He looked at me with an intensity that pinned me to the spot. “Because it needs doing,” he said, his tone flat, just like it had been yesterday morning.
“Why are you really here, Griffin?” I challenged, stepping down one more step and putting myself right in his personal space.
I needed to know. I needed to understand what a man like him—older, serious, carrying something heavy I couldn’t name—wanted with a twenty-three-year-old waitress who smelled like coffee and grease and had two kids’ worth of permission slips on her refrigerator. Men his age wanted women who had their lives sorted. I was still building mine from the ground up.
“Go inside, Keely.” His grip on the crowbar tightened until his knuckles went white. He wasn’t looking at the porch anymore. He was looking at my mouth.
I should have listened, but I didn’t. I took the last step down, closing the distance until I had to tip my chin up to look at him. This close I could see the tension working in his jaw. Could feel the heat coming off him. He was very large and very still and looking at me in a way a man had never looked at me before.
And suddenly, I was tired of being the one who was always overlooked, who handled everything for everyone else and never reached out for what I wanted.
“Make me,” I challenged.
The second it left my mouth I knew I’d miscalculated. I saw it in the way his jaw ticked and his nostrils flared.
I had zero business pushing at a man like Griffin.
And yet, I didn’t move.
He dropped the crowbar and it hit the dirt with a dull clang.
I let out a gasp as he moved, my hands instinctively flying to his shoulders as he picked me up. He didn’t hesitate. His massive, calloused hands clamped mercilessly onto my wide hips, his long fingers biting into my soft flesh as he carried me back up the steps and thrust me against the wall of the house.
He held me there. His face was inches from mine, his jaw tight, his chest heaving like something was working its way up through him that he’d been holding down for weeks.
“You want to know why?” he growled, his face inches from mine. “The first time I saw you in that diner, you had me harder than a rock in eight seconds flat. I’ve spent every night since then picturing you in my bed, screaming my name while I fuck you, hard and fast until I empty myself inside you. Is that what you want to hear?”
He leaned in closer, so close his face blurred and I had to close my eyes.
“I’ve thought about your pussy every night for two weeks,” he whispered against my ear. “How it would feel wrapped around my cock. Hot and wet, squeezing me.”
The air left my lungs. There was a raw honesty in his voice. And hot honesty. Did he mean that? Did he want me that bad? My mind was racing as fast as my pulse. For years, I’d been the one helping my mother hold it all together, the one everyone depended on. With just a few words he made me realize that what I wanted was to be his.
I opened my eyes, looking directly at him. “Yes, please.”
Yes to all of it. Yes to the fact that a man years older than me with scars on his face and ghosts in his eyes had been losingsleep over me. Yes to the fact that he’d looked at my body—this body I’d spent years being quietly ashamed of—and wanted it. Wanted me.
“You have no idea what you’re asking for.” His hand came up to cup my jaw. His palm was calloused and hot, his thumb dragging across my lower lip.
“Maybe I do,” I countered.
As if those were the words he’d been waiting to hear, he crashed his mouth down onto mine, and the world simply vanished. It wasn’t a tentative kiss. It was a claim. It was possessive and desperate, a collision of two people who had spent too long pretending they didn’t want this.
His hands moved from my waist to my hips, gripping me with a strength that made me melt. He tasted like dark roast coffee and the sweltering heat of a summer night, and I couldn’t get enough.
He broke the kiss for a split second, only to bury his face in the crook of my neck. I felt his teeth scraping against my soft flesh as if he were marking me.
Mark me, I thought, a desperate ache settling low in my belly.Make sure no one else even thinks about looking at me.Own me.
I arched my back, pressing myself against him, feeling every hard line of his body. My sweatshirt had ridden up, and his large, calloused palms were against my bare skin, sending ripples of awareness through every nerve ending.
“You’re too young,” he muttered against my skin. “I should walk away. I should let you find some boy who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing. But I can’t. I want to show you everything. I look at you and I want to own every damn inch of you.”
“Then own me,” I said, my voice breaking. I pulled his face back to mine, my thumbs tracing the hard line of his jaw. “I don’t want a boy, Griffin. I want you.”
He let out a low, guttural sound and captured my mouth again, deeper this time. His tongue tangled with mine as we learned how each other tasted. Addictive was how he tasted. I arched my back, pressing my chest against his hard frame, desperate for more. Then, he was sliding that hand under my bra, his huge, calloused palm swallowing the heavy weight of my breast. I groaned into his mouth, the rough scrape of his fingers against my bare skin sending a vicious, throbbing ache straight down between my thighs.
“Touch me, Griffin,” I begged, my hands tangling in his hair and pulling his head down. He obeyed, pushing the bra and sweatshirt up and out of the way and I sobbed as his mouth closed over the center of my breast. His tongue licked my puckered flesh. The feel was rough and so exciting. I felt another rush of wetness dampen my panties.
