High Octane Heroes (17 page)

Heat crawled up her neck. Telling herself to take no excuses for what she wanted was a lot easier in her head.

“I told myself before this last tour when I came home, if you were single, I was going to stop dragging my feet and ask you out. But I’m not the same man you knew. I’ve changed, and it’s not all good—”

She cupped his face. He’d followed her, fought for her and rescued her. She didn’t deserve him. “I don’t care. I know how I feel.”

His blue eyes glared. “Will you stop fucking interrupting me?”

“Sorry,” she murmured, but couldn’t help letting a smile steal across her lips because she thought she knew what he was having trouble saying. She waited, happiness blossoming inside her chest.

He pursed his lips, but there was a slight upturn in the corners. “I’m trying to say…I think I love you.”

 

 

 

 

 

W
hen the economy’s in the toilet, you take any job you can get. The best I could find after the auto plant shut down required wearing an industrial-strength pushup bra under a white tee, skintight, too-short shorts that gave me a pronounced camel toe, and involved pouring cheap bourbon out of top-shelf bottles into dirty glasses I foisted on the barflies at Lucky’s Corner Tavern. I missed dressing for the office, wearing skirt suits, blouses made of anything other than cotton, and bras that supported my breasts instead of trying to push them into my chin. I also missed my dignity, but most days it seemed a small price to pay to keep my creditors mollified. After all, I knew former coworkers who had exhausted their unemployment benefits and still hadn’t found work of any kind.

Barflies weren’t the only customers at Lucky’s. A drug dealer and his muscled-up posse had taken up semipermanent residence in the back corner where they could watch the front and rear
entrances while they conducted business with a steady stream of twitchy, lowlife street-level dealers.

Lucky Jr., the second-generation owner of the corner tavern, paid them no never mind so long as the drug dealer’s clientele didn’t bother his rummies. His attitude might just have been the posturing of an old man, because the illegal sawed-off shotgun he kept under the counter near the cash register might frighten some punk stick-up man brandishing a Saturday Night Special, but was insufficient against the overwhelming firepower of several fully automatic assault rifles.

I did my best to ignore the business transacted in the back corner of the bar and the men who conducted it, but one of the drug dealer’s muscled-up posse members caught my eye every time he walked in. Often dressed in a tight-fitting black T-shirt, faded button-fly Levi’s, and black lace-up work boots, he stood well over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and a thick chest that tapered down to a tight abdomen, firm ass, and thighs like tree trunks. The prominent bulge in the crotch of his jeans convinced me his thighs weren’t the only parts of him with redwood-like qualities, and his greasy, shoulder-length black hair and failure to shave on any kind of consistent schedule only enhanced his thuggish appearance. His associates called him Howitzer—often shortened to Howie—because of his big guns, biceps as big as my thighs.

Even though he was exactly the sort of man I avoided, just seeing Howie swagger into the bar was enough to make me wet with desire, and I snuck surreptitious glances at him throughout my shift. I caught him eyeing me several times, but no more often than the other men in the bar. After all, despite how much I disliked my required apparel, I dressed to draw attention, increase alcohol sales and earn extra tips.

No drugs ever changed hands inside the bar. The dealer who
camped out in the back corner supplied the street-level dealers, who visited him to pay their bills and their respects but picked up their supplies elsewhere. On any given night several thousand dollars—potentially nearing a hundred thousand—might be in play in the back corner, and the dealer’s posse was there to protect it.

I’d been working at the bar for more than a month before Howie ever spoke to me. One of the street-level dealers—a wiry little man whose eyes bounced left to right as if he were unable to focus—aggressively hit on me, suggesting in rather crude language what he wanted to stick in my mouth and what he expected me to do to it.

When I attempted to blow him off with a laugh and an equally crude comment about the probable size of his equipment, he reached across the bar and grabbed my arm, sinking sharp fingernails into my soft skin. I tried to pull away but his grip was too strong, and he pulled me tight against my side of the bar. I glanced to my left and realized I was too far from the cash register to grab the sawed-off.

