Dance of the Rogue Read online

  “Sweetie, you put the make on me months ago. I made my choice.”

  Rolf gave her an uncharacteristically sober expression. “Yeah, but then I had an ulterior motive. He wasn’t fit to live with until I put the move on you and forced him to make a decision. We sure did make him jealous, didn’t we? Stubborn as a mule, our Magnus was.”

  “Yes, well, I was—am—just as stubborn.” Her smile lit her face from within. “We have some interesting conversations.”

  It was Rolf’s turn to laugh out loud. He gave her a quick hug. “Still. Any time you want something new and delicious, you give me a call.”

  She gave him a long, theatrical sigh. “Are you practicing for later tonight? Or are you stalling so nobody accosts you in the parking lot—for a change?”

  Rolf narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing, child.” She patted his cheek. “Just don’t let a cop catch you.”

  With that she turned and tossed over her shoulder, “All the students are out of the building, but I still have some bookkeeping to do. Be sure the door’s locked on your way out, okay?”

  “I will.” Rolf frowned. Was he that transparent? Or did her students brag to her about their conquest of him? If so, they probably didn’t know he and Kat were family. Thoughtful now, he let his mind wander to all the one-night stands he’d picked up at this class, at Soren’s bar—hell, anywhere and everywhere. More often than not, the ones he chose were tall, model-thin with enhanced tits, artfully made up and, most important, reckless and eager. Sometimes he didn’t even ask their names. Were they just using him to scratch their itch? Yeah, he’d taken out a couple of them on second and third dates, ending up, of course, in their beds, but soon after the conquest, every one of them had lost their appeal.

  Crap. He was just reacting to Kat’s radiant smile when she talked about Magnus. That love shit wasn’t for him. Bad boys didn’t settle down. They seized opportunity whenever and wherever. They wouldn’t let all of tonight’s blatant foreplay go to waste.

  And he was primo bad boy.

  Shaking off his melancholy mood, Rolf strode out of the dressing room and down the stairs to the back door. After it slammed shut behind him, he checked to be sure the lock had engaged. He didn’t worry about Kat being alone downtown at night. The gallery had high-tech security and her car was parked inside an attached garage, so she wouldn’t be accosted.

  But he would. And he looked forward to it.

  Yep. There she was, she of the Angelina Jolie mouth. Looking for the real thing to suck on instead of the tip of a wood-handled artist’s brush.

  “Hey there.” The throaty voice sounded like velvet rose petals as she approached him, leading with her hips like a runway model. About twenty-four, he gauged, she was decked out in a denim miniskirt and a light blue sweater-type top that buttoned down the front and ended shy of her waist.

  “Hey yourself.”

  “You made my mouth water.” She reached up with delicate hands and glided her palms across the front of his Thor’s Hammer T-shirt. “Correction. You make my mouth water. Present tense. And I can think of only one way to quench my thirst.”

  She leaned into him as her arms slid around his shoulders. She pressed her tits into him. Rubbed herself up and down against him like a cat. “My car’s right over there. Under the street lamp. The one that’s burned out.”

  His hands burrowed under the blue top, skimmed over soft, warm skin. She even smelled like rose petals. “I’d better walk you to your car then, so you’ll be safe.” He bit lightly on her earlobe, tracked his palms higher up under her shirt. She leaned away from him a fraction, enough to allow him easy access to her tits. He palmed them, a pair of heavy globes with rock-hard nipples under a silky bra.

  “Nice tits. Show them to me.”

  The words were barely out of his mouth when she pulled her arms away and reached for the buttons. In seconds she had the top off and dangling from one hand.

  “Oh yeah, baby.” He bent forward and clamped his mouth on one ripe tit through an almost transparent bra. She moaned and arched her back, thrusting the firm flesh closer into his face.

  “Mmmm.” He moved to the other tit and wet it too, then raised his head to admire how distended her brown nipples were. “Take it off.”

  “I will. But let’s get to the car first.” She looked around the empty parking lot. “We’re standing right under a lit lamppost.”

  “All the better to see you. Come on. Show me what you’ve got.”

