Ecstasy (A Contemporary Romance) (8 page)

Jolene Mackenzie was a good girl.

* * *

Zane stood behind the bar and wiped another
glass dry, sliding it beneath the counter in preparation for
opening the bar. His bar.

He still couldn’t believe “Piano Man” was
his. Every time he pulled up underneath the neon sign on his
Harley, he got a rush. But as he wiped down the brass counter one
more time, he frowned at his reflection. If he didn’t find a great
piano player, and fast, “Piano Man” would be a laughingstock among
piano bars. Unfortunately, the last five guys he had auditioned
stunk.

Hell, he could play better than them, and he
could barely read a note.

Someone from outside pushed the door open
slightly and a shaft of blinding light hit Zane across the
forehead.

“
Excuse me,” he heard a timid little voice
say.

“
We’re closed,” he said gruffly. “Come
back at five.”

But the girl disobeyed him and walked through
the door.

Zane looked at her in disbelief. The last
time he’d seen someone as prim and proper as the young girl
standing before him, he was in church looking at a nun. And lord
knew he hadn’t set foot in a church for well over a decade. Maybe
two.

On second thought, no nun ever had such
gorgeous blue eyes and a mouth he could imagine wrapped around his
dick.

“
I said we’re closed,” he said, glaring at
her. It was pissing him off the way his dick was perking up just
because some meek, blond girl, barely out of pigtails, was walking
across the floor toward him.

“
Are you the owner?” she asked him, as if
she hadn’t heard him tell her to leave twice already.

He glared at her, trying to scare her away,
but when she kept staring at him with her huge, blue eyes, and held
her ground, he nodded.

“
What’s it to you?”

She held up the want ads. “I’m here to apply
for the piano job.”

He snorted. “You?” He threw his head back and
laughed in her face to drive the point home. “Honey, this ain’t no
church, and you certainly ain’t no piano man.”

Her face set in a mulish expression. She
turned away from him, but instead of walking back out the door, she
walked towards the small stage and sat down at the piano.

“
I’m auditioning,” she said, and he knew
she was trying to be brave, but even in the dim light of the bar he
could see her hands shaking.

He looked down at his jeans and cursed the
huge bulge in the front of his pants before taking several menacing
steps towards her. But before he could forcibly grab her by her
skinny little shoulders and throw her out onto the sidewalk, she
opened the Blue Book of Jazz and Pop standards and began to
play.

He stopped in his tracks. She played thirty
seconds of one song and then flipped the page and played thirty
seconds of the next. Zane sank down into the nearest chair.

The little choir girl was incredible. The
piano player of his dreams. Shit! He couldn’t have her in the bar.
Every man in the place was going to start having dreams about
laying her sweet little body over the front of his thighs, pulling
up her pleated skirt and...

“
Stop!” Zane said loudly, almost more to
himself than to her, but this time she obeyed him.

“
I want the job, sir,” she said in a calm
but firm voice.

“
No. The bar is called Piano Man, not
Piano Woman.”

“
That’s sexual discrimination,” she
pointed out.

He rolled his eyes. “You’re not good
enough.”

Her eyes shot fire at him. “Yes I am!”

Suddenly Zane had a thought. “How badly do
you want this job?”

She lowered her long eyelashes and then
looked back up at him. “I want it.”

Slowly, Zane got up from the chair and
sauntered over to her. Sitting down next to her on the piano bench,
he said, “I’m willing to make you a deal.” He saw her swallow and
then she licked her lips.

“
I’m listening,” she said as she removed
her slender fingers from the keyboard and clasped them primly in
her lap.

He bent his head over hers until their lips
were touching and then he slipped his tongue into her mouth, dying
to taste her.

“
This is what I want. Are you willing to
give it to me?”

Her eyes grew even wider, but she nodded.

“
Whenever I want?”

She nodded again.

“
However I want?”

This time she smiled at him and reached out
her hand to shake on the agreement. “I’m Jolene,” she said in a
voice as sweet as honey. “What’s your name?”

