Have Mercy: A Loveswept Contemporary Erotic Romance (8 page)

Tom felt himself shaking—anger, unfulfilled lust, pain, he wasn’t sure what combination coursed through him, but it felt physical as it moved through his body. “They ought to be calling you a goddess,” he said. “A sexy, confident, talented goddess. And I hope I never hear anyone call you anything less.”

As he spoke, thunder rumbled in the distance, the wind picking up the scent of rain and carrying it across the field. There were actual tears in Emme’s eyes when she looked up at him. She reached for his face, her hand stretched out between them. Lightning illuminated the sky behind her, streaking through the building clouds. By the time she actually touched him, just the pad of her thumb against his cheek, thunder had joined the lightning, the sound making them both jump.

“It’s still a bad idea,” she whispered. “We’re on tour. We’re coworkers. It’s unprofessional.”

Tom leaned into her touch for a bare moment before the raindrops started.

Fat, heavy things they were, hitting the ground with as much force as his head had earlier. Before he could say something astute, like, “I think it’s going to storm,” the warning shower turned into a torrent, water streaming from the sky.

“Get in the van.” Emme had to shout to be heard over the sound of the rain. They ran, slipping in the red clay, mud splashing up to their knees. Tom felt himself sliding across the ground and had to
laugh when he windmilled his arms like a cartoon character to stay upright. He turned to see that Emme was smiling, too, hair plastered to her skull, T-shirt now entirely transparent and the most beautiful article of clothing he’d ever seen. He pulled open the door of the van and boosted her inside, letting himself get a solid handful of her ass as he did.

He slammed the van door behind him. Windows completely cloaked by the rain, inside of the van illuminated only by flashes of lightning, sound completely muffled by the rush of the downpour like a freight train, the van felt almost cozy. Intimate. Private.

Emme crouched by the seat, dripping onto the van floor. There was mud smeared on her cheek somehow. Tom’s feet squelched in his sneakers when he scooted toward her.

Emme looked up at him through rain-spiked lashes. Her eyes grew bigger as he lifted the hem of his T-shirt, wringing water out of it as he went. “C’mere,” he said, but it came out as a whisper under the pounding of the rain. She leaned closer to him; he could feel her breath against his bare belly where he’d lifted his shirt, and the warmth against his wet skin raised shivery goose bumps. When he lifted the tail of his shirt to her cheek, she closed her eyes and gripped his hip to keep her balance.

Emme crouched below him, her hand on his hip, his shirt lifted, sent a million beautiful and filthy thoughts racing through Tom’s mind. But since she’d stopped them earlier in the field, he just took a deep breath and pressed his damp T-shirt against her skin, wiping the mud off.

Emme made a little sound, a cross between a hum and a grunt. He felt it in his midsection, the vibration of her voice against his hand through the fabric of his shirt. When she opened her eyes and looked up at him, there was a predatory gleam in her gaze.

“You should get out of that wet shirt,” she said.

Tom found himself obeying before he even had a chance to think. He lifted it off over his head and tossed it aside, and it landed with a heavy splat somewhere in the back of the van. Emme’s hands were on him immediately, rubbing up and down his sides.

“You’re shivering,” she said. “You ought to change into something dry.” She made her voice sound brisk and businesslike, but there was a tilt to the corners of her mouth and a gleam in her eye that felt like a challenge.

“Should I?” Tom asked. His voice came out deeper than he’d intended.

Emme leaned back against the front seat. “Definitely. It can’t be healthy to sit around in wet clothes like that.”

Tom hesitated for just a moment. The van wasn’t tall enough for him to be able to stand up
straight, and awkwardly hunched over the seat wasn’t his idea of the best place to try and perform a striptease. But Emme had told him to do something, and he wanted to make her happy, and the way her eyes were eating up his bare chest sent him right over the edge from arousal into hot, pure lust. Gaze locked with hers, he reached for his belt buckle, watching as she flushed pink, her breathing fast.

Tom had just started to pull the leather of his belt through the slide of the buckle when the front door slammed open. He jumped, letting out a yelp and smacking the top of his head against the van roof.

