Red Hot Kisses Read online

  That girl has me going places I don’t think I should ever venture.

  I head on out and spot Seth and Trixie as the valet brings up his car.

  Shit. He’s really doing this. He’s going for it, and Trixie is falling right into that lap rocket I’m sure he has just waiting to greet her.

  “What’s up?” I give a curt nod Seth’s way.

  “What’s up with you?” His eyes narrow in on me as the valet hands him the keys. “Miranda wanted to let you know she’s in the restroom.”

  Trixie grunts, “I believe she referred to it as the little girls’ room. I’m sure she’s powdering all her pink parts just for you.” She snipes the words at me as if each were its own white-hot bullet.

  “Oh, right.” Crap. The last thing I need is getting saddled with Smirnoff tonight while Seth gets the gold. Nope. Not happening. “Actually, she asked if you could wait for her.” I stare Seth down a moment, not sure where I’m going with it. “She mentioned something about needing a lift to her apartment. I guess you both live in the same building.” Brilliant. I happen to know for a fact Miranda lives at Kappa G, but Seth doesn’t know that. “I’ll give Trixie a lift and spare you a few minutes. Thanks for coming out.” I grab Trixie’s hand and sail her through the parking lot, suddenly thankful I didn’t bother with valet for the night myself.

  Trixie gets into my truck, bubbling with laugher as we speed out of the lot.

  “I’m guessing Randy Mandy shut you down for the night? Either that or you just avoided the hell out of that Smirnoff situation.”

  I don’t say anything as we wait for the light to change. My mind is still reeling and I don’t know what I’ve done, but one thing’s for sure—I don’t feel like spilling the truth to Trixie. The girl has an ego, an attitude. Hell, I don’t know what you call it. But she’s got plenty of it.

  “I wouldn’t worry about Miranda. I’m sure if he’s up for it, Seth might even get lucky tonight.” There. If Trixie has any misgivings that things are going in a romantic direction with Seth, I hope to God I just killed it. Seth isn’t the kind of guy I picture Trixie with. She needs someone more her speed. Seth is a junior with way too many girls under his belt, even if he’s not slaying them by the dozens the way I was.

  “Wow. Didn’t see that coming. I guess when you’re at your level of the fornication game, you just sort of accept the fact your girlfriend is going to cheat on you.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend. Never had one.”

  “Aw, well, it’s a novelty you probably have no interest in.” She slaps her knee, and I can’t help but follow her curves right up to that illuminated angelic face of hers. Scratch that. Trixie is a devil through and through.

  “Not true,” I’m quick to counter. “Part of giving up my playboy ways is all about exploring my options. And a girlfriend, as in singular, is something I might just test drive.” I shrug it off because most likely I won’t. “Nolan and Misty are happy. Knox and Harper. You know the drill.”

  “Oh, honey, I do. And believe you me, I’ve got a plus one on my bucket list, too, but I guess that’s sort of way down the line for the both of us. I’m not exactly the world’s easiest person to get along with.”

  “You’ve got that right.” We share a quick laugh.

  I pull in behind Cutler Tower, the dark side of the dorm where not even the moonlight dares to tread and there’s not a soul in sight. I get out and we walk toward the monolithic structure following navy shadows of the night.

  “Thanks for ride. Sorry you’re not getting laid tonight.” Her sarcasm shines right through her apology, and I hold back a laugh.

  “No, you’re not. I have a feeling you like to see me tortured.”

  Her eyes widen as she bears into mine, and I’m trapped. Something about those unearthly colored eyes, they have the power to hold even the strongest of men.

  She pumps her shoulders. “There’s having fun—and then there’s tormenting you. I’m all about the latter.” Trixie stops shy of the corridor that leads to the elevator, and her eyes shine like twin diamonds, each its own brilliant stone. Her lips quiver a moment as she steps in close.

  Get a grip, boy. I try to talk myself down off the ledge I’m on. Knox keeps jumping in my head, begging me to keep an eye on his baby sister, protecting her from the perverts floating around.

  I swallow hard, trying to figure out what I want to say. I know for a fact it isn’t goodnight.

  “You are tormenting me.” My finger glides over her lips like a reflex, and her eyes grow large. Her chest expands as she steps one inch closer, and that’s all I need for affirmation.