* * *

That first night, Jolene played the piano
like she had never played it before. She knew she was still on
shaky ground. Besides, she was so excited and nervous about the
terms of her contract with Zane, she needed to blow off her energy
at the keyboard or she’d go crazy.

All night she had watched him out of the
corner of her eye. In her fantasies, she had never created any man
as incredible as this one. Six feet tall, and all muscle beneath
his worn jeans and tight black t-shirt, his teeth gleamed white
against the dark tan of his skin. Stubble covered his jaw line and
his shoulder-length dark brown hair and piercing green eyes made
him look so much like a pirate that Jolene felt as if he was living
in the wrong century, on the wrong continent even.

At the end of the evening as the last
customer walked out, he locked the door and then joined her on the
stage again.

“
Stand up,” he said as he sat down on the
piano bench.

She did as he asked and tried to get her
knees to stop shaking. Pulling her so that she was standing between
his knees, he reached around the back of her skirt and popped open
the top button, then slid the zipper down until her skirt fell into
a heap at her heels.

She looked around the bar at the hundred
tea-light candles glowing, at the fireplace roaring, and knew that
all of her fantasies were about to be made real.

He hooked his fingers into the edges of her
cotton panties and slowly slid them off, over her ass and down her
smooth, untouched thighs. Jolene had to fight the urge to cover
herself from him, and she barely managed to keep her hands clenched
at her sides.

Before she knew it he had moved his hand
between her legs and slipped the index finger of his right hand
into her vagina. She gasped even as she felt her muscles convulse
around his thick, long finger.

Jolene was scared. She had barely even
touched herself there in the shower. But she was so excited her
fear hardly seemed to matter. She strained against his finger and
he pushed it so far inside her his palm covered her and his thumb
was pressing on the sensitive flesh at the top of her vagina.

She knew from her books that it was called
the clitoris, but she could hardly think the word to herself.

“
Your clit is so swollen,” he murmured,
his mouth less than an inch from the cleft between her
legs.

She liked the way clit sounded coming from
Zane’s mouth and she forced herself to say the word out loud. “My
clit has been swollen all night,” she murmured.

He groaned, then lifted his thumb off her
clit and blew softly on the engorged flesh. Her vagina clenched
around his finger and as he blew on her again and slid his finger
in and out of her vagina, she closed her eyes and started to see a
rainbow of colors. Her legs were shaking uncontrollably now, but
not from fear. She was trying to crest the tallest hill she had
ever encountered, and she needed Zane to help her over it.

She put her hands on the back of his head and
pressed his mouth to her. “Thank god,” she cried as he worked his
tongue and his teeth over her inflamed flesh and clasped her
buttocks with his strong hands.

Jolene’s world exploded in a blaze of
fireworks. Now that she knew what awaited her on the other side,
she knew she would never be able to go back to the perfect world
she had come from.

Jolene Mackenzie wasn’t a good girl
anymore.

Candace looked up from her computer screen
and realized she had been writing all morning. She reread the
beginning of her new story and smiled.

Evidently, Charlie’s lessons had inspired
more than her underutilized libido. His incredible lessons had
stimulated her mind and imagination as well.

But as she remembered their promise to each
other to keep whatever happened in Charlie’s “classroom” inside the
classroom, she was assailed by guilt.

A bad little voice inside Candace’s head
said,
Don’t worry, honey. He’ll never read your book. He’ll
never find out that you and he are the live action figures playing
out your sex scenes.

Candace had never written so fluidly before.
What’s more, she had never been so inspired to continue with her
story, to find out what was going to happen with Jolene and
Zane.

I can’t stop now.
The words
reverberated in her skull, so she said them aloud, announcing them
to herself in her empty office. “I can’t stop now. I
won’t
stop now!” she proclaimed and gave up trying to win the battle to
be the good girl she was supposed to be.

