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Dragging my hand through my hair and down my face, I sighed. “Hopeless.”

She unbuckled her belt and scooted closer to me. “Don’t say that, Rye. It was your optimism and your hopefulness that made me do what I did tonight.”

I turned my head, and we sat like that, side by side with her hand on my arm over my center console, staring at each other for what felt like forever.

Finally, her gaze dipped, and she said, “I’d like us to finish what we started.”

Huh?Was she saying what I thought she?—

“I want you to take me back to my house, and I want to have you in my bed. You wanna know the best part about gettin’ older? I can’t get pregnant. So if you can promise me that insanely big dick hasn’t been inside some Coachella-bound twenty-five-year-old in the last year, then I want you to come inside me.” Her cheeks pinked to an impossible shade of sexy. “Fuck me, Rye. Finish what we started.”

In my state of dumbfoundedness, I put the truck into Neutral instead of Reverse. I’d already released my parking brake, and we began sliding slowly down the embankment toward the forest.

Aubrey shrieked. Her hands shot out toward the dashboard, and I fumbled to start the truck and put us in Reverse. My tires spit dirt as I punched the gas and we backed up, and she gasped and snapped her seatbelt back in place while I whipped my truck around so fast, smoke probably came off the engine.

The driveback to her place was quiet.

And kind of awkward, for me anyway. I wasn’t sure why since I’d wanted her for as long as I could remember, but she stared at the side of my face the whole way, and I couldn’t figure out what she was looking for.

Did she see what everyone else always had? Grady Graves’s youngest son, his baby boy who wasn’t to be trusted or relied on, who couldn’t do anything without his daddy’s say so?

Or was she looking at me like that because I’d proved myself tonight as a means to her end—the end of her dry spell?

Good job building the tension, idiot.

She’d get what she wanted from the “kid” inside her house, and then what?

I parked behind her little white SUV in her driveway, turned off my truck, and let my hands fall down to my thighs.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothin’.”

“Rye—”

“You know what? I think I should just head back to my uncle’s. I’ve gotta head home early tomorrow mornin’, so it’s probably best if I… y’know. Go.”

She flopped back against her seat. “You’re leavin’ tomorrow?”

Was I hallucinating, or was that disappointment in her voice?

I nodded. “Yeah, I’ve been here too long. The next few weeks, there’s a lot to do before the drive.”

“I don’t know what changed for you in the last twenty minutes. Things feel different now between us, but if you’re headed out tomorrow, then spend the night with me. Please?”

I turned to face her. “Look, tonight was a dream, Spitfire. Really. But I want you too much for a one-night stand. If I stay with you tonight, it’ll kill me to leave in the mornin’ knowin’ we can’t ever go back. Once you get what you need from me, I’ll never see you again. Not like this, not how you are tonight.”

She huffed an angry breath at me. “Ryder Graves, get your ass in my house now.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

AUBREY

Rye thoughtI wanted to use him? Now that I knew he had the skills to light my body on fire, I what? Just wanted to get my rocks off and then send him on his way?

“Come in,” I said when I unlocked my front door and pushed it open, and Rye followed silently.

“I haven’t, you know.”