  My hand slips behind her neck, my fingers stabbing into her thick glossy hair, so slick and shiny it makes you want to touch it all day long, and I pull her in close. I lean in, my heart detonating in my chest, one booming explosion after the next. My lips part to greet her. I don’t close my eyes until the last possible second just drinking down that stunned look on her face. And just like that, I swipe my lips over hers just barely.

  Trixie molds into me, her arms wrapping around my neck pulling me closer with a greedy fervor. She presses a long, lingering, meandering kiss over me, and we both groan in unison. A knot builds deep down in my gut because I know this is wrong. Everything in me knows Trixie Toberman is the very last person I should be doing this with. Knox pops into my mind, and I pop him right back out. Sorry, dude. You lose tonight. This girl, these lips belong to me at the moment, and I’m about to take ownership of them in the very best way. My hand rides up her back, feeling out her body as if I were a cartographer in need of every last detail. Her chest presses hard against me until I can feel every last pillow soft ounce of the girls. Trixie muscles me closer until her fingertips burn into my flesh.

  Our mouths move in a preciously slow rhythm that I don’t believe I’ve ever experienced before, and it feels strangely erotic. Trixie’s vanilla perfume makes me hungry for her in ways that are perfectly beastly, and in no way can I ever think of this girl as a sister ever again. Not sure I ever did. If anything, that first kiss cured us of that. Her lips open and her tiny wet tongue delves into my mouth and I chase it around as if I were feral.

  Holy crap, I have never felt so insanely charged by a kiss of all things. In all of my past experiences, the kisses were the least titillating as far as anything that’s ever happened behind closed doors. Never in my life has a kiss had the power to skyrocket me to the moon and beyond, and that’s exactly what Trixie and her mouth have the authority to do.

  I’m high, drunk, so jacked up on what Trixie’s doling out I don’t ever want this feeling to end. I don’t want this kiss to come to a conclusion. Selfishly, I want the night to go on forever so we can stand here doing just this—savoring one another in the dark, away from prying eyes, as if we were Whitney Briggs’ best kept secret. And in a way we are. I certainly am not about to whisper a word about this to anyone. I’ll leave it up to her what she decides. For now, having Trixie all to myself this way feels like more than enough.

  Her legs hike up around me, and I lift her up by the thighs, holding her, pinning her to the wall of Cutler Tower as our mouths cut loose, run wild, slow down, then speed back up again. My insides spin with a feeling I’ve never felt before. My body screams to have her, to beg her to have her way with me, and yet not a single part of me wants to ruin this perfect moment, this perfect kiss.

  If this is what it’s going to be like with Trixie, it’s safe to say I’m screwed. There will never be another moment where I won’t crave her mouth, the gentle swatting of her tongue, those little noises she’s making as if what we’re doing right now pleased her to no end.

  But deep inside of me a flare is going off. Red flashing lights, bells that won’t stop ringing, all doing their best to warn me that I’ve just treaded where I don’t belong. Trixie deserves some decent kid who doesn’t have a Guinness worthy track record of sleeping around. I can’t get that idea out of my mind.

  This can’t be right.

/>   We’re not right.

  I shouldn’t have done this. It’s all my fault. Nothing about this is good.

  It’s happening way too fast, and everybody knows—only fools rush in.

  Good Knight Kisses

  Trixie

  Marley James nee Jackson is perky, pretty, petite, and I’m sure a half dozen other things that start with P like the word perfect. We’ve been locked at the hip in Hallowed Grounds for what feels like ten solid hours while she helps me nail down the basics of the “Sex and the Coed” article that I’ll be working on alongside her. Correction—we’ve decided that since I only meet the coed requirement of said article, I’ll actually have my own byline. The only problem is, I need to come up with a catchy name. “Virginity and the Coed” doesn’t quite have the perky punch as Marley’s byline does. Anyhoo, after the first three cups of coffee, I learned everything there was to know about Marley other than the obvious, wavy blonde hair, button nose, and apple cheeks any supermodel would risk breaking an ankle to capture. I learned that she had a crappy ex and then met wonderful Wyatt, who happens to be her husband now. I learned that he’s a little older than her, and she found that hot and exciting at the time, and still does. I also learned he was the springboard for all the kooky experimentation that she underwent in the bedroom in the name of Whitney Briggs. Talk about committing to your work. Marley has gone into an obscene amount of detail letting me know they had sex and sex and sex. It almost made me want to scream and not out of pleasure.

