Page 53 of The Renegade Billionaire

“Yeah, but that’s silly. Right?”

His hand tightens on my wrist. Not painfully, just the slightest pressure to seal us together, and then his thumb strokes back and forth across the inside of my wrist and every thought in my head vanishes into thin air.

“There are very few people in my life that I have a connection with, Madison. In fact, besides Grey and our nephew Sage, I work very hard to keep everyone out.” The sadness in his tone tells me he’s being honest. “But here, with you and Pops? It’s as if someone rewrote my life and dropped me into a new story. One where I belong just for being me. One that has me working harder than I’ve ever worked in my life, smiling more than I knew possible, and dreaming of a girl who might still poison my breakfast just to get me to move along if I’m not careful.”

I gasp and jerk back, but he doesn’t release my wrist, so my fingers twitch against the scruff of his jaw.

“I would never poison anyone.” I gasp haughtily.

His teeth shine in the moonlight. “No, you wouldn’t.” He says it as if he knows me, understands me. He says it as if there’s not a doubt in his mind that he can trust me.

My gaze drops to his lips, those perfectly pillowy lips, and my heartbeat hammers in my ears. Have I ever wanted to kiss someone as much as I want to kiss Braxton Mitchell?

I snort a laugh, and his entire face dances with amusement.

“What were you thinking just now?” he asks, peeling my fingers away from his jaw and holding my hand in his lap.

Gosh dang. How long have we been sitting so…so intimately?

“It’s probably better if I don’t say.” I’ve never been so thankful for the cover of darkness as I am right now because heat travels at warp speed across my cheeks, down my neck, all the way to the tips of my aching nipples.

Never. Not once in my life have I ever thought the wordsaching nipplesin relation to my own breasts. I guess it’s another thing we can chalk up to this handsome housemate of mine.

I giggle to myself again, but he doesn’t press. He watches me with a mix of amusement and lust. It’s the lust that sobers me quickly.

“Your skin is so soft,” he whispers. I stare at where his thumb swipes over my pulse point.

“I like lotion. It makes everything slippery.” Oh my God. Did I seriously just say slippery? Slippery Madison? “Soft. I said soft.”

His rumble of laughter is a balm to my burning skin. “Slippery, huh?” he asks while running the thumb of his free hand along his bottom lip.

“Soft. And I bet your lips are soft.” Did I just moan that out loud?

Okay, Madison Melissa Ryan, I know you only had a couple of drinks tonight so get it together.

“Madison,” he rumbles in warning. “As much as I’d love to show you just what I can do with my lips, we need to get you home. You’ve been drinking, and I’m not that guy.”

“You’re not?”

His grip on my wrist sends an electric shock throughout my body when he squeezes—it’s a tease of what he could do to me without any clothes on.

“Oh, God. I think I’m drunk.”

Braxton throws his head back and laughs, and even though I know he’s laughing at me, I can’t help but savor the sound—he’s infectious.

He leans in so our foreheads are nearly touching. “Did you have fun?”

When I nod, our noses touch.

“That’s all I wanted. You deserve to have fun, Madison. Fun and so much more.”

“Do you have to go home?”

The muscles in his body bunch next to mine. “Home in general, or home right now?”

Both, but I want to play pretend for a little bit longer—pretend that he is actually the hometown hottie. “Right now.”

He scans my face, but I have no idea what he’s searching for.