Page 71 of Slow Hands Cowboy

“Is this a house that you... did you build this for a future family?”

It was big for one person. Especially if he always meant it to be for one person.

“No,” he said. “It’s just for me. I don’t ever plan on having a family. I mean, I already have one. I’ve got Cody and Lila, Nolan, even. I don’t need to get married and bring any more kids into this world. I would be ill-suited to it.”

“Why?”

Because all she had seen of him was that, in spite of everything, he was a nice man. Yes, there was a hardness underneath all of that, but he was helping her. Helping her, even though she knew he was attempting to help his business as well.

But the image of him in this house, this place that he had built as a monument to his adult success, by himself made her feel sad. It also underscored the realization that she had been about to submit herself to a life where she lived in a house with another person, and was still ultimately alone.

They ate dinner in relative silence, and she ignored her heart as it attempted to beat out of her chest.

“I can’t stay till November.”

“I’m not asking you to stay until November.”

But she was staying here.

She was struggling with the intensity of everything. Of this new information that she’d taken on about Walker, mixed together with the image of him from high school, mixed together with the very adult attraction she felt for him now.

She took a shaking breath. “So, I was thinking. I really don’t want a zip line. But... The other thing that I’d like is to get a little more sexual experience. I don’t know if you’d be interested in helping me out with that?”

Chapter Fourteen

It was all Walker could do not to sweep the plates off the table and pick her up out of her seat and throw her down on top of it. Take her right then and there. But then, that wasn’t really good for his pride, or his reputation as someone who was good in bed.

“That’s a very polite request,” he said.

“I don’t really know how to do this,” she said.

She sounded calm. As she always did. But she looked like a stewed tomato. Her cheeks were bright pink, her lips practically trembling. And he wanted to kiss them.

He’d gotten a taste of her earlier. Just a taste. Right there in front of Alan. And it had been sweet. Enough to know that he wanted more than a taste now. He wanted everything.

He was the one who was about to beg. No two ways about it. This was his fantasy, years of fantasies, every fucked-up, malformed desire he’d had since he was in high school, come to life in front of him.

Addison Carey was admitting that she wanted him.

He should torture her for that. He should make her pay. Far from sweeping everything off the table and clearing space for him to take her then and there, he should demand that she get down on her knees and beg for what she wanted. Hope that he would grant her request. Every mask he’d ever worn was in danger of slipping then. Every facade that he’d fixed thoughtfully into place was rapidly dissolving, because he had spent all these years pretending not to be bothered. Not by the way that she treated him, not by the degree to which his desire had a chokehold on him. Not in any way.

And now it was all crumbling. All that cool, all that lack of care, turning into dust, because he did want her. He did care. Because there wasn’t a single thing that he had wanted for this many years that he hadn’t gotten, other than her, and having that waved in his face now, a red flag in front of a bull, was sending him into a dark and beautiful place.

Because it reminded him of being a teenager, but without the helplessness. The intensity, yes, that push and pull that he had always experienced with her. That glory and terror of desiring her, and knowing that she could pull the rug out from under him in the next moment.

But she was looking up at him with sincerity and a very particular sort of defeat in her eyes. And he knew that she was lost in a hell made in high school just as much as he was. That she was as gloriously tangled up right now as him, and that was a whole new sort of revelation.

“Please don’t be mean to me,” she said, her voice coming out a whisper.

At that, the pettier part of him dissolved completely. But so did his resolve, to not make this quick, not a fast and furious exorcism of old desires and intense current cravings, but to show her everything that she had been missing for all these years. To turn Alan into a distant memory. Someone she couldn’t even recall, much less someone that she would miss.

He wanted to ruin her. For everyone that had ever come before him, and everyone that would ever come after.

It was intense, to a degree that set his teeth on edge, but it was real as anything.

“Oh, I’m not going to be mean to you. I’m not going to go easy on you, either.”

Her blue eyes went wide as she looked up at him, bit her bottom lip, nearly sent him into space. He was so hard right now that he could barely see straight, and he didn’t want her to know that. Didn’t want her to know just how fucked up he was in this moment. How close he was to losing it completely.