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“Excuse us,” she says to the line, in a perfectly normal voice. “We’re closing early.”

* * *

She drags me behind the bakery by my wrist, into the storehouse where the miller keeps his flour, and shoves the door shut behind us.

It’s dim and dusty in here, with stacked flour sacks up to the ceiling and one little window high on the wall. Hattie turns around, grabs my shirt, and slams me back against the sacks so hard a cloud of flour puffs up around us.

I let her. I could stop her with one finger. I don’t want to.

“That,” she says, breathing hard, “was the hottest thing anybody has ever done for me.”

“I didn’t do anything. I touched his shoulder.”

“You threatened to stand outside his window.”

“It wasn’t a threat. I really would.”

She makes a desperate little sound, grabs my face in both hands, and kisses me.

And I’m gone.

I spin us around and pin her against the flour sacks, and another cloud goes up, and neither of us cares. I shove her skirt up with one hand and find her with the other, and she’s so wet my fingers slide right in. She moans into my mouth, loud, and I clamp my other hand over her lips.

“Quiet,” I growl in her ear. “The miller’s right outside. You want him to come in here and see me fucking you on his flour?”

She whimpers against my palm and clenches around my fingers so hard I almost lose my mind.

I work my fingers in and out of her, slow and deep, and she shakes and grabs my wrist and rocks her hips into my hand. Then I pull out of her and lift her up, and she wraps her legs around my waist, and I open my pants and slide into her in one long push.

She screams into my hand.

Fuck. Fuck. She’s so tight like this, with her back against the flour and her legs locked around me and her whole weight sinking down on my cock. I can feel every pulse inside her. She’s trembling.

“Rowan,” she moans into my palm. “Oh God, you’re so deep like this… I can feel you in my stomach…”

“You walked into that market with your head down,” I tell her, and start moving. Short, hard thrusts that slam her back into the sacks. “You let that little prick talk to you like that. You stood there and took it.”

“I…”

“Never again.” I drive into her, harder. “You hear me? Not one more day of that. You walk through this village like you own it. Because you do. Because anybody who looks at you wrong has to deal with me.”

She’s sobbing now, nodding, her nails digging into my shoulders.

“Now come for me,” I growl, “and try not to scream for the whole village this time.”

She fails. She comes with her teeth sunk into my shoulder, her whole body clamping down on my cock, and a muffled scream that probably makes it to the well. And I follow her right over, slamming my knot into her and pouring everything I have inside her while flour rains down on us both from the sack I just split with my fist.

When I can think again, we’re sitting on the floor of the miller’s storehouse. Locked together. Covered in flour. White from head to toe.

She looks down at herself. Then at me.

Then she starts laughing so hard she can’t breathe.

“We look like ghosts,” she wheezes.

“We look like bread.”

She laughs harder. I hold her and wait for my knot to go down.