“This has nothing to do with William Bailey.”

He looks unconvinced but doesn’t call my bluff. Instead, he brushes his lips over mine. Gentle. Careful. Sweet.

The only thing that can break me tonight is sweet, and I won’t be broken. I bite his full bottom lip and dig my nails into his shoulder blades.

A quick study, he gets my message. His hand tangles into my hair while the other digs into my ass and pulls me against him. The hard length of his c**k rests between my legs and lights a hot coil of pulsing energy.

He rubs his tongue against mine and moans. Or maybe that’s me, because I’m pulling him closer. I wrap my arm tighter behind his neck, and I’m practically crawling up him in my efforts to get closer and closer still.

I break the kiss and make myself back off. I’m not the kind of girl who loses control. I don’t lose my mind over men and expect to be saved. I don’t want Asher to save me.

His fingertips are at my hip, tracing an invisible path down and under, moving ever closer to that coiled ache between my thighs. His lips part and our breath mingles as I savor the heat of his body against mine, the sweet anticipation of his fingers inching closer to where I want them.

I slide a hand down his bare chest and between our bodies and cup him through his swim trunks. I’m rewarded with another hiss and then his lips, his tongue, his teeth, hot and desperate against my neck, nipping, toying, playing. Electrifying the sensitive skin.

He cups my breast, and this time I know the moan I hear is my own.

“So goddamn sexy.” His thumb flicks across my nipple, a strangled sound escaping his throat.

I graze my fingertips under the waistband of his swim trunks. I want to feel him in my palm. I want that power to whip through me as I wrap my hands around his hot flesh and it pulses thicker, harder.

For a moment, that’s where this is headed. His hands are greedy, all over me, his mouth doing delicious things to my neck.

“You have protection, right?” I ask.

He laughs and stops toying with me, his head leaning against my shoulder. Slowly, he slides his hands to my back. “That’s not exactly something I keep tucked in my swim trunks.”

I’m so aroused it hurts. Asher is stunning. Solid. Delicious. I want to bite into that corded muscle of his neck. Want to explore that smattering of chest hair with my fingers while I drag my mouth down his flat stomach.

But he doesn’t have protection, and that’s a deal breaker.

“In your house?” My breathing’s unsteady, my heart pounding.

He cups my face in one big hand. “Why don’t you run home and get dressed? I’ll take you to breakfast.”

My jaw goes slack. Who the hell is this guy? Who has brakes that good? “Are you serious? I mean, you don’t want to…” Rarely am I at a loss for words.

“Sure, I want to do a lot of things. But sweetheart, you don’t know a damn thing about me.”

“You’re really hung up on that.” I unwrap my legs from around him and run a hand over my eyes.

Just my luck that I’d pick a bad boy who’s all Mr. Sensitivity and wants to get to know me.

So be it. That’s a better fit for the New Me plan anyway, right?

“Good. Because, you know, I’m not that kind of girl anyway.” I wait a beat, but God doesn’t strike me dead. “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes?”

His lip twitches.

“What?”

“I’ve just never met a woman who can really get ready in fifteen minutes.”

I hoist myself out of the water. “I’ll bet breakfast on it. If I take longer than fifteen minutes, I’ll cook for you.”

Asher runs his eyes over my body, lingering at all my best parts. “Deal.”

I grab my towel, making no effort to minimize the swish of my h*ps as I exit through his gate for the first time.

I pad through the dewy grass back to my mother’s house and slip in the back door. I take a quick shower to wash off the chlorine. After a towel-down and some lotion, I slip into jeans and a tank, and pull my wet hair into a ponytail.

When I head toward the door again, my mom is blocking it. Her arms are crossed and worry creases her features. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

That old shame slithers up my spine and I immediately imagine she knows what I’ve been up to tonight. The trespassing. The strange man. The lust.

So many deadly sins, so little time.

“I don’t live here anymore. I don’t need your permission to go to breakfast with a friend.”

She looks at her watch skeptically. “It’s 3 a.m.”

“I’m hungry.”

She shakes her head. “I want you to think about how important that wedding was to your sister. And then I want you to think about how you can make it right.”

My jaw drops. “What?”

She tucks a piece of chestnut hair behind her ear and cocks her head. “We’re a family, Maggie, and we’ll forgive you for your mistakes. But we can’t do that until you own up to them.”

My fists clench until I feel the bite of my nails against my palm. It’s a lecture I’ve heard so many times I could recite it in my sleep. It’s a lecture I deserved more times than I can count. “I didn’t have anything to do with the stink bomb.” The words are hard and gritty, pushed through clenched teeth.

“Maggie—”

I push past her, through the door and into the moonlight, anger and hurt a burning fist in my chest.

When I finally steady myself and make it to Asher’s, he’s waiting for me on his patio, sipping out of a steaming mug.

“You lose.”

I tense, still wound up from my confrontation with my mom. “What?”

He smiles and points to his watch. “Twenty-five minutes. You lost the bet.” His smile fades. “Are you okay?”

“Oh, right. Yeah.” I wave a hand. “I’m fine.” I let out a long, slow breath and settle into a chair. The moon shines bright and stars sprinkle across that infinite span of darkness. “I’ve missed this.”

“What? Breakfast? First dates?”

“The stars. The light is constant in the city. Inescapable. I missed seeing the stars,” I say, more to myself than him.

Suddenly his words register and I shift my eyes to him. “And this isn’t a date.”

Asher raises an eyebrow but doesn’t question me. “So you left for a while but now you’re back…for good?”

I wrinkle my nose. “You still insist on playing the get-to-know-you game?”

“Absolutely.” He grins at me and leans forward. “I like hiking, seafood, and long walks on the beach at sunset.”

