22. Jenna
Jenna
Inearly drop my glass.
“How—”
“Your footsteps. Like an auditor sneaking up on a discrepancy.” He straightens and turns, wiping his hands on a rag that’s more grease than fabric, and the grin that spreads over his face at the sight of me—sleep-rumpled, bare-legged, wearing his shirt and holding the evidence I went through his fridge—should require a permit.
“Also, I have cameras. I knew you were up as soon as you stepped out onto the mezzanine.”
“Oh. Um. I was looking for you. I wasn’t snooping,” I say quickly, realizing he probably caught my slow wander through the photographic evidence of his life.
“Couldn’t care less if you were.” He crosses the room and presses a kiss against my cheek. “Good morning, wife.”
The word wife in his mouth makes my knees a little unreliable. I try to play it off. “You always start your Saturdays by building motorcycles?”
“Depends.” He tosses the rag onto a bench.
“Sometimes I restore classic cars. Sometimes I day trade just to see if I can still beat the market with both hands tied. Sometimes I stay in bed long enough to make you question your own stamina.” He’s circling closer, eyes dark and delighted.
“But I figured you needed your rest after last night.”
My cheeks heat, remembering the multiple orgasms and filthy things this man did to me. I clear my throat, try to be casual. “Is this your secret? You’re actually a grease monkey with a spreadsheet fetish?”
“I contain multitudes, babe.” He eyes the cold brew. “Is there more of that, or did you drink it all?”
“Why don’t you go check,” I say, taking another long swig just to prove I’m not afraid of him, or his fridge, or the weird, craving ache in my chest that comes from remembering the photo of us on his shelf.
He grins and heads back to his bike. “You know, I like you like this. You should sleep in more often.”
“Pass.” I move to sit on the bottom step, knees to chin, and watch him work.
I’m not usually a girl for engines, but I am a girl for men who know how to be alone with themselves, who know how to fix things, who come with the self-sufficiency baked in.
I drink the last of the coffee and set it aside, waiting for him to say what I know is coming.
He says nothing, for a good minute, and in that minute I hear everything: the low radio, the rhythmic clank of a socket against metal, the way his breathing is unhurried even though he knows he’s being watched.
A normal man would put on a little show for my benefit—gloat, ask what I think, crack a joke about giving me a ride after.
Not Dominic. For all his extrovert bravado, this is a man who can be alone in a room with just his own mind and not try to run from it.
I clear my throat. “So what’s the project?”
He glances up, then back to the bike. “Nineteen seventy-three Triumph Bonneville.” He pats the tank like a flank. “I’ve been restoring her for four years. Logan says I’m stalling because if I ever finish her, I’ll have to find a new excuse to hide down here.”
“Are you?”
“Obviously.” He says it without a flicker of shame, and something in my chest goes sideways. “A man needs one thing that doesn’t close, Jen. Deals close. This just—continues.”
I get up and move closer to the bike, circling it slowly.
The parts laid out on a towel in size order.
The little handwritten labels. The masking tape on the tank with three paint-code candidates in his blunt block letters.
I realize that this is what his brain does when nobody needs anything from him at all.
“Hold this, please,” he says, pressing a loose bracket into place and guiding my fingers to it.
I take it with suspicion. “What is it?”
“Carburetor bracket. Keep it steady.” He fits a socket over the bolt. “Here.”
I hold it while he tightens the bolt. “If you pretend your wife is a grease monkey’s apprentice, is there a sexual fantasy attached, or are you genuinely just using me for labor?”
He doesn’t even look up. “Yes.”
I roll my eyes, but my lips can’t help it—they twitch. “You’re impossible.”
He winks. “You know why I like doing this?”
“Because it makes you feel in control,” I deadpan.
He laughs. “No, sweetheart. Because it reminds me that breaking isn’t the same as ending. If you’re patient enough to understand how the pieces fit, most things can be rebuilt.”
Something in his voice makes me look at him closer.
He’s got grease under his nails and a streak on his cheekbone, and I realize, in a way I hadn’t before, this is a guy who doesn’t just fix things because he wants to shine them up and show them off.
He fixes because he is compelled—because if he doesn’t, the broken thing will haunt him, and the only way to drown it out is to tear it down, clean every piece, and put it back together better than it was before.
