Coming from a gay guy, that was a major compliment.
The bells over the coffee shop door sounded as a gray-haired, sixty-something couple exited. Lissa glanced at her watch. Ten minutes till her appointment. A block and a half to go.
She could spend five minutes determining if Mr. Nice Guy was single and searching and then huff it to the Sugar Shack. Or forgo the meet and greet, arrive at her appointment on time, and take Sam up on his mouth job offer when she arrived home.
As much as she loved Sam, there was no future for them beyond friendship. There probably wasn’t one with the guy in the coffee shop either.
Lissa walked back to the shop anyway.
To the sound of tinkling bells, she pulled open the wood door with white and red stained-glass coffee mugs designed into its window slats. Entering the shop, she looked up at the bells…and nearly slammed into Mr. Nice Guy.
He stood in front of a customer bulletin board, pinning business cards up with long-fingered hands that bore neither rings nor tan lines. After tacking the last card onto the board, he turned toward her, flashed a smile sexy enough to do a fluttering number on her sex, and moved right on past and out the door.
“Well, shit.” So much for opportunity knocking. Even worse, she was starting to sound like a broken record.
She should forget about him and get to her appointment. But between his lack of a wedding ring and that sexy smile, her eagerness flame was rekindled.
Lissa grabbed one of the newly posted business cards off the bulletin board. Thad Davies, Handyman was written in black, and beneath it, in bold, blue lettering, Loose Screws Construction. Was the company name meant to be a double entendre, and exactly how handy of a man was Thad?
Handy enough to leave her his number.
Smiling, she tucked the business card into her satchel. Later, maybe she would give him a call. Or maybe she would pick up a box of Sam’s favorite sweets while she was at the Sugar Shack and use them to bribe him into making good on his mouth job offer.
“You’re a bastard!”
Thad Davies sank back against the black metal rails of his headboard and sighed over the glaring brunette standing on the end of the bed’s bare mattress.
Naked and flushed with the aftereffects of orgasm, she looked ready to beat the shit out of him. From what little he knew of her, she was nice enough. Her sweat-glistening tits were definitely nice, as they jostled around with her anger. That didn’t mean he was ready to forget she was a client and sleep with her for free. “You play, you pay, sweetheart.”
With a huff, she bounded off the end of the bed, flashing an ass that was just as nice and well rounded as her tits. “Don’t call me that! And don’t you ever come near me again.”
She reached the tangle of sheets, covers, and clothing, which had found their way to the floor in the midst of their wild screwing, and started kicking them apart.
Damn, he really didn’t like upsetting women. It wasn’t his fault they hired him for sex and ended up falling for him along the way. Not all of them did, but more than a couple had in the five months since the woman-pleasuring division of Loose Screws started up. “You called me,” he reminded her.
The brunette stopped kicking to look at him, hurt evident in her eyes. “I thought we had something between us.”
“We do. A business deal.”
The hurt left her expression as cold fury took over. Soft pink lips, which less than ten minutes ago had been wrapped around his dick and delivering him to nirvana, pushed into a hard line. Giving the chaotic pile a final kick, she uncovered a slim red purse and yanked it up by the strap. “Consider the deal off,” she bit out as she shoved her hand inside the purse and yanked out a handful of bills. “Don’t expect any referrals to be coming your way.”
Fifties and hundreds plastered him in the chest and rained down on the bed around him. Some people might feel cheap in a situation like this. For Thad, it was all in a day’s work, and he happened to love his job most of the time…well, what man in his right mind wouldn’t?
Pushing the bills off his chest, he moved to the edge of the bed and swung his legs over the side. He rolled the condom off his deflating shaft, tucked it into a tissue, and deposited it in the wastebasket between the bed and the short black oak dresser that doubled as a nightstand. “Don’t you be forgetting that silence agreement you signed.”
Midway through diving down to retrieve her bra and panties, the brunette’s breath dragged in on a gasp. She glared at him. “Like I would tell anyone I had the poor taste to pay to fuck you.”
“You got your money’s worth. All six times.” Today, she’d chosen to suck him off while he fulfilled her order of oral sex. The five times she employed his services before this, she’d been after her pleasure alone. The ecstatic cries centering each of those sessions said she’d enjoyed herself plenty.
With a final huff, she jerked the bra and panties off the floor and, not bothering to go back for her skintight white minidress, stormed out the bedroom door. Less than twenty seconds later, the front door slammed. The short lapse of time told him she’d left his rental duplex buck naked.
The neighbors would have a coronary over that exit.
But to hell with what his neighbors thought. Thad had never been a saint a day in his life and he never intended to pretend otherwise, even if the ultraconservative city of Crichton and the surrounding county preferred him to do so.
He scrubbed a hand over his face, aware that line of thinking was a lie.
He didn’t want to give a damn what his neighbors thought of him and if they discovered he worked part time as a gigolo, but he didn’t have any choice in the matter. Thanks to the economy being blown to shit and taking his job with the local automotive plant along with it, staying in the area meant making his money by whatever means possible.
Loose Screws, the construction company he ran with two of his former plant coworkers, was taking off slowly. And business would continue to be slow until the economy bounced back. The cold hard truth was most people didn’t have the money to spend on building or remodeling.
Women did have money for sex. Or whatever else might tickle their fancy, or any other part of their mind and body.
Last week Benny pulled in a grand just for spending the afternoon alone with an eighty-year-old widow. Alone and naked, but still that was a helluva lot of dough for a few hours of small talk while being ogled by an old lady.
Speaking of his business partner, Thad should give Benny a call and see if he and Nash needed help at the current construction site. The job was a relatively small one. It was also nearly finished, and the sooner it got done, the sooner they would get paid. Nash could avoid needing the cash by sucking up his loathing for the wealthy and asking his affluent father for a handout the man was eager to give. Benny was doing whatever it took to keep his Alzheimer’s-stricken foster mother in an upscale nursing home. Thad just liked to be able to afford to eat and make rent.
After going into the half bath adjoining his second-floor bedroom and getting washed up, Thad pulled on a pair of boxers and jeans, then headed downstairs to the kitchen. He lifted the cordless phone from the counter, planning to punch in Benny’s cell number while he discovered what, if any, food waited in the refrigerator.
The phone rang before he could punch the first number. Pulling open the fridge door, he hit the phone’s Talk button. “Loose Screws. This is Thad.”
“I need you,” a low, husky feminine voice implored through the phone line.
One of the reasons he was able to charge as much as he did for his gigolo services was the shitload of testosterone the good Lord saw fit to gift him