  After a second or two of deliberation, the blonde smiled. Then lifted her hands to the front clasp, opened the bra and pulled the cups to the sides of her breasts, 36-DD if they were an inch.

  “Beautiful.” Store-bought, but still beautiful, he thought. Kudos to her plastic surgeon. He stroked the firm flesh in spiraling circles until he reached her nipples. Watching the sexy droop of her eyelashes, he pinched both nipples.

  She yelped.

  In a flash he bent down and laved first one then the other, then suckled gently. “There. Does that feel better?”

  Those plump lips made a moue. “That hurt. You’re such a bad boy, I’m going to have to punish you.”

  “Oh yeah? Like how?”

  She flung her arms around his waist, rubbed her bare breasts against his T-shirt, buried her face in the crook of his shoulder. “I think you’d better shield me from prying eyes.” She stuck out her tongue and lapped at the strong muscle in his neck. “Come. You’ll have to guide me, because I’ll be walking backwards.”

  How could he resist? “Okay, babe, how about we dance?” He placed both his large hands on her tiny waist and began to hum a tune made popular by Mariah Carey, sliding one foot in front of the other in time to his off-key music until they reached her car, a late-model two-seater, in the shadows where the light from the lamppost didn’t quite reach. He backed her right up to the driver’s door.

  “No, no,” she said in a pseudo-stern voice. “I’m punishing you, remember?”

  He lifted his hands off her soft, warm body. “Go to it.”

  “Switch places. Your back against the door. Yeah. Like that. Spread your arms out and rest them on the roof. That’s good. Your punishment will be to stay absolutely still.” She gave him a seductive smile that made her eyes glow even in the dim light of a half-moon. “No matter what.”

  Rolf settled himself against the car, feet slightly apart for balance, palms down on the summer-warmed metal of the roof. He didn’t have long to wait. She reached for the five-button placket of his jeans, unbuttoned them, tugged the pants down his hips. With no shorts to hold it back, his cock, hard and huge, sprang free.

  “Oooooh, I love a man who goes commando style.” Without further preliminaries, she dropped to her knees and wrapped her bee-stung lips around his Magnum. Instinctively, Rolf rocked his hips into her face and brought his hands down to grab hold of her head.

  “Uh-uh.” She bolted to her feet. “Absolutely still. Remember your punishment.”

  “Aw, sweetheart, you make me forget myself. Your mouth is everything a man ever dreamed of.”

  Around her pout, she murmured, “I guess there’s no sense in punishing myself, right? Denying myself that absolutely gorgeous cock would be really stupid. It’s so yummy, all big and purple and throbbing. And just waiting for my mouth.”

  “Look, darlin’, my hands are right where you ordered. Why don’t you continue?”

  She made a greedy sound in her throat and went down on him with an eagerness and expertise that belied her relative youth. She sucked the hard length of him way into her throat while massaging his balls with one hand and, with the other, stroking whatever part of his cock wasn’t in her mouth. The lady was really enjoying herself.

  Timing her wasn’t even on his radar screen, but it seemed like only seconds had gone by when she did something that pushed him right to the brink. Rolf pulled his hands off the roof and fisted them in her long blonde hair, drawing her face even closer to his crotch as
he pumped his hips into her. She grabbed his ass cheeks with both hands and squeezed hard, her long fingernails digging into his skin.

  With a fervent curse, he shot wave after wave of cum into her voracious mouth. Far in the back of his mind, in the minuscule part still thinking rationally, he was glad it turned out this way—no condom to dispose of, no messy juices to clean up. And he probably wouldn’t have to satisfy her. The way she milked him out of every drop of cum, it was obvious she was getting her own rocks off.

  In a seductive voice he tossed off some sweet nothings as if by rote and stroked her hair as she continued to suckle and lap at his still throbbing cock. Finally she drew her head back, slowly exposing the deflating length of him until she released the head with an audible sound. He could see it still wet and gleaming from their melded bodily fluids.

  Now came the part he liked least of all, the exchange of names and maybe phone numbers, the vague promises, the expectations they always had once they’d swapped spit and other stuff, then the awkward good-nights. But she surprised him.