Water gushed into the driver’s side as Guillermo’s face appeared, his hair and beard drenched. “Holy shitballs, it’s raining like a motherfucker!”

Emme was up and across the backseat before Tom could react. “Here’s a dry shirt,” she said, tossing one at him. “We got caught out in it, too,” she told Guillermo.

Tom pulled the shirt down over his head. It smelled like Emme. “Both got totally soaked before we got back in here,” he heard himself say, protesting too long and too loudly.

Guillermo climbed all the way into the driver’s seat and shut the door. He gave both Emme and Tom a long, considering look before he spoke. “Dave’s waiting in the tow truck,” he said. “Turns out that first house? The one we drove by? Guy who owns it also owns the body shop in town.” He shook his head. “God, I love Mississippi.”

Emme rubbed her hands together. “Great!” she said. “So looks like we can still make it to Tuscaloosa tonight. Just a little off schedule, but we won’t have to cancel.” She steadfastly ignored Tom’s eyes, even as he tried to catch her gaze. She pulled on her jacket. “Let’s go.”

By the time they arrived in Tuscaloosa, late, Emme was a tightly coiled spring of unfulfilled desire, anxiety, and frustration. She hated being late; few things made her feel so out of control. She’d gritted her teeth for three hours while Dave and Guillermo’s new buddy Jimmy had towed the van and replaced the tire, chattering happily about college football the whole time. She had refrained from telling Dave to drive faster, although she could feel her foot searching for an invisible accelerator from the backseat. The minute she’d had cell reception again, she’d called the bar manager and explained what had happened, promised him they’d still be on time, and managed, somehow, to sound professional rather than frantic. She had sorted through three different colors of binders to plan an alternate route, scanned her spreadsheets for adjustments she could make if she had to.

As they pulled up at the back of the bar, only a half hour to go before their show was scheduled to begin, Emme desperately needed to regain some of her control. To his everlasting credit, Dave took one look at her as she leapt out of the van and said, “We’ve got the sound check. Go change.”

Emme took a deep breath. She hoped he could see the appreciation in her eyes when she thanked him.

But she
really
hoped he didn’t see when she leaned in close to Tom as she pulled her bag out of the van and whispered, “Meet me in the green room,” so low it was almost like she only brushed her lips against his ear. She could almost tell herself she hadn’t made a sound, that his eyes hadn’t flashed up to meet hers before he turned away so fast she must have imagined it.

The club where they were playing, like most of the bars they played in, fell somewhere between slightly seedy and downright dirty. The bar manager led her to the green room, which was neither green nor a room, but instead was a basement niche carved out from the space underneath the stage. The space was dark and low-ceilinged, the concrete floor cracked and sloped and gathering puddles of indeterminate liquid. Somewhere a pipe was leaking, the steady dripping rasping like sandpaper against her already raw nerves.

The only light in the room came from a naked bulb hanging so low from the ceiling that Emme nearly walked into it. A giant mirror hung along one wall, smudged with God only knew how many years’ worth of dust and fingerprints.

Emme picked her way across the floor and set her dress and makeup bag down on the rickety folding table in front of the mirror.

She took a deep breath and a good look at herself in the mirror. Her hair had dried into fuzzy waves, her T-shirt was still slightly damp, and there was mud caked on the hem of her jeans and her Converse sneakers. She looked like an Emily. She felt like an Emily.

Then she heard the shuffle of a shoe sole against the stairs, a soft, deep voice saying, “Emme?”

This is my phone booth
. Emme looked into the mirror. Behind her, Tom stood in the doorway to the green room, looking a little nervous, a little uncertain, one foot still on the bottom step, as if she might turn around and tell him to leave.

Emme met his eyes in the mirror and waited.

Tom took another step into the room. “I told Dave and Guillermo that I needed a smoke.”

“So smoke.”

Emme watched through the mirror as he pulled a cigarette and lighter out of his pocket. He’d changed shirts and rolled up his sleeves to reveal his forearms. That tattoo. Her panicked heartbeat slowed back down to a measured pace, but it was beating in her clit.

Tom cupped the flame and raised it to his cigarette, took a long, slow inhale, meeting her eyes.

