Rebel

“I know. Every time I look at him, I smile. I can’t help myself. He’s so damned adorable I can’t imagine someone just locking him in a yard and leaving him.”

Wes’s gaze fastened on her. “What do you mean?”

“The guy who owned him as a puppy before he was taken away. More of a fucking animal than Rodie ever was. He put Rodie in a cement yard surrounded by chain link and just left him. Threw him food and water once a day and that was it. Rodie was out there alone twenty-four hours a day for the first six months of his life. Just a baby. Every time I think about it, I want to hunt that man down and chain him to the train tracks. Don’t I, buddy?”

The pitch of her voice in the last sentence brought Rodie’s head up, and Rubi leaned down to meet Rodie’s kiss.

“A rescue,” Wes said, a half grin of understanding on his face. “Somehow, that makes perfect sense. Was his name Rodie when you got him?”

“No. He was never spoken to, so he didn’t respond to anything. I renamed him Gerodi, Italian for hero.”

“Hero,” he laughed to Rodie. “But no pressure, buddy. What is he?”

“Mutt, like me.”

Wes crouched on the deck and scrubbed Rodie’s body with both hands while Rodie panted, a look of bliss on his face. “Well, he’s a handsome mutt. And big. What, sixty-five, seventy pounds?”

“Just under seventy when I took him to the vet last month. Are you a dog whisperer in your spare time? I’ve never seen him take to anyone like this.”

“Grew up on a—”

“Farm,” she finished for him, crossing her arms with a laugh. “I’ve heard.”

The wind sprayed sprinkles across the deck, and Rubi turned inside.

“I’ve been wanting to see your house,” Wes said. “Is it as amazing as Jax’s?”

He stepped into the kitchen, and Rubi called Rodie in, then closed the door behind him.

A slow, low whistle slid through Wes’s teeth. “Damn, girl.”

Rubi glanced over the awesome kitchen space. Working at home, she spent a lot of time looking at the black-and-gold granite counters, polished slate floors, and rich walnut cabinetry, and never got tired of it. She’d lived in a lot of nice places, all around the world, but this—this was the only one that had ever felt like home.

He ambled in, sliding one of those talented hands across the smooth granite island at the center of the kitchen. “I knew you made bank with your apps and programs, but…not quite this much.”

“It’s not mine. I thought you knew that.”

He glanced at her as he neared the table in the breakfast area. “For as well as we know each other, it seems there’s a lot left to learn. Whose is it? Do you rent?”

“It’s one of Dolph’s two dozen homes.” Rodie wandered to Wes’s side, and he absently leaned down to scratch his ears, creating that blissful look on Rodie’s face. Wes had definitely passed the Rodie test—one more reason for Rubi to fall for him. “I moved in a year ago, when my condo building was converted into luxury town homes, which I didn’t want to buy in to. He’s never even stepped foot in this house since he bought it. It was vacant for years before I moved in. I don’t even know why he keeps it. I never planned on staying, but…now I love it. I don’t want to live anywhere else. I’ve tried to buy it from him, but…” She shrugged. She really didn’t want to get into that now. “Maybe he’ll let go of it someday.”

“I could see how it would be hard to leave a place like this.” Wes laid the rig on the table. “It still so weird to hear you call your father Dolph.”

“It’s a strange nickname for Rudolpho, but everything he does is strange. And honestly, I think he changed it because Rudy is too close to Rubi and he’s always wanted as little to do with me as possible.”

“No, I mean… Never mind.”

“That I don’t call him Dad?” she asked. When Wes nodded, she said, “Well, he’s never been a father, let alone a dad. I’d never call him either.”

Reaching in the nearest cabinet, she pushed aside the Advil and pulled down a bottle of Tylenol, offering it to him. Then grabbed water from the fridge, returning to hand him the bottle.

With Rodie snuggling up to Wes like he was a long lost friend, Wes popped and downed the pills. She glanced at the rig, taken aback by its streamlined construction. “Let me go change, and we can talk about this.”

When she turned, Wes caught her arm and pulled her into his body. She tensed, her hands pressing against his warm chest.

“You’re wearing more than you were at the club. A hell of a lot more than that corset last night, which was mind-blowingly hot, by the way. Tell Lexi I’ll be her first sale.”

She slanted a saucy smile. “You’d look amazing in red.”

He snorted a laugh, turned her toward the table, and eased her in front of him, wrapping her in his arms and setting the water on the table. With his chin on her shoulder, both of them looking down at the rig, he pressed his face to the curve of her neck. “I’d buy it for you,” he murmured against her skin. “But I’ll wear red if it turns you on.”

