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“Bolton.”

“It’s your word. I know what that means to you. So you decide.” I turned my hands in his grip until I was the one holding his wrists. “But I’m standing right here, and I’ve wanted you so long I can’t remember wanting anybody else.”

“She’s all the family I’ve got,” he said.

“I know. She’s mine too, in a way.”

He looked at me. I watched the fight go out of him, a little at a time.

“Fuck,” he said, very quietly. “I’m going to hell.”

Then he picked me up.

My back hit the shop wall, hard enough to shake the pegboard over my head. A wrench dropped off its hook and rang on the concrete. My legs went around his waist. He kissed me like he was making up for every one of those years, deep and filthy, and his hands went up under the T-shirt and found out I had nothing on beneath it.

He swore against my throat.

“All week,” he said. “You’ve been walking around my house like this all fucking week and it’s been driving me insane.”

He pulled the shirt over my head and dropped it. Then he just looked at me, pinned up against his wall under the work light, and nobody had ever looked at me like that. His hand shook when he put it on my breast. His palm was hard with calluses. He dragged his thumb over my nipple until it stood up tight, and then he bent his head and took it in his mouth, and I felt the pull of it all the way down between my legs. My head knocked back against the boards as I breathed hard.

“I used to think about what you’d sound like,” he said against my skin. “I’d ride past your shop and think about putting my hand over your mouth so half of Main wouldn’t hear you scream when I made you come.”

His hand slid down between us. He found me wet, and he groaned into my neck. He stroked me slowly at first, learning me, and his fingertips were so careful I pushed down against them. Careful was more than I could stand. He pushed two fingers into me. I grabbed his shoulders. He worked them deep, with the heel of his hand grinding on my clit, and he watched my face the whole time. It built fast. My thighs shook around his hips. I came so hard I bit his shoulder to keep quiet, and I felt him shudder.

He whispered against my hair and told me there wasn’t a neighbor for a mile and I could scream the roof down if I wanted.

I got his belt open one-handed. I shoved his jeans down his hips and wrapped my hand around his cock. He was thick and hot, so hard he jerked in my grip, and the skin there was softer than anything else on him. I stroked him once, root to tip, and felt him go wet against my thumb. His head dropped against the wall beside mine.

“Now,” I said. “Havoc. Now.”

He lifted me higher and drove up into me, all the way, and we both cried out.

He was big. I felt every inch of him, a stretch that burned and then turned sweet. He held there as deep as he could go, with his whole body trembling, and put his mouth against my ear.

“Ava-Rose,” he said, like he’d been waiting years to allow himself to say it.

I hadn’t heard that man say my name since I was nineteen years old. It went through me harder than his fingers had.

He drew back and drove into me, and he said it again. He said it every time. Ava-Rose. Ava-Rose. Fuck.

There was nothing gentle in it, and I didn’t want gentle. He fucked me against that wall with his hands under my thighs and my heels digging into his back. The boards scraped my shoulder blades. The pegboard rattled, and his tools came off it one after another and hit the floor around us. Every thrust knocked the breath out of me. I pulled his hair, and he swore and went harder, and the angle changed so that he dragged over my clit every time he moved.

He never put me down. He held me up on that wall with the muscles standing out in his arms and sweat running down his throat, and he got his thumb between us.

“Give me another one,” he said in my ear. “I want to feel it.”

I came with my nails in his back and his name coming out of me in pieces, clenching around him so hard he swore. He slammed into me twice more and stayed there, buried deep, and I felt him pulse inside me. He groaned through his teeth, and his knees nearly went.

Afterward he held me against the wall. Neither of us could have walked. I could feel his heart going against mine. He kissed my shoulder, my jaw, the corner of my mouth, small and soft.

When we’d composed ourselves, he carried me back across the dark yard in his arms and left his T-shirt on the shop floor. He put me down in his bed and got in beside me. It was the first night he’d been in it. He ran his hand down my bare back, all the way, like he was checking I was real.

On the nightstand, my phone lit up and started to buzz.

I knew who it was before I reached for it. Only one person in the world ever called me that late, and lately it was to check if I was all right.

Brynn.