His fingers curled into her, finding the edge of her underwear. She bit her lip as he slipped a finger beneath the elastic.
He groaned and lowered his head to kiss her as his single finger explored between her thighs.
She started to pant, already close to losing it.
“Zoe, I’m sorry, I have to see you properly,” Liam said. “I’ve been thinking about you so much…”
“Whatever you want.”
She loved how out of control he sounded, how desperate. She wanted him to want her, to need her as much as she needed him.
She watched with hooded eyes as he dropped to his knees in front of her. He pushed up her skirt, reaching for the sides of her panties. She lifted her butt and he slid them down her hips and over her legs. Then he was spreading her legs wide again, his expression caught somewhere between pleasure and pain as he looked at her.
His eyes lifted to meet hers for one brief, intense moment before he leaned forward. She braced her weight back on her arms as she watched his dark head draw closer and closer.
The first touch of his tongue nearly sent her over the edge. Her whole body jerked and Liam’s hands clamped on her thighs. He pressed closer, his tongue hot and wet and fast against her as he kissed her with big, greedy openmouthed hunger.
Too quickly she felt her climax rising inside her. She fought it, wanting to savor every last second. Liam’s hands slid up the outside of her thighs to her hips to draw her closer again. She tried hard to hold out, but he was so avid, so intense…
Her back arched and her thighs trembled as she came, her hips pushing against the grip of his hands. He rode out her orgasm and kept kissing her, still hungry for more.
She gasped, quivering with arousal. It was too much. He was too much. She grabbed a handful of his hair and used it to drag his head up. His gaze was unfocused, his expression distracted as he looked up at her.
“Liam. Are you trying to kill me?” she panted.
He looked dazed for a second, then he smiled sheepishly.
“If you had any idea how beautiful you are, how good you taste to me…”
A lot of men had said a lot of things to her over the years. Liam’s words blew her mind.
“Come back up here,” she said, pulling on his hair to encourage him.
He came willingly. She kissed him deeply, getting turned-on all over again by his apparently unending need for her. She reached between their bodies to find the stud on his jeans, sliding it free and unzipping him without breaking their kiss. He was hard and silky, ready for her. She wanted him inside her, filling her.
She pushed his jeans down to free him and guided his erection between her thighs. The first nudge of his hardness against her made her inner muscles tighten. Then he was sliding into her, thick and long and exactly what she needed.
He stroked into her once, twice, then his fingers gripped her hips and he stilled.
“Zoe—”
She knew what he was worried about.
“I’m safe, I promise,” she assured him. She didn’t want to be separated from him by a piece of latex. She wanted all of him against all of her.
He hesitated briefly, then he began to move again. He kissed her as his cock stroked her, his whole body hard and focused. He filled her utterly, stretched her, and every thrust sent shivers of reaction through her.
Desire tightened low in her belly for the second time. Liam broke their kiss to press his face into her neck.
“You feel so good, Zoe. So good,” he murmured as he peppered kisses on her skin.
“So do you, Liam. You feel perfect.”
His hands tightened on her hips and he thrust deeper, harder into her. She met him thrust for thrust, tilting her hips to deepen his penetration. She felt the exact moment when he reached the end of his tether. His body slammed into hers in one final, deep stroke. He pressed his hips into hers, his mouth open on her neck. He exhaled in a rush that almost sounded like a sob. She forgot to breathe as the last shudders of his body tipped her over into her own climax. She tightened around him, milking the last of his orgasm, totally lost to everything but the feel of him in her, around her.
Her heartbeat was still pounding in her ears as Liam’s hand found the back of her head. He held her close for what felt like a long time, their bodies still locked together, his face pressed into her neck. She could feel how tense he was, could feel the bulge of his hard bicep against her back.
She wished she could see his face, wished she knew what he was thinking.
“Liam?” she finally said.
He lifted his head, then flexed his hips and withdrew from her. She felt the loss, the emptiness that he left behind. He didn’t look up as he took a step away from her, concentrating on pulling up his jeans and tucking himself away.
