Then his body relaxes. He says nothing, but turns in my arms. His eyes meet mine before I glance down and see his cock go hard, as if matching the intensity of his expression.

His gaze slides over me, and I start to speak, but he shakes his head. Just the slightest movement, but it silences me. Then he pushes me back so that my now-heated skin is pressed against the tile. There is heat in his eyes. Hunger. And in one fast, almost violent movement, he claims my mouth, his hands on the tile on either side of me.

We touch nowhere except our lips, and yet I feel him throughout my entire body. My skin tingles. My cunt throbs. My breasts seem to beg for him to touch me, rough and wild. To take and to claim and to—

He spins me around so that now I am facing the shower stall, and he pulls my hips toward him, holding on to me so that I don’t slip. Again, he says nothing, but he puts my hands on the tile, so that now I am bent forward at the waist, and he is behind me. He strokes his hands over my back, then over my ass, then he urges my legs apart and slides his hand between them. I am completely wet, and desperately aroused. I want him to use me. I want him to fuck me.

And then he is over me, one hand cupping a breast as the other guides his cock to my core. When he’s positioned, he doesn’t hold back, just cups my breasts and slams hard into me again and again, deeper and deeper.

I am on fire, wildly turned on by not only the way he feels pounding inside me, but also by this reality. By coming to him, giving myself to him in both apology and passion, and then knowing that he needs this. That he needs me.

This will be fast, I know, for both of us. I can feel the pressure building inside of him just as it builds inside me. I’m close, so close to the edge as he slams harder and harder into me, and when he finally cries out in release, I join him, my body clenching tight around him, drawing it out so that he clutches my breasts tight and I moan in the complete, decadent, wild pleasure of this moment.

It was fast and brutal and incredibly powerful.

Most of all, it felt right. It felt like an apology and a promise.

He holds me while we catch our breath, his lips brushing the back of my neck. Then he urges me up and under the shower spray. He stands close to me, using a washcloth to clean us both before turning off the water. He grabs a towel from a pile near the stall and dries me, then wraps me in a dry one. He dries himself next, then wraps the towel around his hips.

“Sylvia,” he says. And it is the first word he has said since I arrived.

I close my eyes and draw a breath. “I’m sorry I lashed out at you. I put you on the spot and I punished you for not telling me a secret, and that was horrible of me, especially since I’ve already told you that I understand about secrets. They’re yours, not mine, and I don’t have any right to demand them.”

“You have every right to this one,” he says. “A child affects you, too.”

I draw in a shaky breath. “You didn’t tell me—and, and I guess I thought that meant that I don’t mean to you what I thought I did.”

From his expression, you would think that I’d landed a physical blow. “Oh, sweetheart, no.”

“Then why not tell me?”

He drags his fingers through his wet hair, then leads me back to the lockers. I gather my clothes as we go, and as Jackson opens his locker, then starts to dress, I do the same. “Everything’s happened fast with us, and I’ve only recently made up my mind about Ronnie—to push the action, set a court date, and bring my little girl home.”

I frown, because something about what he says doesn’t make sense to me. But I can’t put my finger on it.

“More than that, though, I think I was afraid to tell you.”

“Afraid?”

“You didn’t sign up to be with a man with a child.”

The words are flat and hard and they weigh heavy on me. “Sign up?” I repeat. “Like we all pick a queue for our lives and our loves and that’s where we go and we never veer out of our line? It doesn’t work that way, Jackson.”

I’m dressed now, and I go to him. He’s in jeans, but he hasn’t buttoned his shirt, and I press my palm against his bare chest, letting his heartbeat resonate through me. “I love the man, Jackson. Architect, lover, father. And I’m not saying that a child won’t change things between us, but we can make it work. I want to make it work.” I meet his eyes, overwhelmed by the tenderness I see looking back at me. “I don’t know a thing about toddlers. But I love you, Jackson. And you love Ronnie. That makes it a no-brainer for me.”

“Oh, baby.” He pulls me close and kisses me, long and lingering and so wonderfully sensual that when he finally breaks it, I have to sit on the wooden bench or else fall to the ground in a puddle.