Three hours later, Rosie pulled our cart over in Aisle 11B of Home Depot, ran her fingertips over a sawhorse made of two-by-fours, and said, “This is nice.”

Awwww, fuck. “Listen,” I told her, pretending to be pissed, but not really pretending either. I loved what she did to me, loved how she talked and how she acted. But there were things she didn’t quite get. Like painfully intense hard-ons that made me want to fuck her in public without even getting my pants down all the way. Being a woman, I was pretty sure she couldn’t fucking comprehend the need. “I come here all the time. I can’t be walking around rock hard, you hear me?”

She straightened her shoulders, and her eyes moved over the stuff in the cart. She took a packet of 400 grit sandpaper and propped it in front of the leg holes where a kid would sit, but which was also totally giving away the size and intensity of the bulge in my pants. “There, see?” She turned around, bending down in the most crazy-making way. “You think we could make this…taller?” She pouted and lifted her ass in the air by coming up on her tiptoes, pure old-school pinup. “Because that would be much more convenient for…”

I grabbed a second package of sandpaper and shielded the other leg hole, to keep the goods covered. “You. Paint. Now.”

She play-huffed and ran her tongue along her teeth. “I like making you crazy, Max. I really, really do.” She swaggered on down Aisle 11B as my raging hard-on and I followed.

We didn’t even get one aisle farther, though. Instead, she took a detour to a nearby end cap and plucked a pack of extra-large zip ties off a hook. “Oooh.”

That was my limit. Goddamned Fifty Shades of Grey, for Christ’s sake. I was all for kink, but not at the expense of safety. “I’ll buy you some soft cuffs,” I told her as I snagged them from her fingers and put them back on the shelf. “Zip ties are dangerous. Believe me, I know.” I pushed the cart along, and she trotted to keep up.

“Wait,” she said, giving me a little shove before looping her arm in mine. “How do you

know? Who do you know with?”

I snorted. I couldn’t fucking help it. “Who do you know with? We playing Mad Libs now?”

A red flush crept up her chest to her neck, and she grabbed hold of the cart, her small and polished hands totally the opposite of mine, yin and yang. She elbowed me and tried to bring the cart to a stop. She huffed again. “I get turned on, and my words get jumbled,” she said, smiling hard. “But seriously! How do you know?”

There was no way in hell I was gonna talk about some other woman with her, because not a single one of them held a fucking damp sparkler to the blazing brilliance that was Rosie. “Internet.”

She glared and smacked her lips. “That’s annoyingly vague.” She curled a finger in the air, a come-hither move that made my balls ache. “Details, handsome. I want details.”

“Paint…” I told her, forging ahead, past fixtures and fasteners.

But this time, I was the one who got distracted. On the next end cap were garbage disposals. The inspector hadn’t written that down, but I’d been in the house renovation business long enough to know that it was one of those details that could seal the deal. Might even make someone overlook a damp basement. The noise of a perfectly working garbage disposal was real-estate magic. I picked a solid choice, top of the line, no froufrou bells and whistles, and put it in the cart. Two shelves down, I spotted something that was right up her alley. I picked up a female and male piece of PVC pipe. “Take a look at this.”

That was when I realized she wasn’t with me. I turned around and saw her fussing with something, with her back to me, a few aisles back.

I made a U and damn near knocked over an old lady buying a new toilet seat, but with a few long strides, I was back with Rosie. “You okay?”

Her eyes were wide and nervous. “Ummmm…”

I looked down at her wrists. Somehow, she’d managed to work one zip tie around one wrist and looped the other around it, to bind herself into cuffs.

“Holy shit.” I inspected her wrists to try to see how much room she had. Answer? None. “Christ. I told you. Soft cuffs. Leopard print, whatever you want.”

“I don’t want soft cuffs,” she said, flexing her fingers. “But I think I might be in over my head.”

She most definitely was, and I found it super fucking sexy. Totally goddamned inappropriate, but I couldn’t help my thoughts from rushing toward all sorts of inappropriate things, shit we could only get away with if we stayed in here until after closing. What a fucking time we’d have. I’d take her on every washer-dryer set they sold—high-efficiency, low-profile, everything.

