The parking lot was totally empty when Pearl parked in front of the lobby. Wil nosed his truck in beside her Caddy and waited while she went inside to pick up a room key from Lucy. He should wait until they were in the room, call the whole thing off, and see where a few of those steamy hot kisses would lead.
She dreaded the contest, but she’d made her brag and now she’d have to pay the fiddler. She had no doubts that she could outdrink Wil Marshall, but she also held no half-assed notions that it would be an easy feat or that tomorrow morning she wouldn’t have a full-fledged head-banging hangover.
“What are you doin’ home so early? It’s not even nearly midnight yet.” Lucy looked up from the computer. “Guess what? They had a memorial service for me. I’m dead. Cleet had a few words to say about how he couldn’t understand why I’d commit suicide. My sister said it was because I never got over losin’ that baby. Kinda strange readin’ your own funeral thing from the newspaper.”
Pearl leaned on the countertop. Whiskey shots could wait a few minutes. “You lost a baby recently?”
“Not recently. Three months after me and Cleet married. I was sixteen and pregnant. He was twenty. He married me and three months later got drunk and beat me so bad I lost the baby. It was a girl and I was glad she didn’t have to grow up and get whooped on. I made sure there wasn’t no more pregnancies. Cleet didn’t know that I went to the health department and got pills.”
“You all right?” Pearl asked.
“I left it all behind me. My family, my mama, all of it. I’m not sorry. Never will be. You want to take over or let me finish up until closing time?”
“I got a bet goin’ with Wil Marshall. That fool thinks he’s better at shots than I am so we’re going to have a fact-proving test.”
Lucy’s brow furrowed and she cocked her head to one side. “What are you goin’ to shoot at? Can you do that this close to town? You goin’ to use a rifle or a pistol?”
Pearl smiled. “Not that kind of shot. Whiskey shots. I told him I’m Irish and I can drink him under the table any day of the week. So I need the key to room two. That way when I get the job done and come on home to my apartment I won’t have to listen to him snoring.”
“Room two is already full up. We’ve got eight customers in all. They’ve all gone to parties, I guess. They checked in, stayed in their rooms a little while, and then come out and left. I’d take number ten if I was you. It’s on the end and there’s nobody next to it. You really think you can outdrink a man big as him?”
“I do,” Pearl said.
“Well, I wouldn’t test your mettle.” Lucy took the number ten key from the pegboard and handed it to Pearl. “Still want me to lock it up?”
“Yes, and sleep late tomorrow. I’ll help clean rooms since you worked half the night for me.”
Lucy smiled. “This ain’t work. Cleanin’ rooms ain’t even work. And you are goin’ to have a big headache in the mornin’ even if you do win the bet.”
Pearl pointed at Lucy. “I’m lucky to have you.”
Wil got out of the truck when he saw Pearl coming out of the motel lobby. “I was about to go on home. Figured you’d backed out and was just goin’ to leave me sittin’ out here for pure spite.”
“If I backed out, you’d win by default. I was talkin’ to Lucy. We’re in room ten. You got the Jack?”
He held up a brown paper bag, the top twisted around a square bottle. “Never been opened. If we empty this one and you can still stand on your feet, then you can go get yours.”
“Shot glasses?”
He held up his left hand. The shot glasses looked tiny in his big hand. “I borrowed two from Austin.”
She held up the key.
“Walkin’ or drivin’?” he asked.
“I reckon we can walk that far. We’ve each only had one beer.” The high heel on her boot slipped off the sidewalk onto the gravel, and she had to catch herself on a porch post to keep from falling into him.
He reached out and grabbed her arm. “You are already a little tipsy on just one beer. I bet you don’t get three shots down before your cute little ass is fried.”
“Ah, honey, you’ve got a hard lesson to learn,” she whispered.
All the hair on his neck stood straight up. Her voice was always slightly husky, but when she whispered it was so hot that he wanted to make love to her until dawn rather than drink whiskey with her.
“Okay then, braggy butt, if you don’t pass out after number three, then I’ll take you to dinner next week,” he said.
She slung the door to the room open and stood to one side. “If I do?”
