Make You Mine by K.T. Quinn

8

Charlotte

A knock came on my door.

I blinked awake, my eyes scanning the dark motel room. Had I imagined it? The only sound was the hum of the mini fridge over in the kitchenette. There was nothing that—

Knock knock knock.

Three hard knocks, unmistakable in their urgency. Like police announcing they were about to kick the door in.

“Coming,” I called, rushing out of bed to the door.

Before I could reach for the handle, the door swung open with a bang. Jayce stood in the doorway, bulging arms crossed over his chest. The moonlight reflected off the colorful ink on his right bicep, and his blue eyes glistened with a smile that didn’t touch his lips.

“Hey,” he said in that smooth, sexy voice, full of mischief.

A tingle went up my spine. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m here for my jacket.”

“Oh. Right.” I numbly went back into the room. It was folded neatly on the table, though I didn’t remember putting it there. I carried it back to the doorway. “Here.”

A grin came to his handsome face. “That’s not all I came for, Charlotte.”

The door closed behind him as he stepped into the room.

Our lips connected with magnetic attraction, warm and full and soft. His hand danced around the side of my neck to hold me against him, even though nothing could have stopped me from kissing him in that moment. Fireworks exploded in between my legs as he drove me backward toward the bed. I fell to the sheets, which were wonderfully soft against my back as he stepped up between my legs.

“I’ve dreamed about you,” Jayce said softly in the darkness. “I’ve dreamed about nothing but you, Charlotte.”

My name sounded perfectly sweet on his lips, like a chocolate-covered cherry he wanted to bite into. I held my breath as he stood before me, arms bulging with muscle and tattoos dancing as he readied himself.

He ripped off my pajama bottoms with magical ease; one moment they were there, the next they were gone, like steam evaporating from a pot of boiling water. I gasped as Jayce buried his face in my panties, pulling them aside and then inhaling me like I was a drug he’d been craving, his breath hot against my wet lips.

“I want to taste you,” he rumbled into me. “I want to make you mine.”

His tongue was impossibly long as it moved toward my clit. It touched me with the barest amount of pressure, but even that was enough to make me gasp and arch my back against the sheets. He stared up at me with his eyes, his beautiful blue eyes as I accepted his tongue into my wet heat, wedging me apart and licking up and down, exploring me for the first time.

“Fuck, you taste good,” he growled into me. “I’m going to eat you up.”

“Yes,” I whispered as he used his fingers to pull apart my lips. “Yes, yes, yes.”

His dark hair moved back and forth as he tasted all of me, deep inside my slit and then up and out to swirl around my clit. Back into my sex he went and then out again, a circuit of powerful pleasure that left me groaning, and curling my toes into the impossibly soft sheets.

“Taste me,” I begged, though he was doing exactly that. I put a hand on his head and held him against my quivering walls. “Yes, there, right there, don’t stop, yes…”

*

I woke to the sound of my phone alarm going off, soft but persistent.

This time my groan held no pleasure. Sunlight peeked through the curtains and splashed across my face, making me wince and shield my eyes with an arm. There was a persistent throbbing in my head, and my tongue felt swollen in my mouth. Finally I could stand the alarm no longer, so I yanked it from the charger and mashed my thumb on the screen until it went silent.

I opened my eyes. Six empty beer bottles stood on the dresser across from me in an unstable pyramid, three-two-one. Did I finish the six pack? I remembered finding a Natalie Imbruglia playlist on my phone and cranking it up while dancing by myself in the motel room. I could have sworn I only drank three. Or maybe four.

I held my phone close to my crusty eyes. Seven-fifty. Wow, I slept in. Normally I was an early riser, my body always up and ready at five in the morning while Scott stayed in bed. He would have made fun of me if he were here. “Who’s the lazy one now!” he would have said, tickling me awake until I fought him off. He would make a day of it, constantly reminding me of the fact while we prepared the food truck and began serving customers.

Scott is gone, I remembered with sadness. He’s seeing someone named Tammy. He doesn’t want me.

A memory tickled my mind. Seven-fifty? That was dangerously close to eight o’clock, which was when I had to be somewhere…

Suddenly I remembered where I was. This was Eastland, not Savannah. I was in a motel room.

I had community service.

“Crap!” I shouted. “Crap crap crap!”

I rushed out of bed and threw on fresh clothes. Could I get there in time? What else did I need? My mind felt as thick as honey as I looked around the foreign motel room. I grabbed my purse off the dresser, knocking the pyramid of beer bottles over in the process.

Shoes, I managed to think through my pounding head. I need shoes.

I sifted through one suitcase, then another. By the end I was tossing my neatly-folded clothes on the floor in a rush to find my sneakers. Where were they? I knew I saw them yesterday when I arranged all my clothes. But they were nowhere to be found.

