CHAPTER FOUR
Keely
A day off in my world didn’t mean spa days and sleeping in. It meant three loads of laundry, catching up on my pharmacology chapters, and trying to ignore the fact that my bank account was screaming for mercy.
Griffin had done what he’d said he would do.
He’d fixed my car, putting in a new battery and dropping off the keys during the lunch crowd so I don’t confront him.
He knew I’d make a fuss and insist on paying him.
Which I would when I saw him again. I didn’t want to admit how his taking care of me made me feel.
I’d caught myself in the bathroom mirror this morning and stood there longer than I should have, wondering if he really did find me attractive.
Not that I ever viewed myself as attractive to the opposite sex.
I was too focused on what I deemed not pretty by society standards.
I was too used to hiding my curves, trying to down play them.
Oversized on top. Dark on the bottom. Nothing that asked to be looked at.
And frankly, I’d never had a man make me feel beautiful.
Until him.
I felt beautiful when he looked at me.
It was now midmorning and I was hunched over the kitchen table, nursing a lukewarm coffee and trying to memorize drug interactions, when a low rumble sounded outside.
It was a heavy-duty engine idling at the curb.
Standing up, I pulled my oversized sweatshirt down over my shorts and peeked through the blinds.
Griffin’s black truck was parked out front.
By the time I opened the front door, he was at the tailgate, hauling out a stack of pressure-treated lumber and a heavy-duty toolbox. He was wearing a t-shirt that was far too tight across his shoulders, and a pair of work boots that looked like they’d actually seen some dirt.
I stood in the doorway and watched. The way his back moved under that t-shirt when he lifted the lumber.
The flex of his forearms when he gripped the tailgate.
There was something deeply unfair about a man that large moving that efficiently, like his body knew exactly what it was built for and had never wasted a single motion being uncertain about it.
I felt the pull of him low in my belly, that same insistent heat that had been living there since the first night he’d sat in my section. I pressed my palm flat against my stomach
I wanted to know what it felt like to have those hands grip my hips the way they gripped that lumber—firm and certain and completely without hesitation.
I wanted to know what his mouth felt like.
I wanted things I had no business wanting standing on my front porch with my pharmacology notes still open on the kitchen table.
“What are you doing, Griffin?” I called out, leaning against the doorframe.
He didn’t even look up. He picked up the wood and started walking toward the porch. “Fixing that step before someone goes through it.”
“I didn’t ask you to do that.”
“No. you didn’t.” He dropped the wood with a heavy thud near the bottom of the stairs. He finally looked at me, his gaze sweeping over my messy hair and my bare legs before snapping back to my face. His eyes were dark, tracking the way the sweatshirt hung off my shoulder.
I walked down the steps, stopping two from the bottom so I was still above him. “Griffin, you can’t just show up and do this. This lumber costs money.”
“I didn’t ask for payment.” He reached for a crowbar in his belt.
“You fixed my car and now you’re fixing my house? Why?”
He looked at me with an intensity that pinned me to the spot. “Because it needs doing,” he said, his tone flat, just like it had been yesterday morning.
“Why are you really here, Griffin?” I challenged, stepping down one more step and putting myself right in his personal space.
I needed to know. I needed to understand what a man like him—older, serious, carrying something heavy I couldn’t name—wanted with a twenty-three-year-old waitress who smelled like coffee and grease and had two kids’ worth of permission slips on her refrigerator.
Men his age wanted women who had their lives sorted.
I was still building mine from the ground up.
“Go inside, Keely.” His grip on the crowbar tightened until his knuckles went white. He wasn’t looking at the porch anymore. He was looking at my mouth.
I should have listened, but I didn’t. I took the last step down, closing the distance until I had to tip my chin up to look at him.
This close I could see the tension working in his jaw.
Could feel the heat coming off him. He was very large and very still and looking at me in a way a man had never looked at me before.
And suddenly, I was tired of being the one who was always overlooked, who handled everything for everyone else and never reached out for what I wanted.
“Make me,” I challenged.
The second it left my mouth I knew I’d miscalculated. I saw it in the way his jaw ticked and his nostrils flared.
I had zero business pushing at a man like Griffin.
And yet, I didn’t move.
He dropped the crowbar and it hit the dirt with a dull clang.
I let out a gasp as he moved, my hands instinctively flying to his shoulders as he picked me up.
He didn’t hesitate. His massive, calloused hands clamped mercilessly onto my wide hips, his long fingers biting into my soft flesh as he carried me back up the steps and thrust me against the wall of the house.
He held me there. His face was inches from mine, his jaw tight, his chest heaving like something was working its way up through him that he’d been holding down for weeks.
“You want to know why?” he growled, his face inches from mine.
“The first time I saw you in that diner, you had me harder than a rock in eight seconds flat. I’ve spent every night since then picturing you in my bed, screaming my name while I fuck you, hard and fast until I empty myself inside you. Is that what you want to hear?”
He leaned in closer, so close his face blurred and I had to close my eyes.
“I’ve thought about your pussy every night for two weeks,” he whispered against my ear. “How it would feel wrapped around my cock. Hot and wet, squeezing me.”
The air left my lungs. There was a raw honesty in his voice.
