Mile High (Up in the Air #2)(11)

The group burst into laughter. Even their laughter sounded catty, so I knew they were saying something awful. I forced my mind to focus on something else, a longtime habit I’d used for avoiding unpleasant things that couldn’t be changed.

We eventually made it through the line and got in and out of the bathroom without incident. The group of mean girls had had Judith and Marnie about ready to brawl. They’d gotten progressively louder, emphasizing words like ‘whore’ and ‘gold-digger’, as they shot me strangely malevolent glances.

Whatever they’d read about me, I couldn’t understand how it would affect them, or why they would care enough to be openly hostile to a stranger. It was beyond me, so I didn’t linger on the musings long.

CHAPTER SIX

My back stiffened as we approached our group again. James was standing near Stephan and Javier, and they were laughing at something. But he wasn’t alone. Melissa was practically plastered to his side, laughing along with them.

“You notice that bitch didn’t say boo until we left. Then she swooped in like a vulture,” Marnie was saying under her breath.

“I don’t like her. She talks a lot of shit about people for doing less messed-up shit than she does on a regular basis,” Judith added.

I tried to follow all of the shits in that sentence. I gave up as we got close enough for me to see the way Melissa’s hands were sneaking in little touches all over James.

She touched his arm, patted his back, reached way way up and squeezed his shoulder. And then ran her hand along his chest and stomach on it’s way back down. James took a little step back, avoiding her touch, but I still saw red. Red as in crimson. Crimson as in blood. Blood as in I was going to make the bitch bleed.

I moved between the two of them in an odd haze of temper, plastering myself to his side and pushing her roughly out of the way with my body. I ran my hand along the line of his chest and abdomen that she’d touched, as though my touch could erase hers.

I heard the ice cubes in her drink clink against her glass as she was jostled by my sudden movement.

She gasped in outrage.

I ignored her, looking up at James. “Why were you letting her touch you?” I asked him quietly.

He looked surprised, and half-amused. “I thought she was a friend of yours. I was trying not to be openly rude, but she was making it difficult. You have a drink while you were gone? You were gone for thirty minutes. Now you’re acting a little…differently.”

“You f**king bitch. You made me spill my drink on my dress,” Melissa was yelling behind me. It was easy to ignore her, for some reason.

I ran my hands up and down James’s torso again, using my fingertips to trace each muscle. He was unbelievably hard.

“Not one part of my body is this hard,” I mused aloud.

“Careful, Love. You can’t offer a starving man a feast and expect him not to take you up on it.”

I stroked his chest again, pausing at one of his ni**les. “I want to see your skin,” I told him.

Now I’d done it. I’d gone and touched him, and it was worse than being drunk. I couldn’t seem to focus on anything but touching more of him.

“Fucking Bitch!” Melissa said louder. “Do you have any idea how much this dress is worth? It’s BCBG. Do you even know what that is, you skank?”

I saw James’s eyes widen just a second before he spun me around, putting his back to the crazy redhead.

I heard the sound of a drink being thrown, glass and all, against his rock-hard back.

It had been aimed at the back of my head, I realized, stunned. She was such a crazy bitch…

“Fuck,” James said, glaring over his shoulder at a still fuming Melissa. “You need to get the f**k out of here, or security will be escorting you out. I think you’ve embarrassed yourself enough tonight, don’t you?” His tone was positively scathing.

Melissa cursed fluently as she stormed away.

Our group erupted into chatter as she walked away. The general consensus was, ‘Bitch is crazy’.

“Bitch be cray cray,” Murphy summed it up, as only Murphy could. Everyone laughed, breaking the last bit of tension.

I looked up at James, pursing my lips. “That was gentlemanly of you, taking the shot for me,” I told him.

“Thank you.”

He shook out his shirt, ice cubes still flying off of his back. I checked his back. His shirt was soaked.

Even his jeans were soaked. I was relieved to find, though, that the glass had broken on the ground, leaving him unscathed.

A waitress showed up with a bucket and mop and began to clean up the liquid and broken glass. We moved out of her way.

“It looks like you’re going to have to take off all of your clothes,” I told him with a smile.

He smiled back, but his smile was all heat. “I have a change of clothes in the car. Come with me?”

I leaned in closer to him, inhaling deeply. He smelled so good that I felt my eyelids drift closed with the pleasure of his scent. It was so good that I wanted to put a name to it, and bottle it up.

“Convince me,” I told him softly, as I forced my eyes back open to look at him.

He glanced around, running his tongue over those sexy as hell teeth. “Okay. Did you have something particular in mind, or do I get to pick how? I’m trying to play nice here, since I don’t want to scare you off again. You’re not making it easy, though.”