The Sheriff told me not to be late. That was the most important thing. If I hurried, I could still get there on time.

I slipped on the heels I’d been wearing for the past two days and rushed out the door.

I hurried down the road and prayed Billy in the motel lobby couldn’t see me. There was no shoulder on the road, so my options were to run in the ditch or on the pavement. Fortunately, there were no cars on the road. I knew I looked ridiculous trying to jog in heels. After a hundred feet I gave up, took them off, and ran barefoot while carrying them. Hopefully I didn’t step on any broken glass.

No matter how small the town was, it was too far when traveling on foot. I ran for ten minutes before the double-wide trailer of the diner appeared on the right. I made myself stare straight ahead as the few patrons watched me through the windows, the girl jogging barefoot up the road like she was fleeing Freddie Kruger.

After the diner I passed another of those strange metal skeletons. This one had a long face and sneering steel teeth, and it seemed to be laughing at me as I ran the final fifty feet to where I was supposed to be.

The community center was a sad little building with one boarded-up window and half the shingles missing from its roof. A butch woman wearing a John Deere tractor hat stood outside with a clipboard in her hand and an annoyed look on her face. She watched as I shambled the final stretch to her.

“I’m sorry!” I gasped, catching my breath. “I’m sorry. So sorry. For being late. I got lost.”

She leaned away from me. “You smell like a Sunday morning frat house.” Then she looked at the heels in my hand. “Those the shoes you brought?”

“I couldn’t find any others,” I said. “Is there a loaner pair or something I can use today?”

“Nope.” She ticked a box on her clipboard, then handed me an orange reflective vest. “Put this on. You’re on trash duty. That’s your ride.” She nodded at a white pickup truck with a man inside parked a few spaces down.

“Thank you,” I said, grabbing her hand to shake. “Sorry again for being late. Won’t happen again!” Because hopefully this is the only day of work I’ll do, I thought as I approached the truck.

I opened the passenger door and froze.

Jayce sat in the driver’s seat, an amused grin on his handsome face. He wore a tight black T-shirt with an orange reflective vest over top.

“Huh,” he said in his rumbling voice. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’re stalking me.”

Seeing him brought back memories of my dream. My sexy dream. “You. Just what I need.”

“You’re not who I was hoping for, either.”

I climbed in and he started the truck with a rumble.

“Guess you saw Judge Benjamin yesterday?”

I could still feel his face between my legs, long tongue penetrating me deeply, devouring me completely. The image was fresh and vibrant like an oil painting.

I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. “Listen. I’m very hungover right now, and I woke up literally five minutes ago. So if we could have a moment of silence for my sanity I’d be very happy.”

“Suit yourself.”

The truck rumbled down the road, bouncing along as it hit old potholes that had never been filled.

“This is all your fault,” I said.

Jayce grimaced at me. “Thought you wanted silence.”

“The judge was sympathetic until he realized I knew you.”

“You don’t know me.”

“No, but I had your stupid jacket with me. When the judge saw it, he turned on me like that.” I snapped my fingers.

“How’d he find out it was mine?”

“I told him.”

“Ahh,” he said with satisfaction. “So you didn’t listen when I told you to keep your mouth shut?”

I shook my head and stared out the window, my head still pounding too much to respond.

We drove a few miles down the frontage road next to I-16 and parked on the shoulder. So much trash littered the side of the road I wondered if a garbage truck had wrecked nearby. Jayce hopped out, reached into a cooler in the bed of the truck, and waved a water bottle.

“Water?”

“I don’t need it,” I said stubbornly.

He tossed it to me anyway. “Drink,” he ordered.

I wanted to argue, but my body was craving water more than anything, and the bottle was cool in my hands. I gulped it down so fast that rivulets ran out the side of my mouth and down my chin.

“Thanks,” I gasped when I was done.

“Mmm hmm.” Jayce grabbed trash bags out of the bed of the truck, and sticks with little needles on the end for jabbing trash. He pointed into the distance. “We’ve got this stretch of road from here to the Murphy ranch, about a mile thataways. We’ll get as much done as we can today and come down the other side of the road tomorrow.”

“All right.”

He watched me pull on my heels. “Are those the only shoes you have?”

“I couldn’t find my sneakers. And I was already late.”

He shook his head but said nothing as we began our work. I held the black trash bag in my left hand while stabbing pieces of garbage with the stick in my right, and then scraped them off into the bag. It was simple enough, but not precisely easy since the trash kept sticking to the needle.

“So you’ve got community service too?” I asked.

“No,” he said flatly. “I just love picking up trash.”

I stabbed a coke can and dropped it in my bag. “You piss off Judge Benjamin?”

