51. “I can do it better.”
“I CAN DO IT BETTER.”
HALE
The problem with inviting a very independent, very stubborn woman to move into your family home and telling her to make it hers is that she will take you literally.
The making-it-hers part was not the problem. I liked finding paint chips fanned across the kitchen table and hearing her talk about opening walls and widening windows. I liked that she wanted roots here.
I wanted her here.
The problem was that Yasmine did not only want to decide what changed. She wanted to change it herself.
Case in point—four o’clock on a random Thursday, she was standing on the top rung of a ladder she had been specifically told not to stand on, working crown molding off the ceiling of the study.
The room had stopped being mine somewhere around March, and the shelves were taped over in plastic, textbooks and everything under them sealed in for the duration.
She hadn’t heard me come in. Dust streaked one cheek, her overalls were cuffed above bare ankles, and one strap had worked loose enough to show the yellow tank underneath.
Pretty. Stubborn as hell.
I got my phone out, snapped a picture, and slid it away.
“Get down.”
She glanced over her shoulder. “Hello to you, too.”
“Yasmine.”
“I’m almost done.”
The molding gave a warning crack.
I crossed the room and put a hand on the ladder.
“Give me the hammer.”
Her grip tightened on it. “No.”
I looked up at her. She looked down at me.
“Get off the ladder,” I repeated.
Her eyes narrowed, and I should have stopped there. Instead I reached up, got a hand around her waist, and lifted her down.
“I had it,” she said.
“You were beating trim with the face of a claw hammer. There’s a tool for that. Four of them, actually, and I own all four.”
“It was coming down.”
“So was half the ceiling. That plaster’s original. You can’t buy it.” I took the hammer from her hands.
She folded her arms. “I was figuring it out. Some people enjoy learning how to do things.”
“I can do it. Tell me how you want it and I’ll do it.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“Or we hire somebody. I know three men who do this for a living and two of them owe me.”
“That is even less the same thing.” She planted both hands on her hips. “You always do this.”
“Keep you from cracking your head open?”
“Take over.”
I set my palm flat against the ladder rail. “I stopped a bad idea before it got expensive.”
“Because you decided you could do it better.”
“I can do it better.”
“Again, not the point.”
“Then explain it before I guess wrong again.”
She waved a hand between us. “You decide how it gets done. You decide when to step in.”
“You were making it harder than it needed to be.”
“And there’s that.”
“What?”
She stepped back and studied me with one sweeping, unimpressed glance. “You’re smug about it.”
“I’m right about it. I’m not stopping you from learning. I’m stopping you from learning this particular lesson in the emergency room.”
Her mouth opened.
Closed.
Then she blurted, “I let you tie me up.”
I blinked. There are turns in a conversation a man can see coming. That was not one of them.
“You like being tied up,” I reminded her.
“Uh-huh.”
“You do.”
“And what do you get out of it?”
“I get to make you feel good.”
Her face went flat. “That’s such bullshit.”
“Didn’t say I didn’t enjoy it.”
“You like watching me lose control.”
I didn’t say anything to that, mostly because denying it would have insulted us both.
“You like calling the shots,” she continued.
“You’ve never complained.” I tipped my head at her. “So what are we really fighting about?”
Her eyes went past my shoulder to the leather couch shoved against the wall, a sheet thrown over it to keep off the paint and dust, and stayed there a second longer than they needed to.
When she looked back at me, she said, “What happens if you’re not the one in control?”
I looked at the couch, then at the black bandana hanging off the handle of her camera bag. She followed the line of my attention, and her chin came up.
A smarter man would have let it lie. There was a version of this where I laughed and went back to the repairs.
“All right,” I said.
“All right?”
I crossed the room and worked the knot loose off the bag handle. Whatever I’d expected to happen when I walked into this room, it wasn’t my dick taking an interest in being challenged.
“You want a turn. Take it.”
She eyed me. “Just like that?”
“You asked.” I pulled my shirt over my head, tossed it toward the desk, then stripped the sheet off the couch and sat down.
“There’s a cord in the desk drawer,” she said.
“No.”
“No?”
“No rope.” I tied the bandana over my eyes and got the knot where I wanted it. “You don’t need it. I’ll sit where you put me and I won’t move.”
“You say that now.”
“Try me.” I stretched my arms along the back of the couch, hands loose against the leather.
It was quiet behind the blindfold. I couldn’t see what she was doing with her face, which I regretted immediately. Hadn’t realized how much I relied on that.
