“Just hold still.”
“I’m holding still! How fucking long does it take to screw in a screw?”
“Did you just swear? Did I just make you swear?” There was a smile in his voice like he’d just checked off an item on his personal bucket list, and that made my stomach flip… which was seriously annoying.
Since when did he notice that I didn’t swear? Since when did he notice any darn thing about me?
“Hurry up.”
“Two seconds. I’m screwing as fast as I can.” His voice was a rumble against my back.
Oh, good grief. “Move your arm. I did not sign up to play kitchen Twister with you, Mr. Richards.”
He snorted. “Kitchen Twister. You’re funny.” He backed away just a tiny bit, and I whirled to face him.
“Since when do you talk to me?” I demanded.
“What?”
“Three years, Mr. Richards. Three years, and the only time you notice me is when I piss you off! Now, you’re pushing me against the cabinet and… and… and… taking your own sweet time screwing.” My eyes widened. Had I actually just said that? The look on Ryder’s face suggested I had. “I mean… screwing as in drilling.” Oh, dang it. “I mean, drilling as in using your power tool. I mean…” I pushed my lips together, forcing myself to shut up, and whimpered just slightly. “You know what? I changed my mind.” I pushed at his chest, and he took a half step back. “We can do this another day.” I grabbed my iPad. “Tomorrow. Maybe the next day. We have plenty of time.” I grabbed my keys. “We should go.”
Ryder didn’t move. “I notice you,” he said in the deepest, gruffest voice I’d ever heard him use.
“What?” I paused without turning around.
“I notice you, Colin. I notice you plenty.”
I closed my eyes and took a slow breath. That was not at all what I’d expected.
2
Ryder
Colin was wrong. I’d noticed him plenty in the last three years. The buttoned-up way he came off when he found himself in a new situation. The tiny little dip of his eyebrow when one of the workers on a job screwed up. The way his laugh went silent when something was really funny. The creamy brown skin that looked like it had never seen a moment of harsh weather or heartbreak.
He was beautiful and mesmerizing, smart but so very stubborn. And I couldn’t decide if I wanted to kill him or fuck him. Most days it was the former, but today… today I wanted to bend him over the custom kitchen island and shut him up once and for all.
He turned around, his hand fluttering to his collar like a little old lady who’d just heard shocking news. “Well, I… I don’t know what you mean by that. But it doesn’t matter. I’m going to go.” He turned around in a circle until he faced me again. With a lifted finger, he continued. “And another thing. Stop looking at me like you want to… to… do that to me.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “Do what? Flick you in the center of the forehead? Mess up your perfect fucking hair? Throw you over the back of my bike and dump your body in the woods?”
Toss your sexy ass across a pair of sawhorses and eat you out till you scream?
I blinked and shook my head. Unhelpful thoughts were unhelpful.
Colin shook his head. “That’s not what I mean, and you know it. You’re looking at me like I’m naked, like you want to…” He swallowed. “Have sexual congress with my person.”
I opened my mouth to tell him I did, in fact, want to have sexual congress with his person, but before I could say it, he kept going.
“And that’s clearly not, um, happening or like… really what you want. Obviously.” He flapped his hand in the air, gesturing to my general self. “I mean, obviously. So it makes me feel like you’re deliberately antagonizing me which is not acceptable.”
Colin cleared his throat and looked up at me expectantly. He wasn’t short by any means, but I was a big guy, muscled from my job in construction and a particularly busy roofing season, and naturally tall after being born to two tall parents.
“How do you know what I want?” I asked, somewhat peeved at his assumptions.
He crossed his arms, revealing a velvety elbow patch stitched into his professor jacket. Suddenly, an image of another kind of patch on a different kind of jacket came to the front of my mind without my consent. My motorcycle club’s patch was a bulldog in motorcycle goggles and an old-school leather helmet. The black leather of my cut would look amazing against Colin’s brown skin.
He spluttered. “Because… because… because.”
He jutted his chin out to punctuate his nonsensical sentence. I wanted to grab it with my hand and hold it firm while I kissed the fuck out of him.
“That!” he squawked. “That look, that. You’re such an asshole! How can you look at me like that when you—mpfh!”
I shut him up with a kiss. A hard one that left him no room for a final breath or another sputtered word.
The arguing wasn’t ever going to get us anywhere. If I tried explaining to him that I was, in fact, gay and I was, in fact, attracted to his stubborn ass, he would never believe me. So I kissed him.
And kissed him.
“Mmmm.” He groaned into my mouth and melted against me. His long fingers clutched the front of my dusty denim shirt and held me close without realizing what he was doing.
Somehow, Colin’s face was still smooth even though it was late in the day. I cupped his jaw and tilted his face until he was right where I wanted him. He smelled like expensive cologne and latex paint, a combination so familiar to me after these past few years that it made me hunger for him with one simple whiff. I could walk onto a job where he’d been and know it immediately.
I was shocked to discover the hard ball of a tongue ring inside this prim, know-it-all’s mouth.
“Fucking full of surprises,” I muttered into his mouth, seeking the little piercing out with my tongue again.
The longer I kissed him, the more I felt the warm puffs of breath against my face, the more I hungered for him. I wondered how I’d lasted this long without him. How the hell did I not shove him up against the nearest sheet of drywall on that first job together and get a deep taste of him?
He pulled back enough to murmur, “What? What? I don’t understand. You’re… you… you don’t…” Before leaning back in as if he needed another quick nibble before finishing his thought.
I ran my hands down his back to clasp the tight cheeks of his ass under his jacket. Colin Kearns had the best ass in Tennessee, and I’d wanted to grab it about a thousand times. Late one night on the Purvis job I’d caught him in blue jeans and a wash-worn T-shirt, and I’d stared so long and hard at his ass, I’d been shocked not to get a subpoena from the perv police.
“Want you,” I admitted with a growl. “Want to fuck you. Right here. Right now.”
“But…” He couldn’t take his mouth off mine long enough to really argue with me. Why hadn’t I tried this tactic sooner?
I was hard as hell and aching to feel his hot mouth wrapped around me. All I could think about was feeling that tongue ring against the head of my dick. “How can I get you to suck me off?”