“Something like that.”

“What were you doing in jail?”

He grinned at me. The same grin that had touched his lips before he went down on me in my dream. “I was sittin’, mostly. Not much else you can do in a cell.”

I rolled my eyes. “I mean what did you do to get thrown in there? Did you roll through a stop sign? Resist arrest from that sheriff jerk?”

He paused to give me an even stare. “In Eastland, you don’t need to break the law to end up in jail. You should know that more than anyone.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” I said, though he’d avoided answering the question. I wondered how he’d gotten on the sheriff’s bad side. Especially since he lived here, instead of being an outsider like me.

My heel caught on a depression in the road and my ankle twisted. I fell to one knee and yelped, wincing as my stick went flying.

“You all right?” Jayce asked.

“Fine,” I grumbled. “Just fine.”

Jayce was there in three long strides. He grabbed my hand and pulled me up with easy strength. Standing close to him, I could smell his scent. Smoke and oil, just like his jacket. I wondered if it was deodorant or just how he smelled naturally.

“Thanks,” I said.

His hand lingered in mine, large fingers warm and comforting. “Don’t mention it.”

I limped for the rest of the day, but I wasn’t about to let a self-inflicted injury slow me down. We fell into a rhythm cleaning the road, one piece of trash at a time. As soon as we filled our bags, Jayce walked back to the truck and drove it up to us so we could toss them in the bed, then we opened new bags. As the sun climbed higher we began taking breaks, drinking bottles of water from Jayce’s cooler. I don’t know what I would’ve done without those. Sweat ran down my back and pooled against my bra strap.

Despite the heat, it was a pleasant day. Especially when the occasional cool breeze blew. The morning dragged on, and the bed of Jayce’s truck filled with bags of trash: four, then six, then eight.

“Good time to stop for lunch,” he said after one load. His muscles bulged as he tossed the bags of trash in the back. “Fuck, I’m hungry.”

“We get a lunch break?” I asked. I was imagining the diner menu in my head. I could crush a patty melt and milkshake right about then. Good hangover food.

“Technically, no,” Jayce said, climbing into the driver’s seat. I joined him in the passenger side and he continued, “If we see the sheriff or someone else coming to check on us, we can rush back out there.”

He reached through the cab divider into his cooler and pulled out a sandwich in a plastic baggy.

My stomach rumbled. “We can’t go somewhere?”

“We can,” he said as he opened his sandwich bag. “But it’s a small town. We’ll get caught. Then Mindy would dock us an hour on our time sheet.”

“Oh. Okay.” I opened my purse, and breathed a sigh of relief to see the can of fruit and bag of chips that I’d bought from the motel lobby. A meager meal, but better than nothing. I peeled off the top of the can of fruit and asked, “How many hours of community service do you have?”

He bit into his sandwich. “Too many.”

I grabbed a slimy piece of fruit and popped it in my mouth. “I’ve got a hundred and twenty. And my license is suspended until I’m done.”

“Sounds like Judge Benjamin, all right,” Jayce muttered.

“He told me you were a bad guy.”

Jayce snorted without looking up from his sandwich. “Did he now?”

“Uh huh. Probably ‘cause you’re part of that biker gang, right? The Copperheads?”

His head whipped around and his eyes were full of fire. “Why the fuck do you think that?”

“I dunno,” I said defensively. “They were visiting you in jail. You ride a bike like them.”

“How do you know what I ride?”

“I saw you on the road last night. When the sheriff was driving me back to the motel.”

Jayce examined my face like he was trying to decide if I was telling the truth. He must have come to the conclusion that I was, because he said, “I’m not a Copperhead.”

“Okay, okay. I didn’t realize it was a touchy subject.”

He looked in the side mirror. A car came driving up the road, then passed us. It wasn’t the sheriff.

“Maybe,” Jayce said, “you should mind your own business.”

“I was just making conversation.”

“Whatever you say, Peaches.”

I blinked. “What’d you call me?”

“Peaches.”

“Let me guess,” I said through clenched teeth. “Because I’ve got an ass like a Georgia peach. Sweet and juicy enough to sink your teeth into. I heard enough crappy comments like that in my old job, thank you very much.”

“I…” he started to say, but I was still going off on him.

“Do you honestly think girls like to have their bodies compared to fruit? Are guys that oblivious?”

Jayce only stared at me. “You’re eating a can of peaches.”

I glanced down and winced. He was right.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m hungover. My mind is still cloudy.”

“Uh huh,” he grunted.

I raised my eyebrows hopefully. “I don’t suppose you have another sandwich in that cooler?”

He shoved the rest of his lunch in his mouth. “Nope.”

Jayce climbed out of the truck and resumed cleaning up trash, leaving me feeling like a jerk.