She dropped her own gaze to her knees. Her chest felt impossibly heavy. Just seconds ago they had been one. Now they were two very separate, distant beings. And she still had no idea what Liam felt about her—apart from the fact that, contrary to what she’d initially believed, he found her desirable.
Apparently, that wasn’t enough.
Be careful what you wish for, Zoe, she thought mockingly.
She’d wanted to see how far she could push him. That was what the skirt and the shoes and makeup had been all about. Well, now she knew. She could push him into sex. He wanted her.
But he didn’t want to want her. He resented it, resisted it.
She had a bad taste in her mouth. She recognized it: disappointment. She’d swallowed enough of it over the years to know.
She pushed herself off the table and tugged her skirt down. Her bra dangled from her elbows and she slid the straps back up her arms and hooked it closed. Liam waited until she’d pulled on her underwear before speaking.
“Zoe—”
“Don’t say it. I don’t want to hear it.”
“That shouldn’t have happened.”
She looked at him, anger searing through the regret and hurt of his withdrawal.
“Don’t apologize to me. Don’t stand there and tell me how you never meant to touch me, how much you wish you hadn’t. It was good. Don’t ruin it.”
She pushed past him. The guys all pretended to be very involved with their work when she exited the file room and strode toward the door.
She drove home and showered, scrubbing off the makeup, trying to wash away the red suck marks he’d left on her breasts and thighs.
How could a man want her so much one moment, then barely be able to look at her the next? She didn’t understand it. Did he think she wanted a commitment, was that it? Did he think she would put pressure on him, ask for things he wasn’t prepared to give?
She shook her head angrily as she dressed. If only he knew. She was in no position to ask anything of him.
Maybe she should tell him, let him know he was off the hook for all the commitments that women usually wanted from men. She was never going to ask him to marry her or have a child with her. She was every red-blooded guy’s wet dream—a woman who liked sex and would never, ever make demands. Liam had no idea what a good deal he was turning his back on.
She drove back to the workshop dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, her hair pulled back in a damp ponytail. She’d been gone forty minutes and she didn’t look at anyone as she made her way to her workbench.
She kept her shoulders square as she picked up her pencil. It wasn’t until she’d been working for ten minutes and Liam still hadn’t come to talk to her that she realized she’d been waiting for him to do just that.
Finally, after another ten minutes had passed, she glanced over her shoulder toward his office.
The seat behind his desk was empty.
She stared at it for a long moment, then turned back to her work.
Easy come, easy go.
Pity she didn’t believe it.
LIAM LEANED LOW over the handlebars of his custom chopper and let the wind rip at his clothes.
He had to find a way to deal with Zoe.
He had to find a way to stop wanting her.
It wasn’t until he saw a tall, green line of cypress pines ahead that he realized where his subconscious had led him. He turned the bike into the sedately curved driveway of the Springvale Cemetery and throttled back. He parked in a designated spot and carried his helmet under his arm as he walked across the lawn to the memorial garden where his mother was buried.
A small bronze plaque marked her resting place. The grass was neatly trimmed around it but a few old leaves obscured her name. He squatted and brushed them aside so that he could see her properly. Marianne Louise Masters. Dead at the too-early age of thirty-nine.
She’d had a hard life. Not a lot of money when she was growing up, then she’d fallen pregnant to Graham Masters, her high-school boyfriend, when she was just nineteen. They’d married but she’d lost the baby. Liam had come along a few years later. By then his father had already developed into a problem drinker. He’d always had a volatile temper and with alcohol in the mix it hadn’t been long before he started taking his frustrations out on his wife and child. By the time Liam was eight he’d had a broken arm, a perforated eardrum and two separate cases of broken ribs. His mother had fared far worse. A broken jaw. A dislocated shoulder. Lost teeth, blackened eyes. And whatever punishment his father had meted out in the bedroom.
They’d run away twice. Both times his father had hunted them down. They’d left too many clues, trusted the wrong people. The last time they ran, they took only what they could carry and went as far as they could with the money his mother had managed to hide from the weekly budget. All the way from Queensland down the coast of Australia, then across to Adelaide. For the first couple of years they’d moved every few months, just to be safe. They’d wound up in Melbourne when Liam was twelve. The three years they’d spent there had been the best of his young life.
