“You come all the way out here in your little shorts and attitude just to call me names?” he asks.
I ignore the heat in my belly. “I came to say I know what you’re doing.”
He drops the wrench. It clangs. Suddenly he’s right in front of me. Not touching. Just there.
Big, broad, bare-chested, and smelling of oil, heat, and sweat. His gaze drops down my body again, slow, lingering, as though he can’t help himself. As though looking at me is a need. It isn’t just hunger now. It’s possession. When he looks back up, eyes dark and heavy-lidded, I feel it in my spine, a spark catching flame.
I fight the urge to step back. My pulse flutters, wings trapped beneath my ribs. I hate that he can make me feel this exposed. This charged.
“You don’t know a damn thing about what I’m doing,” he says in a low voice.
I swallow hard. “Then tell me.”
He smirks. “No.”
He grabs my wrist gently, then guides my hand down his stomach. My palm meets heat, muscle, skin. Then lower until I feel the hard line of him straining beneath his jeans.
A gasp catches in my throat, jagged as broken glass.
“This is what I’m doing,” he murmurs. “You came here for answers. But what you really want is to forget.”
I don’t answer. Can’t. My skin burns. My head spins. Then he takes my mouth with a hunger that claims every part of me.
His tongue slides past my lips, and I gasp. He swallows the sound, one hand fisting in my hair, the other already sliding up under my tank top. Fingers skim my bare stomach up to cup my breast, his thumb brushing the hard peak until I arch into him.
“No bra?” he murmurs, voice rough against my mouth. “You came out here like that, just waiting to be touched?”
His palm molds to me, thumb circling with slow, dirty pressure that makes my breath stutter. He isn’t in a rush. He’s savoring. Teasing. Making sure I feel every brush of skin, every flick of his thumb, a promise written in heat.
My knees weaken, muscles pulling taut with a hunger I don’t want to name.
“You’re not gonna distract me—”
“You’re already distracted,” he rasps, his voice dark silk against the shell of my ear. “And wet.”
I am. Just from his voice. Just from the way he’s looking at me, every glance an unspoken vow to ruin me slow.
His hands grip my waist, firm, steady, and before I can blink, he lifts me easily, sets me down on the workbench behind him, cool metal kissing the backs of my thighs.
I gasp at the shift, hands flying to his shoulders for balance. His eyes never leave mine. They burn.
“Malachi—”
“Shhh,” he whispers, mouth brushing the underside of my jaw. “You want it slow and filthy, baby? You want to feel every second of it?”
His hands slide up my thighs, dragging the hem of my tank top with them. Fingertips scrape bare skin, up, up, until his palms flatten over my ribs, right beneath my breasts. He doesn’t touch higher. Not yet.
“You’re gonna be soaked for me,” he says, voice low and dark. “Begging. And I’m not gonna give it to you ‘til I feel you tremble.”
He doesn’t rush. He peels me open with the reverence of someone unwrapping a gift already claimed. One hand grips the hem of my tank top and lifts it over my head in one fluid motion. His eyes lock on my chest, bare and exposed, and he stills for a second, just watching. Soaking me in with the hunger of a man starving. No bra. Nothing between us.
“Fuck, look at you,” he breathes. “You knew what you were doing coming out here in this.”
His knuckles brush over my stomach, dragging heat in their wake, then up to cup my breast. His thumb rolls over my nippleslowly, deliberately, with the kind of focus that says he has all the time in the world to ruin me.
He stares at my bare chest, imprinting every inch of it in his mind. No one has ever looked at me this way before.
“Fucking perfect,” he rasps. “Look at these tits. They were made for my mouth.”
