a ticking time bomb.

Eventually I was saved by the bell when the phone rang. The second my boss turned his back, I slipped out of his office, back to the relative safety of the front parlor.

It took ten minutes to remember the twenties in my pocket and go on the coffee run like I was supposed to. The bustling cafe down the road felt like another world, and the balmy summer air helped calm me a bit by the time I got back to the shop, but I was still a hot mess overall.

My nerves were shot, my body was tingling all over—I wasn't sure if that was good or bad—and my brain was basically running a constant stream of static, like vinyl crinkling in the silence, spinning around and around and around but emitting no music, only white noise. That's what Zander Rollins did to me. This man was dangerous.

I spent the next few hours parked at Janet's desk in the front room, responding to client emails and performing other menial tasks. I'd already cleaned everything up from Zander's last session of the night with that goth girl, Cynthia, so this was all I had left to do. I could have left at any time, but I was happy enough here, catching up on things. It definitely wasn't just that Zander was in the other room...

Eventually I conceded defeat. I didn't have the strength to keep away from him. And I had to make a move of some kind if I ever wanted the heat between us to blossom into more, didn't I?

Of course there was the complicated matter of our last conversation. And the streams of dirty thoughts running through my head—his hands featured heavily in a lot of them; long, tapered fingers, golden hair brushed over the backs of them, large enough to wrap around one of my wrists and still touch his fingers on the other side...

I wanted him to slide those fingers inside my mouth and command me to lick them clean. I wanted him to wrap them around fistfuls of my hair and yank me around by the root. And then there were his lips, also surrounded by stubble. Perfectly formed, plump, sculpted like marble, so they looked both hard as rock and delicate as butter at the same time. Zander was the only miracle here.

I just didn't know if I could catch him for my own. Or if I was biting off more than I could chew with the entire possibility. But it was like a train wreck—no looking away or going back this late in the game, he had me right where he wanted me. Where I hoped he wanted me.