And hot honesty. Did he mean that? Did he want me that bad?
My mind was racing as fast as my pulse. For years, I’d been the one helping my mother hold it all together, the one everyone depended on.
With just a few words he made me realize that what I wanted was to be his.
I opened my eyes, looking directly at him. “Yes, please.”
Yes to all of it. Yes to the fact that a man years older than me with scars on his face and ghosts in his eyes had been losing sleep over me. Yes to the fact that he’d looked at my body—this body I’d spent years being quietly ashamed of—and wanted it. Wanted me.
“You have no idea what you’re asking for.” His hand came up to cup my jaw. His palm was calloused and hot, his thumb dragging across my lower lip.
“Maybe I do,” I countered.
As if those were the words he’d been waiting to hear, he crashed his mouth down onto mine, and the world simply vanished. It wasn’t a tentative kiss. It was a claim. It was possessive and desperate, a collision of two people who had spent too long pretending they didn’t want this.
His hands moved from my waist to my hips, gripping me with a strength that made me melt. He tasted like dark roast coffee and the sweltering heat of a summer night, and I couldn’t get enough.
He broke the kiss for a split second, only to bury his face in the crook of my neck. I felt his teeth scraping against my soft flesh as if he were marking me.
Mark me, I thought, a desperate ache settling low in my belly. Make sure no one else even thinks about looking at me. Own me.
I arched my back, pressing myself against him, feeling every hard line of his body. My sweatshirt had ridden up, and his large, calloused palms were against my bare skin, sending ripples of awareness through every nerve ending.
“You’re too young,” he muttered against my skin. “I should walk away. I should let you find some boy who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing. But I can’t. I want to show you everything. I look at you and I want to own every damn inch of you.”
“Then own me,” I said, my voice breaking. I pulled his face back to mine, my thumbs tracing the hard line of his jaw. “I don’t want a boy, Griffin. I want you.”
He let out a low, guttural sound and captured my mouth again, deeper this time.
His tongue tangled with mine as we learned how each other tasted.
Addictive was how he tasted. I arched my back, pressing my chest against his hard frame, desperate for more.
Then, he was sliding that hand under my bra, his huge, calloused palm swallowing the heavy weight of my breast. I groaned into his mouth, the rough scrape of his fingers against my bare skin sending a vicious, throbbing ache straight down between my thighs.
“Touch me, Griffin,” I begged, my hands tangling in his hair and pulling his head down.
He obeyed, pushing the bra and sweatshirt up and out of the way and I sobbed as his mouth closed over the center of my breast. His tongue licked my puckered flesh.
The feel was rough and so exciting. I felt another rush of wetness dampen my panties.
“Keely,” he groaned, his breath hot against my damp skin. “I’m going to lose it right here on your front porch.”
His mouth was everywhere—my neck, my shoulder, the sensitive skin above the collar of my sweatshirt.
Back to my breasts. He was devouring me with his mouth.
I was frantic, my hands pulling at his t-shirt, wanting to feel his skin against mine.
I needed to know if he was as hard and scarred as he looked.
“I’ve been going out of my mind,” he muttered, his hands sliding down to my hips, pulling me so tight against him that I could feel exactly how much he wanted me. “Thinking about how you’d feel under my hands. Thinking about these curves.”
He captured my mouth again, and this time there was no restraint. It was messy and raw, our movements desperate as we struggled to get closer. I nipped at his bottom lip, and he responded by lifting me even higher, his hands cupping my rear as he pressed himself into me.
Suddenly, his movements stalled. His mouth left mine, and he went still as stone.
His eyes had shifted to the open door beside me. I followed his gaze. The small table in the hallway held a framed photo of my brothers in their kindergarten graduation caps and one of me and my mother.
“Griffin?” I whispered.
He looked back at me, his face tight, his breathing jagged. He didn’t let me down, but the possessive fire in his eyes was warring with something else. Something I knew on a first name basis.
Responsibility.
“Not here,” he growled, his voice sounding like it was being dragged over miles of gravel.
“No one is home but me,” I argued, even though a part of me knew he was right. This house was for my family, for the duty I carried. It wasn’t for this—not for the raw, primal way he wanted to take me.
“Doesn’t matter.” He finally let my legs slide down his body until my bare feet hit the porch. He didn’t step back, keeping me pinned between the wall and his massive frame. “When I have you, I want it to be where I can hear every sound you make. I want you in my space. My bed.”
I leaned my head back against the wall, trying to catch my breath. The rejection stung, but the promise in his voice was so dark it made my pulse leap all over again.
“My shift ends at seven tomorrow,” I said, my voice finally steadying.
“I’ll be in the lot at six-forty-five,” he stated. He leaned in, his mouth hovering an inch from mine, his scent of leather and cold air filling my lungs. “And when we get to my cabin, you aren’t leaving until I’ve had every bit of you I’ve been dreaming about.”
He didn’t kiss me again. He just turned, walked back down the steps and picked up the crowbar and went to work.
I walked back into the house, closing the door softly behind me.
I stood there, listening to the rhythmic, almost violent sound of him tearing the rotting boards off the porch, knowing exactly what kind of wrecking ball was coming for me tomorrow night.