I should get up. I should run before this goes any further.
But I don’t.
Instead, I hold out my finger.
“Are you going to finish what you started?”
Chapter Ten
Breaker
“Are you going to finish what you started?”
Her eyes are dark, glinting with challenge and something else — something that makes my blood run hot. The whipped cream on her fingertip catches the dim garage light, a tiny white flag of surrender that neither of us is waving.
I should say no. I should get up, make some excuse, put distance between us before this becomes something I can't walk back from. The ghosts in my head are screaming warnings — Marcus, Danny, Angela, all the names carved into headstones because they got too close to me.
But her finger is still there, extended, waiting. And the way she's looking at me...
"Riley." Her name comes out rough, scraped raw. "You don't know what you're asking."
"Maybe I do."
I take her wrist again. Slower this time. Deliberate. Giving her every chance to pull away, to come to her senses, to remember all the reasons this is a terrible idea.
She doesn't move.
I bring her finger to my lips. This time, I don't just taste the cream — I taste her. Savor her. The salt of her skin beneath the sweetness. The tremor that runs through her when my tongue traces the pad of her fingertip. The sharp intake of breath that tells me she feels this too, this impossible pull between us.
When I release her hand, it hovers in the air between us for a heartbeat before dropping to her lap.
"Breaker..." Her voice is barely a whisper.
"I know." I drag a hand through my hair, trying to ground myself. "We shouldn't."
"No. We shouldn't."
But neither of us moves. It feels like the world is closing in, shrinking until it's just this workbench, this moment, her eyes locked on mine.
"You're looking at me like I'm already yours," she murmurs.
The words hit me like a fist to the chest. Because she's right. That's exactly how I'm looking at her — like she belongs to me, like I have any right to claim her, like I'm not the worst possible thing that could happen to a woman already running from danger.
"I'm not a good man, Riley." The confession scrapes out of me, raw and painful. "I've done things. Violent things. Things that would make you run if you knew."
She pauses for a long moment, then sighs. “Then why did you do that with the whipped cream…? And why have me stay here at your clubhouse?”
I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, playing it off. “What, waste good whipped cream?”
Her eyebrows lift. “You think you’re funny.”
“I think you started it.”
She lets out a disbelieving laugh, half-nervous, half-angry. “I was just trying to help.”
“What you did looked like a lot of things, but sure as hell didn’t look like help to me.”
Her cheeks flush; she sets down the pie tin with a clatter. “You’re impossible.”
