Page 69 of Where You're Planted

“No. But thank God I have a man here to manage my medical choicesandmy cabinets for me.”

Jack threw his head back to laugh. “Listen to your attitude today.” He immediately cut off her reply, adding, “I love it. Everyone thinks you’re this cheery, sweet children’s librarian, but you’re actually vicious.”

She couldn’t fight her own smile. “Shut up and make yourself useful, Jack.”

He slipped three screws between his lips and mumbled around them, “Yes, ma’am.” Then he effortlessly hoisted up the cabinet onto the ledger, grabbed the drill, and had the whole thing secured to the wall in under thirty seconds.

She was not prepared for his casual efficiency or the way his broad back flexed under his shirt. And now that she could breathe a little more freely after getting some of the weight off her chest, she wanted to find out how efficient Jack could be with his hands onher.

He moved on to the next cabinet, measuring and predrilling holes, lifting it into place, checking that it was flush with both the first cabinet and the wall. Tansy was determined to be useful in her own project, but that mostly amounted to her bracing an extra hand under the cabinets while he did everything else—clamping the units together, fitting shims behind them where the wall bowed, and drilling in the screws.

He muttered that she should sit, get off her sore ankle, but quickly realized she wasn’t going to listen to that nonsense. Still, even though this was surely a two-person job, she found herself almost exclusively in Jack’s way. He had to keepnudging her over with a hand at her hip and reaching around her, caging her body between his own and the cabinets, the delicious smell and heat of him enveloping her.

If he knew the effect his closeness was having, he wasn’t smug about it, and his focus never strayed from his task, even as it became harder for her not to put her hands on his shoulders just to feel them flex.

Increasingly, she felt like she’d stumbled into a home renovation porno, and the long stretch as they worked in silence dulled her irritation and leveled off her wine buzz, leaving her relaxed.Pliable.She let her fingers linger on his every time she passed him something and openly stared when he wasn’t looking and then even when he was. She was mesmerized by his throat, right there at her eyeline, the bob of his Adam’s apple when he swallowed, the sound of it in the too-quiet space. They were inches apart, yet no matter how her needy gaze bored into him, silently willing him to look at her, he maintained his focus straight over the top of her head.

Until she licked her lips, and his gaze stuttered down, snagged by the movement and probably by the unrestrained lust pooling in her eyes. His next screw slipped from his grasp. He huffed a tiny, frustrated breath—finallya crack in his restraint that told her she wasn’t alone in her lust haze.

She squeezed down between his solid, strong body and the cabinet he was bracing behind her. Her face dropped a breath from his belt buckle as she reached between his boots for the screw. Then she came back up and waited for him to meet her eyes, her heart thrumming wildly in her ears. She held the screw to his lips, and after a long, agonizing moment, they parted, and he dipped to take itand her fingertipsinto the warm heat of his mouth. His eyes were so dark and full of fire at the same time, pinning her there as he swiped his tongueagainst her thumb and then caught the screw between his teeth. He pulled back to rasp, “Tansy.”

“Hmm?”

He had one hand braced on the cabinet above her head, the drill in the other hand, and the screw still dancing between his lips when he spoke. “Could you not make me drop this cabinet on you?”

She wanted to kiss the screw right out of his mouth. Instead, she slid back a step and braced her shoulder blades against the cabinet, her face and neck hot.

He tore his eyes from hers to drill the screw into place and then dug two more from his pocket to finish securing it.

Finally, he turned her by her shoulders, walked her back against the opposite kitchen wall, and said, “Nowput your hands on me.”

20

Jack

“You’re so bossy,” Tansy said but pulled his face down to hers anyway, catching his mouth in a bruising kiss. She broke it off abruptly and stiff-armed him, keeping him from moving back in like he wanted and matching her kiss with one of his own. “I shouldn’t like you when you’re like that,” she panted, “trying to tell me what to do. I shouldn’t find your bossiness even remotely attractive.”

Jack reached for her face, but she held him off again, eyes dancing from his mouth to his eyes and back. He raised his hands in surrender, desperate for the right approach for her to approve getting them on her body. She’d been teasing him for the better part of an hour, and he’d kept his hands dutifully occupied with her cabinets as long as he could stand it, but he couldn’t take it anymore. “Tansy,” he pleaded, gruff and impatient.

She eased the press of her palm, dragging it from hisshoulder down over his chest, coming to rest against the lower part of his stomach, just above his belt. She gave him a tentative push, as if checking the structural soundness of him. He wanted that pressure lower, wanted to guide her just a few inches down so she could feel what she was doing to him. Instead, he stepped into her space, and this time, she let him crowd her and duck his mouth down to her ear. “You’ve proven your point.”

She untucked his shirt and pulled it open, one snap at a time, and then pushed the halves out of the way to drink him in. He flexed involuntarily, desperate for more than her eyes on him.

“What point?” she asked.

“That you’re calling the shots here.”

“Am I?” She caressed his face, her thumb sliding across his lower lip and dipping into his mouth just like when she gave him that screw back. Fuck, he needed to kiss her. He was ready to beg but settled for biting her thumb, her palm, and the tender skin inside her wrist.

“You know you are,” he said. Then, he hooked a tentative finger into the looped drawstring of her pants and gave it a gentle tug, asking, “But do you actually want to be? Because I think you might like it if you let me take over here.”

Her gaze fell to the drawstring, her chest heaving now, and when he brushed his fingertips along the warm skin just above her waistband, her eyelashes fluttered closed. She leaned back against the wall like it was too much to hold herself up, and Jack moved in closer, wedging his thigh between hers. He slipped both thumbs inside her waistband, brushing satin that he couldn’t see yet, and slid them around to her backside, pushing her sweats down her hips to expose the top of that satin underwear and palming the incredible swell ofher ass in both hands. He pulled her to him, dragging her core up his thigh, and finally caught her mouth with his when her lips parted on a moan.

Her arms flew around his neck, and she hooked a foot around the back of his leg. He boosted her, one hand clutching her thigh, the other still squeezing her ass, and pressed his body into hers to hold her against the wall. But he was much taller than her, and the angles were wrong, his erection pressing into her belly. He could probably manage the physical demands of wall sex for long enough to get them over the edge, but he wouldn’t be able to touch her how he wanted.

“You got a single table or countertop anywhere in this place?” he asked.

“Now you get why I didn’t want to do this here.”

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