“Tonight you can look, but not touch,” she said, and felt a wash of calm run through her even as her nipples tightened at the thought.

Tom nodded and exhaled, not moving an inch from his spot just inside the room’s entrance. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed, and Emme liked the thought of him being nervous.

The light from the single bulb cast shadows over the planes of his face as she watched him in the mirror, the glow from the tip of his cigarette an orange spark against the darkness of the room. He looked disreputable in that dank basement room, the kind of man it might be dangerous to be around.

Just how well do I really know him?
That thought sent a jolt of arousal straight through her. Well enough to know that he wouldn’t move from that spot unless she told him to, but she could pretend. She could imagine that the reason she made him stay there was because she was afraid of what he might do to her, not because she knew she couldn’t trust herself if he got anywhere near her reach.

Emme wasn’t sure if she wanted to reward him for the sight of his naked chest in the van earlier or if she wanted to punish him for tempting her with what she knew she shouldn’t want. What she did know, with certainty, was that every minute he stood watching her she felt stronger, sexier.

Emme reached for the hem of her T-shirt and pulled the damp fabric slowly up her body,
revealing the pale white skin of her belly inch by inch. When Tom inhaled sharply behind her, she bit back a smile.
Good
.

She folded her T-shirt and set it down on the table, then reached for her brush. Wearing just her black lace bra and her jeans, she teased her hair at the crown, fluffing it into a fine blonde halo. As she coiled the mass of it onto the top of her head, Emme felt the weight of Tom’s gaze like a fingertip against the vulnerable, exposed skin on the back of her neck. She closed her eyes and shivered. God, she wanted him to touch her, but this was its own delicious agony.

When Emme opened her eyes again, she checked for Tom in the mirror. He hadn’t moved except to bring the cigarette to his lips, slowly and deliberately. He inhaled, eyes locked on hers. When he shifted, she noticed two things: his erection, pressing obviously against the front of his jeans, and that his hand shook as he lowered the cigarette from his mouth.

She unzipped her muddy jeans and pushed them to the floor.

Emme turned to admire her own ass in her black boy shorts—something she never would have done without an audience, something she did now for the pure pleasure she got from the groan Tom made when she did it. Her heart thudded against her sternum the way it did during a song, when all the parts and pieces and instruments worked together with the energy of the audience; only this time, she was all the instruments, all the lines of music, and Tom was her audience of one. When she tried to name the feelings soaring through her, two opposing thoughts came to mind:
powerful
and
vulnerable
.

Emme pulled her black garter belt and black silk stockings out of her bag. She hooked the belt around her waist, watching Tom watch her in the mirror all the while. His face had darkened, and his hand hovered in the air in front of his fly, as if he wasn’t quite sure where to put it. She gave him just the tiniest nod of permission as she bent over to slide one stocking onto her foot.

Tom ran his hand over the front of his cock as she rolled the silk slowly up her leg, the trail of fabric against her skin its own brand of erotic torture. Her fingers brushed against the bare skin at the top of her thigh as she hooked the lace of her stocking to the garter. She sighed at the sensation at the same time Tom sighed behind her, his eyes falling closed.

“Look at me.”

His eyes snapped open and met hers in the mirror again.

“Good.” Emme gave him a hint of a smile as she unrolled the second stocking up her leg.

It was too dark for Emme to see Tom’s eyes, but she knew they were blue, surprisingly light with his dark hair. He’d finished the cigarette and crushed it out on the dirty floor. His eyelids had
grown heavy, his lips parted, mouth open and lewd. The sight sent images chasing through her head, a flipbook of pictures of what he might look like right before he came, how his face might glaze with pleasure if she sank to her knees and took him into her mouth. The thought pulsed through her as she watched him watching her.

Stockings attached, she leaned over the table to get closer to the mirror for her makeup. She knew as she did it that the action pushed her ass up, displayed it for him.
He could take me right here. I’m already bent over the table and ready. But he won’t
.

Unless I tell him to
.

Oh, that thought was delicious. So delicious that she had to give a little wiggle to feel the slide of the lace against her clit as she heard him make a noise that sounded startlingly close to a whimper.