The Reluctant Romantics Box Set (The Fall, The Mind, The Heart)

“You don’t understand. It’s my most prized possession.”

Jack got on his knees as he saw the panic on my face. “Look at me, Rose. Do I look like I would ever want to hurt you?”

Breathless at his stare, I shook my head as I snatched the book out of his hands. He leaned in and kissed me gently as he pried it from my fingers. “You won’t even read it,” I challenged.

“I read Fifty Shades,” he admitted freely and without shame.

I burst out laughing as he grinned down at me. “Seriously, you think guys don’t get a little curious about all the fuss? Though reading Fifty Shades on a plane to Iceland got me some odd looks.”

I laughed again as he leaned in.

“Go build something,” I said as I kissed him one last time without a care in the world.

It was only when Jack walked away that I remembered my heart already had a home.

Jack

Two days…two fucking days.

She wasn’t sure.

And I was starving for more of her. Making love to that woman had shifted everything inside me. She’d needed something. I could feel it in her body, in her touch. I could clearly see it in her eyes. And I wanted to be that something. I’d wanted it so badly. Her silence was both overwhelming and deafening. It told me what she needed hadn’t been me or my touch. Fuck if I hadn’t known the second I sank inside her that I’d been right to wait because I knew how much I’d feel it. And I did.

And she felt it, too.

Sex changes some things, but unbelievable sex changes every-fucking-thing. Men who deny that are either liars or cowards.

Pounding away at particleboard, I looked to the entrance doors of the center every few minutes in vain. She was hiding, and I knew that, too. Even as I fumed, nothing in me told me what we did was a mistake. I was already on fire for her and having her body the way I did just gave it a gust of wind. And I’d gladly stay burning in a constant inferno for just another taste of her.

I saw her signals, all of them mixed and completely fucking unreadable. She was scared, but she had nothing to fear from me. I thought I had read her well enough to take her in the way she begged me to, but if I was wrong, that made me more of an asshole than I felt like.

I wasn’t wrong. No fucking way was I wrong.

This woman had me twisted.

I kept busy, knowing she’d have to face me eventually, and if this was a brush off, make the inevitable excuse. She believed what we’d done had been a mistake, and that cut deep, deeper than it should.

What the hell was I doing, anyway?

I pulled out my ear buds blaring Wu-Tang’s “C.R.E.A.M.”, another one of Rose’s rap suggestions, and threw my mallet down with a curse.

“Jack?”

I jerked my head up, hearing Rose’s voice, but saw Dallas instead. It hadn’t struck me how alike they sounded.

“Hi,” I said, unable to mask my temperament.

“You okay?”

“Fine,” I replied with a smile as I noticed Annabelle take a step toward me. “I’m dirty, baby girl.”

“So is she,” Dallas encouraged as she led her daughter my way. All my anger and worry dispersed as Annabelle took an unsure step without her mother’s help and landed in my waiting arms. I didn’t have much experience with kids until I met Dallas’s children, and yet somehow, it felt natural as Anna looked up at me with a one-toothed smile. She was the most beautiful little girl I’d ever seen. My chest squeezed as she began to talk to me brokenly.

“It’s unreal, she’s been through four sitters and came close to hating her grandparents, and with you, it’s just so natural,” Dallas said, amazed.

“Maybe she’s just opening up a bit?” I said, bouncing her in my lap.

“Sometimes a girl just needs the right guy to get her to do it.” I froze with Annabelle in my lap, knowing our conversation had moved into dangerous territory.