“Ladies first.”
She stepped into the room, peeled off her coat and tossed it on the bed closest to the door, sat down on the other bed and removed her boots. He put the brown bag and two shot glasses on the small table in the corner and sat down beside her, close enough that she could smell the remnants of Stetson and beer on his breath. He kicked off his boots, removed his coat, and tossed it across hers.
“If I’m still standing after three shots?” she asked.
He tipped her chin back and kissed her, teasing her mouth open with his tongue. “Then you can take me to dinner next week.”
She moved over and sat down in his lap and cupped a cheek in each hand. She pulled his lips down to hers in another searing kiss. “If I’m still standing, you have to cook dinner for me. Nothing frozen or prepared.”
“Deal. And if you pass out, you have to cook for me. Nothing frozen. No takeout. From scratch with dessert.” He wrapped his arms around her and slipped a hand under her shirt. Her bare skin was as soft as satin sheets and warm on his cold hands.
She’d never known rough, cold hands could cause her skin to sizzle.
“Deal,” she gasped.
“Any more bets or ground rules, or do we spit on our knuckles and begin this war?” he asked.
She kissed him on the cheek as she stood up and straightened her shirt.
Kissing was finished.
Battle was beginning.
She pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. “I’ll pour. Only ground rule is that all is fair in chaos and Jack.”
Wil grinned and took the other chair. “Then let the contest begin. Are we doing doubles or singles?”
She held up a glass and studied it. “These are made for doubles but let’s do singles. To this line”—she pointed to a rim halfway up the glass with the name of a bar written above it—“should be a single shot. So here goes.”
She filled the two glasses to the mark and tossed hers back like a gunslinger in an old western movie. Heat, almost as fiery as what smacked her when she kissed Wil, hit her empty stomach like a blowtorch. The first one was always the hottest. It paved the way for the rest. By the eighth or ninth she wouldn’t even feel the fire.
Wil threw his back and swallowed. He had an advantage over Pearl that he hadn’t told her. He’d eaten a whole plate full of goodies before she arrived at the party so he was working on a full stomach. Unless she’d eaten half an Angus steer before she left home, she was drinking on an empty stomach. But she’d said all was fair in chaos and Jack so that meant open disclosure wasn’t an issue.
She refilled the glasses, giving him a few drops more than she put in hers. All was fair in Jack and chaos. His exact words had been to let the contest begin.
“I’ll drink this one but only if I get to pour from now on. You put a little more in my glass,” he said.
“All’s fair?”
“Whoever wins will do it honestly. No cheating.”
She took the clip out of her hair and let her red ringlets free to fall to shoulder length. “Okay, no cheating is rule one, then. But you didn’t say that in the beginning.”
His fingers itched to get tangled up in her hair, but more of those kisses in a room with two beds would end the drinking contest and she’d say he cheated. “I’m sayin’ it now.”
“Then I will not cheat. I don’t break rules. But if there are no rules, then I don’t have to follow them. That’s the full mark.” She pointed.
He nodded and downed his shot. “It’s a shame to be drinkin’ good whiskey like this. Jack is sippin’ whiskey.”
“Might as well like the taste.”
She sent her second one down, and sure enough, the blazes weren’t nearly as hot. But like always, whiskey had a way of making other things hot; that warm gushy feeling deep down in her gut sent her imagination into overdrive. No fantasy she’d ever come up with while downing shots compared to the real thing called Wil Marshall.
She poured the third round, making a big show of filling them exactly even, and downed hers before he had time to pick his up. She didn’t feel the fire that time, at least not in her stomach. The rest of her body felt like it was one degree away from combustion, and he didn’t look like he was feeling the liquor at all. She might have met her match after all.
“Talk to me. Tell me something about yourself. Your mama got red hair like you?” Wil asked.
“Hell no! Mama is a blonde and a stereotypical Southern belle. I got this red hair from a distant great-grandma. There’s a connection between my dad and some folks up in northern Oklahoma. Little bitty place called Corn. We went there for a couple of family reunions when I was a kid. Have a distant cousin named Sharlene who has red hair just like mine. Kinky curly and unruly. We shared a great-grandma and we were the only two redheads in the bunch.”
