“Whatever. I’m gonna try and do my homework. Do you care if I use the computer?”

I shrugged and gave her the password to log on and went into the kitchen. When your mom was a drunk and your older brother was too busy trying to claw his way out of the muck and mire, you learned how to fend for yourself. I was never going to have a show on the Food Network, but I could throw together some stuff that would taste all right and keep us going.

I plopped a plate in front of her and turned on the TV. I wasn’t the type of guy who ever just lounged in front of the TV. I was always up to something, had somewhere to go or someone to meet. Maybe that’s why trouble had no problem finding me. I kicked off my boots, pulled off my hoodie, and settled in for as long as it was going to take me to wear Dovie down and convince her to go back to bed with me. Or maybe go down on me. Really, I wasn’t picky.

“This is good, Bax.” It made me grin that she sounded so surprised. I looked over at her and caught her watching me instead of looking at the computer.

“It was fend for yourself or starve around my house when I was little. I learned to make do.”

She swiveled around in the chair so we were facing each other.

“Is that why you started stealing? That’s how you fended for yourself?”

I put the empty plate on the coffee table and gave her a stony look. She was always trying to make me into something better than I really was.

“No. People had stuff that I wanted, so I took it from them. Cars, TVs, credit cards . . . I wasn’t stealing to make do, I was stealing because I wanted stuff that I was never going to work for.”

She made a face at me and turned back to the computer. “That’s not entirely true.”

I gathered up my plate and her now-empty one. I needed a smoke and to get laid, and not particularly in that order.

“What do you know about it?”

She lifted a shoulder and let it fall. “I know you love that car and you didn’t steal it. I know that you wanted to do something nice for your mom, so you used your talents, as felonious at they might be, to get her this house. It wasn’t all about taking stuff just because you wanted it.”

I wasn’t used to anyone else being able to pick my true motivations out from the smoke screen I usually threw up. I couldn’t say I liked it very much.

“I’m gonna step outside for a minute.” She waved me off and I grumbled at her under my breath. Spending time with this girl was more headache than it was worth, even if I could still taste her all across my tongue and feel her like she was embedded under my prickly skin.

I let the smoke of a cigarette fill and escape out of my lungs and tried to get a handle on my rampant thoughts. There was just too much going on. Everything with Race, Titus popping back up on my radar, this girl twining her way into the very fabric of who I was. I wasn’t sure I could handle any of it with barely a month of freedom under my belt. I wasn’t the kind of man who was big on self-discovery and personal growth, only right now it didn’t seem like fate wanted to give me the option of burying my head in the sand.

I flicked the cigarette butt into the gutter at the end of the driveway and walked back in the front door, pulling my shirt off over my head as I went. I figured I could at least take a shower and work out some of my pent-up frustration on my own if Dovie wanted to continue to be a good little schoolgirl. Man, if that didn’t just put images of her in a short, plaid skirt and shiny Mary Janes all up in my head. This chick was going to make me lose my mind.

“I’m gonna take a show—” I got cut off when I entered the room and was simultaneously attacked and shoved back over the edge of the couch by a redheaded flurry of activity. The cushions of the sofa scattered and my pants and boxers ended up clattering to the floor under her small and hasty hands. I grabbed her around the waist as she climbed on top of me, still fully clothed. She put her hands on the center of my chest and loomed over me, her hair a bright curtain closing us in our own moment.

“Why didn’t you call me on Sunday?” I don’t know how she could talk with my dick standing up straight between us, but she started pulling at her top, so I figured if talking to her would get her n*ked faster, I would struggle through it.

“Because I wanted to.”

She paused with her arms over her head and I took opportunity of her position to unhook her bra and set those awesome br**sts free. The pink tips were already hard and she shuddered when I rubbed the pads of my thumbs over them. She responded sweeter than any girl I had ever touched before, like it was a special treat to have my hands on her.

“So you wanted to call me, which means you didn’t?”

“Dovie, I only ever call chicks to hook up, not to chitchat, so yeah, I didn’t call you because I wanted to.”

She giggled a little because I ran one of my hands down her front and circled her belly button with my index finger. I wanted to lick it and put my mouth on every inch of her, but I had to work on getting her as n*ked as I was first, and it seemed like all she wanted to do was catch up.

“You didn’t want to hook up?” She actually sounded concerned.

I groaned and grabbed one of her hands that was still on my chest and wrapped it around the erection standing like a pillar between us.

“What do you think?”

She pulled her bottom lip between her teeth and I groaned again. She was killing me with all her innocent seduction.

“I don’t want to want this, Bax.” Her voice was just a whisper of sound as I popped open the button on her jeans and got a hand under the waist of her panties.

I raised both my eyebrows at her, because as she said it, she started to move her hand up and down the straining length of my cock.

“I was going to let you study. I was on my way to the shower.” She whimpered when my finger hit its target, and she lifted up a little on her knees to give me better access.

