“Try not to sound so surprised. Mum taught me. She said no son of hers was living on takeaway.”
I rested a hip against the counter, watching him move around his kitchen with the same confident ease he did everything else. “Speaking of your mum, how’s she liking the movies?”
“That romantic comedy about the bookshop made her laugh so hard she had tears streaming down her face.”
The spreadsheet has extensive notes on the comedic timing of that one.”
He moved into me, his hands bracketing me on the counter, murmuring, “You and your spreadsheets.”
My heart forgot what it was doing for a second when he leaned in. God, he smelled good. Like soap and leather and something woodsy I couldn’t place. Cedar maybe? Sandalwood? Whatever, it was one of those pheromone-laced forest scents they put in cologne designed to make women fall at men’s feet. I was two seconds away from sniffing him like a woman with no shame when his voice rumbled low, pulling me from my thoughts.
“You’re so fuckin’ beautiful.”
Jesus, who even was this man and what emotional malware was he installing in me? I had to work hard to stop myself from just throwing myself at him and begging him to do all kinds of filthy things to me.
His gaze dropped to my mouth, and everything inside me surged, hot and tight. My thighs squeezed together on instinct. My lungs didn’t seem to know what to do with air anymore. It was all sensation now. Heat, want, and the realisation that my body had fully entered “yes, this is how we die happy” mode.
He kissed me, his hands cradling my face like I was something precious. This wasn’t the Jake who devoured, who claimed with fire and need. This was him kissing me like he had all the time in the world. His mouth moved against mine with unhurried certainty, discovering my responses, drugging me with every gentle sweep of his tongue.
I wound my fingers in his shirt, drawing him closer. The sound he made when I nipped his bottom lip pulsed through me so hard that I had to grab onto him to steady myself.
“Fuck,” he rasped, pulling his mouth from mine just long enough to say that. Then everything shifted, and I had my dominant biker back.
He stepped in closer, pinning me with his weight, his hands shifting from gentle to demanding as they gripped my jaw, angling my face so he could kiss me deeper and filthier.
This wasn’t soft anymore. It was tongue, teeth, and the kind of inferno that felt like he’d set me alight from the inside out. Jake kissed me like restraint wasn’t just off the table, it had never been invited.
I gasped against him, breath catching, but he didn’t stop. Just swallowed the sound like it belonged to him. The room tilted. Or maybe I did. All I knew was his body crushed against mine, his mouth eliciting moans from somewhere I didn’t know I kept them, and his hands, rough and certain, holding me like letting me go wasn’t an option.
And then I made one of those sounds that drives him wild. This one was somewhere between a whimper and a full-blown porno soundtrack. Mortifying. My skin prickled with a split-second feeling of who-the-fuck-even-am-I humiliation, but my body steamrolled it, too far gone to care, too busy chasing more.
Jake, on the other hand, fully processed it. With his dick, if his guttural groan was anything to go by, let alone the way his hand on my waist flexed like he was physically holding himself back. His hips jerked forward, the heat of him unmistakable, and for a second, I thought he was going to say fuck dinner and take me right there.
But then he pulled back. Just enough to drag in a ragged breath. “You have no idea how bad I wanted to ruin this lip gloss the second I saw you.” He ran a finger along my bottom lip. “Been losing my damn mind all day thinking about this mouth.”
“Better than thinking about code,” I spouted, unable to stop the words falling out of my mouth. “Johnson’s latest disaster nearly made me quit today.”
And that is why my mouth needs a kill switch. Going off on random work tangents while a biker is kissing you like that and saying things about wanting to ruin my lip gloss? Not exactly the way to a man’s heart. Who brings up workplace drama when a guy says he’s been thinking about your lips all day? Me. I do. Apparently, my brain thinks foreplay is an impromptu TED Talk on corporate trauma.
But Jake reminded me he’s not like any guy I’ve ever dated when his brows pulled together and he asked, “That bad?”
For a second, I just stared at him. Because what man pauses mid–soul-melting kiss to actually care about your shitty workday? The guys I’ve dated would have taken my turned-on, breathless state as an open invitation to get off, not check if I was okay.
“Worse,” I said, deciding not to brush his question off with flippancy. “He pushed a hotfix straight to production without testing it. No code review, no QA, just vibes. The ‘fix’ was supposed to stop a minor bug with our login form, but instead, he broke our entire authentication system. I spent all day manually patching access for pissed-off clients who couldn’t log in while trying not to fantasise about manually deleting him from existence.”
He laughed. “Want me to have that chat with him?”
“Don’t tempt me. What about you? Good day?”
“Yeah, actually. Been working on this classic bike in the workshop. Finally got her purring today.”
“When you say workshop, do you mean you clock in somewhere, or is that code for ‘we just hang around fixing things while looking sexy and intimidating’?”
His mouth tugged into a smile. “The club bought a mechanic business a few months back. We’ve been building it up since.”
“Right.” I blinked. For a man who usually threw up a firewall any time the topic of his club came up, defaulting to the most unhelpful status update ever—“club business”—this was practically a confessional. “So that’s what you do for work?”
“Yeah. Among other things. Prez is talking about putting me in charge of the day-to-day.”
