Hot Dirty Love (Copperline #5) (9 page)

That night, she filtered into my dreams once again. I was out back of the Copperline, Ruth bent over the hood of a car while I nailed her from behind. Halfway through it, she straightened, her arm curling around my neck as she twisted to kiss me.

But it wasn’t Ruth anymore. Those blue eyes had become brown. The shadows dancing across the dark lot flicked over her face, revealing Rain.

“Fuck me, Professor,” she whispered.

I jolted awake, my dick throbbing in my hand. Desperate to relieve the burning ache, I closed my eyes, stroked my length, and thought of her as I came in the darkness.

The next few days were relatively uneventful.

Class.

Pretending I didn’t know Rain in another life.

Rain pretending she didn’t know me in another life either.

As though she hadn’t told me she was jealous.

Like she had any reason to be. We had fucked. Weeks ago. Once. Really fucking well, but still only once. We both knew that was it. We both had lives to lead that meant we couldn’t fuck again. It would be detrimental to the both of us.

By Friday, I’d grown a little irritable about the whole thing.
What right did she have to be jealous?
To tell me she was jealous, thereby making
me
all out of sorts. Sure, my ego loved it, but she had me second-guessing everything around me all of a sudden. Thinking of her and wondering how she’d feel about what I did and said.

I stood on stage at the Copperline late in the afternoon tuning my Rickenbacker bass. A replica of the one played by the late, great Lemmy from Mötorhead, a legend in bass-world that I’d idolized since I was a little kid.

My fingers danced across the strings, finding solace in the texture against my skin. Notes began to ring clearly. Mindlessly, I began to play, letting the rhythm come to me and flow through my body. To calm my frazzled nerves.

Until I realized that the other Mofos, also on stage warming up, were all staring at me with puzzled expressions.

“What the fuck are you guys all looking at?” I growled, instantly on guard.

“Something wrong, Justin?” Drew asked, clearly concerned.

Weirdly concerned.

Why was he concerned?

I narrowed my brows. “Why are you guys acting like a bunch of fucking vaginas?”

“Dude,” Cody said from behind his drums, “you’ve been sitting there strumming the baseline for
Under Pressure
for about twenty minutes.”

I snorted in response, rolling my eyes to amplify how full of shit I thought they were.

However, Drew nodded. “Either that or
Ice Ice Baby
, but I’m thinking Queen and Bowie are a bit more your speed.”

Shit
, I totally had been. David Bowie’s words still echoed in my head.

Insanity laughs under pressure we’re cracking
…

For a second, I just stared back at them in silent shock. So unlike me, but I didn’t have a retort. My entire brain was wrapped up in quiet whispers and wide brown eyes.

“Jaysus,” Denny muttered, his Dublin accent thick with surprise, “he’s away with the fairies.”

His Irishism yanked me from my frozen stupor…
thank fuck
.

“Fuck off, it’s got an awesome baseline,” I growled, shooting a glare to all three of them, landing on Denny last, “and speak English, you fucker.”

I was still all kinds of pissy as I stomped down the steps after our first set to see Ruth waiting at the bottom, a skirt that barely covered her ass and a top that didn’t cover much of her tits.

Any other time, I’d have been all over that. I even tried to be. Maybe I needed a good hard fuck. It had been a few days and I was under some serious pressure.

I walked over to where she stood, leaning my forearm on the wall above her. I allowed her to wrap her arms around me. To lift her lips up to mine.

But just before she kissed me, I felt a wave of something. Regret. Remorse. Something strange that had me wanting to pull back.

Weird
.

My latest dream flickered through my mind, broken, yet so vivid. Ruth morphing into Rain. Rain’s seductive whisper.

Fuck me, Professor…

With a shake of my head, I dove in to kiss Ruth hard. Almost brutally. Desperately trying to drive this bizarre sensation from my mind. Ruth moaned, and, for whatever reason, the sound grated on my nerves. I tangled my fingers into her hair and jerked hard, causing her to pull away with a pained cry. For a split second, she almost appeared afraid of me.

I think I’m jealous...