“What happened to her?” Wil asked.
“She writes romance books and used to own a bar over around Mingus, Texas. That would be east of Mineral Wells. But she fell in love with a carpenter and moved back to Corn. Last I heard she had a couple of kids of her own. The guy she married had custody of a niece and nephew and she adopted them so she’s got a houseful.”
“She got a temper like yours?”
“Worse.”
Wil chuckled and tossed back the next round.
“Your turn,” Pearl said. “Something about you now?”
“I like to dance. Want to go over to Mingus to the Honky Tonk sometime for a beer and a dance?”
“Hey, that’s the place Sharlene owned,” Pearl said.
“That’s why you look familiar. I saw her one time when me and Ace stopped by there for a cold beer one night after we’d been to a rodeo in Abilene.”
“Small world,” Pearl said.
By the eighth round she was still lucid and Wil was getting sexier by the minute. The room got hotter than a hooker in the front-row pew of a holiness tent revival in the middle of July in Texas. She removed her lacy shirt.
He raised an eyebrow.
“I’m not cheatin’. I’m hot,” she said.
“Liquor, weather, or otherwise?” he asked with a wicked gleam in his eye.
“All damn three. I think it’s close to time for the countdown on television, ain’t it?” she slurred.
“Hell, I don’t know. All I know is that you are damn beautiful, Red, and I’d rather be doing something else than showing you I can outdrink you. Let’s have a pissin’ contest that involves sex rather than shots.” His words came out slow and deliberate.
She grinned. “You are about to lose it, cowboy. That was as romantic as a trip to the outhouse.”
He laughed too loudly. “Never was one much for words.”
She pointed her finger at him. “Don’t tell me that after all the text messages and phone calls. You are getting drunk.”
“So are you, darlin’. Too bad I don’t take advantage of women when they’re drunk. Pour us another round. Is this nine or ten?” He moved his chair close enough to hers that their shoulders touched.
“See, you don’t even know how much you’ve had. It’s nine and you’ll be snoring by ten,” she told him.
He grinned and downed the ninth one, set his glass down with a thump, and took off his shirt, revealing a gauze undershirt and showing muscles she’d only dreamed about. Would she give up before the clock struck midnight and a New Year began? He’d never live it down if he let a woman outdrink him.
“‘Ten more bottles of beer on the wall, ten more bottles of beeeer. Take one down, pass it around…’” He sang off-key and out of tune.
It sounded just fine to Pearl. She didn’t care if he sounded like a cross between Alvin of the Chipmunks and a big green bullfrog, as long as he didn’t put his shirt back on. The room was spinning but she wasn’t going to holler calf rope yet. His eyes looked bleary and his head would hit the table before hers did. She eyed the distance to the bathroom and decided she could make it if she was very careful. She’d concentrate on putting one foot ahead of the other and he would not see her stagger. But first they’d have one more round.
She poured and slopped a little out on the table. “You can have that. I don’t want it.”
He dipped his finger in it and wiped it on her lips, leaned forward, and licked it off.
She opened her mouth and grabbed a fistful of dark hair to keep his lips on hers. She was panting when he pulled back.
He chuckled. “Are you trying to seduce me, lady?”
“Yes, I am. Is it workin’?” She giggled.
“Nope. We’ve got a contest here and I can’t be bought.”
“I’ve got to pee. Is that against the rules?”
“No, but let’s do one more round and that’ll finish my bottle. You’ll have to get yours, but I’m goin’ with you.”
“Why?”
“To make sure you don’t cheat.”
She poured the last of the bottle up into the glasses and tossed hers back. There wasn’t a bit of fire in her stomach, but she wished she’d brought extra underpants in her purse. Damn, that man got sexier with every single shot.
“I vote we take a ten-minute intermission. You can have first turn at the bathroom.” He slurred, but her ears were buzzing and she understood him perfectly.
She stood up slowly.
