Page 3 of Rufus

What the fuck…?

Molly was only a few years older than his daughter, for Christ’s sake!

She was also very slender and maybe only a couple of inches over five feet tall. From what Rufus could see over the desk, she was currently wearing skintight, low-rider blue jeans with a figure-hugging black cotton camisole top.

She didn’t appear to be wearing a bra beneath the latter, meaning the perfect slope of her tiny breasts was clearly outlined. As were the disproportionately plump nipples pressing against the softness of the material.

Rufus’s mouth flooded with saliva at the thought of pulling down that camisole top before giving in to the need to lick and then suck those tasty berries into his?—

What he needed was to get his mind out of the gutter, right the fuck now!

His cock didn’t give a damn how inappropriate his thoughts were. It remained long and engorged inside the tailored trousers of the dark three-piece suit he wore.

Which was when Rufus realized he should have gone home and changed before coming to offer his help at the animal shelter.

He knew the reason he hadn’t thought of it, of course, and it had nothing to do with the telephone call he’d received from his son-in-law on his way to the London offices of Wynter Security.

Even though that call had been to tell him Mia was in labor and Darius was currently driving her to the hospital.

It wasn’t quite as crowded on the London city roads at seven in the morning as it would be in a couple of hours, but Rufus had still broken every speed limit on his drive to the private hospital his daughter and son-in-law had chosen for the birth of their first child.

If Mia’s threats of castration were any indication, there probably wouldn’t be a second one.

And Rufus knew he was prevaricating, using what he recognized as avoidance methods to stop his thoughts from dwelling on the lust he felt toward the beautiful young woman who, although she had called him a silver fox, was still seventeen years younger than him.

And…that thought alone was enough to cause his cock to instantly deflate.

But it couldn’t change the fact that Rufus knew the reason he hadn’t thought to go home and change his clothes, after collecting Mia and Darius’s dog from their house, was because he’d been too busy anticipating having a perfectly legitimate reason for seeing Molly Harper again.

“Is being a silver fox a good thing?” he prompted before his brain had time to filter the remark.

“Oh yes,” Molly assured eagerly. “They’re my favorite rom—” She broke off, color flooding her cheeks.

“Your favorite rom…?”

Her lashes lowered as she looked down at the tiled floor. “A silver fox on the cover of a book is guaranteed to get the author a sale from me.”

Rufus studied that blush on Molly’s usually ivory-colored cheeks and the way she wouldn’t look up and meet his gaze, and instantly drew his own conclusion for her reluctance to complete that preference. “You like to read romance novels.”

Her chin instantly rose defensively, those sky-blue eyes glittering with challenge. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“I didn’t mean to imply there was.” He was partial himself to suspense novels that had a bit of romance, and sex, in them. He might not be having any of the latter, and hadn’t for some time, but that didn’t mean he didn’t enjoy reading about it.

It was also understandable, he thought, for Molly to want to read happy-ever-after stories when it sounded as if her childhood had been the exact opposite of happy or secure.

“No?”

“No,” he soothed. “But you should probably know that, silver fox or not, I don’t have an ounce of romance in me, and I’m way too old now to think of changing my ways.”

The blush deepened in her cheeks. “Perhaps you just haven’t met the woman you’re willing to change them for.”

Since his wife died, Rufus had only had a sex life and not a love life. Even then, it had only been a sporadic interest and never a driving I-have-to-have-her passion.

Sex had had no place in his life whatsoever for the past two years as he rebuilt his relationship with his daughter. After all their years apart, the last thing Mia needed was to feel she had to compete with another woman in his life.

The attraction he’d felt for Molly from the first moment he saw her in the flesh was totally unprecedented.

And fucking inappropriate, he reminded himself again.

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