Then his mom had gotten sick.
Liam stood and stared along the green swathe of lawn. A few graves had withered flowers on them, others had plastic posies faded by the harsh Australian sun. His mom had never encouraged flowers. Not when she was sick, and she hadn’t wanted them at her funeral.
He pressed a kiss to his fingers and bent to transfer it to the plaque. Then he walked back down the hill.
It had been good to come here. He’d needed to remind himself what was at stake. He’d needed to stare the ugly truth in the eye, absorb it, make it a part of him again.
Because he would never put himself in a situation where he had the opportunity to become his father’s son.
In the years after leaving the sanctuary of the Fords’ he’d lived hard. He’d drunk a lot, fought a lot, screwed around a lot. Then one day he’d gotten wasted and wound up in a bar fight for no good reason other than that he was drunk and spoiling for a fight and some guy had looked at him funny. He’d woken up the next day and looked in the mirror and seen his father staring back at him. It had chilled him to the bone. From that day on, he’d never been drunk, and he’d never hit a man in anger.
And he’d never let himself get serious with a woman. There was too much of his father in him for him to risk trying for a wife and family of his own. For his mother’s sake he would ensure that the cycle of violence ended with him. It was a promise he’d made her long ago, and he’d keep it if it killed him.
Which meant he had to find a way to come to terms with his feelings for Zoe. He would not embark on a relationship with her that would lead nowhere. He’d hurt women in the past with his refusal to commit. Zoe would not be one of them.
He was no closer to having an answer to his dilemma by the time he rode into the parking lot at Masters Mechanics an hour later. Zoe had been under his skin since he was kid. He had no idea how to get her out.
She was working with the airbrush when he walked past her. She didn’t look up and he didn’t stop to talk to her. There were things that needed to be said, but he couldn’t say them right now.
He managed to avoid her for the rest of the day. He was congratulating himself on the fact when a knock sounded on his office door and he looked up to see her standing there.
“You got a minute?” she asked. Her expression was absolutely neutral. He braced himself.
“Sure.”
She didn’t come right in. Instead, she went to her workbench to collect the Harley fuel tank and her sketch pad. She placed the tank front and center on his desk, slapping the sketch pad down beside it.
“This is what I’ve come up with,” she said.
He studied the intricate image she’d created on the teardrop-shaped fuel tank. A woman’s face and torso pushed out from the front like the old-fashioned figurehead on a ship. Wings sprouted from her shoulders and ran down the sides of the tank. Toward the rear, flames licked, a blaze of glory trailing behind her, tangling with her flowing hair. He studied the detail of Zoe’s image, picking up on the little visual cues in her work.
“She’s like an old sailor’s tattoo. Almost a mermaid,” he said, slowly getting it. “Old school.”
She nodded, arms crossed over her chest. “That’s right.”
She stood very still, her gaze on his face. Waiting for his verdict.
“It’s great,” he said.
“You still want me to do the bike, then?”
“Of course. Definitely. This is very, very cool. What did the guys think?”
“They like it. Paul suggested a candied-cherry base coat, more flames on the fenders.”
Liam nodded. “Yeah. And let’s pick up this orange and purple from her hair.”
“Okay. Good. I’ll do some more practice runs on the scrap Vinnie found for me while you guys do your bit with fabrication,” she said.
She collected the fuel tank and her sketch book and turned to go. He knew it made him the biggest pussy in the world but he was glad that their talk had been all business.
She was almost out the door when he caught the expression on her face. She looked disappointed. Hurt.
Shit.
He was trying to do what he could to protect her, but every time he touched her he made things more confusing. For both of them.
He ran a hand through his hair.
“Zoe, wait.”
6
LIAM HAD TO SAY SOMETHING. He’d had sex with her twice, and both times he’d screwed things up. He needed to somehow make her understand that keeping things platonic was the best way to go.