Page 47 of Stud

“You’re back!” she squealed from behind me.

“You’re too far away.”

“You’re holding my hand.”

I walked faster. “I should be kneading your ass while I crush you against a wall and lick every inch of your body.”

She whimpered.

This urge to devour Ainsley was a wild buzz, more intense than anything I’d ever experienced. It took root in my gut, splintered through my limbs. It made me feel untethered and famished. Crackling with desire. And happy. The simplest of emotions brimming until my disastrous trip was nothing but a distant memory.

I could hear her scurrying to keep pace. Our palms were dampening, my grip on her slender fingers unforgiving. She didn’t seem to mind.

I led us into the half-finished building and tore into what would be a bathroom—a small space with a small window. The only room with a door. They must have installed the door since my last day, and the second I had Ainsley inside, I tried to shove it closed. It dug into the floor, jarring my arm. Guess I’d be leveling this out tomorrow. Today its only purpose was providing privacy for the sexual tension about to be obliterated.

Squaring my shoulder with the wood, I launched into its center, slamming it closed. Something rattled in the frame. My pulse rattled in my neck.

I spun around. “You’re still too far.”

Her blue eyes were heavy with lust. “Then get over here, cowboy.”

I descended upon her, knocking her hardhat off and capturing her lips with mine, groaning at the contact. It was instant, how she made me soft and hard at once, melting my angst yet shooting me full of steel. I plunged my tongue between her plump lips, a little rough and a lot needy, each swipe searing my mind. I groped her ass and waist and breasts. So many curves. Too much clothing.

Her teeth sunk into my bottom lip as she tried to climb my body. “You’re so tall.”

“You’re perfect.” I hoisted her up, latching her legs around my waist, and swiveled, slamming her back against the door with a violent thud.

A strangled oof pushed from her pretty mouth. “That’s sexier in the movies. I think I broke my spine.”

Head thrown back, I chuckled. “Doll, I fucking—”

Whoa.

Love you. That’s what I’d been about to say. In jest, maybe, an off-the-cuff fondness often offered to friends, but it was more. It was everything.

I’d only known Ainsley two months, not that long, but long enough to piece through my need to see her today and the whirl of emotions spinning through me and understand this was definitely more than infatuation. And she was in the dark about my past.

She had no clue I’d ever even been married.

Legs locked around me, she trailed wet kisses down my neck and along my collarbone, but I couldn’t reciprocate. Her openness in the face of my duplicity was too much.

Her teeth bit, her tongue licked. I was riled up, dying to see her creamy skin, but it didn’t feel right. She deserved to know. The basics, at least. She confessed a deep truth on the phone. I had to man up and offer the same. Find a way to explain Tessa’s accusations without losing the first person in years to make me feel alive.

I returned her kisses, exploring the column of her neck, the delicate lines of her ear. Then I pulled back. “We need to talk.”

“We need to kiss.”

It was hard to argue with her breathy sounds and rotating hips, her body plastered against mine, but this was important. Honesty was important.

I inched away from the door, lowering her so she could find her feet. My shirt was twisted. Hers was halfway up her stomach. Her eyes darted to my hand as I adjusted myself in my jeans. “We do need to kiss,” I said, “but I have some stuff I have to tell you.”

She tapped an impatient sneaker. “I’m not sure what you’re playing at, but I’m a tad horny, and unless you finish the job you started, and I get to strip you naked in the nearish-immediate future, I will die of blue bean.”

“Blue bean?”

“Blue bean.”

Even with my impending admission, this woman had me amused. “I don’t follow.”