Page 8 of My Best Friend's Dad

“I feel like this just so happens to be a night for bad decisions.” Suddenly, jarringly, she stops playing, the last notes echoing through the room like the cries of ghosts.

Werewolf juice? Drama juice, more like.

“I want to make one,” she states with determination. “Rightnow. I want you to lock that door and do things to me on this piano. Sinful, dark things we won’t ever talk about again. We’ll pretend like it never happened the second I leave this room. We can be two people who need each other in this moment. No past. No future. Just now. We won’t call, we won’t see each other, and there will be no obligations. No complications, no relationships, no fights, no breakups, no broken hearts, no betrayals, no asshattery, and no pain.”

Fuck. She had me at asshattery.

I don’t know what I’m doing when I reach into my pocket and pull out my set of keys. They’re ancient because the doors are older than time. The skeleton keys fit the mood. Dark. Gothic. Raunchy.

Okay, maybe not raunchy.

“Keep playing,” I tell her, though I’m not sure if it’s to soothe me, give me courage, or mask my footsteps as I cross to the heavy wood door.

I glide it shut, the thud echoing through the room like a cannon.

I have no idea who this woman is past her name, but at least I’m on a first-name basis.Not that she knows mine. Not that I can give her my real name because that will blow my bartender cover forever.She walked in here looking lost, unsure, miserable, and afraid. But sometime between that drink and when she sat down at the piano, she transformed into a goddess. A sex goddess who wants to have steamy and hot piano coitus with a stranger right here in this room.

As I slide the key into the lock and twist, my mind is in danger of exploding, and it’s not the only thing. My cock throbs against my black pants, embarrassingly tenting them behind my bartender’s apron.

She’s obviously younger than me. I look thirty-five, but I’m nearly ten years older, which probably makes meat least twenty years older than her. I should tell her. I should dissuade her. I should stop this before it happens.

I cross to the piano and open my mouth to do just that, but she turns her head over her shoulder and smiles at me so softly that between the sweet music flowing through the room and the shining, raw sensuality in her eyes and the devious tilt of her bow lips, I’m lost. She doesn’t have the look of a woman who cares how old I am. She said no past and no future. Given how wrecked she looked when she got here, I have no doubt she’sgoing to use me to undo something else in her mind. To forget the hurt, to move past whoever wronged her.

I’d bet anything that I’m a rebound, and it shouldn’t be so…fucking hot.

“You look like you’re going to ask me if I’m absolutely sure,” she says flatly, determination hardening her tone. “Well, I am.”

“We don’t know each other.”

Her lips twitch, and her eyes dance. She never stops playing. “I’m aware.”

“Have you…have you ever done something like this before?”

Why do I feel like I’m the one who’shalf her age? Right. Probably because I haven’t done this before. Technically, one-night stands, yes, but nothing like this.

“No. Have you?”

I shake my head, unable to get my tongue to work, and then I nod.

“Right. Somewhere in the middle. I get that.” She pauses, but there’s no flicker of doubt. Just extra softness that curls her lips in a gentle, encouraging smile. “Are you scared?”

“I…don’t know that scared is the right word,” I reply.

She nods, her hands flying over the piano, the music changing tempo. It’s not upbeat, but it is more violent. Crashing. A wave and a crescendo, a peak and a valley, over and over. She’s had a fuck of a night. There are dark smudges of mascara under her eyes. If she cried, she wiped away the evidence other than the mascara, and it’s been enough time that her face isn’t puffy, and her eyes aren’t even overly red.

She’s probably pretty even when she cries.

But it still makes me want to find the offending parties who hurt her and ram their face so far up their ass that they’ll be smelling their own anus for at least a good few years to come.

She never stops playing. The music swells through the lounge, and I wonder if she knows how talented she truly is.

Or if she’s ever been appreciated.

I’d like to be the one to do that for her, even if it’s just for a few minutes.

“What is that?” I ask.

She twists back around, and she watches her hands as if she’s mystified that they belong to her. “I don’t know. I guess it’s what I hear in my head right now and how I feel. Complicated, angry, inexplicablystarved, sad. Is it wrong to want to feel nothing just for a few minutes? Nothing but pleasure? I’ve never had that, and I’d like to try it if you’d like to try it too.”