by Serena Bell
He crouched behind the wheelbarrow he was filling with weeds and tried not to look at her, because now that he knew those were her breasts, his hands felt hot and itchy with the need to cup them. His mouth filled with saliva, his tongue deliberately not remembering the shape of her nipples. He refused, unsuccessfully, to contemplate the way her wrists had felt, gripped against his palm, the way his knuckles had scraped the brick. He’d wondered if they’d be bloody when he was done, and he’d hoped they would, so that in the morning, the scrapes would remind him (he still had one tiny scab, which he ran his finger over sometimes, with an ambivalent thrill of memory). He’d hoped the skin along her spine or the skin of her ass would be similarly abraded, even though he shouldn’t want her to remember him.
Her clothes fit like a second skin—a light gray tank top and black pants that ended mid-calf—and she wasn’t wearing makeup. When he’d escorted her back to her car the other night, her mascara had been smudged under her eyes, and he’d imagined that her tears sprang from the same mixture of pleasure and pain he’d felt. Now her face was bare, but flushed bright with exertion, and it was impossible not to flash back on the way her breasts had heaved against him while he’d restrained her hands overhead, the way her breath had rushed hot on his cheek.
He was hiding from her, he realized. He was hiding there, squatting behind the wheelbarrow, hoping she’d pass without spotting him.
And hoping she’d see him. Hoping she’d glance between the black iron bars, over the top of the barrow, that her eyes would meet his. That she’d draw up sharp in shock, that she’d trot to the fence and grip the bars, that she’d press her face through the bars and—
And what? Demand he kiss her? Let him clutch her hands tight around the bars, trapping her there? Let him pull both her arms through the bars so the iron would press into the flesh of her breasts, then hold her tight while he worked his body against hers, the metal painful and pleasurable where it bit into his own skin?
Yes, pretty much. Hoping all that, and more, that she’d ask him to open the gate, that she’d lean back against the bars and draw him to her, that she’d look up through her lashes and let that pouty lower lip fall open slightly, inviting him in as explicitly as if she’d said, Kiss me.
Instead—unsurprisingly—she jogged by, so close for a moment that if he had only breathed her name she would have heard it. He could have thrown a clump of weeds and caught her on the arm. There were beads of sweat on her forehead. From this distance, he could hear her breath, fast and desperate, a deep, dark tug that woke his cock and dragged it to standing.
And then she was gone, and he watched her run away, the lean, sculpted muscles in her legs, the clutch of the bigger muscles in her gorgeous ass, the bounce of her ponytail.
He let his gaze drop, reached for a handful of knotweed, and went on with his work.
—
Lily sat at the kitchen table in her sister’s house, peeling an orange and gazing out the window over the kitchen sink.
It was not the most beautiful view ever. The houses in this neighborhood had been built all at the same time and the developer had run out of money for landscaping before he’d been able to do much to break up the view between them. Sierra’s window revealed three consecutive yards, lined up, cluttered with toddler toys and swing sets, pre-fab sheds and plastic lawn furniture. The lawns were drying up in the summer sun, rife with patches of dead grass and crabgrass. Here and there, someone had planted a compensatory fruit tree and there was a patch of shade.
Lily had finished peeling the orange and was dividing it into sections. It made her not only miss her nieces and nephews—who were at camp—but also feel quietly glad they weren’t here. Although the orange was really too big for one person, it was too small for four, and she would have given most of it away.
Sierra had done a good job with those kiddos, taught them manners without disciplining the childhood mischief completely out of them. Lily hoped she’d do as good a job with her own someday.
If she had any. She didn’t know how easy it would be to have kids and own a restaurant, particularly as a woman. The first few years, running a restaurant was backbreaking, life-consuming work. You had to be there every hour of the day and deep into the night, and when you weren’t on the premises, you were buying food at the market—or sleeping.
And there was the problem of having time to meet someone eligible when you were so damn busy. You might be able to have an encounter here and there, but to have a long-term relationship, get married, you’d have to meet a patient man whose own ambitions dovetailed with yours. Fat chance.
Lily figured that even if she managed to meet someone willing to compromise between his ambitions and hers, she’d have to be willing to give up some of her own fantasies. The chances were slim that he’d be the sort of guy who graced her daydreams.
Like Kincaid.
She wasn’t an idiot. She knew that marrying the shirtless man on the cover of a romance novel didn’t necessarily deliver the happily-ever-after it promised. Kincaid might look like the best item on the menu, but she’d be better off taking compatible values and goals over photogenic looks and sexual wow-factor.
On the opposite side of the next yard, someone was pruning one of the few trees. He was wedged in the vee of two branches, leaning back against one while he trimmed a branch over his head with a pole pruner. He was by far the best part of Lily’s view, naked from the waist up, rippling with muscle, not an ounce of fat on his tanned, glistening form.
Nice.
This town was full of them, apparently, these photogenic, wow-factor men. This one’s back and arms were heavily inked, the most prominent tattoo a design that wrapped the back of his neck and covered most of one side of his back. Diamonds—
With a start, she recognized him.