I stared down at Ruth, unsure where my head was at and why I felt so cold and unstable. Closing my eyes with a sick feeling in my gut, I loosened my grip and stepped back.

“Maybe tonight’s not the best night, Ruth,” I finally said.

She nodded, still clearly rather shocked, and slipped away.

I turned to watch her more or less run away from me and once again caught sight of my bandmates. All three of them were frozen in pure astonishment.

For good reason.

This was probably the first time—
ever
—that any one of them had seen me turn down pussy.

Cody had been rendered speechless. He just stood there gaping at me.

“Bloody hell,” Denny gaped.

“What in the actual fuck?” Drew breathed.

What indeed.

“Oh, please…” Brian snapped at Rain in class, “there’s already so much red tape. It’s not like they’re just going to let everyone go out and trash the whole world.”

The Alberta tar sands were in the news, prompting a few questions that spiraled almost uncontrollably into a debate over the pros and cons of bitumen extraction. Controversial on a multitude of levels, the issue had become a hot topic of late across this state just south of Alberta. It was environmental, social, and economical all in one fell swoop. A perfect storm to get people all kinds of riled up.

For the most part in class, Rain kept a low profile. She was smart as fuck, but kept quiet and listened. She took notes. She absorbed the material and aced every test and assignment.

Yet every once in awhile, Douchebag Brian cocked off and said something really fuckin’ dumb. Something that she just couldn’t let slide. Something like the regulations surrounding in-situ production were too strict.

“They have way too many ridiculous laws in place,” Brian continued.

“Hardly,” Rain murmured, just loud enough for him to catch. “It requires a huge amount of water, and that water is then contaminated.”

“They have special ways to store it to prevent environmental impacts.”

“The people who live in the area rely on the Athabasca River for its fish supply which is being poisoned. Cancer rates are climbing. Even though the specific storage modalities are required, they’re not necessarily being used, and it’s killing wildlife and people.”

I should step in
, I thought.

Not necessarily to save Rain, though. Her calm arguments were incredibly convincing and logical. Intelligent and backed up by science.

And her confidence had a way of rattling her opponent, who was usually Brian because the guy was a complete know-it-all who actually knew very little.

He was starting to look red in the face, realizing he was losing this argument. She generally had him clamping his mouth shut with a perturbed glare within a few minutes. He had given it a good go this round, but Rain really knew her shit and it showed. Now he was looking rather petulant. Losing an impromptu debate was clearly not something he was used to.

“Whatever,” he frowned. He was getting ready to throw in the towel, spiraling into petulance.

“I’m not saying it shouldn’t be done,” Rain coolly pointed out, “but I think it could be done in a better way. A safer way. A more environmentally sound way that doesn’t destroy some of the most pristine wilderness on the planet.”

I had learned through these class discussions that Brian was from an oil family. Big money. Big heads.

Rain was most definitely not. She didn’t share a lot about her background, but she definitely veered towards conservation. She was a bit of a puzzle.

I thought back to that day in my office.

I could switch degrees
, she had said.
Go into environmental, like my bachelors
.

I couldn’t figure out why the fuck she was getting her masters in petroleum then, and I thought about that more often than I should have. I thought about
her
more than I should have.

It sometimes even started out innocent enough. Her thoughtful arguments in a paper. Her research to thoroughly understand the concept of the assignment. Her intuitive questions during a lecture that drew me into discussion.

But it would eventually snowball into something extraordinarily dirty, testing my willpower as thoughts of her soft skin and breathy gasps haunted me. She had gotten under my skin that first night at Dave’s party and tantalized me from just beneath the surface. Even in oversized hoodies and faded jeans. Even with her hair pulled back into a ball cap like she was trying to fade into the small sea of faces staring up at me.

Those big brown eyes of hers couldn’t be ignored, though. The memory of her soft lips preoccupied me. Aside from wearing a bag over her head, I didn’t know how to
not
notice, and I sure as heck couldn’t figure out how to
not
react.

So, ultimately, I felt like I knew why she was majoring in petroleum. It was my karma for being a manwhore for so long.

Fate had placed her in my class to fuck with my resolve.