She bent over so she could put her mouth on mine. I let her use those full lips and that clever tongue to kiss me until I was ready to roll her on her back and shove into her, whether she was ready for me or not. Between the soft glide of her hand up and down, and the pull and drag of her mouth over mine, this was bound to be over before she realized what she started. She pulled up and I immediately attached my mouth to the tip of her breast. I rolled the little pebble of pleasure across my tongue while she continued to work me over with her delicate touch.

“It was going to happen anyway. I almost jumped you in the car when you picked me up from school. I hate it. You make me feel out of control.”

Her words were punctuated with a squeeze at the base of my dick that made me grunt in surprise. I needed to get her pants off and get inside of her, like yesterday.

“Being out of control isn’t always a bad thing.” I tried to lift her up and off of me but the couch was narrow and she refused to let my erection go. I was pinned under her and captivated by those moss-colored eyes.

She suddenly climbed to her feet and let me go. I thought she was going to shimmy out of her baggy jeans and climb back on my lap so we could get down to business and I could make her forget all about not wanting to want this, but instead she dropped to her knees in front of me. I think my brain short-circuited, because the next thing I knew, my c**k was sliding in between those lips that by themselves were enough to make me hard.

“Shit.”

I gathered a fistful of that flaming hair so I could watch her slide up and down on me and tried to regulate my breathing so I would last for more than a minute. There had never been anything in my life more beautiful than that face, with its smattering of freckles and sensuous mouth bracketed by those checkered flags. It was a mental image that I was glad came after being incarcerated, because if I had ever experienced all that was Dovie Pryce and her magical mouth before getting locked up, I never would have made it.

She swirled her tongue around the head, ran it along the throbbing vein underneath the side, and used her clever hands to bring me to the brink of exploding in her mouth within seconds. I told her to let me go, bucked up on the couch and used my hands that were lost in her endless waves of hair to try and pull her off of me, but it didn’t do any good. She was determined to see it through to the end, to get me as out of control as she claimed to feel around me.

The very tip of my erection hit her in the back of the throat and one of her hands disappeared between my legs. The only coherent thought I had after that, as the very edge of her teeth scraped over my most sensitive flesh, was oh f**k. I prided myself on keeping it together no matter what the situation was, and she had just undone me. She had taken me apart and left me scattered all over the place. I wasn’t sure what order I went back together in.

She ran her tongue over one of the finish-line flags and shook my grip loose out of her now messy hair. She got to her feet between my still-bent knees and I watched her with heavy-lidded eyes as she let her too-big pants fall to her feet so that she was clad in only her panties and the marks I had left all over her after our interlude in the kitchen. She bent over a little and put her hands on my shoulders and worked her way on top me, straddling my lap. I liked to think I had more stamina than the next guy, but she had turned me inside out, so even with those spectacular tits in my face, it was going to take me a minute to recuperate.

She squealed when I put both of my hands under her ass and got to my feet. She wrapped her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist and we were eye-to-eye. I was taking her to bed.

“That was unexpected.”

The corner of her mouth tilted up in a grin and she laughed when I tossed her onto the bed. I hooked a finger under the leg of her panties and pulled the last garment keeping her from me out of the way. The trip down her long, pale legs was enough to get blood flowing in the right direction.

“I’ve never done that before.”

Just like that, all my pieces went back together in a better way than they had been before. Again, I felt like she was giving me something that was all my own, something I didn’t have to take just to feel like I had something of value. I placed a kiss on the quivering skin of her stomach and looked at her from under my brows. I pulled her legs apart and bent one knee so I could get between her folded-up legs and return the favor.

“You ever had a guy do this for you?”

Her head shook back and forth on the comforter and she curled one of her hands around my face so she could rub her thumb over the star on my face. She liked to do that when we were together like this, I had noticed.

“No. The last guy tried, but I thought it was too much, so I told him no.”

“It feels good. You should let someone make you feel good, Dove.”

Our eyes locked for a moment and I saw her chest rise and fall in a shaky breath. She moved her hand down and brushed her fingers over my mouth.

“You should let someone show you that being good isn’t all that bad, Bax.”

I dropped a sucking kiss on the inside of her thigh and made room for my shoulders between her legs.

“I’m about to be better than I’ve been in a long time, Copper-Top. You’re lucky.”

I wanted to make her crazy, to take her all apart like she had just done to me, plus my dick was back in the game, so as soon as I made her lose control, I wanted back inside her. Hell, I wanted to spend the entire night there, the rest of the week if she would let me.

She was honeyed everywhere, and all her slick pulsing inner flesh was no different. She was just so fresh and responsive. Every time I touched her, licked her, put openmouthed kisses on her little bud of pleasure, she reacted. There was no question she liked what I was doing to her, and when she started writhing under my mouth and started panting my name over and over again, it made me feel better than anything I could remember. I didn’t even register that she was gasping “Shane” and not “Bax.”

She was creamy and fluttery, all greedy inner muscles and clasping hands that were raking over my short hair. She was practically bowed up off the bed, her cl*t throbbing against my tongue every time I detoured to torture her with it. I could feel she was ready to go over the edge, she was moaning and restless against my mouth. I should push her over and eat her up, but I decided I needed to feel her, needed to be inside her when it happened. She was like some kind of redemption I never even realized I needed until we collided into each other’s lives.