“I’m naming it Bacchanalia,” Bridger says with a wicked grin.
“Appropriate.” Bacchus, the Greco-Roman god of intoxication and ecstasy, and propagator of the much-revered orgy would be proud. “Participants don’t have to wear togas, do they?”
Bridger laughs good-naturedly as we walk out of the cabin. “I think clothing sort of defeats the purpose of this cabin, don’t you think?”
I don’t bother answering because that was rhetorical. Instead, we both trot down the cabin stairs and climb into my work truck. The cabins sit only a couple of hundred yards away from The Silo and nightclub, but the dirt road in between isn’t very friendly on Bridger’s Corvette. We had to take my truck so we could stock the cabin bar with a few cases of liquor and mixers.
“Did everything go okay last night?” Bridger asks as he pulls his hat off, scratches at his hair, and then plops it back on his head. He tends to wear it longer these days, but next week, he’ll probably shave it all off. Bridger changes more than the seasons.
“Yeah,” I say as we bounce down the road toward The Silo. It’s a gorgeous June day outside, perfect for outdoor work with the sun riding high and the temps hovering in the low sixties. I think I might even gear up and ride range today just so I’m not cooped up in the office.
“Dude… I need details,” Bridger says, turning slightly in his seat to face me. “Who was that woman? It’s not every day I see Woolf Jennings carting a woman out of The Wicked Horse and away from The Silo. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it.”
I pull into my parking spot beside Bridger’s car and cut the ignition. “That woman was Callie Hayes.”
Bridger’s eyes spring wide, and he shakes his head with an amused grin. “That was Callie Hayes? The girl that got away from the mighty Woolf Jennings?”
“She didn’t get away,” I snap at him. “I let her go. Big difference.”
Chuckling, Bridger exits my truck and I do the same. He meets me at the front and leans an elbow on the hood. His face is a bit more serious now. “So what happened last night?”
Leaning back onto the front grill of my truck, I cross my arms over my chest. I could use Bridger’s advice. He knows all about Callie as I got a little mouthy one night after a party during college, and we exchanged relationship failure stories while we continued to drink in the room we shared at the frat house. Her name has come up on another occasion or two—or three or—when I’m lamenting in my beer glass while some sappy country-western song plays in the background.
“Nothing happened. I brought her home, let her get cleaned up, and we talked a bit.”
Bridger just stares at me. He knows me too well to ever accept that as the full story. He can tell by my tight lips that there’s more, because I don’t keep anything from Bridger and he keeps nothing from me. That’s the way of it as best friends and two men who have seen each other doing very depraved things. Hell, we’ve done some of those depraved things together.
I give a heavy sigh. “She broke off her engagement and moved back home permanently. Or so she says.”
“What are you going to do about it?” he asks me quietly. He knows this is some damn serious business to me.
Grimacing, I give him a hard look. “I’m not going to do a fucking thing. Nothing has changed.”
“You asshole,” Bridger says affectionately. “Everything’s changed. She’s not the young innocent anymore. She’s a woman.”
“She may be a woman, but she’s still far too innocent to get caught up with someone like me. She’d freak the fuck out if she knew what really went on at The Wicked Horse.”
I know that to be true because last night after Callie had a shower and dressed in one of my t-shirts and a pair of workout shorts that swallowed her up, we sat down in the Great Room and shared some whiskey. She told me the gory details of how she caught her fiancé in some fem-dom situation. If it weren’t for the disgust in her voice, I would have laughed at the scenario I imagined, but it was too sobering of a tale when she candidly admitted she had come home to take a pregnancy test. For some reason, I wanted to stand up and dance when she told me she was relieved she wasn’t pregnant, and that she’s actually relieved the engagement is off.
Regardless, she reacted badly to that so I couldn’t even begin to imagine how disgusted she would be at The Silo. Hell, several times a week, you can find Angel pegging some dude up the ass in one of the glass-walled rooms.
I push off from the front of my truck and step up onto the wooden boardwalk that spans the entire front of The Wicked Horse. Bridger follows me in. The entire club is empty as it’s late morning, but the staff will start trickling in soon. While we don’t open until four PM, there’s still a tremendous amount to do to get ready for the evening rush.
“You’re really not going to hook up with her?” Bridger asks as we wind our way through the tables toward the office.
I roll my eyes at him. “Man… this isn’t high school.”
“Fine, then. You’re not going to fuck her?”
“No, I’m not going to fuck her,” I grit out as I punch in the alarm code to the office.
But damn, I want to fuck her so bad.
Last night as she sipped at the whiskey with her feet tucked up underneath of her on the couch, I had to almost physically restrain myself from touching her. I listened to her talk about Will and her life over the last several years. I truly heard her bemoan that she hated living back East, hated her job as an event planner, and hated living in the suburbs where she had dinner on the table every night at six PM sharp for Will, and she wore pencil skirts, flats, cardigans, and headbands because she was trying to be the proper fiancée for a hotshot attorney in a conservatively dull community.
Yes, I heard all of that, but it didn’t stop me from studying her beauty while she talked. Her hair was the color of dark mahogany and worn shorter than she used to… just a few inches past the edge of her shoulders. And the way her green eyes seemed to shine like miniature galaxies of green and gold. Those freckles… doing nothing but serving to remind me of her innocent ways, and even though my shirt on her was baggy, I could still vividly imagine those perfect tits I knew resided under the soft cotton material.
Sitting right there on the opposite end of the couch from me.
That right there was the reason I only gravitate toward blonde women. Those ladies of the sunny-colored hair. It’s because they are the exact opposite of Callie Hayes and everything I would truly desire as a man.
But then again… do I really desire her for anything more than some of the dirtiest, hottest fucking I could ever imagine? Hell, even plain old vanilla on flannel sheets with Callie would be hotter than anything I’ve ever done. I just know it.
The real problem, if I just want to lay it out on the line, is that Callie and I would never be compatible long term. I’m not sure I’m built for monogamy. Never tried it, really, and although Callie is the only woman I could ever imagine committing myself too, I’m not sure I’m ready to give up variety. Besides… Callie would never understand my need to have kink in my life, and I would never expose her to it.
Bridger leaves the subject alone thankfully and sits down at his side of the desk. Our office is huge, furnished with a double-sided desk that we can work at if we’re both here at the same time. That’s a rare occasion though as I have my office back on The Double J and since most of my paperwork still revolves around JennCo, I just don’t use this space a lot. Hell, I actually use it more for fucking women if I’m too lazy to walk over to The Silo, and that is the reason why we have a huge, leather couch against one wall.
Logging onto my laptop, I check my emails. I respond to a few before logging back off. Standing up, I tell Bridger, “I’m going to go grab a late breakfast. Want to come?”
“Nah, man,” he says without looking up from the computer. “I’m going over last month’s reconciliations the CPA sent me.”