Page 5 of Look What You Made Me Do

Apart from that one time.

But she’d come a long way since the sweetness of that brief shy press of lips she’d granted him at the end of their particularly memorable dance at homecoming. Hell, she’d graduated with honors in the kissing stakes.

There’d been nothing shy or sweet about Ella’s kiss just now. It’d been hot and hungry. The same with that look in her eyes. Even in the cute little gingham shirt she was wearing showing zero cleavage, there was a directness in her gaze that left him in no doubt what she wanted.

“Please,” she whispered.

Sweet Jesus. How was he supposed to resist that streak of raw desperation?

“I… don’t have any condoms.”

Without missing a beat, she reached into her back pocket and pulled out a strip of five. They concertinaed down like a pack of magic cards before she threw them at him. They bounced off his chest and fell to the floor.

“That should do us.”

Jake looked at the little packets of temptation. Five? He swallowed as his gaze returned to hers. “Kel’s off shift in an hour.”

“Then why are you wasting time?”

He wished he knew as his gaze returned to the condoms, feeling their lure almost like a physical force.

She gave a frustrated growl low in her throat. “You know, Jake, this wasn’t how I pictured it.”

He laughed. “Oh yeah? How’d you picture it?”

Glaring at him, she grasped the knot at her navel where the tails of her shirt had been tied. In one quick movement she unknotted it then ripped the shirt open. Buttons flew in all directions, pinging on the wooden floorboards as she shrugged out of the garment, flinging it down beside the condoms.

“You weren’t talking, for a start.”

Jake’s laughter cut out. A gentleman may not have looked but there wasn’t one person in Trently who would ever accuse Jake of being a gentleman. So he looked. In fact, he barely stopped himself from licking his lips.

He’d seen a bra like that hanging on the Lucas clothesline when he’d been fourteen. Red lace. D cup. He’d known it was Ella’s – Rachel was smaller and hadn’t ever been big on underwear anyway.

There was a point at which resistance became futile and God help him, he’d reached that point. Lifting his fingers to his mouth, he mimed zipping them closed and throwing away the key.

Then he slid a finger through her belt loop and yanked.

2

DELUCA, SOUTHSIDE SUBURB OF INVERBORO, WISCONSIN, POPULATION 2 MILLION

Two years later

Ella groped her way through the crowd to meet Rosie at their usual booth. Except it wasn’t their usual booth. Nothing about the mom-and-pop neighborhood bar was usual anymore.

It had been destroyed, the new owner making no attempt at retaining any of the kitschy honky-tonk charm.

The death knell had sounded a few months ago when Ed and Phyllis, owners for the last thirty years, had announced they were selling up and buying an RV. The entire time it had been shut down for refurbishment there’d been an awful feeling in the pit of Ella’s stomach.

The sign going up last week had confirmed her worst nightmares. The Touchdown was a sports bar.

Gone were the slightly shabby, chipped linoleum tables and worn red leather bench seats and the endearing faux flaming torches that balanced on the walls, throwing a comforting blanket of warm yellow light. In their place was horrible retina-detaching neon and big-screen TVs in every direction.

The display of beer cans from around the world had been sacrificed as well. As had the comfortable, wide wooden bar stools that actually supported her ass, replaced by trendy metallic structures that looked like they’d crumple beneath Ariana Grande’s svelte frame.

The cheesy Coolidge prints of dogs playing poker and snooker above the pool tables were gone, too. In their place were framed footy jerseys and other sporting paraphernalia.

And it was dark. Black-hole dark.

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