I listened. The house was completely quiet. The crickets chirping through the open window were all I could hear.

She wasn’t coming back. The breeze did nothing to cool me down. My jeans were open, and my dick was out, hard and dripping pre-cum. I was handcuffed to the fucking headboard. The only person in the house was Alice—Claire was spending the night with one of her friends so all of us could attend the auction—and she was the dead-last person I wanted to come to my rescue.

It was one thing for everyone to learn about how Delilah had snuck through Sawyer’s bedroom window all those years ago, but this? Now? I was thirty-two years old. No one needed to know I gotten hard being restrained.

Hell, I hadn’t known I liked it until Sarah, in little scraps of lace and silk, dangled my cuffs from her finger.

“Fuck!” I growled, this time a hell of a lot softer.

She’d planned this. The seduction? Fake.

No. It hadn’t been fake. She’d been dripping wet. Eager. She’d rolled her hips over my face as I ate her out. She’d come, and hard.

No fucking way she’d faked that.

She’d taken what she wanted, then left behind what she’d intended.

A hard dick and the paper on my chest.

Claire’s not biologically yours.

She wasn’t. I remembered the looks around town when I’d brought her home. The whispers. Of course Huck Manning had knocked someone up. He was never going to amount to anything, especially when he had a child out of wedlock and who knew what had happened with the mother. They wouldn’t have believed the truth. They believed their own truth.

They hadn’t deserved to know what really happened. How I’d saved Claire from being raised by a horrible mother.

Outside of my family, the only person I’d wanted to tell never once looked me up. I’d stupidly hoped she might. It hadn’t mattered that I’d turned my life around, raised a girl I was fucking proud of. I was just the fuckup everyone said.

Years went by. The last person I’d thought to bid on me at the auction was Sarah O’Banyon. When she’d stood up in the crowd, I’d been stunned. Immediately I’d wondered… why? We hadn’t said much after I tugged her out of the packed auditorium and to my truck. All she’d said was, “Take me home.”

And I had.

Only three words and my dick had gone instantly hard. There had been a moment when I’d had clarity, when I’d stopped and told her we had to talk. We had too much unsaid between us, but she’d shut that down. She’d even said, “No talking.”

Yeah, my dick had liked that. And taken over.

Fuck! I should’ve at least tried to think about the why of it all. But no. Sarah had always led me around by my dick, and she’d done it again. I wanted her. Still.

She still wanted me, too. But she wanted something else from me as well.