Chapter One
This is bullshit, Gabe thought.
Lounging in his favorite recliner, he crossed his legs at the ankle and took another draw off his Corona as he tried not to glare at the latest intruder on Sole Regret’s tour bus. They had yet another woman touring with the band. As if it wasn’t bad enough that the pregnant chick had decided to set up camp on the bus sofa, now Kellen was courting some red-headed ice queen who’d taken up permanent residence at his hip, and Shade’s ex-sister-in-law turned fuck-buddy kept showing up at their gigs unannounced. He was sure that if Adam’s woman didn’t have to work and Owen’s new flame wasn’t pretending she was mad at him, they’d be on the bus too. And here Gabe was telling Melanie that she couldn’t join them on the road. That the band had a rule about women on tour, and rightly so.
Well, screw that. If the rest of the guys were allowed a little female company to occupy them during the long, boring hours between concerts, then he sure as hell wasn’t going to upset Melanie again by making her feel unwelcome. She was more than welcome as far as he was concerned. Assuming she even wanted to ride on the tour bus. Spending countless hours on the road with a bunch of guys wasn’t exactly the perpetual party everyone thought it was.
Gabe set his beer aside and pulled his phone out of his pocket. He dialed Melanie’s number, his jaw set in a hard line. He wasn’t going to consult the band on this. He didn’t care if they thought he was pussy-whipped, or worse, in love with the sweet little accountant he’d met in Tulsa. He shouldn’t have to take shit for inviting Melanie to the show that night. The guys hadn’t bothered asking if their women could join the tour, so why should he be the only one following the rules?
“Hey, you,” Melanie answered. Her soft voice made the back of his neck tingle with pleasure. “I was just thinking about you. I can’t wait to see you tomorrow night. Did you make it to New Orleans?”
“We’re on the road somewhere in southern Louisiana. We should be there in an hour or two. Are you at work?”
“Yeah, but I can take a little break,” she said. “This spreadsheet can wait.”
He was counting on that. “Can it wait until Monday?”
“Huh? Why?”
“I miss you.” He glanced up to make sure the guys hadn’t heard that because even though he was willing to go to bat for Melanie, he’d be much more comfortable if he kept his love life and his band mates as far apart as possible.
If any of the guys had heard what he’d just said to Melanie, no one said anything. Not even Owen, who lived for messing with people. It was weird that the guys had stopped going ballistic any time one of them showed the slightest weakness for a woman. Hell, Kellen was holding Dawn’s hand in front of everyone and no one had said a thing about it. And Dawn was gazing into Kellen’s eyes as if entranced and speaking to him in a soft, sensual tone. Or she was when she wasn’t too busy laughing at Owen’s stream of jokes. Now wasn’t that just a homey trio?
Granted, Gabe was in a bad mood. Sexy conversations, video chats, and text messages from Melanie had him so horny he couldn’t think straight. He hadn’t seen her in five days and five long, lonely, cock-in-a-permanent-semi-rigid-state nights. The woman had him so worked up, he was surprised he hadn’t done something truly embarrassing. Like fly to Wichita on one of Sole Regret’s rare nights off just to see her.
“I miss you too,” she said. “I stopped at a lingerie shop on the way home from work last night. I was going to keep it a secret and surprise you with my new garters and thong—”
“Don’t!” he interrupted. “I can’t take another set of blue balls, Mel.”
“I could help you with those,” she said in that voice he associated with sex, though they hadn’t even had actual sex since she’d started using that sensual tone. Yeah, she had him all sorts of out of his head and into a mentality that focused solely on satiating his libido. With her. He hadn’t even considered sating his lust with another woman, even though he was hornier than a herd of longhorn cattle.
“I’ll head for the ladies room and put you on video chat,” she said in a sultry voice. “I’ll show you what you do to me and then you can show me what I do to you.”
Hell yeah, he could.
“Just talking to you makes me wet,” she continued.
Gabe sucked a tormented breath through his teeth. He could tell, by the low tone of her voice, that she was turned on. He was already familiar with that tone too. In fact, he heard it when he dreamed of her and then woke up so uncomfortably hard that he’d started habitually masturbating in the middle of the night. His cock was apparently trying to reclaim its misspent youth. He didn’t know how Melanie did it—put him in a constant state of arousal—but he couldn’t take it anymore. He needed her. Yesterday. Not to mention now. And tomorrow.
“Woman, you’re going to be the death of me.”
He already had a change of state going on in his pants. Just how hard could a cock get without any visual or physical stimulation? Pretty damned hard, apparently. She just had to use that voice on him and he was ready to roll. She couldn’t possibly be as great as he remembered, could she? In his mind, he’d exalted her to goddess status. If he elevated her any higher, she’d have to orbit the moon just to return to Earth.
“I plan to make you a very happy man Saturday night,” she said.
