Page 16 of Teach Me
Even the roar of the Harley couldn’t drown out the memory of the so-small voice she’d spoken in. Reassuring him it was okay. Reassuringhim.
“Con, you are a major fuckup.”
His cock, sore from the constant rise and fall of his hunger and rubbing against his jeans, agreed—and it didn’t let him forget it all the way home.
Chapter Seven
“How did Thursday night’s lesson go?” Cris asked.
“Fine. Normal.” Not embarrassing at all. Really.
They were at Brock’s for Saturday morning brunch. A quiet rumble somewhere near Jess’s belly button reminded her she hadn’t eaten since lunch yesterday. Despite another session at JCL, she couldn’t get past the feeling of being watched, even inside her apartment. She’d come home from work last night, crashed on the couch in sheer exhaustion, and woken in the middle of the night with Brit’s voice in her ear, telling her they’d be together soon. And that was exactly why she couldn’t stop seeing Conlan, despite the burn of humiliation every time she thought about Tuesday night.
Unavailable.Right. She only had to look in the mirror to figure out why he was unavailable.
Cris interrupted the morbid flow of Jess’s thoughts. “You know what your mama said about frowning like that.”
Jess raised an eyebrow. “That I’d never stop being a wallflower if I didn’t at least try to look more interesting?”
Cris stuck her tongue out at Jess. “That your face would freeze like that. Jeez! Whose mother doesn’t tell them that?”
“Mine,” Jess assured her but smiled at her friend as their waitress set glasses of ice water in front of them.
Cris knew how Jess’s parents had acted; they’d been best friends since high school, when Cris had taken a front-row seat to Jess’s parents’ idiosyncracies. Now that they’d been gone a year, it was easier for Jess to see them without the rose-colored glasses she’d worn right after their deaths. They’d raised her as they’d been raised, distantly loving and closely critical of anything that would be seen by others as “below their station.” They’d given her stability and financial security, but they had not been easy people to live with, nor had they ever stopped mourning Jess’s lack of societal awareness. Thank God for Cris’s heretical influence or Jess might’ve wandered through her adult life, compliant but unhappy, never gathering the courage to step outside the box her parents had put her in.
“I still can’t believe you’re taking lessons from the yummy guy you’ve been gaga over for the last six months,” Cris said as they joined the line for the buffet.
Jess rolled her eyes. “I told you, it’s just some basic self-defense.”
“Right, and I’m just a little talkative,” Cris said, drawing a snort from Jess. Cris usually chattered as if there was a time limit and she had to get a set amount of words in before the cutoff. “Talkative” was more than a vast understatement; it was the quintessential mountain being labeled a molehill.
“There is that.”
“Oh, shut up.” Cris’s amused tone belied her reprimand. “So spill. What happened? I told you I looked him up, right? The company site was very informative. That is one bad, bad boy.”
The woman in line ahead of Cris turned for a frosty glance at the two of them from under her broad-brimmed hat. Cris glanced at Jess, the twinkle in her eye saying she enjoyed shocking the society matron. Jess hid a grin.
She couldn’t argue. She’d thought Conlan was a “bad, bad boy” since the first time she’d seen him ride up on his Harley outside the coffee shop. She still thought he was the sexiest man she’d ever seen—and by far the sexiest man to ever shoot her down.
Scooping up a biscuit, Cris continued. “What? I’m married, not dead. You’d have to be dead not to notice that ass.”
“Isn’t that the truth?” Jess asked rhetorically. Cris winked at her.
Plates full, they headed back to their table. A couple of nibbles on her biscuit and Cris resumed her interrogation. “Now, tell me all about the hunk and what you did together while ‘learning self-defense’”—she even added the air quotes—“and don’t leave out the juicy details.”
Since the juicy details were fairly embarrassing, there was every likelihood Jess would leave them out. “Well, he’s everything I expected him to be.” Including unavailable, much to her girl parts’ dismay.
“Woot! I knew it! And he’s tall—tall enough to tower over a woman in that perfectly panty-creaming way.”
Denying that would be like denying the sky was blue. “Yep.”
“Stop making me pull everything out of you, Jess! Tell me what he’s teaching you. Do you get to hit him?”
Laughing a little at her friend’s bloodthirsty tone, she proceeded to tell Cris about her lessons. Cris’s eyes got rounder and her mouth got quieter as Jess described Conlan’s techniques and that yes, she did get to hit and punch and kick him.
“Wow! I think Steven needs to pay for some private lessons for me. I wanna hit on a pretty boy too,” she said with a mock pout.
“Well, Jack, Conlan’s co-owner, is fairly hot too.”