I want to say something about that—about how most men I know burn down what they can’t repair. But what comes out is, “How do you know when it’s finally done?”
He looks at me like it’s the easiest thing in the world. “When it starts.” He sets the wrench aside and steps closer, his hands leaving careful prints of grease on his jeans. “But then you ride it, and sometimes it breaks again, and that’s OK, too.”
I move forward, closing the distance between us and letting my fingers tangle in his hair, ignoring the dust and the streak of black at his temple because I want to touch him, want to feel the impossible alive heat of him under my palms.
He looks at me, surprised—but only for a second, because then his eyes darken with that look I know, like he’s been waiting for me to make a move.
“You need something from me, sweetheart, you need to take it.”
My heart thunders beneath my ribs, in my throat, and I reach up to cup his jaw, my thumb tracing the line of his cheekbone.
I’ve spent so long keeping away from this man that it’s taken over a month of me feeling like I’m the prey who finally surrendered to realize that maybe he’s not the hunter at all.
He’s just a man who sees a wreckage and wants to save it, who convinced himself that if he could find the right gears and fix the pattern, the story would have a better ending. That maybe broken things don’t need to be left on the side of the road.
He’s an optimist.
I’m a pessimist.
But somehow we work.
I tip up on my toes and kiss him, slow and hungry.
He opens to it, mouth parting, tongue and teeth clashing in a way that makes my chest shiver.
My hands move from his hair to his chest and I push him flush against the workbench, feeling the length of him, solid and real.
The want inside me is a twisting, multiplying need.
Dominic makes a raw, fucked noise in the back of his throat and lifts me so I’m half-seated on the edge of the workbench.
His hands land on my thighs and squeeze, greedy and grateful, like I’m what he’s been waiting on all morning.
I wrap my legs around his waist, locking him against me, and let myself want—without protocol or project management, just desire unfiltered.
His mouth is on mine again, rougher this time, his tongue hot and insistent.
I can taste coffee on his breath, smell the oil on his skin, and underneath is something purely Dominic: ambition distilled to its human element.
My hands are back in his hair, pulling, and I think I want to break him open and climb inside.
The next kiss is all teeth, and when he grins into it, I bite his lower lip—hard enough to make him pause, not hard enough to make him let go. He licks the spot, dark eyes fixed on mine, and the look he gives me is so hungry and so proud I want to see how far I can push it.
“You have a thing for fucking me in places with bad acoustics,” I murmur.
He slides his hands up, skimming my borrowed T-shirt, grease-covered palms over my ribs, rough thumbs grazing the sides of my breasts. “You like the echo,” he says, as if it’s a fact of physics.
“I like your hands on me,” I admit, before I can think the better of it.
He freezes for a moment—just a flicker, like I surprised him—but then his smile returns, and he runs his tongue over his bitten lip, considering me like a motor he’s about to take apart and rebuild from the pistons up. “You’re getting dangerous, Pemberton.”
I hook my ankles behind his back, my own smile a dare. “So are you.”
He looks at me, head tilted, like he’s memorizing not just my face but the exact pattern of breath and adrenaline that makes up this moment. His hands slip under the hem of the T-shirt, fingers finding their way up my thighs, over my hips, and then settling, proprietary, on my ass.
He squeezes, and I yelp. The noise reverberates in the concrete cavern and turns a dial in him I can’t unsee.
“You know the first time I saw you?” he says, voice thick.
“You were in a pencil skirt, four-inch heels, you’d gone from cursing out Bennett’s filing system to absolutely terrorizing a room of men twice your age.
Everyone thought it was your height, but it was your power.
Pure, collision-grade authority. I wanted it. All of it.”
I want it, too. Every piece. Every gear and screw and bottled-up mess that makes up this man is suddenly the only thing that matters, and for once, I don’t want to be in control. I just want to see what happens when control is on fire and I simply reach for what I want.
Looping my fingers into his belt, I finger the buckle, and pop it, fast and deliberate. I don’t hesitate, not even for a second, because I want to see if this man will actually let me be the one to break something open for once.
The zipper gives way under my knuckles. I push at his waistband and he laughs into my mouth, all grit and amusement, as his hips shift to help me. I get my hand inside and wrap it around his heat, loving the way his eyes glaze as I fist the base and squeeze.