By the time I returned my attention to the shifty-eyed man gripping my arm, Howie had left the back booth and had stepped behind him. He dropped his meaty fists on the man’s shoulders and squeezed. “There a problem here?”

I glared at the man gripping my arm. “Is there?”

The shifty-eyed little man glanced over his shoulder at Howie. “No, I—”

He released his hold on my arm as Howie grabbed his belt with one hand and lifted him onto his toes. Howie spun him around and pointed him toward the door, making him walk on his tiptoes all the way there. He pushed the door open, planted one big black boot on the man’s ass and shoved.

The door swung shut before I saw what happened to the
shifty-eyed drug dealer who had accosted me.

Howie returned to the bar. “Anybody ever gives you a problem like that,” he said with a nod toward the door, “let me know and I’ll take care of it for you.”

“So now you’re my self-appointed guardian angel?” I said, lifting my chin.

He stared into my eyes and lowered his voice so that only I could hear. “That’s more accurate than you realize.”

As I returned his gaze, Howie reached across the counter and gently touched my arm, his calloused fingertips brushing over the fingernail indentions left by the man who had accosted me. Unexpectedly, heat surged through my body, my heart began to race and my knees felt weak, exactly opposite of the reaction I’d had only a few minutes earlier when another man had touched me.

I knew I should pull away, but I didn’t because I wanted Howie to feel the same rush of desire I felt, and I wanted him to pull me across the counter and smother me with kisses even though it went against everything I believed was right.

“You’d better put something on that,” Howie said as he drew back his hand. “He broke the skin.”

Maybe that’s what finally pushed me over the edge. The thought that this big man, this thuggishly handsome man who existed only to protect and perpetuate a lifestyle that no self-respecting woman would ever find appealing, might be my Prince Charming, was so incongruous that it began to fuel my fantasies.

My love life had disappeared at the same time as my job at the auto plant, and the longer I went without, the more batteries I drained. During the next several months I often fantasized about Howie and how we might consummate our inappropriate fantasy relationship.

My favorite involved him taking me in the bar late at night after everyone had gone but the two of us.

Thinking I’m alone, I lock the front door and turn to see him coming from the men’s room, buttoning his fly.

I lick my lips with the tip of my tongue. “You don’t have to do that.”

He leaves his belt undone and crosses the bar to where I stand. He pulls me into his arms, crushes my breasts between us and covers my mouth with his. His kiss is deep, firm, insistent and soon his tongue is buried in my mouth and I suck on it.

Howie reaches down, cups my ass with his big hands and lifts me off the floor. He carries me to the bar and sets me on the worn wood. Without a word, he strips off my tee, my bra, my shorts and my thong, tossing them aside. He settles onto a bar stool and hooks my legs over his shoulders. Then he kisses his way up the inside of my legs until his face is buried in the soft tangle of hair at the juncture of my thighs.

He draws his thick tongue along the length of it, and I am so wet with desire he stops to swallow not once but twice. As he licks me, his two-day-old beard growth scratches my thighs, the sandpaper-like roughness a sexy contrast to the silky smooth strokes of his tongue.

He drives his tongue into me and pulls back, quickly finding the tight bud of my clit. He teases it, licks it, licks around it and then draws it between his teeth and gently holds it as he spanks it with his tongue.

As I near orgasm, I grab two handfuls of his slicked-back black hair. My hips buck up and down, my eyelids flutter and then I cry out. He continues tonguing me but I’ve had enough. I push against his forehead, making him stop.

Howie isn’t finished, though, and he lifts himself off the bar stool just enough to slide his jeans and underwear down to his
knees. He pulls me off the bar and into his lap. The mushroom cap of his cock presses against my slick opening, and with only a slight readjustment, his cock penetrates me and I slide down its full length.

I lean back against the bar and hook my ankles behind Howie. He wraps one arm around my waist, places the other hand on my lower abdomen, his thumb pressed against my clit as he drives into me, and I come a second time before he erupts within me.

