Virgin Seeks Bad Boy (Bliss River #3) - Lili Valente Page 0,6

least someone enjoys my wild side.

With a little luck, and a plan already forming in my determined brain, it won’t be long before Nick comes around to Kitty’s way of thinking.

Chapter 3

Nick

Fuck.

Trouble. This is nothing but trouble.

I should close the blinds.

Instead, I watch Melody and her friend run across the street, unable to take my eyes off my boss’s little sister.

With her thick blond hair and curves for days, she’s always beautiful, but in that dress…

Jesus, that dress…

“Don’t think about it,” I mutter beneath my breath, crossing to the door to flip the sign from “Open” to “Closed.”

It’s nearly midnight. Any customers who show up in the next twenty minutes will probably be drunk, anyway, and I won’t have time to draw anything up, let alone finish a piece. Better to close up and head for home before I give into the urge to follow Melody into The Horse and Rider and offer to buy her a drink.

I can imagine how that would play out—I’d buy her a beer and apologize for being an asshole, she’d forgive me because she’s a forgiving person, and we’d spend the rest of the night getting tipsy enough for me to forget all the reasons I shouldn’t get close to her. Close enough to brush her honeysuckle-scented hair over her shoulder, to gaze deep into those soulful brown eyes, to feel every tempting curve pressed against me until—

“Stop,” I reprimand myself in a louder, firmer voice. I’m pretty sure Melody is interested in being more than friends, but I’m not.

I can’t afford to be.

“Stop what? Who are you talking to, man?” John’s voice drifts from the door at the back of the shop, behind the heavy curtain.

Seconds later, John, in his typical uniform of faded jeans and a threadbare T-shirt with an obscure band logo on the front, eases into the main portion of the shop. He still hasn’t shaved the mangy beard he’s been growing for the past three days, and I’m not sure he ever brushes his curly reddish-brown hair. Still, John has a lovable, ruddy-cheeked Irish guy thing going, and women can’t seem to get enough of him.

His nonchalant grooming habits would make me feel ridiculous about spending fifteen minutes on my hair every morning if I didn’t have a special, loving relationship with my hair that is immune to ridicule or shame.

“No one. What’s up, brother?” I turn to greet him with a high five that turns into a hand clasp, relieved not to be alone with my thoughts anymore.

John is one of my oldest friends. We grew up drawing comics and naked elf girls together in our notebooks and have dreamed of opening our own tattoo studio since we were seventeen. We lost touch for a little while after high school but picked up right where we left off when I moved home from Atlanta.

John had also recently moved back home from North Carolina, where he’d been apprenticing with another tattoo artist, and had just signed the lease on the shop. We’d gone for a beer or two. About three in, he confessed he was worried about carrying the lease on his own.

Within an hour, we decided to join forces and open N&J’s Tattoo Emporium.

We figured “emporium” sounded more civilized than “parlor,” and that the more civilized we sounded, the better. In a small, sleepy bedroom town like Bliss River, a tattoo shop is going to have to keep it classy if it wants to survive.

“I came to check supplies before I called it a night.” John slaps me on the back before moving toward his station on the opposite side of the room. “I’m heading to Atlanta tomorrow. You need anything? Gloves? Ink?”

“No, I’m good. I ordered gloves online, and I’m set for ink.”

I do all the shopping I can online. I hate going to the tattoo supply store in Atlanta. The chances are too good that I’ll run into Wyatt or Nelson, fellow tattoo artists and my old roommates, the ones who kicked me out of our shared apartment when I was drunk and disorderly for a few too many weeks in a row after the last sweet, Southern girl I dated dumped me to go back to her ex-boyfriend.

Sarah Beth.

Just thinking her name is enough to make my jaw clench.

I knew we were wrong for each other from the start—I’m a night owl; Sarah Beth gets up at five thirty every morning to Zumba. I haven’t darkened a church door since I was eighteen; Sarah’s in