“Being good has always been my problem,” she
muttered, thinking how very close to the truth her new heroine
Jolene was. And then Candace smiled again thinking about all the
different ways Jolene was going to be bad, and couldn’t wait to get
the story finished.

Candace spent the rest of the afternoon
typing away at her laptop computer, working hard to get every
nuance and every emotion of her first two lessons with Charlie just
right on the page.

And as she did so, Candace began to forget
that she had ever lived a life without pleasure.

Charlie stood up from his desk and walked
into the guest bedroom of his house. He hadn’t been able to work
since Saturday, since the day his whole life had been turned upside
down by a redheaded vixen who didn’t even know the power she
wielded. He needed to call her, but as it was, he was still too
chicken to dial her entire number without hanging up.

He hoped she would still talk to him. After
the way they had parted on Saturday, after she stood up, put her
clothes on mechanically, and then turned to him with a plastered
smile and shook his hand, saying “Thank you very much for the
lessons, Charlie,” he wasn’t sure if he had done the right thing
with her at all.

His conscience was bothering him more than he
wanted to admit. Above and beyond the fact that he was worrying he
might have taken advantage of her, was the indisputable truth that
if he were with her again, he knew he wouldn’t have one single
qualm about making her scream his name out, over and over
again.

He was still upset that she had left after
only seven orgasms, when he had planned to give her at least ten.
He supposed, somewhat ruefully, the three times he took care of
himself that night after she had left practically made up the
difference. Nonetheless, he would rather have Candace coming in his
arms or on the tip of his tongue, than his hand and his memory
making him shoot all over the shower walls.

The phone rang and Charlie picked up the
cordless handset on his shiny black and white kitchen island.

“Charlie Gibson.”

“Hi Charlie. It’s Candace. How are you?”

Charlie nearly dropped the phone he was so
surprised by her phone call. “Um, uh, I’m fine. Great. Super.” He
thwacked his forehead with the back of his hand for sounding like
such an idiot. “How are you doing?”

He heard her laugh across the wireless phone
line and the choking sensation around his heart eased up a bit.

“I’m great Charlie. Really, really great. I
wanted to thank you for your excellent lessons on Saturday.”

“You do?” he asked and then tried to cover
his gaffe by saying, “What I mean to say is, I wasn’t sure if—“

Thankfully Candace cut him off before he
could make an even bigger ass of himself. “I loved every second of
it, Charlie. And you know what, I’ve been writing better than
ever.”

“That’s great,” he said to her, and meant it.
He hadn’t written worth a shit since Saturday, but he didn’t care
at all. All he wanted was to see her again, but he was afraid he’d
be coming on too strong, that he’d be too obviously sniffing after
her if he suggested moving onto lesson three.

“Anyway,” she said, “I was wondering if you’d
be up for lesson three?”

Her matter of fact, professional tone
confused him, again. Didn’t she know what was bound to happen again
when they got in a room together? But he was so glad she wanted to
see him again, he pushed the thought aside.

“I certainly am,” he said, trying to sound as
detached as she did.

“Should we meet at your house again? Or mine
perhaps?”

“Actually, this time I was thinking we would
meet at a restaurant.”

“A restaurant?” she said, her misgivings
sounding clearly in her voice. “To learn about sex toys?”

He chuckled softly into the phone. “Don’t you
trust your mentor, Candace?”

She was silent across the line for a couple
of seconds and he knew she was thinking it over.
Say yes,
his brain urged her telepathically.

“Yes I do, Charlie,” she said.

“Great,” he said. “Do you know where
Oceanview Restaurant is on the edge of Golden Gate Park?”

* * *

Candace was shocked by Charlie’s suggestion.
She had been shocked ever since she and Charlie had hung up that
morning.

When she had boldly called him, she was
completely sure she was going to have no problem rolling with
whatever Charlie was going to throw at her. She couldn’t suppress a
shiver of delight as she imagined him using a dildo, or something
even more creative, on her during this lesson.