"Wasn't planning on it." His teeth graze my ear. "Come on my hand. Let the room hear you."
I shatter. It rolls up through me hard, and my whole body locks against his arm, and I hear myself cry out without a single thought spared for who's nearby. He works me through it slow, gentling the pressure as I come down, fingers still buried, my pulse fluttering around them.
When I sag back against his chest, he holds my full weight. Doesn't rush to move me. Just brings his slick fingers up and, watching my face, slides them into his own mouth and sucks them clean.
"Show off," I breathe.
"You taste like you're gonna be a problem." He says it like a verdict.
Then he eases my dress back down over my hips, smooths it, and turns me around to face him. He pushes a loose curl off my cheek with a knuckle, careful, the same hand that just wrecked me, and the gentleness of it lands somewhere I didn't have guarded. My chest does something I don't authorize.
That's the part I should be worried about. The hand. The care in it. A man who can flatten you and then tuck your hair back like you're worth handling slow.
"Water," he says. "Sit." He guides me onto the bench, fetches a bottle from a side table, cracks it, and presses it into my hands. Crouches in front of me so we're level while I drink, eyes moving over my face, checking. "Color."
"Green. Extremely green." I drink. "You always this thorough?"
"Yes."
"No notes, then." I let my head tip against the wall. My legs are still humming. "You didn't even take your pants off."
"I don't need a bed to make a woman fall apart." He stands, looks down at me with that quiet, certain face that gives away nothing and somehow promises everything. "That was the introduction."
My stomach flips. Four weeks. Fun only. I can hear Renata in my head, very faint, very far away.
"The introduction," I repeat.
"You'll let me up that mountain eventually." Not a question, the way he says everything. He pulls me to my feet, steadies me, then bends and presses his mouth to mine for the first time all night, slow and deep and unhurried, a man tasting something he intends to come back for.
When he lets go, my heart is going like I sprinted here.
"Eventually," I agree, before I can talk myself out of the word.
CHAPTER THREE
KIERAN
Four days. That's how long I lasted before I gave her the gate code.
She texted me about it this morning, which tells me everything about how she operates.
You said eventually. It's been four days. I'm calling that eventually. Send the code or I'm hiking up there in heels and you'll have to carry me out when I twist an ankle and then you'll feel terrible
So now I'm in my workshop with sawdust on my forearms, pretending the half-finished walnut headboard needs more attention than it does, while Bear loses his mind at the window because tires are coming up the drive.
She parks her little rental crooked across two of the spaces I don't have lines for and steps out into my mountain in jeans and a tank top, hair loose. Bear hits her at the knees. Most people flinch. She drops down and lets eighty pounds of mutt knockher flat into the gravel, laughing, scratching behind his ears like she's been doing it for years.
"You've got a guard dog," she calls up to me. "He's terrible at it."
"He likes pretty women. Bad judgment, the both of us."
She comes up the steps into the open bay, and her eyes move over the place slow, taking it in. Lumber stacked to the rafters. Clamps on the wall. The headboard on the bench, half its grain still raw, half oiled to a deep brown. She walks straight to it and runs her fingers along the curve I spent a week getting right.
"You made this."
"Working on it."
"For who?"