He had no doubt she would, but he wanted to be a very happy man now. And until she was pressed against him, staring up at him with those beguiling hazel eyes while he buried himself in the slick heat between her legs, he was marginally happy at best. “How about making me a very happy man in five hours?”
“More like five minutes. I’m in the ladies room now. Are you ready for me?”
He knew what that meant. No way was he going to watch her on video chat in front of the entire bus. He hopped out of his recliner, hurried to the bathroom, and jiggled the handle. Locked.
“Let me in,” he insisted.
“Just a minute,” a soft feminine voice said from inside. Lindsey was in the bathroom again? He knew she was six months pregnant, but did she really need to piss every twenty minutes?
“I’ve started wearing skirts to work every day,” Melanie whispered from the phone he had pressed to his ear. “Do you know why?”
Yeah, he knew why, but he wanted to hear her say it. “Tell me.”
“So it’s easier to touch myself when I think of you. And I can’t seem to stop thinking about you, Mr. Banner. Do you want me to take my panties off now?”
“Wait until I can watch you do it. I want to watch all of it.”
“Where are you?”
“Waiting for the bathroom.” He knocked on the door again, as if Lindsey would have forgotten he was out there in the twenty seconds between interruptions.
“Almost finished!” Lindsey called.
“Hurry.”
“You should feel how hot and swollen my pussy is for you, Gabe,” Melanie said in his ear. “Just hearing your voice does that to me.”
He knew the feeling. God, she was driving him insane.
“Don’t start without me,” he said, rattling the bathroom door handle as if he was about to piss down his leg.
“Too late,” Melanie said. “I’ve already started. I have to hurry or I’ll be missed at my desk and someone might come looking for me. You wouldn’t want me to get caught with my hand up my skirt, would you?”
Damn it. If Lindsey didn’t hurry up, he was going to miss it. He knew Adam was napping in the bedroom at the back of the bus. He wondered how dead he’d be if he woke the guitarist and told him to get lost so he could watch Melanie touch herself and touch himself without a live audience.
“What are you doing?” he asked Melanie. “Tell me.”
“I’ve got my skirt hiked up around
my waist. I’m holding my pussy is in my hand while I wait. It aches for you, Gabe.”
He knew what it was like to ache for someone. To ache for her. “Rub your clit through your panties, Mel. Make yourself wet for me while you wait.”
“Yes, Gabe.” She released a little moan. “That feels so good. Can I take my panties off now? They’re getting soaked.”
He stifled a groan of torment. “No, but slip your fingers beneath them and tell me what that sweet pussy of yours feels like.”
“Hey, Gabe,” Owen called from the common area. “Are you talking to your mom again?”
Gabe tensed and then cringed.
There were several boisterous laughs from the main cabin, but he refused to look that way. Shit! Were they listening? Could they hear all the dirty things he was saying to Melanie?
“It’s slippery and swollen.” Melanie obeyed his request. “Hot and smooth and oh! I need to come.”
When the door before him unlatched, he yanked it open. Lindsey gasped, her eyes wide, and put a hand over her distended abdomen.
“Sorry it took so long,” she said.
Not sorry enough to get the hell out of his way. He took her by the arm and turned, effectively ejecting her into the corridor and himself into the privacy of the bathroom.
“Okay,” he said to Melanie as he locked the door behind him. “I’m alone now. Take off your panties for me. Show me what I want to see.”
He pulled the phone away from his ear so he could watch as she switched to video chat. He caught a glimpse of her lovely flushed face before she set her phone on the bathroom counter. He loved how she wore her hair to work—her long brown curls all heaped on her head in a messy knot, with tendrils falling down around her heart-shaped face. His need to free those beautiful tresses and bury his hands in them was almost pathological. When she chatted with him on her laptop at home, she let her hair down for him, shook it out, ran her hands through the long, gorgeous mass of curls, but she wouldn’t do that now. Not when she was at work. But she would do other things for him. Naughty things.
Melanie stepped back from the phone so that he could see her. Her tight, gray skirt was bunched up around her hips, and an illegally sexy pair of black lace panties hid her sex. Did all businesswomen wear that kind of underwear under their office attire? If so, he was going to start hanging around water coolers.
When she pushed her glasses up her nose and nibbled her lower lip, his cock jerked with excitement.
“Fuck me,” he said under his breath.
He hadn’t known she’d worn glasses the night they’d met, and if men didn’t make passes at girls with glasses, then he had a gender identity crisis going on.
“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” she said with a naughty grin, her voice echoing slightly off the bathroom walls. Did her colleagues have any idea what kind of sexpot lurked behind her conservative facade? They’d better not. She was all his.
“Are you hard for me?” she asked. “Tell me, Gabe.”
“I’m always hard for you, baby. I belong inside you. Balls-deep inside you.”
