Page 7 of The Contractor's Rose
The sight alone was enough to hammer away every bit of calm I’d managed to wrap around myself this morning.
But what had me skirting the very edge of my self-control—reallytesting the limits of my goddamn willpower—was when we started cleaning up some of the recent inventory she’d never even had a chance to unbox before the monsoon.
She turned and bent to reach for a stack of water-warped boxes, her arms stretching out in front of her, delicate fingers curling under damp cardboard. The light caught her just right—gold filtered through the windowpanes, casting soft shadows along her body. The cotton of her dress clung to her skin like it had been made to highlight every dip and curve.
And then there it was.
The curve. The bounce.The goddamn outline of her nipples pressing against the fabric.
My mouth went dry.
She didn’t even know. Or maybe she did.
Fuck me, that’s even worse.
That was dangerous. That was temptation in its most innocent wrapping.
Exactly the kind of thing I couldn’t let myself think about, and yet—here I was.
Hands twitching. Jaw clenched. Every bone in my body hummed with a restraint I hadn’t had to use in years.
I tore my gaze away and forced myself to focus on the mess around us. On the damage.
The bookstore looked … bad. There was no other word for it. Shelves leaning sideways like drunken soldiers. Pages curling like burnt leaves. A once-perfect romance display now soaked, with the covers of its books warped into waves. Some had split open entirely, their spines cracked, deteriorating before our eyes, leaking pulp.
It smelled like wet paper and ruined dreams.
But even here, even now, nothing in this wreckage commanded my attention the way she did.
She knelt in front of one of the soaked boxes, her back to me. The hem of her dress lifted just enough to reveal the soft pale skin at the back of her thighs. A place I had no business looking.
But Jesus Christ, I looked.
I couldn’tnot.
My jaw locked tight, molars grinding, the muscle ticking at my temple.
Every instinct screamed?—
Go to her.
Help her.
Touch her.
Not just out of care, butwant. The kind that had nothing to do with being a decent man and everything to do with wanting to pull her into my arms and wreck her a little bit, just to see what she’d sound like falling apart in my hands, my mouth, my bed.
Jesus.
She had no idea.
No idea what she was doing to me.
Or maybe she did. Maybe she felt it, too.
The pull. The heat. The way the air between us had grown so thick, I could barely breathe through it.
She was twenty-seven. Smart. Sweet. So fuckingsoft.