  She gathered up the shirt and bra she’d dropped to the pavement and rose to her feet, rubbing her bare tits across his torso as she did so. “Thank you for priming the pump,” she murmured. Forgoing the bra, she slipped her arms into the soft blue sweater and buttoned it. “My boyfriend will thank you too. I’m gonna fuck him so good tonight, he’ll pop the question.”

  With that, she moved him aside to open the door then slid behind the wheel of the roadster. She retrieved the keys from under the seat, started the powerful engine and pulled out of the parking slot, leaving Rolf standing there, his limp dick hanging out and his mouth hanging open.

  Then he laughed.

  No work and all play on his part. Life couldn’t get any better than that.

  He buttoned his jeans and tugged the T-shirt down over the waistband. Whistling, he strode to the side of the lot nearest the building, where his own car was parked. He opened the door—it was old enough that he didn’t worry about locking it; no one would steal it—and his mouth dropped open again.

  “I see you had your little appetizer out there,” said the brunette with the long legs, sitting in the back seat. In fact, he could see exactly how long her legs were. She was totally naked. “Come here and let’s have the main course.”

  Rolf shrugged and dove right in. Just like Warren Beatty in Shampoo.

  Chapter Three

  In between swaths of the windshield wiper, Fantine saw her target in the neon sign, “Thor’s Hammer”. Engaging her blinker, she turned the RV into the driveway alongside the pub on the corner of a pair of busy streets—a good location, she noted. Her practiced eye skimmed the two-story building, with its well-maintained, red-brick exterior and an asphalt parking lot alongside, running the length of the structure. A rainy Saturday afternoon in July didn’t seem to deter patrons. The lot was almost too full to allow her, even with power steering, to jockey the twenty-three footer nose-out into three parking spaces at a diagonal.

  The rain had almost let up, but she wasn’t going to ruin her expensive designer sandals in a puddle. She swung out of the driver’s chair, settled a rain hat on her head and yellow slicker over her two-piece knit dress and, carrying her shoes in one hand, disembarked from the passenger side.

  And stepped right into a puddle. The warm water caressed her bare toes, the bottoms of her feet, the skin around her instep. She had the strongest urge to dance the way Gene Kelly did in Singing in the Rain, one of her favorite movies.

  What the hell, she thought with a quick glance around. No one was walking about, she was half hidden in a parking lot, and the pull was irresistible. Spreading her arms out, she began doing a soft-shoe while crooning the words under her breath. Water splattered her ankles, her calves, reminding her of carefree childhood days splashing through the runoff along the curb after a rainstorm. She traipsed to the far end of the lot then back past the RV on her way to the sidewalk, spinning and laughing, singing and humming.

  Just like Nonie would. Her own grandmother had been quite stodgy, but Nonie would have joined her in the water. Fantine was sure of that.

  The thought of Nonie sobered her. She was here to find Nonie’s grandson, not to emulate Gene Kelly. She walked around to the front of the pub, entered the vestibule and used the scarf from around her neck to dry her feet. Tucking the damp scarf into her slicker’s pocket, she slipped into her high-heeled sandals, buckled the ankle straps and opened the door to the pub.

  * * * * *

  “So Kat arranged for me to crash one of the Platinum Society’s shindigs. You know, the sex club?” Rolf wiggled his eyebrows like Groucho Marx before biting into his cheeseburger breakfast.

  Lunch patrons lingered in several of the booths inside Thor’s Hammer, and two regulars played a game of darts in the far corner. Half the guys on barstools watched the Atlanta first baseman knock a homer off Philadelphia’s relief pitcher on the big-screen TV mounted near the ceiling, while the rest of them nursed their beers in solitary contemplation. Rolf sat near the on-tap beers, where Soren was building a Guinness.

  “Man, I’ll tell you, there was enough pussy in that house to wear me out! I think I fucked four or five of them. Or maybe I did the redhead twice. I don’t remember.”

  “T.M.I., Rolf. Too much information.”

  But Rolf continued undeterred. “And you know what they say. Variety is the spice of life. Believe me, there was plenty of spice in that place. Matter of fact, a couple of them surprised the hell out of me.”

  “Which means you don’t have any hell left in you?”