“Show me.”
He reached for his fly and tilted the phone down, watching his screen to make sure she had a good view as he unfastened the buttons of his jeans one by one. He slid a hand down into his underwear and freed his throbbing erection from its confines, shuddering in bliss as his hand skimmed his cock’s sensitive surface.
“I swear it gets bigger every time I see it.” Melanie’s comment drifted up from the phone.
“It gets more desperate for you every time you see it.” He drew his phone closer to his face so he could see what she was doing on her end more clearly. He needed a bigger screen, he decided. No. He needed her here. Live in the flesh.
“This is where I want it, Gabe,” she said. He didn’t catch much of what she was doing as she moved but after a moment of holding his breath in anticipation, he released it in an excited whoosh as her pussy was displayed on screen, her fingers spreading her lips so he could see her intimately. So intimately. Her finger probed her opening, and she said, “In here. I want you here. Your fingers, your tongue, your cock. Right here.”
“Yes,” he said breathlessly. “That’s exactly where I want to be.”
He imagined himself buried inside her as he began to stroke himself. His hand was a poor substitution for her soft, silky heat, but it would have to do. He could hear her timid moans as her fingers slipped in and out of her pussy. He knew she’d have been louder if she’d been at home. She really put on a show for him late at night when he was alone in his bunk and she was in her bedroom. The first time he’d talked her into having phone sex, she’d been a little hesitant, but now she completely got off on it. And it made him crazy for her. Fuck, everything the woman did made him crazy.
His ass clenching rhythmically, Gabe pumped his hips as he thrust into his hand. He could almost feel her body against his, her pussy gripping his cock as he imagined fucking her against the bathroom wall. On the screen, her fingers moved to her clit, and she was soon trying to stifle her cries of release as she came for him. He scowled when she dropped her phone with a loud clatter and he could see nothing but blackness and hear nothing but her faint ragged gasps for breath.
He paused, waiting for her to return to him. After a long moment, her face appeared on the screen. Her glasses had slipped down the bridge of her nose. Her eyes were glassy, her cheeks were flushed, and her lips looked swollen, as if begging for kisses. His kisses.
“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t know why doing this at work turns me on so much.”
He grinned at her. “I do. You’re naughty, Melanie Anderson.”
She chuckled softly. “I was a good girl until I met you.”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
She shook her head, sending a few escaped curls dancing around her shoulders. “It’s a very, very good thing. Now come for me, Gabriel Banner, before I have to go back to my desk and pretend I care about numbers when I’d rather be stuffed with your cock.”
He smiled at her. “I love it when you talk dirty.”
“Soon I’ll be whispering those things into your ear. Soon I’ll be able to feel you inside me again. Your hard body against mine. Your breath against my skin.”
“Yes,” he groaned. “God, baby, do you think about me as much as I think about you?”
“Do you think of me constantly?”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “Every waking moment. Hell, you’re even in my dreams.”
“Then yes, I think about you just as much. I want to watch you come now, Gabe. Show me.”
He grinned at his good fortune. He was one lucky son of a bitch for finding a woman like her. He loved turning her into a naughty girl. It had been a goal of his. And... mission accomplished.
Gabe set his phone on the counter so he could take his cock in both hands. Knowing she needed to get back to work, he tried to hurry for her. Because she was watching and making little noises of appreciation and offering soft words of encouragement, it didn’t take him long to erupt. He caught his load in his hand, holding his palm at a distance so she could watch his fluids jet from his body. She’d told him that watching it come out made her cunny quake, and he was all about giving that sweet pussy an added thrill.
He took a moment to recover his breath and then lifted his phone from the counter, holding it between his jaw and shoulder as he washed his hands in the sink.
“I’m going to be inside you the next time I come, Mel,” he said, drying his hands on a hand towel and then closing his fly.
“God, yes. I want that too. I don’t know if I can wait until tomorrow night to see you again,” she said.
“Good.” He smiled crookedly. “Get on a plane and meet me in New Orleans tonight.”
She paused for a long moment and he wondered if maybe she didn’t want to see him as badly as she claimed. Maybe her insatiable need for him was all an act. Maybe reality would be a whole lot different from the games they pl
ayed on screens.
“But you said you didn’t want me at your shows,” she said quietly.
He could tell by the tone of her voice that his words had hurt her.
God, I’m an ass.
“I’m a liar, Melanie. A cowardly fucking liar. I do want you at my show and I need you in my bed as soon as possible.” He just hoped her needs matched his own.
Chapter Two
Melanie dashed up the two flights of stairs that led to her third floor apartment. She unlocked the door and was kicking off her shoes before she’d even closed the door behind her.
Her new roommate, Nikki, looked up from the screen of her laptop and smiled a warm greeting.
“You’re home early. Did you get fired or something?”