Chapter 7
Seven
Wren
The lock clicks. The sign’s still turned to CLOSED from the cat circus. It’s just us now, the hum of the cases, the smell of sugar, and Rhett Maddox in the middle of my shop looking at me like that panel was never once the point.
“So,” I say. “The panel.”
“The panel.” He doesn’t go to it. He comes to me instead. Slow. “It’s fine. Locked it an hour ago.”
“You said—”
“I lied.” He stops close. Too close. The buzz under my skin climbs to a roar. “I’ve been lying about that panel since two o’clock. Figured you knew.”
“I knew.”
“Yeah.” His eyes drop to my mouth and stay there. “You knew.”
I should step back. There’s a whole speech I could give about quiet lives and fresh starts and not doing this with a man who flirts with the entire county. I’ve got it ready. I’ve had it ready for a week.
I grab a fistful of his shirt and pull him down instead.
He makes a low sound against my mouth, surprised and pleased, and then he’s kissing me like he’s been thinking about it just as long as I’ve been pretending I haven’t.
His hand comes up to the back of my neck, warm and sure.
No hesitation in him at all. Rhett Maddox has clearly never in his life stood around wondering if he’s allowed.
Neither am I, apparently. My hands are already under his shirt, up the hot skin of his back, and he tastes like the cookie he stole, and I want to bite him for it.
“Trouble,” he breathes, pulling back an inch. His pupils are blown wide. “Tell me to stop, and I’ll stop. Say the word, and I’m out that door, no hard feelings, I’ll go find a cold shower and my dignity.”
“Don’t you dare stop.”
“Thank fuck.” He grins, filthy and delighted. Then his mouth’s on my throat, and I forget I ever had a plan.
His scent is everywhere now, smoke and pepper thick in the back of my throat, and that thread of sweetness under it I can never catch.
My whole body lights up for it. This is the thing I’ve been calling heartburn all week, and it turns out heartburn is my new-omega instincts screaming alpha, yes, this one, and I’ve been a damn fool to argue.
He walks me backward until my spine hits the counter. His counter. The one he sat on all afternoon, swinging his boots, driving me out of my mind on purpose.
“Up,” he says against my jaw.
He lifts me before I’ve finished deciding to let him, big hands under my thighs, and sets me on the counter like I weigh nothing.
The tile’s cold through my jeans. He’s hot everywhere else, stepping into the space between my knees, close, closer, and I get my hands in his hair and drag his mouth back to mine.
We’re not careful about it. That’s the thing I’ll remember.
There’s no slow build, no shy first-time fumbling, just two people who’ve been winding each other tighter for a week finally letting the spring go.
He gets my shirt up and off. I get his over his head.
He’s all muscle and heat, a tattoo I don’t have time to read.
His mouth finds my breast through my bra, and I make a noise I’ve never made in my life.
“There she is,” he murmurs, pleased, thumbing my nipple through the lace. “All that scowling. I knew you’d sound like that.”
“Shut up, Rhett.”
“Make me.”
I do. I pull his mouth back to mine and kiss him quiet. He laughs into it. His hand slides down between us and works the button of my jeans.
“Off,” I tell him. “These need to be off.”
“Bossy.” But he’s already dragging them down my legs, my underwear with them, and then his hand’s between my thighs and any smart thing I was about to say dies right there.
His fingers find me slick and ready and he groans like I’ve done him a personal favor. “Look at you. All this for me? And here I thought you didn’t like me.”
“I don’t.” I rock into his hand, shameless. “I really don’t.”
“Liar.” He circles my clit, slow, watching my face the whole time, learning exactly what makes my breath catch. He finds it fast. He’s good at this. Of course he’s good at this. He slides one finger into me, then two, and my head drops back, and I stop caring about anything but his hand.
He curls them, finds a spot that makes me buck, and grins against my throat like he’s won a bet. “There,” he says. “Right there. I’m going to remember that one.” He does it again, and again, until I’m rocking on his hand and past caring who can hear.
He works me right up to the edge and holds me there, grinning.
“Rhett, I swear to God, if you don’t—”
“Say please,” he says.
“Absolutely not.”
“Say it, trouble, and I’ll give you everything you want.”
“You first.”
He laughs, low and wrecked. “Please,” he says, and it comes out rougher than his jokes. The swagger slips for half a second before he covers it back up. “Please let me. I’ve wanted you since the second you told me you were trying not to meet anyone.”
