Free Change of Heart by Nicole Jacquelyn Page A

squeal.
    “Fuck. Stay here,” I ordered, turning around to make my way through the crowd.
    I was anxious as fuck to leave her to cross the bar, but I’d promised Jay I’d open up for him. Usually people weren’t in a hurry to sign up at open-mike night. They came wanting to get up onstage, but it took a bit for them to gather up the balls to do it. That’s where I came in. I’d been playing in Jay’s bar for the past couple of years, and I was pretty comfortable up there. I made it look easy. Simple. I wasn’t great, but I wasn’t bad, either. By the time I was done with one or two songs, people had usually filled in the open spots on the sign-up sheet.
    “Hello, patrons of Jay’s,” I said, leaning into the mike as I took Jay’s guitar from him and set the strap over my shoulder. “How drunk are you?”
    The crowd cheered, and I smiled, looking over to Ani.
    She was sitting at a bar stool with her legs crossed, her ass almost hanging out of her tank top as she sipped from her beer, her eyes on me. Her lips were turned up around the rim of her glass, and I couldn’t help but smile back.
    What the fuck was she doing to me?
    *  *  *
    “You did so good tonight,” Ani said sleepily from the passenger seat later that night.
    “Thanks,” I said quietly as we finally pulled into the little subdivision I lived in.
    My town house wasn’t much, but I owned it outright, and the homeowners’ association took care of the yard and shit so I didn’t have to. When I’d started looking for a place a couple years before, all I’d found were three- and four-bedroom houses in our little town. Homes for families. I didn’t really want or need that much space. So when they’d started building town houses on the edge of the city limits, I’d jumped on one. My house was a place I crashed—nothing more, nothing less—and I didn’t want the hassle of trying to keep up with the yard and maintenance and shit.
    “You’re not dropping me at home?” Ani asked, a small smirk on her lips as I pulled into my one-car garage.
    “Just noticed that, huh?” I joked, shutting off the truck and pressing the garage door remote on my visor. I’d passed the turnoff to her place more than a mile back.
    “I’m not very observant,” Ani mocked, jumping from the truck to the cement floor.
    As I rounded the truck, she stepped in front of me, reaching for the door to the house. She probably would have made it, too.
    But she hadn’t put her pants on when we’d climbed back into the truck, and as she’d sat in the cab, the bottom of her tank top had ridden higher and higher. By the time she reached the doorway to my house, the bottoms of her ass cheeks were peeking out of the lace along the bottom edge of her shirt.
    By the sway in her hips, she knew it.
    “You like teasing me?” I murmured in her ear as I wrapped my arm tightly around the front of her body, stopping her in the open door.
    “You like it,” she replied with a small laugh, arching her back.
    “Floor, wall, kitchen table, or bed?” I asked, pushing her ahead of me into the dark house without letting go of her.
    “The couch isn’t an option?”
    “You want the couch?” I pulled the garage door closed behind us and locked it.
    “Not really.”
    “Bed, it is.”
    “Well that’s not very original.”
    “Always busting my balls,” I muttered, spinning her around and pressing her up against the wall. “That foreplay to you?”
    “If it is, we’ve been practically fucking for the last ten years—”
    I laughed against her mouth as I leaned in, and within seconds, she was laughing with me, wrapping her arms around my neck as she hopped up. I grabbed her bare ass in my hands and groaned, finding the smallest piece of underwear known to man nestled between her cheeks.
    I stomped toward the stairs as she rubbed her lips against mine, and thank fuck I didn’t have a ton of furniture and knew my way around in the dark or we would have fallen ass-over-elbows as