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His hand moved from my waist to the hem of my sweatshirt. His fingers found skin. Warm. The shock of contact made us both pause. His breath caught. Mine did too. Then his palm was on my back, tracing the line of my spine from waist to shoulder blade.

“Christ, your skin is… I didn’t…” He stopped. Started again. Worse. “I’ve been thinking about this since the clinic. Since the wall. Since you took the retractor out of my hand and didn’t even look at me.”

The words broke on the way out. Ungraceful. His sentences got longer and his thoughts more disorganized the closer he got, and something about that, watching him come apart when he never comes apart, landed in my chest where fear usually lived and replaced it with something I didn’t have a name for.

I pushed his cut off his shoulders. The leather was heavy. It hit the floor with a sound that carried in the quiet room. His Henley came next. Over his head. His chest was lean. Roped rather than bulked. Built by work instead of a gym. A scar crossed his left ribs. Old, white, left by something sharp and deliberate. I put my palm over it. His skin was warm. His heart beat under my hand.

He lifted me onto his lap. The couch leather creaked. Old. Worn smooth in the seat from ten thousand nights of men sitting exactly where we were sitting. His hands found my hips. His thumbs pressed into the hollows above my pelvic bones. The pressure was perfect. Exactly right.

I reached between us and found his belt. The buckle was cold. My fingers worked it open and his breath went ragged against my neck, and his hand came up to the back of my head, fingers laced through my hair. Not pulling. Holding. The way you hold something you’re afraid of breaking.

“I need you to…” He stopped. Swallowed. “Tell me what you want. In words.”

“Not here.”

“Say it again.”

“Not on a couch in a room with four doors into it.” I got a hand flat on his chest. His heart was going hard under my palm. “I want you inside me and I would like to not be listening for boots in the hallway while it happens.”

“There’s a door down the hall that locks.”

“Then use it.”

He was up off that couch with me still on him before I finished the sentence.

The door shut behind us, and he had me against it. His mouth was on my throat. His hands went under my thighs and lifted. I got my legs around his waist and felt exactly how hard he was through his jeans. The sound I made wasn’t one I’d have chosen.

“Bed,” I said.

“In a minute.”

“Patch.”

“Maren.” His forehead came down against mine. “Give me a minute.”

So I gave him the minute.

He got my sweatshirt off over my head and my bra after it, and then he just looked, and I’m not a woman who’s ever known what to do with being looked at. I’m built for lifting sedated dogs off tables. Strong through the shoulders, thick through the thighs, nothing anybody puts in a magazine.

He put his mouth on me like I was the best thing he’d seen in a decade.

His beard was rough. His tongue was not. He got one nipple in his mouth and worked it until my hands were in his hair and I’d stopped being able to hold a thought straight, and then he moved to the other one and did it again, slower, while his thumb kept the first one company.

“Bed,” I said again, and this time he listened.

He got my jeans off me and I got his the rest of the way down and then his cock was in my hand, thick and hot and already slick at the tip, and I stroked him once, twice, watching his jaw come apart while I did it.

“Careful,” he said.

“I’m being careful.”

“You’re being deliberate. That’s worse.”

He put my hand aside and put his own between my legs and found my pussy already soaked, and made a sound low in his chest like the fact of it had cost him something.

“Christ,” he said. “You’re wet as hell.”

“I’ve been wet since you put me against that door.”