His eyes followed her all the way to the bathroom. She didn’t stagger one bit. He’d never met a woman who could match him shot for shot, but that redhead could sure hold her liquor. The numbers on the digital clock beside the bed said it was eleven fifty-something, but they were dancing around like line dancers doing the Cotton-Eyed Joe in a honky-tonk.
He stood up slowly and held onto the chair until the walls stopped spinning. He would be standing outside the bathroom door when she came out. He wasn’t admitting defeat, not yet.
Pearl put her head between her knees as she sat on the potty and took long, deep breaths. Damn Wil Marshall anyway! Most men folded after round nine. Only twice had she had to go to round ten and that was with her best friend in college. A girl who’d come from a long line of AA members.
Had the ten-minute intermission already passed? Actually only five of it was hers. He would have to use the bathroom too. She sat up, got a fix on the cold water faucet to still the walls, and pulled up her underpants. When she opened the door, he was leaning on the jamb.
“Thought you’d passed out in there and I’d won.” He grinned.
“Ready for the second bottle?” she asked.
He moved to one side. “I’m ready. How about you, Red?”
She took a step, got off balance on the second one, and the brown carpet was coming up in slow motion to meet her when Wil’s strong arms grabbed her around the waist. That motion set him off balance and he fell toward the bed, taking her with him.
“You did that on purpose.” She was cuddled up in the crook of his arm with her head on his chest. How in the hell did two people fall on a bed in such a perfect position? Was it fate or just plain dumb luck? And why did it feel so damned natural and good?
“I didn’t trip you, darlin’,” he whispered.
He buried his face in a mop of red hair. He deserved a kiss for saving her from breaking an arm—or worse yet, her cute little nose—with that fall. Besides, the countdown on the television had begun and the announcer yelled nine. He wanted a New Year’s kiss and he wanted it to be with Miz Red Richland.
Eight. She pushed her hair out of her face and looked up into the depths of his brown eyes and saw only her own reflection there. Austin would say that she’d found her soul mate. The thought scared her but not enough to wiggle out of his embrace.
Seven. Her eyes looked like warmed-over sin on Sunday morning, but they were searching his face in a way that made him sweat bullets. Why didn’t that man count faster?
Six. She pressed her body against his.
Five. He brushed back a cascade of red curls so he could see her face better. Every single freckle should be kissed.
Four. She combed his black hair back with her fingertips. If he passed out without kissing her, it would be grounds for justifiable homicide.
Three. His lips started coming closer to hers.
Two. She licked her lips and shut her eyes.
One. Boom! They met in a clash of heat and desire hotter than any pepper grown in Texas as the old year faded and the new year began with the familiar tune playing on the television.
One passionate, hot kiss would not satisfy all those shots. Two stirred the red-hot embers and got a big fire going in her gut. Three fanned the fire so high and hot she tugged his undershirt up out of his jeans and over his head.
With his lips still on hers, he pulled her camisole up. He broke the kiss long enough to get it over her head and then his lips settled back on hers.
She undid his belt buckle and unzipped his jeans, then pressed her body so close to his that she could feel his hardness on her belly. His hands were all over her, undoing her bra, tossing it in a blur toward the other bed. She moaned when his fingertips grazed her breast and when he strung kisses from her neck to her belly button.
His fingers were white-hot fire on her skin. She started to tell him that she liked to date, loved to party, adored the chase, but she didn’t go to bed with men she’d only known a week, but words fled her brain when his tongue found her belly button. She arched her back and gasped at the sensation.
Her hands grazed the tight muscles on his chest, through the soft dark hair that extended from taut nipples to belly button, to that dense soft bed of curls, for his erect penis. She wrapped her cool fingers around it and he gasped.
His hand grazed her inner thigh and she opened up for him. She was ready but he wasn’t through playing…not yet…and he liked those little kitten moans when he touched her in the right spots.
She grabbed his hair and pulled him back up for another kiss before she peeled his jeans completely off and threw them across the room. She crawled up his body like a sleek mountain lion and stretched out on top of him.
His rough hands were hot as hell when they skimmed her back and flipped her over under his body. “Is this because we’re both drunk or do you really want this?” he asked.
“I. Want. This,” she panted.