Kincaid. Up a tree, not a hundred yards from her house.
She looked away. It was one thing to idly admire a random, well-muscled arborist, another thing to deliberately ogle a man she knew while he worked.
A man who had made her come, standing up, in an alley, through some combination of the skill in his fingers, the taunt in his voice as he’d counted, and the way he’d confined her.
What a bizarre coincidence. As if the universe were trying to tell her something. And maybe it was. The universe had, after all, brought him to the diner where she worked and bade him sit, idle, in a back booth. It had dictated that he would be in the diner on a night when she cooked, that she would cook his meal, that Markos would castigate her, and that Kincaid would stand up for her.
He pushed himself up out of the notch where he’d been working and stepped onto a higher branch. She watched his calf bulge, saw the ink on his back ripple with the surge of energy under his skin. Sunlight played off the sweat on his neck, caught the blond hair on his forearm as he raised the pole to clip another branch.
More.
It wasn’t even a word, really. More a sensation, a sinking heat, a spreading warmth. She’d never been someone who responded to visual stimulation. Sure, she could appreciate a photo of a hot, mostly naked guy, sure, she could admire a well-sculpted male form, but she didn’t troll the internet for video or anything. She didn’t linger and stare.
Or if she did, she wasn’t so conscious of herself. She didn’t feel so out of control of her body, like there was a trip wire between the two of them, so that when he raised his arm to show her the twist of muscle that defined his shoulder, when he displayed that tuft of darker hair like some primitive mating call, her body shot to awareness without her brain even having a say in it.
I’d do it again. What we did in the alley.
Her brain might be arguing for sticking to the plan and prioritizing compatibility, but her body was full-speed-ahead for More.
I could go talk to him.
Damn, she was weak. She’d driven two thousand miles in a broken-down beater to escape her own mistakes, sworn she wouldn’t make the same ones again, and the shine of sweat on well-de
fined muscle was doing her in.
Come on, Lily.
If he’d wanted to see her, if he’d wanted to do it again, he’d known perfectly well where to find her. The fact that he hadn’t found her, hadn’t come to see her, spoke loudly of his intentions. He’d had what he wanted from her, and he was done.
If she went to talk to him now, she’d just be pathetic.
She washed the orange off her hands, then began straightening the kitchen. Avoiding looking at him as best she could. Just—just checking from time to time to see if he was still there. Like poking a bruise to see if it was still sore.
It was still sore.
She was still on high alert for the motion of that trip wire.
And then, as she watched, the branch he was standing on split and he tumbled out of the tree and out of her sight.
Chapter 8
“Oh, my God, are you okay?”
A female voice, aflutter with concern. The smell of an orange. Cool, soft hands on his arm.
He’d been taking a slow inventory of his body parts, not quite willing yet to open his eyes. He hadn’t struck his head or lost consciousness, so that was good. He seemed to have feeling in all his limbs, so he probably hadn’t broken his neck or spine. There was no intense pain radiating from legs or arms, so apparently he’d gotten insanely lucky and not broken a bone.
“Kincaid, are you okay?”
The female voice knew his name, and now her small hands were beginning to prod him all over, as if she were doing an inventory of her own, which was delight and agony, particularly the one that was moving over his calf and up to his thigh, sending wake up! wake up! messages to the one part of his body whose good function he obviously did not need to worry about at all. The other hand was in his hair, as if checking the sanctity of his skull, and it took all his willpower and self-control not to grab the owner of the hands and pull her down into his lap.
Because the female voice belonged to Lily, who had magically appeared out of nowhere when he fell out of the tree. She was touching him all over as if she were some kind of healer who could tell from feel if he’d broken something.
Or maybe she was just as eager for an excuse to touch him as he was (perversely, misguidedly) ecstatic she’d found one?
“I’m okay,” he finally found the wherewithal to say, not so much because of how bruised and scratched he was, but because she’d stolen all the breath from his lungs. He took one of her hands in each of his and removed them from his body. “Except you have to stop that,” he told her.
“Did I hurt you?” she asked, obviously horrified.
“No—”
And then they both looked down at his lap where a tent had formed in the loose, light fabric of his cut-off Carhartts.
“Oh,” she said, and blushed. That was ironic, considering that she’d seen it all, and far more, the other night.
“I guess I’m lucky,” he said. “Don’t seem to have broken anything.”
He realized after the words were out of his mouth that they could have been a double entendre, but she let it go, continuing her—now visual—inspection of what he’d done to himself in his fall from the tree.
The worst of his wounds was a long, ragged gash down one calf, and she touched the edge of it and said, “This has to be cleaned. That’s my house. My sister’s house. Can you limp over there and I’ll run in for some first aid supplies?”
He was fine, except for being banged up and cut, which he didn’t give a shit about. But she was looking at him with so much concern, those big eyes alight for him, that he couldn’t make himself turn down her offer. “Sure,” he said. He got to his feet and followed her to her front yard.
“Sit there,” she said, gesturing at the front steps. She disappeared into the house.
