Page 13 of Look What You Made Me Do

The following Friday, Ella arrived at Jake’s bar too late to grab the usual booth and with Rosie cooking dinner for Simon at home, it didn’t make sense to take up an entire table.

She just wanted a couple of quiet drinks and a chance to think before meeting the new man in her friend’s life. This place might not be the quiet, laid-back bolt hold of old and, she was running the risk of coming face-to-face with Jake again, but it was close to home and old habits died hard.

So, she’d chosen a bar stool and was consequently balancing precariously on an inadequate piece of chrome and plastic while her butt cheeks fought and lost the battle with gravity. She felt like an elephant sitting on a pogo stick.

How the hell she was going to get off was a total mystery.

She’d fought with Cam today. Again. He’d skipped school.

Again. How was she supposed to be the authority around Deluca High when she couldn’t even control her own brother?

And damn it all – why wouldn’t he let her in?

“Hi.”

Ella looked up from her wine to find a tall, nice-looking guy about her age standing next to her. He was wearing a suit, his tie pulled loose.

“Haven’t I seen you some place before?”

Ella groaned inwardly. Just what she needed right now – a pick-up line. She could see a group of guys watching them and nudging each other in her peripheral vision and had no desire to be part of some horrible dare.

“Yes,” she said unsmilingly. “That’s why I don’t go there anymore.”

The guy’s confident smile slipped and for a moment Ella felt a twinge of guilt but the loud guffawing in the background hardened her heart. She watched him slink back to his friends, who slapped him vigorously on the back.

Ella returned to her wine and realized Jake had appeared behind the bar. Topping up her almost empty wine glass, he murmured, “Are you torturing my customers?”

She spied the nearly empty beer bottle he held in his hand. Noticed his hands, period. Magic hands. Hands that knew their way around a woman’s body. She’d relived those three orgasms he’d given her obsessively this past week and her abdominal muscles contracted in primal recognition.

Which made her seriously cranky. She had more important things to think about than Jake’s freakish ability between the sheets.

“I try not to feed the animals.”

Jake gave a faux horrified gasp. “That’s not a very nice thing to say.”

The group of men broke into a chorus of loud cheers as they watched some football replay on the closest big-screen. They punched the air and grunted like a pack of gorillas.

She raised an eyebrow at Jake. “I rest my case.”

He grinned then downed the dregs of his Corona. “Now, now, Ella. They’ve been working hard all week. All they want is to sit around with their friends, watch the game and maybe even get laid if they’re lucky.”

Three giggling women came to the bar and called to Jake. They were blonde and big-boobed and impossibly young. Smiling at them, he said to her, “Don’t go anywhere,” before sauntering off.

His imperious command was irritating but not enough to shift Ella’s ass off the pogo stick. No way was she going to execute a move with such a degree of difficulty in front of the Barbie triplets who were currently presenting their forearms for Jake to sign.

Ella rolled her eyes as they giggled and waggled their fingers at him as they left. “Looks like you’re the only one getting laid around here tonight,” she said as he sauntered back.

Jake inserted a slice of lime into the neck of his next Corona. “They just wanted my autograph.”

“Oh please. I saw the way they were batting their eyelids at you. You could have had all three of them at once.”

He laughed. “Ménages aren’t as fun as they used to be.”

Ella’s mind went blank. Ménages? Plural? “Poor baby,” she said derisively.

He leaned forward on his elbows. “I prefer to devote all my energy to one woman at a time.”

Before she could lecture herself on not, under any circumstances, thinking about how good Jake was at devoting all his energy to one woman, Ella was already there.

---