  But while Marley sifts through the hundreds of questions sent to her inbox over the summer, pulling out the ones she thinks are a better fit for my article—I sit here and dream about kiss number two.

  Hot hell in a handbasket.

  Rushford Knight has a mouth, and he knows how to use it. Honest to God, that boy doesn’t even know how to fight fair. After we warmed one another with the heat of a thousand hell fires by way of our tonsils, we didn’t even say goodnight as we parted ways.

  “You know, this never used to be an answer column.” She sniffs into her keyboard. “Once upon a time, it was just me and my musings. But after Wyatt and I tied the knot, it got a little weird sharing our bedroom antics with the masses.” She wrinkles her nose and looks like a caricature of herself. “So I pretty much welcomed the questions, and in doing so I opened the floodgates. I’ll admit, I’m not even remotely qualified to answer half of these. But that’s never stopped me!” She harps out a laugh.

  I like Marley. She’s fun and easygoing and doesn’t seem to care too much what others think. She reminds me a lot of myself in that respect. Although there is a niggling doubt in the back of my mind about what Sunday and my brothers would think about those things Rush and I have done in secret.

  It’s been almost a week since that last savory peck, and each time we’ve seen one another we’ve pretty much pretended as if nothing ever happened. NOTHING?

  Suffice it to say, I’m still caustic toward him and he’s still his unpleasant obnoxious self in return. It’s as if what happened between us wasn’t even real—like maybe I dreamed the whole thing. It boils my blood to think he might be ashamed of the fact, but, in all honesty, I’m a bit ashamed, too. I came into this whole college experience eschewing playboys and manwhores alike, and Rush is the embodiment of both. Wait. They’re the same thing, right? Oh, who the hell cares.

  That boy is not the one for me, and I know it. There. I need to put my foot down the next time I’m in a dark corner with him. Sure, the first time I was to blame, but that second round—Rush clearly took the wheel, and boy does he ever know how to navigate those mouthwatering curves.

  A surge of heat rips through me, and I quiver at the thought of him taking the proverbial wheel again. My bones go weak. My stomach sizzles. My brain feels as if it’s turning into a fuzzy pile of mush just thinking about Rush hauling me into a secluded spot and having his way with my mouth. I hate that I’m so irrationally turned on by the thought. I really hate that I’m wondering if he’s just as preoccupied with the event as I am.

  A thought comes to me. Hey? Maybe he was just getting back at me for that first kiss? You know, tit for tat. He needed to one-up me because he’s some big macho guy who can’t handle letting a girl have the sexual ball in her court. Of course. It totally makes sense now. Someone as egotistical as Rush probably gets his ego bruised if a girl comes onto him. That last kiss was just a war of the sexes thing. Retaliation at its best. He evened the score, and now we can each move on. He taught me a lesson—schooled me on who the boss really was. Touché.

  What an idiot.

  I gulp down the rest of my iced coffee and get a slight caffeinated buzz from the effort.

  Marley begins to hum along with the song blaring over the speakers, some annoying ultra-cheery pop number that sounds like it was actually manufactured in a gumball machine. I pull my laptop close, trying to focus on my work, on anything, but I keep envisioning Rush coming at me with those full lips. It’s like I’m having withdrawals or something.

  I glance around at the student population, the theoretical people I’ll be helping with my esteemed albeit non-sexual in nature advice. A boy with a surgical mask sits adjacent to me, tapping over his phone as if his life depended on it. A girl wearing red pants and a T-shirt that reads, Nobody is Perfect! My Name is Nobody hums into her own phone. And just this small sampling of the student population has me feeling a bit unsettled. If one out of two are virgins, then my money is on the guy in the mask. Clearly, the girl in the bright red pants has no problem with self-expression. But, hey, neither do I, and I’m pretty good about being a loudmouth when I want to be. So I guess the takeaway is pretend like everyone you see is your general target market. Hey—maybe we’re all a bunch of virgins running around—sans Rush and his pussy patrol (yes, the offensive moniker is real, and he’s all but copyrighted it)—maybe Marley is the only quasi-slut in this entire establishment. Although, technically, she nixed that nickname in the bud once she said I do. Face it. Nobody really cares how much you bang your husband.

