Easy Little Lick (Copperline #3) (2 page)

The buzz I still felt coursing through my veins and the fear I heard in the woman’s voice twisted inside me. Suddenly, I didn’t care if I got in trouble. I wanted to help her. I wanted to stop him.

“I have to go,” I gasped frantically when I heard another loud crash. “I have to stop him.”

“Sir, stay with me. Law enforcement officers are very close. They will only be a minute or two.”

It was more like three. Just over three of the longest motherfucking minutes of my life. I watched the clock, my panic growing as each scream echoed in the night air.

And then…
silence
. Eerie and cold in the darkness.

I shot out of bed, barreling down the steps out the door just as the sheriff pulled up. Right behind him was an Ophir PD car.

It had been just over three minutes, but it was still too late.

By the time they arrived and subdued the abusive, angry man, he’d already done what he’d come so close to doing many times before. What my dad and mom had told her would happen if she didn’t leave him.

What I could have stopped if I’d only intervened. If I hadn’t hesitated because I was stoned, selfish, and paranoid.

I watched as they carried the woman’s body from the house, zipped up in a black bag. The guilt crushed me. It cut me deep and festered in my conscience.

It haunted me.

It changed me.

I still drank. I even still toked up a little now and then, but I always kept a tight hold on it. I always made sure it wouldn’t fuck with me too much. I made sure I could and would still man up whenever needed.

I would
never
hesitate again.

Five years later…

“But it’s a sex party, Cody,” Justin groaned as he picked up his bass to prepare for the show that night. “A
sex party
. When’s the last time you were laid, anyway?”

I only laughed. A wild orgy was Justin’s version of heaven and, really, a rare event for small-town Montana. To me, though, while it did sound pretty fuckin’ hot, it also sounded kind of…
empty
. I’d done the random hookups, not a ton of them, but enough to know that something was just missing there.

Maybe it was because I was younger than the other guys in the band, something they gave me shit about all the time. I was the baby of the group. I’d lived my whole life in the small town of Ophir, just outside of Butte, and even Butte wasn’t huge by any standards. My buddies, mostly the other Bangin’ Mofos, lived much more vicariously than I did.

The thing was, I just kinda
knew
there was someone out there who would come along, hit me like a ton of bricks, and that would be it. Forever. Sort of a chickish view on life, so I didn’t really share it with my manwhore friends, even though they were settling down one by one, getting all domesticated.

Justin, though… he was a bit stubborn about it. He’d always been the wildest of the bunch, always on the lookout for something hot and dirty. Always seeking a new twist. Voyeurism, exhibitionism, threesomes, foursomes…
moresomes
. He truly couldn’t understand where I was coming from.

He figured my parents’ idealistic marriage had ruined me for casual hookups.

Maybe he was right.

I’d grown up listening to my mom and dad go on and on about the moment they met. How they knew right then and there it would be forever. It was a summertime street dance and the band started to play my mom’s favorite song. She had exclaimed that she wanted to dance, and the crowd had practically parted to lead directly to my dad. My mom always told the story to my brother and me with a sappy, sweet grin on her face. She said it was like a scene in a movie, and my dad would throw her a little wink as he smiled at the memory.

Two decades later, things were smooth sailing in the Driscoll home. I could see how they loved each other more and more every day. They still flirted like teenagers even after kids and bills and years of water under the bridge.

So I just couldn’t settle for quick and dirty. Not when I knew something like
that
was possible.

I had no shortage of offers with the girls that hung around our band. Over the past couple years, I’d touched and tasted more than a few, but nobody really seemed to fit. None of the girls I’d had really
felt
right. The sparks didn’t ignite. I never really experienced the burn.

They saw the outside me. Tall and pretty fuckin’ buff from all the time I spent on the drums, more or less every waking moment that I wasn’t working my day job as a mechanic for my buddy Brannon. I had ocean-blue eyes and sandy light brown hair. The chicks that flocked around the Mofos took one look at me and went all rainbows and butterflies thinking I could be the
one
.

But they never really scratched beneath the surface. They didn’t take the time to get to know me. They saw muscles and heard the words ‘
drummer in a band
’ and that’s all they needed. Everything was always so superficial, and there was no depth to their attraction.

I started feeling like I had unrealistic expectations. I had my heart set on that perfect girl who would come along and rock my world.

But maybe that perfect girl didn’t exist.

“Fuck,” Justin continued, “I need a wingman,
desperately
, and Drew already said no.”

Drew nodded as he tuned his guitar. “Maggie’s out of town.”

“Dude,” Justin pleaded, “if she was here, she’d be begging you to go. She lives for that shit.”

“Yeah,” Drew laughed back, “but she’s not, and I can’t go without her. That’s
cheating
, you fucker, and she’d kick my ass.”

