Best Friends Forever

She danced so freely, laughing with her friends. There was nothing forced or sloppy about her, not like so many of the girls there that night, and every night at places like Scald. She wasn’t trying to be “cool” or “sexy,” she was just effortlessly mesmerizing. Mick nursed his import beer as he watched her, unable to take his eyes off her spinning, undulating form.

Her ass in that dress. Her legs. Hell, her everything.

He’d watched her leave the dance floor and approach the bar. Her friends split off, and she was alone. Mick had never been good at opening lines, but he figured if he sat down, offered to buy her a drink, and introduced himself, that might be enough to not get laughed at, or flat turned down, anyway.

Before he could act, however, the two Arab guys approached. Saudi? Qatari? If he could hear them speak, clearly, he could identify their dialect and probably tell them, with reasonable accuracy, where they’d grown up, within a few hundred kilometers.

Mick sat back to watch their flirtatious efforts unfold, but when he saw the man produce that capsule and slip it— so quickly even he almost missed it— into her drink, he knew he had to act.

He wasn’t in a Watterson Gaming property, so he knew to expect zero leniency from Scald security. He hoped to avoid confrontation altogether, but he doubted the cocky, gold-clad assholes would back down without a show of force. He intervened, and as expected, immediately came under attack. Messy, but definitely an attack.

Pounding them into the ground would have been fun, and probably therapeutic, but he needed things to end quickly and to melt away, maybe with the girl on his arm. No police, no questions from hotel security.

The first man, charging forward in a blind rage, went down easily. The second was larger and a bit more calculated in his approach. Mick fell for neither of his two feints, however, and when he got past the man’s flailing fists, he executed a textbook uchi mata, judo’s “throw of kings,” applying just enough extra mustard to the throw to make sure his opponent wouldn’t recover quickly.

Being a fugitive, even if only from nightclub security over a minor scuffle, gave Mick the familiar jolt of adrenaline, and he fell right back into old habits. He took the girl by the hand and slipped into the sea of bodies on the dance floor. When they got a safe distance away, he tried to calm her, although being so close to her, smelling the floral scent on her hair and losing himself in the depths of her ice-blue eyes, made rational thought difficult. When he noticed a yellow-shirted rent-a-cop getting too close, he made the decision to hide in plain sight. To plant a kiss on this girl he’d just met, this beautiful, fresh-faced angel, and hope that if she didn’t exactly respond, that she’d go with it long enough for the heat to blow over.

The “heat,” however, rather than blowing over, became a conflagration. An inferno.

The heat between Mick and Ayla, that is.

Mick expected the kiss to surprise her, and she did tense up for a moment, but she didn’t attempt to withdraw, and began to fervently return his passion. To all the world, they must have looked like long-term lovers, kissing and grinding and groping in the middle of the dance floor, when in reality they’d just met. Or not even officially met, actually.

The kiss lingered, with stops and starts, changing positions and angles as their bodies pressed close and Ayla could feel what seemed like an angry, throbbing beast in his pants, struggling to be set free.

When they finally, mutually came up for air, Ayla and Mick stared at each other in shared disbelief. He lifted the back of his hand to his bottom lip and wiped it, breaking into a smile. Ayla was dazed and breathless, but filled with a hunger like she’d never known.

Back in the window of his condo, Mick braced himself against the glass pulling furiously on his cock as he thought of the way she filled out that dress… how she tasted… how soft the back of her thigh felt when he reached down and cupped her ass, pulling her in tight. She yelped into his mouth when he took possession of her body like that, and she shuddered as she ground her hips against his thigh.

Fuck it. Mick thought of her climaxing, right there on the crowded dance floor, and he came. His cock pulsed as he gritted his t

eeth and emptied himself against the window.

As he finished, Mick stood up straight and stretched both arms over his head. He lived in a world filled with wealthy men, which meant beautiful women. But there was something about that girl from the club, all those years ago, that he always came back to. Her beauty, her… purity.

There was something fresh about her. She wasn’t at all need or desperate like so many of the women who filled the clubs he’d spent time in all over the world. She didn’t have an agenda or motive. She was an innocent as it got in his world.

Although as unknowing as she appeared, she turned out to be anything but.

Once they’d slipped out of the club and back out into the casino and found that quiet corner atop the parking garage, and they were as alone as they could be in the middle of one of the most action-packed miles of real estate on the planet, she demonstrated a fiery sexuality that almost overwhelmed him.

But if Mick spent too much time thinking about that garage roof, he’d never leave his condo and make it to his boss’s first appointment of the day, with the casino magnate who’d flown in from Macau to discuss a potential partnership with Watterson Gaming. Mick wasn’t needed on such occasions, per se, but Winston preferred to do business with his entire “team” nearby, legal advisors, financial people, and the muscle; Mick Merryweather.

After a shower and cleaning up the mess Ayla had inspired him to make, Mick donned his black suit and went to work.

Chapter 4

Preston had a meltdown at drop off, making one last plea for his mom to pass on work and take him to the water park. Then, the energy drink Ayla had been drinking on the car on the way to her job fell out of the cup holder when she had to make a sudden stop, soaking the entire right leg of her pants.

She was already running late, so there was no time go home and change. She used some Chipotle napkins from the floor behind the passenger seat to dab herself as dry as she could, but she was doomed to spend the first part of her shift wet and sticky, not to mention lacking the boost the rest of the can would have provided.

By the time she reached the time clock, it was 10:02, and her boss was waiting when she arrived at her desk.

“Late again? Sorry, but that’s an occurrence,” Teri reminded Ayla. As if she needed to be reminded. And as if she was actually sorry.

“That’s your third this quarter. That’s a write up.” The way Teri said “write up” with that scary grin on her face made Ayla want to punch her in her stupid Botoxed face.

Teri Palermo was in her early fifties, but she’d had so much work done in an attempt to look young and lure husband number five that she had a permanent Joker-style smile. “Next time you’re late is a suspension. And that’s back from lunch or break or anything. That would really suck to have to suspend you for something so stupid. Maybe you should take your job here a little more seriously. Your numbers haven’t really been that great lately anyway, right?”