When she returned, she had a plastic box of supplies. She set it down beside him and trotted around the side of the house for the garden hose, which she used to rinse the worst of his cuts and scrapes.
It felt good, letting her care for him. He realized that was part of what he’d coveted, watching her in the diner. The way she nurtured people. No one had taken care of him in so long. Possibly no one ever would again. It wasn’t outrageous, was it, to let himself bask in the feel of her hands, smoothing antibiotic ointment on his cut, or the look of concern in her eyes?
Except he wasn’t a little boy feeling safe because his mom had pasted a Band-Aid on his leg. He was a grown man who’d spent almost the last decade getting battered and cut and not having anyone give a shit, and it was absurdly self-indulgent to feel so grateful about a tube of medicine. And he was deluding himself, too, about the innocence of his appreciation. He liked that she was sitting on the steps between his legs, her face at navel level, her slim, sweet hands sending something close to a quiver straight up his inner leg, until it lodged like raw need in his balls. Gave him a hard-on that made the one a few minutes ago look like a pup tent.
Maybe the movement in his crotch caught her attention—it sure as hell caught his—because she looked up at him, then, her eyes straight into his, pupils huge.
And he looked right back.
There they were, the eye contact like flame, and he couldn’t look away even though it hurt to keep looking into those green eyes. There was something in that gaze—so naked and needy—that made him feel like he was the one who was exposed. She’d done that to him the other night, too, bared her secrets and left him feeling like the one who’d been flayed.
He touched her lower lip. He’d had it against his own lips, held it hostage between his teeth, but somehow the feel of it against his thumb was more intimate. Maybe because she was slightly below him on the stoop, looking up at him from under those lashes, shockingly innocent and vulnerable for someone who’d made it abundantly clear that she had a kinky side. And when he ran his thumb across her lip, so his fingerprint caught on a patch of chapped skin, her tongue came out and swept across the sensitive tip of his thumb. His cock twitched in response, and it wasn’t till it did that he realized where her hand was—resting on his upper thigh. Her thumb brushed over the hypersensitive head of his erection and he almost came in his briefs.
Aaaaand here he was again.
He drew his hand away from her tempting mouth and scooted up a stair. Hearing, echoing in his head, Grant’s words:
Do only what you absolutely have to. Keep your nose clean otherwise.
Kincaid’s mind retorted, By “have to,” Grant, what exactly do you mean?
Because Lily was definitely a compulsion. An addiction, almost.
“I’m dirty and sweaty,” Kincaid said. Translation: This isn’t going to happen. You don’t want this to happen.
She bit her lower lip. “I don’t care.”
Fuck.
She took the step he’d vacated, slipping herself back between his legs, tilting her head back, her lips already parted. He was such a goner. He bent his head and put his mouth to hers, loving the slickness of her tongue, the way she whimpered and grabbed for his shoulders. She was breathing hard, yanking his hair, digging her fingernails into his back, the nails barely finding purchase in the sweat from his landscaping exertions and from her being so near and so eager. He kissed her and kissed her, drowning in her mouth, forgetting to breathe, tugging her tighter between his legs so he could feel her belly against his torturous hard-on.
“You make me crazy,” he blurted out.
She pulled back to let him see her smile, then kissed him again.
Maybe it was the slip of her tongue against his, maybe the way she squirmed, but he needed to hold her still, needed to keep her from moving restlessly like that, from sliding all over him and lighting up every square inch of his skin. He wrapped his hand in her hair, hard. Knowing it was too tight, knowing he was pulling. Jerking her head back so he controlled the kiss completely, the pressure, the depth of penetration. Telling her he’d control the sex that way, too, because he knew that was what she wanted to hear.
She moaned and bit him, pr
oving him right.
Funny to know so much about someone, and so little.
A car horn honked, Lily broke the kiss, and the driver shot them a dirty look.
“Whoops,” Lily said breathlessly. “I don’t want to get my sister in trouble. You’d better come inside.”
He wanted to. In all the possible ways. But the car horn had fired up his adrenaline and reminded him of how little leeway he had in this world. The next-door neighbor could come home and discover him not doing his work, and if he screwed up this job, he might not find another. If he went too far with Lily, if she changed her mind about wanting things rough, suddenly decided that allowing wasn’t the same as consenting—well, that could bring the cops.
Better to slam this door with her than have the literal metal bars clanging the end of his brief freedom, before he’d even gotten a chance to try to find the will.
“I can’t,” he said regretfully.
Her face fell. She had one of those faces that showed everything, that couldn’t hide. Another thing he liked about her.
“You never come into the diner anymore,” she said.
“That’s because this is a bad idea,” he said, jabbing his finger to indicate what had just happened, the impossibility of resistance, the chemistry that made him so goddamned stupid.
“Why?”
“I am not your kind of guy,” he said.
She glowered at him. “What kind of bullshit is that?”
“I guarantee you I’m not.”
“You think you know me?”
“I know that.”
“What kind of guy are you?”
He could tell her. A convicted felon.
It might scare the shit out of her. She might run the other way. And that was what he wanted. It was.
Or it might not scare her. It might turn her on.
