“Don’t you dare call me that again.” My voice was the only part of me that was steady.
His blistering hot tongue licked against my skin. I yelped and jumped back, cradling my hand against my chest like he’d burned me—and I liked it.
His grin was shameless. “I was going to say Madison.”
The teasing flipped me around and turned me inside out. I couldn’t take it. “Give me your keys. You’re done here.”
“No, I’m not.”
My blood pressure crept higher. “I’m in charge.”
“Then you know you can’t fire me. I’d hate to tell Wilna I couldn’t fulfill the deal and she had to give the fifty grand back.”
Damn. The money. The work. There was so much more to do. “You can’t kiss me again. You can’t touch me again.”
Instead of looking ashamed, his expression turned smug and his goddamn eyes twinkled. “I won’t—unless you beg me to.”
I scoffed, but he didn’t laugh. He was serious. As if I’d beg. A tremor raced down my spine and my lips still tingled.
“I’m finishing this job,” he said with a note of finality. “I’ll do the work however you want, and I won’t interfere?—”
“Ha!”
The corner of his mouth lifted. “As long as we understand each other. I’ll be back tomorrow. I just ask one thing.”
“I can’t wait to hear it.” I managed to sound derisive instead of breathy. My mind wanted to be guarded; my body wanted to hear exactly what that one thing was.
“You think about what I said.” He spread his arms wide and all I could do was look at his body. “This place is yours. You said you didn’t want to be dictated to by others anymore. Then don’t be. You can turn the building into anything you want. Is that really Flatlanders?” A mischievous glint lit his dark eyes. “Mad Maddy.”
That low growl. I almost moaned.
He strode toward the front door, his boots hitting nice and steady. And then he was gone, leaving me alone in a building that could be anything. Unlike me.
CHAPTER FIVE
Teller
“That place could be anything.” I paced in front of Tenor’s desk. On the other side of the wall of windows, the distillery was bright. Sunlight filtered from the many windows around the building. It wasn’t five o’clock yet, but I had to leave soon. If I sat at my desk, I’d nod off. After a restless night of sleep, worrying that I’d overstepped— No, I had pushed it and I knew it.
It would have been easier to stop breathing than it would’ve been to not kiss her. Yet I worried I’d lost the trust I was trying to build with her.
The taste of her though. She’d had a handful of jelly beans before I’d kissed her, and she’d been a sweet dessert I wanted to devour. A mere whisper of a touch, and it had me wound up a million different ways inside.
“She doesn’t want it to be anything,” Tenor said for probably the third time.
“The building has it all. Do you remember, before Scooter put in a bar, that place was a restaurant?”
The corner of his mouth twisted up. “One we feared getting hepatitis in. That’s why it was shut down.”
I sank into the chair across from his desk. “No, it was closed because the guy who bought it from the original owner had a record.”
Tenor snapped his fingers. “That’s right. He was a sex offender, and he was hiring nothing but fifteen-year-old girls. Scooter got a helluva deal on that place.”
I grunted. “She doesn’t want to run a bar.”
“What makes you think that?”
“There’s no passion.”