“
Fuuuuuuuck
,” Justin snorted in exasperation. “Why the fuck is Cody the only other single Mofo? The fucker is pure relationship material with all his nice guy shit. If any of you bastards wound up getting pussy-whipped, it should have been him. But
nooooo
.” He turned to Denny, our Dublin-born front man, who was testing the mic. “Wait, you and Felicity are into exhibitionism, right? What was that thing you did back in Ireland? Dogging? Why don’t you—”

“Feck off,” Denny replied, grinning slightly at Justin’s desperation, but exuding an underlying possessive vibe that said he
really
wasn’t joking. “I’m not sharing Fliss.”

“Maybe Brannon and Sophie,” Justin thoughtfully murmured. “The three of us have gotten busy before.”

“And I’m pretty sure Brannon told you never again,” I said. Brannon was a friend of the band and became my boss when we’d graduated from the automotive program at the local community college. He and his girlfriend Sophie had a rather adventurous beginning to their relationship, fulfilling all the things on her naughty bucket list. Since then, though, they had settled pretty concretely into monogamy.

“Fuck,” Justin muttered, turning back to me. “See, you fucker? There isn’t anyone else
but
you.” His mouth dropped open with an epiphany. I could almost see the light bulb appear over his head. “Maybe you’ll meet your dream girl there, that perfect woman you've been saving yourself for.”

“Yeah, right,” I laughed. “Nobody meets their soulmate at a sex party.”

Right about then, we heard footsteps on the stage stairs.

Doug, the owner of the Copperline, came up first, followed by a girl who appeared pretty close to my age of twenty-three. She stood slightly hidden by him. From what I could see, she had long dirty-blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail and was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. All in all, her appearance seemed fairly nondescript.

“These guys are our regulars on the weekends, the Bangin’ Mofos,” Doug was saying as he led her up to the stage, coming to pause beside my drums. “Hey guys, I want you to meet Ilsa. She’s a new waitress who will be starting tonight. Ilsa, that wanker over there is Denny, there’s Drew on lead guitar and Justin on bass, and this big fella behind the drums,” he motioned over to me, “is Cody.”

“Ilsa…” I murmured to myself, “like on Casablanca.”

I hadn’t really meant to say it out loud. I had the tendency to spout out things without thinking more often than not, usually things that didn’t make a lot of sense to most people. That was the only place I’d heard the name, though… Ilsa Lund, Bogie’s star-crossed lover from the old black and white flick. Brannon’s grampa always had WWII movies playing in his garage, and Casablanca had sorta stuck with me after all those years.

When I spoke, Doug stepped aside, and Ilsa looked right at me with the most beautiful hazel-brown eyes. Even from where I sat a few feet away, I could make out the amazing color framed by long, thick lashes. Drawing me in and holding my attention. Hypnotizing me.

I pushed back my beanie hat and just sort of stood there staring at her, taken captive by her gaze. Rendered speechless.

“So, be nice to her,” Doug continued, “but I don’t want any of you guys to fuck her, got it?”

At that remark, her eyes went very wide, and the most tantalizing shade of pink colored her cheeks. She quickly looked up at her new boss, somewhat alarmed, but more in a question.

“It’s kind of a ground rule I've started,” Doug explained to her with a shrug, then looked back at us. The guy was an old biker, grew up in Sturgis, all leathery and really badass looking, so his menacing glare tended to be sort of boner-shriveling. “I go through waitresses like crazy with these manwhores. I’m tired of that shit.”

With those words, Ilsa looked back at me with her eyebrows furrowed.

So much for a good first impression.

Over the next couple weeks, she avoided us. I wasn’t sure if it was Doug’s warning, or if she was just naturally shy.

She reminded me of a shadow. Silent. Moving around the outskirts where nobody would notice her.

I could barely keep my eyes off her, though.

The other barmaids often came to our parties, breaking Doug’s cardinal rule over and over, generally with Justin, sometimes with Drew and Maggie. They gossiped about who had done what in little groups at work. At every after party we had, I wondered if Ilsa would show up.

But she never did.

She didn’t dress like the bar skanks either. Much like that first time I met her, she wore jeans and loose-fitting T-shirts. Her hair was usually just pulled back in a simple ponytail.

She made her rounds at the tables each night, giving slight smiles to the customers. Shy, but sweet. She seemed to fade in and out of the background. Because she shrank away from the limelight, because she didn’t wear super short skirts and have cleavage down to her navel, she seemed to fly under the radar.

The band and, for the most part, the crowd at the Copperline treated her almost like furniture. Like she wasn’t a living, breathing woman with beautiful eyes who blushed the most stunning shade of pink when I once spoke to her.