His mouth eased over her skin while Rodie tried to push in between them at their feet. She relaxed into Wes. Her eyes slid closed, head tilted back to rest on his shoulder. She felt enrobed in his heat, his strength. She felt safe and loved and appreciated—things she’d never felt in a man’s arms before. She’d felt sexy, desired, and needed—physically—with men in the past, but this was so different. So deliriously decadent.

And she was in deep, deep trouble. Because she wanted him more than she wanted to turn him away. His warm, hard chest pressed to the thin shirt on her back. He kept his hips against hers, his erection riding the low curve of her spine, and she wished there was nothing between them. Wished she could feel the length of him at her back, skin to skin.

“God you feel good. I feel like I haven’t seen you in days,” he said, his chin on her shoulder again. “Did you get enough space?”

“Wes…” That little burn of panic started along her breastbone. “I…don’t know what I’m doing. I usually know exactly what I want. But I’m so torn, and I’m confused. It’s not fair to you—”

He turned his head and kissed her, just a press of lips to shut her up. But the kiss turned instantly hungry, like that one taste had given them both reminders of what they’d been missing. Wes’s tongue searched her mouth, and Rubi didn’t resist like she should have. She tilted her head back and opened to him, relishing the sound of need vibrating in his throat. Then he pulled away just as quickly as he’d kissed her, leaving her lightheaded and lost.

“Oh, yum. You taste like chocolate.” He pressed his face to her neck again, one hand deep in her hair, clenching, releasing, clenching, as if he were trying to get hold of himself. Then pulled back and looked into her eyes. “Baby, try not to think too much, okay? Let’s just enjoy being together for now.”

She returned her attention to the table, but his body was still plastered to the length of hers. “I can’t think like this.”

“Focus, precious.”

Ten

Glancing over the rig again, Rubi was surprised by the addition of knee hinges. “You’ve done some work on it.”

“While I was giving you space,” Wes said, his voice wry. “I guess something positive came out of it.”

A startled type of joy tingled in her chest—he’d taken her advice. She felt strangely…validated. Though hundreds of clients had paid her big bucks just to get her take on a project, the fact that Wes had done it warmed her in a way no paid project ever had.

“So, what do you think of the knee hinges?” she asked.

“They’re good.” He reached around her and worked one of the hinges open, tilting the apparatus so they could look directly into the space. “This one is the spring design, because that’s what I had on hand. But I added electromagnetic mechanisms to the ones at the hip to try them out. It’s a supersimple unit I rigged from a car starter.”

Rubi shook her head, a slow smile growing. “If I said your ingenuity was making me hot, that would be weird, right?”

“Honey, if it makes you hot, and I’m doing it, that’s not weird.”

He could make her smile so easily.

Inside the hinge, the space was small, maybe three inches in diameter, with two rings of metal layered on top of each other, springs hooked to the discs and something small and mechanical at the center.

She recognized the rings as the pivoting pieces. The springs as the leverage. But pointed at the center mechanical device. “What’s this?”

“A motor.”

She glanced sideways and found his cheekbone less than an inch from her lips. “I thought you had it in the back.”

“I did. But I tried out your suggestion and added motors at each hinge to see if that would increase the strength of the pivot. It worked, but not nearly as much as I’d hoped. The physical therapist said the best rig won’t interfere with normal motion, so I’m trying to keep it small. She also said it was important for the rig to keep from causing other physical problems.”

Damn. She was getting all soft again. He’d tried both her suggestions. “Like what?”

“I guess if the rig makes Wyatt use other parts of his body in abnormal ways, he could develop problems with his hips, upper spine, shoulders, even his neck. So she said the rig should be as small and as close to the human form as possible. The back piece”—he pointed to the area that connected the two thigh pieces and settled at the base of the spine—“houses the battery, which has an AC connector for recharging. Before I tried the smaller motors, it also held one larger motor that controlled the hinges remotely.”

She stared at the configuration of the apparatus with a kind of wonder. All the metal was machined to ultrasmooth planes. All the screws and connection plates were recessed. Every plastic cover to the hinges fit perfectly. The damn thing looked like it had been made at a production plant and just pulled from its shipping box.

“Who helped you build this?” she asked.

“No one. Why?”

“Because it’s… Shit, Wes, this is way more sophisticated than I thought. This had to be machined, engineered, built…”

“Troy’s dad has a machine shop and lets me use it in off hours, nights, weekends, that kind of thing. I engineered it. Have to get some use out of that expensive education, right? As far as building it, I kept it as simple as possible. A few screws, a weld here and there. I’m a KISS kind of guy. It’s sort of my life philosophy.”

Wonder…no, awe…flooded her. She turned her head and found his lips right there, less than an inch away. So damn kissable. “Your education? What kind of education?”

“Engineering.”

She leaned sideways, trying to get a better look at him. “You have a degree in engineering? From where?”