Page 44

I slip my hand inside her underwear and touch her bare for the first time, and everything I thought I knew about wanting this woman turns out to be a rough draft.

She's slick and swollen and so silky my fingers slide through her like I've been touching her for hours, finding the shape of her, learning where she tenses and where she opens, mapping her the way I'd map anything I intended to keep. She jerks against me when I find her clit, a full-body flinch, her teeth sinking into her lower lip.

"Right there?" I circle it slowly, feeling her thighs clamp around my hand.

She nods, fast, frantic, and her head drops back against my shoulder, throat exposed, eyes shut. The dock is dead silent except for the water and her breathing, which is getting less and less quiet with every pass of my fingers.

"You're so wet." I can't stop saying it. I don't want to stop saying it. I want her to hear it in my voice, what it does to me that she's this wet, that my hand is this slippery, that every time I drag my fingers through her she gets wetter. "You've been this wet all night? Sitting out here next to me?"

A tiny, desperate nod.

"God, Vanessa." I press two fingers inside her, slow, curling them forward, and she bites down on nothing and her back arches off my chest, hips rolling up into my hand. She's tight around my fingers, clenching in waves, and I can feel her pulse inside, fast and hard and everywhere. "You feel… fuck. You feel incredible."

Her hand flies to my thigh. Nails digging in through the denim, hard enough that I'll still be able to see it tomorrow.

"I need to hear you say this is okay." My thumb finds her clit again while my fingers work inside her, pressing, curling, figuring out the stroke that makes her whole body jolt. "Tell me."

"It's okay." She can barely speak. "More. Please. I'll be quiet, I promise."

I pull her tighter against me, my free arm locked across her ribs, holding her still while I work her with my hand, and I put my mouth against her ear and tell her the thing I've been swallowing for three weeks.

"You know what you did to my yard?" My fingers keep moving, steady, relentless, and her hips are rocking with them now, small urgent rolls she can't control. "You walked in and fixed everything. Every goddamn thing in that office. Every file. Every invoice. Every customer who stopped calling because I couldn't keep my shit together long enough to return a phone call."

She makes a sound. Tiny, broken, barely there.

"You fixed my yard," I tell her, pressing harder, feeling her clench, feeling her thighs start to tremble against my forearm. "And I don't know what to do about the fact that you fixed my yard and I want my hands on you every second of every day and I can't have both. But right now, I've got you in my lap and you're soaking my hand and you're the best thing that's walked onto this property in three years and I need you to come for me and not make a sound."

She turns her face into my shoulder. I feel the exact moment it takes her.

Her whole body locks rigid, every muscle she owns going taut at once, her teeth sinking into my bicep hard enough to bruise through my T-shirt, bearing down on my fingers so tight I can feel her pulse hammering against them from the inside. Her thighs clamp shut around my wrist. Her hands fist in the front of my shirt. And she doesn't make a sound beyond her broken breathing.

I watch it happen. I watch her face buried in my shoulder, feel the shudder start in her stomach and roll out through her thighs, feel her bear down and pulse and pulse and pulse against my fingers, hot and slick and gripping, her whole body shaking in long waves that keep going after she's stopped clenching, smaller and smaller until she goes completely boneless against my chest.

I don't move my hand. I hold her through the last of it, feeling the aftershocks, feeling her soften and go still.

Her breaths are ragged against my neck.

I'm so hard it hurts. I don't do anything about it. I don't ask her to. She's limp in my lap, wrapped in my jacket, her face still pressed to my shoulder, and she stays there, not speaking, not moving, just breathing, and I hold her until her body stops trembling and her grip on my shirt slowly loosens.

She falls asleep like that. Between one breath and the next, gone.

I sit on my dock with her whole weight against me. The harbor dark and flat and silent, and I don't move. I don't want to move. I want to stay exactly here with my hand still warm from the inside of her body and her breath on my neck and my jacket around her shoulders.

I can't have this.

I can't have this.

I can't have this and I just took it anyway.

I carry her to her truck. She barely stirs when I buckle her in. I drive her home, get her upstairs, put her on the bed with the jacket still on. Lock her door from the inside before I pull it shut behind me.

I walk back to the yard and sit in my truck in the dark lot with my hands on the wheel, still smelling her on my fingers, wondering where the hell we go from here.

Chapter 12

Vanessa

Iwake up in his jacket.