I can’t help but smile. “You’d think we had a country full of avid hikers,” I say. “Every trail at every national park would be packed if everyone who says they like to hike actually did it.”

“Your turn,” he says. “Tell me something about yourself.”

Is this guy for real?

I steal his mug from his hands and take a long sip of hot, rich coffee.

“I’m waiting.”

I let the heat sink to my belly and relax my shoulders. “Well, I should tell you one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“I am that kind of girl.”

His laugh is rich and deep and sexy. “Sure you are.”

“You don’t believe me? Ask…oh, anyone in this town.”

Something changes in his eyes. If sadness had a color I’d say I could see it circling his pupils. “I don’t put much stock in the things people say. Anyway, I’d rather hear about you from your lips.”

He can’t possibly know what that single statement means to me. The silence stretches between us as I consider how to abbreviate my life into a series of simple sentences. He doesn’t rush me. Doesn’t seem intimidated by silence like so many people are. That alone makes me want to share myself with him.

“I’m just Maggie.” I fight the urge to say too much. Months trapped in a self-constructed prison of silence have left me hungry for a confidant, but sexy Asher isn’t it. “Black sheep. College dropout. Famished. Painfully turned on.”

He groans, a low, guttural sound that speaks to his own arousal. “Well, I can fix the famished part, but the last will have to wait.”

But I don’t want to wait. I need to…escape. Forget. “I pay my bets.” I wrap my fingers around his biceps. “Let me cook for you.”

“You really cook?”

My eyes flick to the large French doors at the back of his house, but I dismiss the idea, ready to be on my own turf. “Follow me to my place and I’ll show you.”

I think we both know I’m not the slightest bit interested in food.

***

Asher

Maggie takes her coffee black. Straight from the pot, no sweetener, no fancy cream. Just coffee. She puts herself out there in the same way—no frills, no pretense, no bullshit. Just Maggie.

I like that. I like it more than I want to. I like her more than I want to. More than I’ve liked any woman since Juliana f**ked me over.

We’re at her shitty little rental house in New Hope, and our breakfast dishes litter the kitchen table.

“I’ve decided I’m not going to sleep with you,” she informs me between bites of feta omelet.

“Really?”

“Yeah, my food is so damn good, I don’t need you to get off.” She takes a sip of coffee. Her tongue darts out to taste her bottom lip after every sip, an innocent gesture that makes me think of mouth and tongue and tasting in a very different context.

“Hmm,” I say, as if considering. “You make a damn good omelet, but I promise you I’m better.”

“Are you sure?” She slips another bite in her mouth. “Because I’m bordering on foodgasmic about now.” Her eyes float closed, and she makes a little sound at the back of her throat, tilting her head back a fraction of an inch.

I put down my fork. In the battle between my throbbing dick and empty stomach, my dick has won. It’s not just that she’s gorgeous. There are plenty of gorgeous women in this world. Maggie is more than that. She’s a study in contradictions and I am an eager student.

My time in New Hope is coming to an end, and I don’t know what I was thinking when I joined her in the pool tonight.

That’s a lie. I know exactly what I was thinking. I was thinking of big smiles and bright green eyes that are so damn familiar I’m sure I’ve seen them before. I was thinking of soft skin and bare, sun-kissed shoulders.

I was thinking of the way her face looked by the river when the as**ole in the tux told her he was marrying someone else. I didn’t understand the conversation. Didn’t need to understand it to know she needed me. To feel it.

“Do you make a habit of cooking breakfast for strange men?”

She runs her eyes over me, lingering on my chest and the tat snaking around my biceps. “Only the good-looking ones.”

Or only when she’s trying to get another man out of her mind. “Are you in school?”

“Not at the moment.” She pushes her plate across the table. “Do you want any more? I can make you another.”

I’m used to women trying to tell me their life story, trying to play on my sympathies. I’m used to women who want me to rescue them, but not this one. “Is there a reason that you change the subject every time I ask you a personal question?”

She leans back in her chair. “I’m a private person.”

My mind is flooded with images—her hair slicked back from her face, her br**sts rounded under the surface of the water. When her tongue darted out to taste my lips and she wrapped those long legs behind my back, I lost sight of all sense.

Maggie chews on the corner of her lip and my brain paints a picture of those lips working their way down my stomach, opening over my cock.

“Don’t you want to…” she’d asked.

“You didn’t seem so private in the pool.”

“That was just about sex, Asher.”

Another contradiction. That openness. That in-your-face sexuality matched with complete avoidance of any kind of intimacy.

And hell, I could use some just-about-sex right now. It’s been too long since I’ve tasted a woman, since I’ve felt a woman’s mouth on my dick and buried myself inside her.

But I’m not about to end my celibate streak with someone as vulnerable as Maggie. Because no matter what she says, what happened in the pool wasn’t just about sex. It was about him. The groom. The man her eyes kept returning to as we danced.

“You want to meet my little girl?” Her words rip me from my reverie.

“You have a kid?” Where are all the toys? There are dog toys all over the place, but no signs of a baby doll or Barbie.

Maggie would probably hang by that thick red hair before she’d let a child of hers play with Barbie dolls. But what about Little People or picture books? I hope she’s not one of those moms who always pawns her kid off on the sitter. That makes me uncomfortable as hell.

Then, like a f**king genius, I put it all together. “Your little girl is a dog, isn’t she?”

Maggie hops up from her chair and tugs the back door open. “Come on, baby girl. It’s okay. Lucy! Come say hi to Mama!”

I love the idea of this rough woman owning a spoiled little dog.

The image in my mind is turned on its head when one hundred and fifty pounds of Rottweiler runs toward Maggie with the frenzied glee of a ten-pound pup.

When Lucy reaches Maggie’s feet, she immediately drops to the ground and rolls onto her back.