Page 102 of Boss of the Year

His hand fell over mine, trapping it against his chest. “No.”

I swallowed. “Oh. Okay.” I tried to pull my hand back, but he kept it there, trapped. “Lucas?”

His heart pounded beneath my palm. His eyes were closed, and the muscle I’d just mapped in his jaw ticking while he took a deep breath, held it, then exhaled over several seconds.

He wasn’t letting me continue. But he wasn’t letting me go either.

My mind scrambled for a foothold, trying to find the shape of what this was. He hadn’t wanted “maybe,” he said at the farm. Because he had wanted me there too. And badly. I was willing to bet that if he had allowed my hand to keep going, eventually I would have found the same evidence of that desire now.

He said I would beg.

Well, I wasn’t ready to do that. I wasn’t ready for sex either.

But I did want something more than a kiss.

There was no “maybe” about it.

“Courage,” I murmured, to myself and maybe to him too.

Then, before Lucas opened his eyes or I lost my nerve, I lifted my leg under the water, then slid it across him in one quick motion until I was no longer seated on the bench, but straddling his lap. The water lapped between us, covering my breasts to just above my nipples.

My hand was still pinned to his chest.

Yeah. I was right about him wanting me. The steel length now nestled against my inner thigh told me that plainly.

His eyes popped open, dark and wide and stunned. “Marie?—”

“I want to,” I insisted. “I want to touch you. And I want you to touch me.”

But his reaction wasn’t at all what I was expecting.

His body remained stiff. The way he was sitting, with his neck craned back, eyes squeezed shut again, jaw clenched, and all of him quivering with tension, he didn’t look like he was enjoying himself. At all.

I sat back on his knees and took my hand from his chest so I could cover my own, aware of the way one move would bare my breasts completely. Aware now that he may not want to see them.

His eyes opened, a typhoon whirling in their depths. “What’s wrong?”

“I—” I swallowed, looking at anything but him. “Nothing’s wrong. For me, anyway. But you…it’s okay, Lucas, if you don’t want to do this. If you changed your mind. About me.”

I made to slide off him, but his hands found my thighs like iron vises, clamping me in place.

“What do you mean, if I changed my mind?” he asked through gritted teeth.

God, he was really going to make me say it.

“I just mean…”

The typhoon threatened to strike, demanding the truth.

I found I had to give it.

“I meant it’s all right that maybe…maybe I’m not what you thought?”

A deep furrow carved between his brows. “Marie, I’m having a lot of trouble getting the blood to flow to my brain here, so I need you to speak more plainly. Specifically, what the fuck are you talking about?”

My God, he looked like he was in so much pain.

“Just that, I’m not…perfect. Like my sister. Or a model or whoever someone like you would usually, um, be with. Like this.”