With a firm thrust he started a nice easy rhythm. She wrapped her arms around his back and raked her nails across his flesh. She’d never felt so uninhibited, so totally into sex as she did right then.
His mouth covered hers in a string of passionate kisses that fanned the flames already sending her up in blazes. She arched her back against him and gave herself to the red-hot fire that only Wil could put out.
Wil felt as if he’d waited his whole life for that night and he didn’t want to rush. Besides, as drunk as he was, he might pass out cold when it was done and he wanted to hold her in his arms as long as he could.
Pearl gasped when she climaxed and he brushed a sweet kiss across her lips.
She expertly flipped him over onto his back without missing a stroke and said, “My turn, darlin’.”
“Mercy!” he whispered as she started to do the work, bringing him right up the edge of passion and then slowing down, all the while kissing his ears, his eyes, and his lips with so much fire that he wondered if all there would be left in the morning was a pile of ashes in the middle of the motel bed. She put one hand behind her on his tense thigh and the other on his chest and settled down to serious business. When she heard him call out her name in a throaty Southern growl, she gave in to the desire and buried her face in his neck in a moan. He rolled to one side without letting her out of his arms and held her tightly.
“My God!” she said.
“Nope, just mighty fine Jack Daniel’s sex,” he said as he ran his hands down the length of her body. “Your skin is as soft as whipped cream. Which reminds me, maybe sometime I’ll cover you up in whipped cream and then lick it all off.”
She shuddered just thinking of the sensation that would cause.
“Ready for round two?” He kissed that soft spot right below her ear and worked his way down her body, tasting, nibbling, sucking, and licking, causing brand-new liquid heat spasms. He kissed her toes one by one, then her ankles, and then suddenly he was lying on top of her planting hot, steamy kisses on her lips again.
She’d truly met her match in shots and in sex. She bit the inside of her lip to keep from screaming out and arched against him again.
When he stretched out on top of her, she flipped him over and sat on his chest. “My turn,” she said. All was fair in love, war, whiskey shots, and sex, and Wil was about to find out just how hot she could make him.
“But—” he started to argue.
“Shhh.” She put a finger over his lips and kissed his eyelids.
His skin quivered when she gently scraped a nipple with her teeth, and his breath came out in ragged gasps when she finally got back to his waiting lips.
The kisses that followed weren’t soft and sweet; they were demanding and passionate and set loose a desire that she’d never felt before. It went beyond want, further than need, and into a place where she felt if he didn’t make love to her that her heart would stop beating and she’d wither up and die.
He did an expert roll, which impressed the hell out of her since they were both still drunk and tired from the first round.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and asked, “We goin’ to ride the bull again or just sit in the stands and cheer?”
“At this point we’d better ride the bull, darlin’.”
She nibbled his ear and whispered, “You think you can stay on eight seconds?”
“How about eight minutes for every one of those ten shots?”
She tried to do the math in her head but couldn’t get past the fact that it added up to more than an hour. She’d concede the battle to him if he could make love to her the second time around for more than an hour with ten shots in him. Hell, she’d get down on her knees and propose to him right there in the motel if he could stay the course for eighty minutes when they were both drunk as rabid skunks.
She ran her hands down his muscular back and tangled her hands in his hair, pulling his lips to hers.
“This feels so right.”
“Does, doesn’t it?” He wasn’t a bit surprised to find her ready again.
Twenty minutes later he collapsed on top of her with a loud moan.
“That wasn’t an hour,” she said breathlessly. He wasn’t getting the crown for only twenty minutes.
“That was the appetizer and the entrée. We’ll have dessert in a few minutes. I’m afraid I’m not up to seven courses. Not unless I’m sober.”
He rolled to one side and pulled her close to his side, burying his face in her neck and starting to fan the fires of the still-smoldering embers with his kisses.
She sighed heavily.
“Want me to stop?”
“Hell no!”
“Three courses it is, then. When we’re sober, we’ll try for the fancy stuff.”
Drunk or sober or somewhere in between, Pearl had no doubt that the heat from seven courses would kill them both graveyard dead.
But what a hell of a way to go!