Free Wild Child by Molly O'Keefe Page B

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    You just did , Monica thought. But Gloria, Monica could see, now that the flashlight wasn’t blinding her, was assuring Jackson that he didn’t need to do anything of the kind. Yes, clearly Gloria was going to take the fact that she’d seen the Golden Boy Mayor making out with the Wild Child to her grave.
    Yeah, right .
    But Gloria drove off, wishing both of them a good night, and suddenly the night was cooler, the world a little bigger than it had been just moments ago. And she wanted to go back to just the two of them in the darkness. The two of them and the kiss, and the touch of his hands and the aching tension low in her body.
    “I cannot believe that just happened,” he breathed up at the stars.
    She laughed, and at his murderous look she laughed harder. “Come on, Mayor. It’s a little harmless necking. Hardly the end of the world.”
    It took a moment, and frankly, she wasn’t sure if he’d ever smile, but his lip finally curled. “This has never happened to me.”
    “You’ve never been caught kissing?” How hilarious! She’d spent two years on that reality show making sure she got caught kissing at every turn. “Not even in high school?”
    “I was … careful, then.”
    The implication was that he wasn’t careful tonight. Because of her, because something about her made him act out of character, lose some of that tightly wound control.
    Before it even registered, she squashed her emotional reaction to that. Because the fact that she cared, that she found deep in her chest some sort of feminine pride in that, was shocking.
    It was just a kiss.
    But she couldn’t even buy her own bullshit. For other women it was just a kiss. For her it was the first step down a road she had no interest in retraveling.
    It started off as being complimented, feeling a certain pride that he responded to her the way he did, but it ended—and she knew this—it ended with throwing away all her hard-won feminine independence. She didn’t needa man to define her worth; she didn’t need sex to be her compass. The attraction of men was a shit currency and she knew that better than anyone.
    But one kiss from this man, one offhand comment about how she affected him, and she could feel herself tying her pleasure, her pride, her sense of self to a man’s attraction to her.
    How disappointing.
    Now she was grateful for the wide world, the space between them. She needed a world’s worth of distance between herself and her mistakes and this man who would take her right back there.
    Monica’s lips glistened in the lamplight, and it took everything he had to look away from her. His mind, thick and slow from the kiss, from being caught in such a position by the police chief of all people, ran around in circles, sure of only one thing.
    Monica was a terrible distraction.
    Despite the embarrassment of being caught like that—despite the town, the contest, his sister—she could make him forget every one of his thousand responsibilities. He would throw all of them onto the back burner just for more … of her.
    Dangerous. So damn dangerous.
    The beginning of that kiss had been tense. Despite her flirting, despite her willingness, he’d felt the fight in her. That moment of panic when he thought she’d run, push him away and vanish into the night.
    He didn’t like to think what that might mean.
    But then, as if his fingers under the edge of her shirt, right at her spine, had unlocked her, she melted against him. Arched to meet him. It had been sweet and hot and about the most perfect moment in his life in as long as he could remember.
    Whatever “show” she was talking about, he didn’t know if that was it. All he knew was that she was viciously, sublimely exciting.
    But she was staring at him, her eyes deep and dark, and he realized that whatever her reasons were, the kiss was a mistake for her, too.
    Ironic that it stung.
    “I’ll walk you home,” he said.
    “You don’t have to do that.”
    “Yeah … I