  A devious thought comes to mind, and I’m quick to run with it.

  “Ha!” I slap my hand over the table while pretending to be reading one of the thousands of questions Rush sent us. “Check this one out.” I clear my throat as if readying to read the question out loud. “What would you think if a boy and a girl who pretty much couldn’t stand one another, every now and again shared a deep, passionate kiss out of the blue? There’s this boy on campus, and well, it’s sort of become our thing.”

  Marley looks up at the ceiling as if that’s where she drew all of her responses. “Sounds disturbing.” She turns her attention back to her laptop. “Besides, it’s too unbelievable.” She waves it off. “Delete, delete, delete. Half of the questions we get are totally bogus, and my bullshit meter just hit sky-high on that one. That was a load of bullcrap. But don’t worry. After you read a couple hundred of these, you’ll be able to spot a fake in the crowd a mile away.” She looks my way as she reaches for her coffee. “I mean, come on, what girl in her right mind is going to let some guy she openly detests make out with her whenever he wants? That’s ridiculous. I’d have to question her sanity.”

  “Her sanity?” Crap. I’ve sensed there was something deliberately wrong with me for a very long time now. And this is how I find out about it? Sitting in a coffee shop with Germaphobe Boy? Having Little Ms. Perfect in the red pants shoot me daggers every now and again? Now that’s a load of bull.

  I mean, I know I have that thing—that can’t sit in a nail salon, can’t get too deep into a crowd, can’t stand in a line bullshit thing—but still. In fact, it’s a small miracle I’m here in Hallowed Grounds. I don’t generally do coffee shops. I loathe the long lines they inspire, and if there are more than three people standing in it, I’m forced to do the five-minute math—each person in line equals five minutes. There’s no way you could pay me to stand in a forty-minute line. There is not enough caffeine in the world to make that happen. Just th
inking about it makes me twitchy. There were six people in line when we arrived, and Marley graciously offered to buy our coffee, so I gave her my order and sat down near a nice spacious window. So what if I don’t like feeling enclosed and trapped? Who the heck does? That certainly does not qualify me as criminally insane. My God, does it?

  “Like how insane?” I press on. “I mean, it’s just a kiss, right? Kisses aren’t really that big a deal, are they?”

  Marley sits up and sprays her coffee out in Ms. Perfect’s direction, causing her to take those red-hot pants of hers and trot right on out of the establishment. “Are you kidding me?”

  Marley’s eyes bug out as if I just questioned if the world was round. My old neighbor in Bel Terra once confided in me that he thought the Earth was just a flat piece of matter floating in space and that boats held the very real danger of disappearing off the side and into the nethersphere. That pretty much solidified the fact he was a nut job, and I never spoke to him again. I have a very low tolerance for idiots, and thus the startling surprise that my mouth keeps gravitating toward Rush.

  “Trixie.” Marley grips the edge of the table as if girding herself for what comes next. “Kisses between a boy and girl are usually not your run-of-the-mill peck on the cheek like you’d give your grandpa. We’re talking heated lust, burning passion, the memorizing of one another’s souls as you extricate an excitement that cannot be manufactured in any other way.” She shakes her head, disbelieving that she actually had to expound on this issue for me—odd explanation as it were. But my God, every word of it is true. “If that girl is letting this guy kiss her, over and over again, then she’s into him, even if she doesn’t want to admit it.”

  “No way, no how.” I pick my cup up and thump it over the table as if to prove my point.

  Her left eye comes shy of closing. “You seem rather adamant. Do you know her?”

  My mouth falls open, and before I can come up with thirteen different lies, a shadow darkens our table. We glance up, only to be greeted with the Cheshire cat grin of a glowing lemon-eyed, stubbled cheeked, still dewy from a shower, Rush Knight. He’s so unabashedly handsome it’s shocking on every level. My stomach squeezes tight at Mach 5 at the sight of him.