Good Time Girl. Candace Schuler

he was, found his hat in the way and yanked it off, tossing it blindly away so that it flew over the windshield and landed on the floorboard in the front of the car.

      He moved one hand up her side, gliding swiftly over a rounded hip and the gentle dip of her waist, skimming the side of one soft breast, over her smooth, bare shoulder, to fist in the soft, tousled hair at her nape. He drew her head back, forcing her body to bow beneath his, instinctively reasserting his control over her, and dragged his open mouth down the long, elegant line of her throat to the tantalizing swell of cleavage revealed by the scooped neck of her blouse.

      Roxanne’s response was unhesitating, unapologetic, and wildly uninhibited. She clutched his head in both hands and arched under him, pressing her breasts forward, urging him to take more. To take all. To take everything.

      He obliged with flattering speed, his mouth open and sucking at the soft flesh of her breast above her blouse. One hand moved down to her bare thigh, then began inching upward again, sliding under the bunched-up hem of her tiny denim skirt. She felt his fingers skimming along the leg opening of her panties, and then they were edging under it, tracing the sensitive crevice at the top of her thigh, touching the soft crinkly hair that covered her mound, moving inexorably toward the throbbing, heated core of her.

      She tensed. Breathless. Waiting. Wanting. Her nerves screaming with anticipation. Her body screaming for release.

      “How do you like to be touched, Slim?” he murmured, his voice low and heated, just on the edge of ragged. “Slow and easy?” He skimmed her clitoris with his fingertip, gently, like a man lazily strumming a single string on a guitar.

      Roxanne gasped as heat forked through her, and rolled her head against the hood of the Mustang, lifting her hips upward, pressing closer, straining.

      “Or fast and furious?” He flicked the swelled nubbin of flesh, quickly, as if he were doing hot licks on a banjo string.

      Roxanne bucked wildly beneath him and her hips began to piston in silent demand. She was as taut as an expertly coiled rope, the tension in her arched body a palpable thing that held her, quivering and breathless, on the edge of release, needing only the right touch to send her flying.

      “Talk to me, Slim,” he growled, his head lifted now so he could watch her face as he held her there, trembling on the brink. His eyes were like blue lasers, hot, intense, and focused. “Tell me how you want to be touched.”

      Roxanne moaned, incoherent with need and excitement, and reached down to grab his hand, intending to direct his fingers to where she most wanted them to be, to show him what she wanted with every fiber of her being.

      “No.” He resisted the silent demand. “Tell me.”

      “I…I… Oh. I don’t. I can’t. I… Oh, please. Please. Just touch me. Touch—”

      “Well, hot damn, would you look at that.” The voice rang out across the parking lot, boisterous and male. “Yahoo! Ride ’em, cowboy!”

      The two people sprawled on the hood of the Mustang stiffened, stilled in a frozen tableau of passion rudely interrupted. Tom’s hand was under her skirt, inside her leopard-print panties, a millimeter from where she needed it to be. Roxanne’s fingers were clamped around his wrist, the nails biting into his flesh in a futile effort to guide him to the right spot.

      “Come on, Hank, honey.” It was a woman’s voice, high-pitched and giggly. “It ain’t polite to stare.”

      “Well, hell, darlin’, it ain’t polite to do the wild thing in public, either, but—”

      “Come on, Hank. Let’s just go inside. I want to dance.”

      They could hear Hank grumbling but he went, his boot heels crunching in the gravel as he followed “darlin’” into the honky-tonk. The door to Ed Earl’s creaked open, spilling music and light out into the parking lot, then closed again, surrendering the night to the garish pink glow of the flamingos on the roof.

      Roxanne bit back a strangled whimper of frustration and loosened her grip on Tom’s wrist, hating the loudmouthed cowboy and his giggling girlfriend with her whole heart. She’d been so close. So tantalizing close! All she’d needed was one more second. Just one more measly little second and she knew her good-looking, dangerous cowboy would have taken her all the way to paradise.

      Tom swore ripely and withdrew his hand from Roxanne’s panties, silently thanking God or whoever was in charge of looking out for damn fools that Hank and his darlin’ hadn’t come by two minutes later. He’d been that close—that close—to unbuttoning the fly of his Wrangler and giving it to her right there on top the car. Two minutes more—hell, less than two minutes!—he’d have been bare-assed, his jeans around his knees, thrusting into her with no more thought for time and place than a stallion covering a mare.

      And no cowboy yahooing in the parking lot would have stopped him until he’d gotten them where they both wanted to go.

      Even now, it was a near thing. His control—such as it was—wouldn’t survive another close encounter. The next time he put his hands on her, he wouldn’t stop until both of them were naked, sweaty, and too exhausted to do more than moan in satisfaction. And, damn it, they needed a bed and some privacy for that!

      “Come on, Slim.” He stepped back and took hold of both her hands, pulling her upright. “Let’s get the hell out of here before we get ourselves arrested.”

      Bemused, befuddled, her body humming with unfulfilled desires, her brain fogged by unsatisfied lust, Roxanne slid obligingly, even eagerly, off the fender of the car—and then just stood there, staring up at him with a soft, besotted expression on her face. Lord, he was good-looking. And sexy. And she wanted him so much. So very much. More than she’d ever wanted anything or anyone in her entire life. She swayed toward him, her face raised, her lips parted, her eyes drifting closed.

      He took a quick step back and dropped her hands. “No.”

      Her eyes snapped open, widened at his abrupt, almost-biting tone.

      “We lock lips again and, I swear, I’ll hoist you right back up on the hood of this car and finish it,” he warned, his voice low and soft and strained. “Every last cowboy in the bar could come tromping out to watch and I wouldn’t stop. Not until we were both too tired to move. And maybe not even then.”

      Roxanne smiled beatifically, thrilled to the core by his ragged admission. “I wouldn’t want you to stop,” she said, her voice as ragged, as strained, as his. “I didn’t want you to stop before.”

      Tom gulped audibly and his hands fisted at his sides.

      The jolt of pure female sexual power that surged through her at that small, telling gesture was utterly intoxicating, adding another layer to her simmering sexual excitement. No man had ever threatened her with ravishment before. No man had ever had to fight to restrain himself from carrying out that threat, either. It made her feel irresistible. Invincible. Intensely, totally female. At that precise moment, good girl Roxanne Archer disappeared completely. In her place was good-time girl Roxy.

      And Roxy was hot.

      Roxy was itchy.

      Roxy wanted a man—this man—and didn’t care who knew it.

      She tilted her head, looking up at him from under provocatively lowered lashes, and gave him the same slow, seductive come-to-mama smile that had drawn him to her in the bar. But this time there was no calculation in it, no planning or plotting. She was acting on pure feminine instinct. “I guess we’d better do as you suggested, then, shouldn’t we?” she said, and licked her lips. Slowly.

      Tom made a low growling noise and took a careful step back, away from her and the temptation she so blatantly offered.

      Roxanne’s smile turned positively feline. Her eyes glowed. Without shifting her gaze from his, she reached down with exaggerated slowness and slid the first two fingers of her right hand into the pocket of her skirt.

      “The key,” she said, and held the plastic