Kim Harrison - Hotter Than Hell

A flash of gold.

“No, it’s not.” She closed a hand over his forearm, willing him to believe her. “You didn’t see what I saw.”

Glen was out of the office, hand-holding a client through a recording session, when the email came. NoMan was playing at the Atlas on Friday night. Ali was pretty sure she’d have told Glen about it had he been around; he had been the one to bring the band to her attention after all, even if he continued to insist they were nothing more than they seemed.

The denim skirt was so short it barely required all five letters and the heels on her boots made her legs look at least three inches longer. A white shirt so she’d stand out in the dim light of the bar. Noticeable, Ali decided, checking the mirror as she picked up her black leather messenger bag, but practically business casual given the excesses of the music industry.

The Atlas was attached to a downtown hotel that had seen much better days. There was a pool table off in one corner, a heavy, dark wooden bar across one narrow end, and a decent-sized stage across the other. Ali arrived at eight for a nine-thirty start, but the redhead and her boyfriend were already at a table. Pulling a t-shirt from her bag, Ali arranged her face in her best I can do things for you smile and moved in to make her pitch.

By nine-twenty she had all six t-shirts in place. Tight and low cut, black on white and stretched over the redhead, the two blondes from the parking lot, and three brunettes with a similar advertising under-structure, the name Bedford Entertainment would be impossible for the brothers to miss. At fifty dollars a shirt, it would be three hundred dollars well spent.

By nine-thirty the press of bodies had raised the temperature in the bar just a little higher than comfortable. As far as Ali knew, anticipation had no actual scent but there was definitely something in the air besides sweat and scotch. Something that kept her shifting on her high stool at the bar, every movement bringing her into contact with the men and women packed around her, every contact making her nerves sing that much more.

Shadows moved across the stage, then one long note dropped the room into silence. As the stage lights came up, NoMan started to play.

The hats and boots hadn’t changed, but above torn and battered jeans, Brandon wore a gray t-shirt with the sleeves ripped off that was so tight it looked painted onto his torso. Bare, muscular arms already glistened with sweat. Travis’s jeans were in better shape, but his untucked white-and-pink-striped shirt was half unbuttoned and gold hair glinted between the wings of the shirt every time he pulled back the bow. Ali wasn’t surprised to see he still wore his sunglasses.

The first two songs were the same as the last time but, just like the last time, by the third song Ali’d lost any hope of keeping coherent notes. All she could do was ride the sensation, intensified by the close quarters. Off her stool now, she moved with the music, with the crowd, touching, rubbing as the notes from Travis’s fiddle burned through her blood and Brandon’s voice licked at her skin.

Hands gripped her hips and dragged her back against a hard body, hot breath lapped at her ear, and a familiar voice just barely audible over the music growled, “You drive me crazy, Ali. I look at you like this and I can’t keep my hands off you.”

She bit back the moan that possibility evoked and struggled to turn but Tom held her in place, his erection a line of hard heat against her thigh.

“I could have you right now,” he said, slipping one arm around her waist and pulling her closer still as fingers stroked up her bare leg under the edge of her skirt, blunt nails digging lightly at her skin. “I could lift your skirt, drag your panties aside, slip into you.” Two fingers pushed under the elastic. “I could fuck you in time to the music.” The fingers slid down the wet line of her sex, teasing. Up on her toes, Ali’s head fell back against Tom’s shoulder. “I bet they’d notice—no one else would but Brandon and Travis, they’d watch from the stage.” Then the fingers were gone and his grip was gone and there was only his voice at her ear. “I want to, but I won’t. Because I’ve moved on.”

She managed to turn in time to see him push the fall of thick dark hair back off his face and, eyes tracking the motion, she noticed there was something in his ear. By the time she got all the way around, he was moving away, slipping easily through the crowd, the only person in the room who hadn’t given control of his body over to the music.

Wax plugs in his ears to keep himself from being swept away.

As heated bodies brushed rhythmically against her, and the hands on her skin and the breath raising goosebumps on her neck belonged to strangers, Ali looked to the stage where Brandon held the microphone like a lover and sang of learning to touch and Travis danced the bow across the strings of his violin spilling out notes in point and counterpoint…

…and she knew.

After, when the music ended, she slid back up onto the stool, ordered a scotch, and waited. The crowd had thinned and those who remained were moving around the room like cats after a kill—slow, deliberate, sensual. The box of CDs on the end of the bar had emptied as people paid for the chance to take the sensation evoked by the music home.

Brandon stood just off the stage, brushing damp tendrils of the redhead’s hair back off her face while Travis stood beside him, one hand gently kneading her boyfriend’s broad shoulder. All four of them glanced down at her chest, and she half turned, pointing toward the bar.

As Brandon’s eyes met hers, Ali raised her glass and smiled.

Travis laughed, the sound falling into the room like pebbles into a pond, the ripple of reaction spreading. Someone dropped a glass. Someone else moaned. Brandon leaned toward his brother, asked a question, and when Travis nodded, led the way up onto the stage and toward the door at the back. They paused at the door, standing close enough as they turned that Ali knew they had to be touching shoulder to hip. Still smiling, Travis beckoned.

Given the sunglasses it should have been impossible to tell who he was beckoning to.

It wasn’t.

His teeth were very white.

Backstage was nothing more than a long, narrow room between the rear wall of the stage and the brick, outside wall of the Atlas. The air was cooler and smelled more like dust than like sex and alcohol. Following the two men past stacked chairs and empty boxes to where a small lounge had been set up in the far corner, Ali wondered a little at her willingness to throw caution to the winds. If the brothers could make anyone do anything…

The possibility smoldered in the cradle of her hips, the heat shifting and flaring as she walked.

“So, Alysha Bedford of Bedford Entertainment…” Travis dropped onto one corner of the disreputable-looking couch, Brandon perching on the arm beside him. “…you’ve got our attention.” His right hand rose to rest on his brother’s thigh, long fingers absently stroking the faded denim. “What is it you want?”

Ali drew her tongue over dry lips. She wanted them to touch her. To drag rough fingers over her skin. To open her. To fill her. To feast off her. That was what she wanted but it wasn’t why she was there. She was there because they had something she needed and she had to convince them that they in turn needed her. “I know what you are,” she said.

Travis laughed but Brandon tossed his hat down on the other end of the couch and drew both hands back through damp hair, pale eyes never leaving her face. “I think she does.”

“Do you?” Travis stretched out one long leg, the room narrow enough his boot ended up thrust between Ali’s ankles. She looked down, saw the black leather and barely stopped her hips from rocking forward. “All right then,” he murmured, “what are we?”