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bubbled out of her.
    “You’re not? Why?” He inched his hand higher, and she clamped her legs together and breathed deeply.
    “I don’t normally move so fast. I am a bossy, headstrong business woman. I will start and finish a project in record time. But with men, no—that’s not me. I barely date. Most men just aren’t worth the time.”
    Deacon took his hand from her and just listened. This is where the secrets of Rayka Sinclair’s heart lay. She was not used to intense emotion. Blind attraction was foreign to her. Going fast was unheard of. He could echo that sentiment but would not. She didn’t need to know that.
    “So, I’m worth the time?”
    “I have no choice. I had no choice last night. I had no choice when you ripped my panties off.”
    “We always have a choice,” he said. He would be a good guy, give her an out.
    “I don’t feel like I do.” She turned to him this time and tentatively ran her hand up his leg. Deacon felt his skin grow warm and hum with her touch. Jesus. Just that alone was enough to make him feel like he would lose it and come right there. Come in his pants like a teenager with a hair trigger. She gave him a hair trigger. She gave him a deep swelling feeling in his chest and the urge to smile and the feeling that things were okay. Even his deep sense of loss over losing Gideon, his last remaining family, seemed less painful. It was fucking crazy.
    “But you do. Always. You can say stop to me and I will. Just make sure you mean it.”
    Her hand went a little further. It was if she were almost frightened to touch him, and yet she couldn’t seem to help herself. “I don’t want you to stop.”
    “I haven’t started.”
    “I won’t want you to stop. I went to dinner with you after you yanked my panties off my body and demanded I go ass-bare to dinner in a dress that fits like a second skin.” Her hand stilled but she didn’t withdraw it.
    “Why’d you do it?”
    “Why do I do anything for you? You make me nuts.”
    “A whole twenty-four hours into the deal,” he said.
    “I know. Isn’t that bizarre? Only twenty-four hours and it feels like much more. What do you think that means?”
    Deacon shrugged and pulled into the driveway. There was that little fairytale door. When he crossed the threshold, would he become the big bad wolf? He thought he might. “I don’t know. But it’s time.”
    “Time for what?” Her eyes were huge in the shadowed interior, their blue somehow luminescent in the near dark. She looked terrified and excited. Deacon leaned in and bit her bottom lip hard enough to make her gasp but soft enough for her to feel it throughout her body. Just enough that the pain would up her pleasure.
    “Time for you to take a few orders. Time for me to get my hands on you. All of you.” Time for me to fuck you the way I want to fuck you and then maybe understand why you make me feel this way. Why I feel this way. But he didn’t say that part aloud.
    * * * *
    “I never thought a candy store owner would rip my underwear off. Or make me—”
    “Have phone sex? Call his name?” He laughed against the hollow of her throat. He could smell dark chocolate on her lips from the post-dinner biscotti. She’d had wine instead of coffee. Red wine. She had dipped the biscotti into the wine to soften it and then gently worked the hard cookie with her tongue and teeth. Deacon had thought he’d go mad before dessert ended.
    “Yes and yes.” She arched into his hands that seemed to have a mind of their own. He’d deliberately cupped her buttocks and hauled her forward against him and rubbed his cock against the cleft of her sex that he knew was wet and bare beneath the dress. Then of their own accord, his hands would migrate. Breasts, shoulders, the slender small of her back, the bell of her hips as they flared out in a way that made him nearly crazy. All woman. Not one ounce of her angular or boyish. She was exactly what he longed for. She didn’t just turn him on,