Page 48 of Escape Girl

I inhaled so sharply into the microphone that the gasping sound echoed around the entire bar. The mic slipped right out of my sweaty hands and hit the ground.Boom!

Sloan jumped on the stage next to me. “Are you OK?”

As if I could even form words. Or do anything at all to break the eye contact with Bobby.

His hair was shorter. Much shorter. He wasn’t as tan, which made sense if he was living in Chicago now instead of California. His face was thinner, and he had unfamiliar dark circles under his eyes. They kind of matched mine.

Now that I’d cataloged all the things Ididn’tlike, my brain started adding up everything else. Holy shit, was he handsome. I’d looked at pictures of him since I’d left, of course, but photographs of Bobby didn’t capture him at all. He was one of those people that you had to see in movement, in person. His animation and warmth were everything. People always flocked to him because his energy brought a tangible pulse to the room.

His eyes were so blue. So blue. They were like a tractor beam; if I suddenly found my body in the air floating toward him, I wouldn’t have been surprised in the least.

“Oh,” Sloan muttered as she saw Bobby across the room and took in our staring contest. “Yowza. I guess he really likes your hair.”

I finally blinked and shook my head. “He’s always looked at me like that,” I whispered, looking past her to the bathroom hallway. Was there a door to the street back there? I had to get out of this bar and far away from him before we did something very, very stupid.

I may not have seen him for six months, but I still knew my husband’s looks. Under the shock in his gaze was something else very…basic. Biological. Primal.

He may have wanted to know what the hell I was doing smack in the middle of his new life, and he probably wanted answers to a lot of questions. But I could read his dark pupils, the slight flaring of his nostrils, the angled set to his jaw.

At this exact moment? He wanted something else more.

And as my body was all too ready to submit to his gravitational pull, I needed torun.

“I have to go,” I said to Sloan, grabbing my suit jacket from her hands and fleeing down the stage steps. I ignored the DJ’s protests about my abandoned encore, ignored Sloan calling after me that I didn’t even have my purse, and stumbled in my heels down the dark back hallway.

Past the restrooms at the dead end of the long hall was a door with a beat-up exit sign over it. Fifteen feet away, I cringed and peered at the handle. Was the door alarmed? If so, was I willing to set it off to get away from Bobby?

Heavy footfalls in the hall behind me, moving fast.Muchfaster than my high-heeled skidding. Yep! Yep, I was willing to set off an alarm.

But just as I placed my fingertips on the door, a much stronger hand reached from behind me and grabbed the door to keep it closed.

I’d thought I’d been spiked with adrenaline on stage. But now, trapped in the dark between the door and Bobby’s body, so much flooded through my veins, I transformed into a coiled, vibrating wire.

“Now here I thought you didn’t want to escape anymore,” he growled in my ear. “Since you’ve ignored my last few invitations.”

Every nerve ending in my neck came alive at the warmth of his breath. I’d heard Bobby’s voice lowered with passion before, but I’d never heard it this thick with arousal—or threaded with anger. My body reacted with zero involvement from my brain. My back arched, throwing my head against his shoulder and pressing my suited bottom against his…whoa.

“Yeah.” With the hand not holding the door, he gripped my hip and pulled me even tighter against his hardness. “Jo said I should leave and call you tomorrow so that we could be adults and talk.”

He turned his head to flick his tongue along my neck. I bit my lip, hard, and rocked against him shamelessly.

“The problem with that,” he went on, “is that the moment I saw you I didn’t feel like an ‘adult’ anymore. I barely feel human.”

I knew exactly what he meant. I’d given up on rational thought the moment I left the stage. I didn’t want to be a responsible adult woman. I wanted to be an animal.

Bobby dropped his hold on the door and whirled me around to face him. We stared at one another in the dim glowing exit sign light. We were both breathing hard, and his lips were inches from mine. “I don’t want to talk right now either,” he rasped.

He glowered down at me, his hands on my shoulders. My heart pounded so hard I could feel my pulse in my ears. My body screamed at me to take a step forward, to rub every inch of me from head to toe against him. I wanted his skin. I wanted to taste his sweat.

“Do you want to talk?” he asked.

I shook my head, eyes wide. Two, three, four times.

“I’ll leave if you want me to.” It sounded like it hurt him to say the words, they came out so hoarse. It looked like it hurt too, because his face contorted, as if in pain.

He was telling the truth. That was the thing about Bobby. He might be in the grip of the fiercest lust and stewed in months of anger. But he would never purposefully do anything I didn’t want him to do. Just one out of thousands of reasons I’d fallen in love with him.

I didn’t say a word. Maybe some tiny sane part of me thought he should leave. But if he actually tried, I knew with one hundred percent certainty that I would reach out and stop him.

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