as she went around him, Poppy wanted to kick herself. It wasn’t his fault that she kept forgetting to protect herself. Falling for him might have started as an accident, but it was her fault that she kept slipping deeper.
NINE
“You have to press harder than that,” Turner said, standing behind her.
“You said it was like filing my nails,” Poppy said, pushing the sandpaper across the surface of the wood he’d just let her cut. “I don’t press harder than this when I do that.”
Well, sort of let her cut. The circular saw was heavy… and scary. It was so loud and she couldn’t help but be hyperaware of the lethal blade zipping around at a zillion miles an hour. Still, he’d put a hand over hers and let her think that she was actually in control of the monster.
“We’ll be here for hours if you keep doing it like that. Stop being so gentle.”
“It needs a little love,” she said over her shoulder, the safety glasses slipping down her nose a little.
His hand landed on hers again and he began to push and direct the sandpaper in her fingers against the wood.
“Ow,” she said, nudging him with her hip. “You’re too rough.”
The heat of his mouth in her hair reached all the way to her shoulders. “Sometimes a little rough is exactly right.”
They’d got past her weird professional phase during the designing, but hadn’t gone so far as to reach the level of intimacy they’d been at when he arrived a few hours ago. It was probably the Goldilocks zone, or that’s what he might think. Even if she wasn’t falling deeper, she sure wasn’t climbing out of her infatuation.
“You better not wreck my closet before it’s even built.”
“Trust me, Popkat. We just wanna take the hard edge off…” His non-sanding hand crept onto her body, slithering around her ribs. “You’re all smooth lines and soft silk… I’ve gotta do what I can to give you the same.”
Except hard was exactly what she wanted from him. Rough sounded perfect. Anything would be perfect, as long as it came from him. His face slipped lower in her hair, his hand loosened from the sandpaper. It was wrong. So wrong that they didn’t even have to be facing each other to be overwhelmed.
As one set of fingers began to trail toward her wrist, the others grazed the underside of her breast. Poppy couldn’t help it, her exhale of ecstasy somehow forced her head to drop to the side, granting him access to the side of her neck.
Before his lips could reach their target, the front door far behind them suddenly opened.
“Hello, worker bees!”
Turner let her go to face their guest. Poppy was so pleased to have the workbench there in front of her for support. If it hadn’t been there, she’d have melted to the floor for sure.
“You just walked into Poppy’s apartment without knocking,” Turner said, quite clearly pissed. “You do that with my other tenants, Ritch?”
“No, but your other tenants have, you know, floors and light-fittings. What the hell is she wearing?”
Oops, the bridesmaid’s dress. Poppy had forgotten about that.
“Mind your damn business and stop looking at her,” Turner snapped.
“Oh,” his friend said, exaggerating his response. “It’s like that, is it?”
“What do you want? Why’d you come up here?”
“Not to interrupt whatever you’re pissed about me interrupting.”
Figuring she should participate before the friends came to blows, Poppy put a practiced smile on her face and spun around. “Ritchie, right?” She took off the safety glasses to slip them onto the bench behind her. “You never did tell me your name.”
“Yeah,” Ritchie said, casting a curious eye from her to his tense friend. “Nice to see you again, Poppy.”
Even with only a view of Turner’s back, Poppy could sense his tension. “Turner was just teaching me about wood.” She frowned at herself. “What to do with it… I mean, how to work with it…” Opening her mouth, she was almost pleased to read Ritchie’s amusement because it meant he’d pedaled back whatever he and his friend might have been about to get into. “I’m supervising, really.”
“His wood,” Ritchie said, enjoying the moment. “Good to know.”
“I told Ches I wasn’t gonna make it tonight,” Turner said, the only one in the room not interested in keeping things calm.
“Yeah, he told me, that’s why I’m here,” Ritchie said, switching his focus to his friend. “This is Naught’s thing, not mine… You don’t show, and then what? You don’t think Pres will figure things