Free Bad Girl by Night by Lacey Alexander Page A

seeking privacy to talk to him—until she turned on him with angry eyes and said, “What do you think you’re doing?”
    “Coming in.”
    She blinked, looking as incredulous as if he’d just suggested they have sex again. Maybe that’s what she thought he was after. “No, you’re not.”
    “Seriously?”
    “Seriously. Please just go away and leave me alone.”
    Okay, her snotty attitude was beginning to piss him off—because he’d done nothing wrong here and she was acting like he had. “I can’t come in your shop?” he asked a bit more harshly. “What if I want to buy something?” It was a store, after all. How could she keep him from going inside?
    “I’m closed for lunch.”
    “Shit—can’t we just talk for a few minutes? Like civilized human beings?”
    When she turned back to meet his gaze this time, though, she was actually trembling. All over.
    Aw, hell—snotty or not, it made him feel like an ass.
    Now she spoke more slowly, her rudeness laced with a true sense of desperation. “Look, if you have even an ounce of kindness inside you, you’ll forget you ever met me .”
    The words, the look in her eyes, made Jake go still, frozen in place on the step below the entryway—as she went inside, shut the door in his face, and audibly turned the lock on the other side.

Chapter 5
    J ake stood there for a minute, as if waiting for her to change her mind and open the door. After all, she was right on the other side. Maybe she’d suddenly see reason.
    But then he remembered the shocking new fact he was still trying to wrap his brain around. Desiree wasn’t quite the same woman he’d just met. And while Desiree was the kind of woman who’d open the door, this Carly chick was someone else entirely.
    Finally, he stepped down onto the sidewalk and started slowly back up the street, completely baffled as he continued trying to reconcile that the person who’d just locked him out of her store was the same welcoming, aggressive woman he’d met a month ago.
    The woman he’d shared with Colt. Sometimes the memory still shocked him—for lots of reasons.
    He’d gone through a special hostage ops program with Colt at police academy ten years ago, and while he’d always gotten along with him, they weren’t particularly close. If someone had told him an hour before it had happened that he’d be having a threeway with the guy that night, he wouldn’t have believed it. It was just dumb luck they’d been hanging out together on that particular evening of their yearly reunion. Colt had taken a business call on his cell as they’d headed toward the bar, and he’d stayed in the lobby to finish it, requesting, “Somebody get me a beer,” as the other guys went inside. Jake had complied, and they’d taken turns buying beer for each other all night.
    Was he sorry Colt had been involved in his tryst with Desiree? Wait—shit . . . Carly. Her name was Carly; that was hard to get used to. For the past month, Desiree had been giving him wet dreams that had left him waking up in the morning feeling all of thirteen years old. But he didn’t feel like a kid when he really let himself remember that night—nope, then he felt about as much like a lusty adult male as a guy could.
    And the truth was, he didn’t regret Colt’s involvement. The evening hadn’t turned out like he’d initially envisioned it might—he’d never been with a woman so bold, so uninhibited. But it had set his blood racing, drawn him to her in a way that had felt . . . almost magnetic, like he couldn’t have resisted if he’d tried.
    And then, in the midst of all that sex—he’d begun to see tiny hints, the quickest glimpses, of something softer underneath her lust. And in the midst of all that had come his frustration at times that she was so . . . controlling. Of the sex.
    It shouldn’t have mattered—she’d willingly pleasured them both, and given that he was a red-blooded American guy with an appreciation for a little kinkiness