“Go on,” I said.
YASMINE
Well.
Shit.
That had not gone the way I thought it would.
But in my defense, I had been losing.
I had needed evidence. Something undeniable. Proof that Hale did not take over just because he was helpful or efficient or worried about me falling off a ladder, but because beneath all that supposed zen, the man was a bit of a control freak.
So I had blurted out, I let you tie me up.
I had not meant, Please take off your shirt and let me reverse the situation immediately.
I had meant, There. Exhibit A, you controlling, smug bastard.
We were supposed to circle each other for another ten minutes until one of us got hungry or distracted or remembered there was crown molding to remove.
Instead, he had looked at the couch, then he had taken off his shirt. Now he sat in the middle of the couch, blindfolded, arms stretched along the back, both hands curled over the worn leather.
Waiting for me to do something.
That was the problem with goading a very competitive man. Sometimes he called your bluff.
And sometimes that man sat three feet away with his shirt off, his jeans low on his hips, and enough confidence to make it clear he did not believe for one second that you knew what to do with him.
I stood near the desk and tried not to look like a woman who had accidentally escalated an argument about crown molding into this.
Sunlight came through the unfinished window and fell across his chest. He looked good obeying me. Long locs spilling around his shoulders, legs spread. Big and strong and unbearably sexy.
I had a feeling he knew it too.
Outside, cicadas screamed in the heat.
Inside, behind the blindfold, Hale angled his head toward the sound of my breathing. “You still there?” he asked.
“No.”
His mouth curved. “Well, somebody’s over there breathing hard.”
I held my breath.
His smile widened.
Asshole. Absolute cocky man.
He believed he could sit there, half dressed, while I circled him and did whatever occurred to me, and remain completely unfazed. That confidence needed testing.
I pushed the overalls down and stepped out of them. One metal buckle struck the floor.
His head turned toward it, and his fingers pressed flat against the leather.
“Hands stay where they are,” I said.
“I know.”
“No reaching.”
“You worried?”
“Making sure you remember the rules.”
“I remember.”
I crossed the floor slowly, his attention following every shift of the boards beneath my feet. When I reached the couch, I ran one finger along the leather behind his neck without touching him. His shoulders tightened anyway, as if I had.
I moved away.
His fingers sank deeper into the couch.
I kissed the corner of his jaw, then disappeared. His head followed me a fraction too late.
I smiled. Maybe I did know what to do with him.
The blindfold changed things.
Without his eyes on me, without that steady look that always made me feel as if he knew what I wanted before I did, I could study him without being studied back.
The hard line of his jaw.
The pulse moving in his throat.
The controlled rise and fall of his chest.
The way his stomach drew in when I dragged one fingernail down the center of it.
I stopped above the waistline of his jeans. He waited. I lifted my hand away, and he let out a slow breath through his nose.
I rested my palm flat over his stomach, and he jumped beneath my hand. I left it there, feeling the heat of him, the effort in every measured breath as he forced himself not to lean into the touch.
Then I took it away.
His grip tightened until the leather complained. That was better than any sound he made with his mouth.
“Mean,” he said.
“You volunteered.”
“Not complaining.”
I climbed onto his lap, and the muscles in his thighs went rigid beneath me. His hands stayed spread along the back of the couch, but his head came up immediately, face turning toward mine like the blindfold was only a technicality.
“Enjoying yourself?” he murmured.
“Very much,” I whispered, then kissed him.
He let me. Let me set the pressure, the angle, the pace. Let me feel the restraint in him like heat under skin.
He kissed me back the way he did everything, thoroughly and with no evidence of hurry. There was not a single crack in that control.
So I made one.
I pulled away.
He followed without thinking, caught himself halfway, and stopped.
His breath broke.
There. A start.
“Hmmm.”
“Don’t gloat.”
I dragged my lips along his jaw instead, then down the side of his throat, and felt the vibration of the sound he swallowed.
My fingers found the button of his jeans. It popped open under my thumb. The zipper came down one tooth at a time.
“Yasmine.”
“Yes?”
“This your whole strategy?”
I wrapped my hand around his dick. His hips moved, just a little, but enough to make me smile. “Working so far.”
I stroked him once, slow enough to feel him lock up beneath my other hand, before lowering myself down between his knees.
His fingers dug in, and he went very still as he guessed what was coming.
I let him wait just long enough to be cruel. Then I sucked him into my mouth.