That does it. That undoes me more than his hand. I reach for his belt.
He gets his jeans open, and then he pauses, his forehead against mine, both of us breathing hard. “You’re sure.”
“Rhett. If you stop now, I will end you.”
“Just checking.” He lines himself up, blunt and thick against me, and pushes in slow. The stretch of it steals the air right out of my lungs. He’s big. He goes carefully, watching my face, until he’s all the way seated and we’re both still for a second, wrecked, forehead to forehead.
“Okay?” he asks. Quiet under the joke now.
“Move,” I tell him. “Please move.”
He moves.
There’s nothing careful about it after that.
He’s got one hand braced on the counter, the other under my thigh, hitching me up so he can drive deeper.
I hold on, take it, give it right back. He talks the whole time, filthy and sweet by turns.
“Fuck, you feel good. Better than I dreamed it, and trust me, trouble, I dreamed it plenty.” A drive that knocks the breath out of me.
“Next time I’m taking you apart slow. Actual bed.
Whole night. No mercy.” Another. “I’m going to think about this counter every shift for the rest of my goddamn life.
” I stop being able to answer. I just make sounds and dig my nails in wherever I can hold on and chase the thing building low in me.
He feels it coming before I do. He always seems to be half a step ahead.
He shifts the angle, gets a hand between us and his thumb on my clit, and the build goes from a climb to a freefall.
He takes in every second of it, eyes gone black and his breath shot to pieces, holding himself back for me, because even wrecked, Rhett has to be the one running the show.
“That’s it,” he says, ragged. “Come on. Let me feel it. Come on my cock, trouble, I’ve got you.”
I do. It breaks over me hard. I clench around him and shake apart on my own counter with his name in my mouth. He groans, drives in deeper, holds himself there.
And then I feel it start.
At the base of him, where we’re joined, he swells. Thick. It catches. It stretches me wider and locks us together, so I can’t move off him even if I wanted to, which I violently do not.
I gasp. My whole body clamps down on it and lights up all over again from a place I didn’t know I had.
“Rhett—”
“I know. I know. Easy.” His voice is shaking. His hands come up to hold my face, gentle now, so gentle it doesn’t match the rest of him. “First knot?”
“I’ve never—” I can’t finish. Another wave rolls through me just from the pressure of it. “Nobody’s ever—”
“Yeah.” He kisses me, slow, riding it out with me while the knot pulses and I come again, quieter, endless. “It’s only a small one. Outside a heat, that’s all we can do. Wait till you feel the real thing.”
I can’t imagine the real thing. This is already more than I have room for.
Every pulse of the knot wrings another small aftershock out of me, and I’ve stopped being embarrassed about the sounds I’m making.
There’s nowhere to go. I’m pinned to him by my own body, stretched around a part of him that shouldn’t fit and somehow does.
The worst of it, the part I’ll turn over later, is that I don’t want to go anywhere.
I want to stay right here, tied to a man I don’t even like, and that is a far bigger problem than the knot.
He holds me through it, tied to me, forehead on mine, both of us breathing like we ran here. For one long minute, neither of us says anything clever at all.
That’s the part that scares me. Not the knot. The quiet.
Because his face, this close, the joke gone off it, his hands cradling mine like I’m worth the care, is not a man having a bit of fun with the new baker.
It’s a man hit by the exact thing that just hit me, and just as thrown by it.
He sees me see it. And then, in real time, he decides to put the grin back on and pretend I didn’t.
“So,” he says, when the knot finally eases, and he can pull back. “Best panel inspection you’ve ever had, or the best one?”
And just like that, he’s back to jokes. Back to easy.
I let him have it, because it’s easier than the alternative, and because I’ve got my own wall to rebuild before he’s even got his jeans done up.
“Get out of my shop, Rhett,” I say, and I’m smiling when I say it, and I hate that too.
“Yes, ma’am.” He drops one last kiss on my shoulder, light, almost sweet, and then he’s gathering his shirt and heading for the door like a man who does this every day of the week.
Maybe he does. That’s the thing I decide to believe, sitting naked on my own counter with my heart tripping over itself like an idiot. He does this every day. It meant nothing. That’s the story, and I’m going to hold onto it with both hands.
The bell over the door goes as he leaves.
The shop smells like him now. Smoke and pepper and that sweet thing I still can’t name.
Six and a half weeks, I think, and don’t even finish it.