My fantasies remain only fantasies, because I would never allow myself to become involved with a man like the Howitzer, but the fantasies continue for several more weeks.

Then one Thursday night, a slow night for the bar but a busy night for the dealer in the back corner, something went wrong. I heard gunshots outside and the shifty-eyed street-level dealer who accosted me many months earlier burst into the bar followed by two other men, all of them armed.

The two legitimate customers in the bar scrambled for the exits and I dropped to the floor behind the bar. I heard gunfire so close it practically deafened me, but could see nothing of what was happening.

Then Howie dove over the bar and landed on top of me, pinning me to the floor with his weight. I had frequently fantasized about his hard body on top of me, but never like this.

“You’ll be okay,” he said, his gaze locking with mine, and his lips only a fraction of an inch from my mouth. “Everything will be okay. Just stay down.”

He pushed himself off me, scrambled to the other end of the bar and shot a man who was running down the hall past the restrooms, headed toward the rear exit.

After a moment of silence, Howie eased out from behind the bar. I heard him moving around, and I slid quietly toward the cash register.

“You can get up now,” he said. “It’s over.”

I rose with Lucky Jr.’s sawed-off shotgun in my hands. I saw the carnage of the attempted robbery, but did my best to ignore it.

“Not yet, it isn’t,” I told Howie. “Drop your gun and lift your hands.”

After Howie did as instructed, I rested the shotgun’s shortened barrel on the bar and used one hand to reach for the phone, intending to call the police. Before I had finished dialing, though, the bar was overrun with uniformed police, and I was instructed to drop the shotgun.

 

I spent the night at the police station answering questions, and I returned to work as soon as Lucky’s Corner Tavern reopened. The bar did a booming business the night the police finished combing the crime scene, and Lucky Jr. recognized the bar’s new appeal. He didn’t bother patching the bullet holes. He raised prices on everything, and he even had to hire additional help to serve all the thrill-seekers who sought out the bar.

Two months after the shootout at Lucky’s, at the end of a particularly busy Saturday night, I pushed the last customer out the door and was about to lock it when a big man in a blue pinstriped suit pushed the door open.

“I’m sorry,” I said without looking up from the badge hanging from his belt, “we’re closed.”

“Even for me?”

When I recognized Howie’s voice, I looked up into the big man’s eyes. He was clean-shaven and his greasy, shoulder-length hair had been transformed into a crew cut. As my heart raced and heat rushed to my core, I realized my self-appointed guardian angel wasn’t the dangerous low-life thug I had been imprudently lusting after for months, but was instead exactly
the kind of man of which forever-after dreams are made. I pushed the door closed behind him and locked it.

Then Howie scooped me into his arms and lifted me from the floor. He kissed me—kissed me hard—and carried me across the room to set me on the bar.

“You don’t know how often I’ve dreamed of exactly this,” I murmured as he stripped off my tee.

And then Special Agent Howard Hardcastle made my dreams come true.

 

 

 

 

 

E
ven at seventy miles per hour, Michael Kent spotted the woman on the roadside in serious trouble. He checked his mirrors and lifted his foot off the gas before crossing two lanes to enter the shoulder. He tapped the brakes, slowed to a stop and threw his transmission into reverse. The Mustang closed the gap to the haphazardly parked SUV in a blink.

The stranded woman waved her arms at him in frantic motions. Her mouth formed a perfect
O
as she issued screams he couldn’t hear above the traffic noise or the sound of his tires kicking up cinders.

As he opened his door, she appeared by his window, tears streaming down her face. She pointed to her car. “My son!”

Mickey went into full paramedic mode with the realization a medical emergency, and not a mechanical problem, waited in the SUV. He hurried to the woman’s car and flung the rear door open.

Not good. The kid, who couldn’t have been older than seven,
was already turning blue as he struggled for breath.

“I called nine-one-one,” the mother cried. “But he needs help
now!
”