  “Ha-ha, good one, Soren. Nope, I plan to live like Dorian Gray, be the baddest Badass around, and still stay young and studly while my portrait gets old and wrinkled up in the attic.”

  Soren moved smoothly to one end of the bar to serve the Guinness then returned to Rolf’s vicinity and began to wipe dry the smooth mahogany surface. “You know who you remind me of? Not Dorian Gray. Don Giovanni.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “The Italian version of Don Juan. It was the opera Crystal had me watching the other night on PBS.”

  Rolf rolled his eyes. His quiet, keep-to-himself brother, watching opera? But then, the way Crystal looked at Soren—hell, just the way she looked—she could make him do just about anything, Rolf figured. “He was the hero, of course, right?”

  “Let’s just say he was the main character. Not a hero. Anyway, this Don Giovanni was a love-’em-and-leave-’em type, like you. In fact, his servant sings a song about him, that he has six hundred and some lovers in Italy and one thousand and some conquests in Spain.”

  Rolf pondered that a moment. “It’s close. Only a few more and I can match that number.” He smiled his bad-boy smile that had melted many a woman’s heart. “Guess I oughta call myself Don, huh?”

  “Maybe so. It might forewarn them.”

  “Even better. Then they’ll know I’m the great lover they’ve been waiting for.”

  At the waitress’s call, Soren deftly mixed a gin and tonic with lime and put it on her tray without missing a beat. “Before you plot today’s conquests with your new name, here’s the rest of the story. A dead man’s statue comes to life and arrives at Giovanni’s palace demanding that he repent. When he doesn’t, the statue sinks into hellfire, dragging Giovanni with him.”

  “Won’t happen to me. I don’t talk to statues.”

  One of the baseball aficionados gestured to Soren for another round of beers. Rolf stood as his brother moved to fill the request. “I’m going out back to get a cuppa, okay?”

  Soren waved him away and Rolf wandered to the kitchen. Nodding a greeting to the chef, he helped himself to a mug of strong coffee with three sugars. His attention was snagged by a moving swath of yellow outside. He moseyed over to the employee entrance door and peered out the small, square window. A woman in a yellow slicker and rain hat was splashing around barefoot from puddle to puddle in the parking lot, her face raised to catch the last misty
drops as the rain subsided. As she spun in a slow circle, Rolf’s breath stopped. The look on her face was one of sheer ecstasy, as if she’d just had an orgasm.

  He shook his head to clear it. He had sex on the brain—hadn’t he just been regaling Soren with his exploits? Idiot. She looked happy because she was barefoot and acting like a six-year-old, not because she had a dildo up her ass.

  Still, something about her unguarded demeanor called to him. He couldn’t remember his childhood being carefree and happy. How had she preserved such a childlike aptitude for pure fun when he threw himself from woman to woman looking for satisfaction? Or, he thought with a frown, distraction.

  Rolf opened the door to pursue the matter, but saw her walk to the street and turn right at the sidewalk. Was she coming to the pub? If not, he determined to follow her and discover her secret.

  * * * * *

  Soren was washing glasses when the door opened and a woman walked in. As he had for the five years he’d owned the bar, he sized up the newcomer in a glance. She wore a rain-spattered, tent-style yellow slicker that hid her figure, a wide-brimmed rain hat covering her hair and shadowing her face. High-heeled red sandals with straps that crisscrossed her ankles and exposed bright red polish on her bare toes, made her look fairly tall, about five-ten if you counted the heels.

  The lunch crowd had thinned out, leaving stools empty here and there. He watched unobtrusively as she strode the length of the bar and stopped at the stool farthest away from the TV. Absently he noted that the home team was now behind by seven runs. The woman flicked off her hat, slid the coat off her shoulders and settled them both over the adjoining barstool. She packed a good one-seventy on her frame, not quite an Oprah or Anna Nicole Smith at their heaviest, but solid and apparently well toned, with pronounced curves. Her brown hair nested atop her head in a thick topknot.

  She wore a knitted, cream-colored outfit—a straight skirt ending at her knees and a sleeveless top with a deep oval neckline that should probably have had a scarf covering at least a portion of her ample breasts.