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"I'm not going anywhere." His rhythm holds, iron-steady, but his breathing is ragged now and his hands are crushing mine and I can feel the control coming off him in pieces. "Look at me. I'm going to finish inside you, and this time you get to watch me mean it."

That sends me flying over the edge. Not the rhythm, not the angle, though both are perfect. His words are the catalyst. I go tight around him in slow strong squeezes I couldn't stop if I tried, and he curses, one low reverent fuck against my jaw, and loses the rhythm entirely as he comes with me.

I feel his release. Deep heat blooming inside me, his hips pressed flush, his whole huge frame shuddering over mine, and feeling it sets me off again. My climax closes around his like a hand, both of us caught in the same long pull, his mouth on my throat, my heels locked behind his thighs, joined so completely I can't tell whose aftershock is whose.

It takes a long time to end. Neither of us hurries it.

When he finally lifts his head, his hair is destroyed and his eyes are the softest I’ve ever seen them. He's still inside me, and I start laughing again for no reason except that I'm happier than I’ve ever been in my entire life.

"Twice now," he says. "With the laughing."

"Get used to it. Apparently this is who I am when I’m with you." I push his hair back off his forehead. "For the record, the shrine's getting a whole new wing after this morning."

"I'd want to approve the plans." Not a flicker of a smile. "Load-bearing walls. Proper drainage."

"You would say something like that with your cock inside me." I clench around him deliberately, and his breath hisses in. I grin like the troublemaker he’s turning me into. "Sensitive?"

"You're going to torment me for the rest of my life." He says it like he’s been told he just won the lottery.

Eventually he eases out of me and settles beside me, pulling me into his side, my head resting on one bulging bicep. His hand comes to rest flat on my lower belly. Enormous, warm and entirely deliberate.

Neither of us says anything about it. It's too early to know and it’s unlikely anyway, but his palm spreads over the whole possibility like he's already keeping it. I put my hand over his, and we lie there in the middle of a workday, basking in each other.

I walked into this house with two secrets and a two weeks left of my notice.

I don't know what I'm walking out with. It might be everything.

Chapter 21

Aiden

The first job of the day is a Grady-White with a fuel line I could replace in my sleep, and I'm taking my time with it anyway, because the office door is propped open across the yard and every few minutes her voice drifts out of it like a siren song and I have to stop and smile, basking in my own good fortune.

Diesel's stationed in the doorway where he can watch her work. He's got no shame about it. Neither do I.

Ten days since she walked into my kitchen wearing my old shirt and took my whole life apart and rebuilt it better, and I still catch myself doing inventory. Her car in the lot every morning. Her handwriting on the whiteboard. Her toothbrush in my bathroom four nights out of seven and climbing. I'm a man checking his pockets over and over to make sure it's all still there.

One thing left to fix.

I finish the fuel line, wipe down my hands and walk into the office. She's mid-call, so I go past her to the filing cabinet, second drawer, personnel. Her formal notice letter’s been sitting in there for three and a half weeks like a splinter I kept forgetting to dig out.

Not anymore. I pull it, and I stand there in front of her, and I tear it in half, then in quarters, and drop the pieces in the wastebasket.

She puts the phone down slowly. "That was a legal document."

"File a complaint with the owner. I hear he's reasonable lately." I set the folder I fetched from my truck on her desk instead. New contract I had drawn up by Whitmore’s lawyers as a subtle fuck you to him. "Office manager. Permanent position. The raise is backdated to your start date, because the probation was insulting and I was an ass."

She opens the folder. I watch her eyes go down the page and get shiny as she reads, and then she looks up at me and gives me that beaming smile that runs this entire yard whether anyone's admitting it or not.

"You’re giving me dental."

"You'll want to argue about the salary. Don't. Marcus already knows, my mother already knows, and my mother says if you turn it down, she's coming back with more than voices."

"Nora knows before me?"

"My mother knows everything before everyone. She's still working through your chocolates, by the way. She says the flowers were excessive and you’ve set a bar for gift giving that I’ll never be able to clear."

Tommy comes strolling through the door with the parts order, looks at the contract in front of Vanessa, shamelessly reading what it is. Then he looks at her face and lights up like the Fourth of July. "You’re staying. I'm telling Marcus." He's gone before either of us can answer, hollering across the lot like a man announcing a fire.