Chapter Two

Jo looked away from him, decided to lower her standards slightly. As much as she enjoyed looking at hot guys across a smoky dark room, she had to be realistic here. She knew what she looked like, she knew her age, she knew all about the damn wrinkles around her eyes and the dimples around her knees. She knew that she couldn’t compete with the lithe little twenty-something-year-olds slinking around the place, wearing tight jeans and crop tops that revealed flat tummies, pierced navels and lower back tattoos.

Jo looked at these women now, with exactly zero envy. No sense being jealous of or resentful about what might have been fifteen years ago… and truthfully, she admired their confidence and devil-may-care attitude. She wished them well. She appreciated their stunning beauty and fresh glow, hoped that they made better choices than she had at that age. She wanted them to have good, happy lives.

Not like she had.

She looked down at herself, at her new clothes, marvelling at just how different they were to every single other piece of clothing that she owned. She’d bought them literally forty minutes earlier, and hidden in a mall McDonald’s bathroom to get changed. She’d also done her makeup in the same bathroom, makeup that she’d bought in the Target next door to the fast food restaurant, barely having a clue what she was buying. She was way out of practice.

Brian had hated her wearing anything short, tight, bright, revealing. He’d loathed her wearing eye makeup, lipstick, perfume. Anything that had emphasized her assets (such as they were, in their non-supermodel faded and saggy glory), anything that got her any attention at all… that stuff was all out.

To be sitting here in this clinging red dress and high-heeled knee-high brown boots, showing off her shoulders and displaying her rather impressive cleavage, was quite a shock to the system, then. Jo hadn’t recognized herself in the bathroom mirror at all and that feeling had only increased when she’d brushed on the bold blush, dabbed smoky gray eyeshadow on her lids, lined her black eyes with a gold pencil to lighten up the gray a bit, put on a racy red lipstick, covered her full lips with gloss. The face that had gazed back at her in the poorly-lit bathroom mirror had been a stranger’s in some ways, but in other ways – much more important ways – it had been the face of an old friend.

So, OK. She couldn’t hold a candle to these sexy young things fifteen years younger than her own thirty-five, swanning around the bar on lustrous waves of golden confidence. That was fact and reality, and that was fine. She wasn’t here to compete, or be the most beautiful woman in the room. But Jo could look better tonight than she had in almost half a decade; she could flirt and feel attractive for the first time since Brian Fielding had entered her life and shattered both it and her into a million pieces.

And yes… she could enjoy a man’s body, and let her own body feel pleasure.

She could. And if luck was on her side, tonight she would.

She sipped her drink, crossed her legs, tried to look like she was cool and confident, despite not wearing her usual ensemble of baggy jeans and oversized t-shirt. She looked down at the dress again, still a bit unsure if it was quite right for a bar like this. The dress had a definite 50’s vibe to it, mostly because Jo’s Mom had always been a huge fan of Marilyn Monroe and Mae West and Elizabeth Taylor – and Jane Russell most of all.

Jo had grown up thinking that those 50’s starlets were the height of femininity and sultriness, so when she’d seen the off-the-shoulder, belted pencil dress on the half-price rack that afternoon, she’d gravitated to it without a thought. And when she’d looked at herself under the glaring lights of the dressing room mirror, she’d known that any one of those Hollywood sirens would have gone for the dress in a heartbeat. So she’d bought it and been so happy – but it wasn’t really what everyone else was wearing in the bar. She looked around at the other women, all so hip and fresh and modern, and suddenly felt desperately old and unstylish and insecure. She felt dated, and not in the ways that referred to the fruit or being taken out for a romantic dinner.

She spotted a group of guys in one corner and narrowed her eyes to try to see them better, sure that they had to be a motorcycle club. No big surprise, because this place was a well-known MC hangout, though not exclusively.

Jo had recently done plenty of research into motorcycle clubs, for obvious and self-defensive reasons, and was pretty fluent in MC culture now. Those matching leather vest things were cuts, worn over leather or jean jackets usually, and showing the club colors. Jo knew that if she got close enough, she’d see patches on the cuts. Some would show a guy’s rank in the club, maybe a position if he was high-up or important enough. Some would show if the club was made up of outlaw-types more commonly known as ‘one percenters’. All would have the club logo or insignia.

For just a minute, Jo toyed with the idea of picking up a motorcycle man… she briefly indulged in a fantasy of peeling off layers of leather, of running her fingers over the inevitable tattoos on his body, of moaning a sexy road name (like Chains, or Rider, or Brute) as he took her trembling body over and over.