I swallow, hard, and hope he doesn’t notice the fact that my hands have started to tremble ever so slightly, my breath hitching before I respond. “Thanks. I think so too.”
He chuckles softly, and his breath tickles the nape of my neck. Only then do I realize just how close he’s standing, mere inches from me. It’s as if the very air in the garage warms between us, thickening. I remember the way he caught my hips yesterday, the way his hands glided over my curves, down, down, until he cupped my pussy and pushed his finger inside me, making me groan and beg.
Fuck.
I grit my teeth in order to keep my head in the game. “So, what’s my next step?”
“That depends,” he says, and something about the way he says it, with a little purr on the end of the words, makes me turn to look at him, curious.
That was a dangerous move. Because now my eyes flash to his, and our faces are just inches apart, and he’s staring at me like he’s hungry, like there’s nothing in the world he wants more than me. “O-on what?” I ask. My voice comes out barely louder than a whisper. Damn it, Selena. Get it together.
He tilts his head, his smile widening. Turning cocksure, because this man knows exactly what he’s doing to me, the bastard. “On how much work we plan to actually get done this afternoon.” He reaches up, then, and catches a stray strand of hair that I didn’t notice had fallen across my eyes. With a slow, gentle motion, so slow that it gives his fingertips plenty of time to graze my temple, then the delicate shell of my ear, he tucks that strand of hair behind my ear, out of my eyesight.
My heart is beating so fast I’m surprised he can’t hear it trying to punch its way out of my chest. There’s got to be some kind of reward for most dangerous look a man can give a woman—and it’s the one Antonio is firing me right now. It promises pleasure—no, better than pleasure, it promises ecstasy. Screaming orgasms like the ones he gave me yesterday.
But it also promises danger. A whole hell of a lot of it. And I don’t know whether I can afford to take the risk.
With a colossal effort, I tear my gaze from his, and glance over my shoulder at the car instead. “I came here to fix Betty. Let’s fix Betty.”
“If that’s what you want.” Antonio’s hand comes to rest on my shoulder. The skin there burns, as if his hand were white-hot, leaving a brand on my skin.
It’s so hot that I’m almost surprised, when he lifts his hand away, to find there’s no mark where his fingertips just were. “It’s what I came here to do,” I repeat, because I can’t say I don’t want it, not to his face. He’d call out that bald-faced lie in a second flat.
“Such a dedicated worker,” Antonio says, and there’s something lighter in his voice now, almost amused.
I square my shoulders. “I might be a spoiled rich girl, but I’m one who knows how to get her hands dirty,” I snap. Then, when he doesn’t reply for a moment, I glance sideways to find him watching me closely, a smile curling the edges of his lips. One that I can’t quite read. He looks almost… surprised? But pleasantly so.
“I noticed,” he says. “Got to admit, when you first agreed to this, I didn’t think you had it in you. But you’ve proven me wrong.”
“I prove a lot of people wrong,” I say, almost without meaning to.
His expression doesn’t shift. If anything, his smile only grows wider. “Oh, I’m sure you do, Princess.”
I narrow my eyes. Yet the word doesn’t feel like as much of a dig today as it did when he last called me that. Because we know each other better now, perhaps. Or because of what he just said about me working hard and being capable of surprising others.
Or maybe just because I know what it feels like to have his cock inside me, and I’m no longer bothered about him giving me cute nicknames.
“So,” he says, interrupting my traitorous brain’s dangerous train of thought, “next steps, then. Let’s get to it.”
“Let’s,” I agree, and then I follow his lead, kneeling down to get ready to start on the paint.
He opens a can, and shows me the colors inside, how to mix them together until I get a paint color that matches the door exactly. “You want to test it on little patches before you paint the entire thing,” he explains. The paint fumes swirl around us as he talks, going straight to my head. Or maybe it’s only the heated looks he’s giving me that go to my head. Because those make me just as dizzy as the fumes, if not more so.