Not now, man. Not fucking now. There’s a time and a place for everything, and this wasn’t it. I wrapped my hands around the zip ties, the bindings digging into my palms. “You’re a piece of work, you know that?”

“My pinkie is going numb,” she said with a little giggle. “But it’s still pretty sexy, right?” She wiggled her fingers and made little fists, then gave the ties a tug by rotating her forearms a half inch. As she did, the ties tightened under my hand, and I had to suppress a groan.

This was a side of her I didn’t know—daring, naughty, the secret sex kitten that had been right under my nose all these fucking years, the girl who’d try out a little bondage at eleven a.m. on a Sunday in Home Goddamned Depot—and I absolutely fucking dug it. But secret sex kitten or not, we had to do something about those zip ties. This was going to go one of two ways: I was either going to have to free her, or fuck her. So I put my arm around her and made her put her cuffed wrists behind the sandpaper barrier in the cart. I guided her back toward the main aisle that linked all the others. A guy with his cart full of petunias that shook as he walked along gave Rosie the old up-and-down. Ass.

“Oh my God, these plumbing parts have genders!” Ties be damned, she snatched up the male pipe and the female elbow and laughed in this sultry way, with her tongue pressed to the roof of her mouth. “How dirrrrrrty!”

“Thought you’d like that,” I told her and took a right into Tools.

* * *

The weirdest thing about Home Depot was that sometimes, there was nobody. I’d been there on days when I couldn’t find a guy to help me in lumber if I sold a kidney on the black market to pay for it. I’d been in there on days when the Patriots could’ve practiced in the aisles and never collided with another living soul. But sometimes, it was like a fucking Fourth of July parade. Like today.

Tools and Fasteners looked like a commercial—all sorts of employees in orange aprons were doing demos for customers. Couples considered things like power drills. A big guy who looked like Santa used a Dremel on a screw poking out of a two-by-four, while an equally big guy, who looked like Johnny Cash, lifted his palms to say what else you got? A lady with big hair and yellow clogs demo’d a vacuum for a family, sucking up packing peanuts from a plastic cylinder the size of a fifty-gallon drum. A few kids were playing right by the pliers, rolling a beach ball back and forth. A little girl dropped her juice box, and her mom grabbed a pack of shop towels to dry it up.

There I was in the middle of the commercial with a woman who’d cuffed herself for me and whose very presence was turning me into an unthinking animal.

Next to me, Rosie whispered, “What’s our escape strategy?”

To take you into the unisex bathroom and fuck you until the supports come off the walls. No. Wait. I looked down at her hands. The grooves were deep and red, and though I didn’t like the idea of her hurting, I did, sorta. A little. “I can’t believe you did that, you vixen.”

She snorted. “Teach me about screws and nuts, boss. The bigger, the better.”

I’ll show you screws. And I’ll show you nuts. Awww, fuck. I shifted my thighs a little because my erection was pushing against my zipper. Keeping my body positioned away from the throngs of people, I glanced side to side and took her cuffed hands in mine. Her smile was so fucking contagious that pretty soon we were standing there having a totally wordless conversation next to the hammers. Because I wanted her. Fuck yes, I wanted her. “I want you cuffed, I want you free, I want you every single goddamned way,” I said near her ear as I chose a small pair of pliers with a blunted end instead of a sharpened one. I wanted to hurt her, but there was only one tool I’d ever use to do it.

Rosie swallowed hard. “What are you going to do about it?”

I studied her and edged her up against the display racks, and she tugged on my belt loops with her fingers. A lock of her hair got caught on the claw end of a hammer, and I pulled it free. “You’ve got no fucking idea how sexy you are.”

She slid her lips together. “Neither do you,” she added as she pressed back into my thighs with her hips.

Fuck.

Fuck.

Knowing I wouldn’t have to wait much longer, I forced myself to step away, pliers in hand. “Come with me,” I told her and headed for the empty back corner of the store.