Too Wild for Me: Chapter Three - The Fire
Chapter 3
Kelsey
The Fire
I last about eight hours.
Eight hours of replaying that workshop kiss in my head. Eight hours of feeling his mouth on mine when it isn’t, his hands on my body when they’re nowhere near me. Eight hours of doing everything except what I really want, which is to march back there and demand he finish what he started.
I scrub tables at the café where I pick up shifts, pretend the streaks left behind by the cloth matter more than the way my chest tightens whenever someone walks in who is not him. I flirt with a tourist who tips too much and winks too often. I laugh at a bad joke. I hand out the wild-girl performance like free samples.
None of it lands.
Because the only moment that feels real is me backed against that workbench with Cade Lawson’s mouth on mine and his hand under my shirt like he had every right to be there.
And then him pulling away. Calling it a mistake.
My jaw aches from clenching it and my palms itch. My body is restless in a way caffeine and sunshine can’t touch. By the time my shift ends, I’m strung so tight I feel like a live wire in a room full of kindling. Ugh!
I should go home. Take a shower. Put on pajamas and pretend I know how to be still.
Instead, I turn toward the lumber yard.
The sun’s lower now, painting everything in that golden light that makes even the ugly parts of town look romantic. The front gate is still open, trucks lined up, stacks of boards throwing long shadows across the packed dirt. The buzz and clatter from earlier is gone, replaced by quiet. Closing time.
Perfect.
I find him in the back lot, near the workshop, rolling down one of the bay doors. He’s wearing a dark T-shirt streaked with dust, jeans hanging low on his hips, and scuffed boots. His hair is a little mussed, like he’s dragged his hand through it a few too many times.
He looks tired. He looks good. He looks like trouble.
“You got a minute?” I call over.
He glances over, hand still on the door chain. His eyes move from my face to the sundress I changed into before leaving the café, then back up again. No wolf-whistle, no lingering stare, just one contained sweep that somehow still lights up my skin.
“Thought you’d be out at the bars by now,” he says.
“I’m full of surprises.”
He lets go of the chain. The door clanks to a stop halfway down. “What do you need, Kelsey?”
The way he says my name should be illegal. Low. Clean. Like he is trying extremely hard not to give it too much weight.
“You,” I say, because subtlety has never been my strong suit and I am too tired to pretend otherwise. “I need to talk. And maybe…” My gaze drags to his mouth. “Other things.”
His jaw tightens, that little tell I’m starting to collect. “Talking,” he repeats. “Right.”
I stalk closer, sandals crunching over gravel. My heart is hammering, but my chin is up. “You kissed me like you wanted it…me, then acted like I tripped and fell onto your face. I’m not letting you pretend it was nothing.”
His eyes hold mine, steady. “I didn’t say it was nothing.”
“You called it a mistake.”
“I said I shouldn’t have done it.”
“Same thing.”
“It isn’t.” I huff.
The words hang between us. Heavy and true. He looks away first, toward the bay, like the half-swept sawdust and neat rows of tools might have better answers.
I step into his line of sight, refusing to be ignored. “You want me or not, Lawson?”
His fingers flex by his sides. Good. Got him.
“That’s not the question,” he says.
“It is the question.”
“The question is whether I should.”
“There you go again,” I snap. “Acting like you’re one foot in the retirement home. You’re thirty-eight, not ninety. I’m twenty-seven, far from being a child.”
His mouth twitches. “Pretty sure you told me to stop acting ancient.”
“Because you are. In your head.” I shove a hand against his chest, not hard enough to move him, just hard enough to feel the solid muscle under my palm. The contact sends a jolt through me. It annoys me that he must feel it too. “You can’t just light me up like that and then hide behind your birth certificate.”
Something shifts in his eyes. A flicker of heat pushing through the calm.
I press in. “You think I don’t know what I’m doing? You think I haven’t had my share of bad decisions already? Newsflash, Lawson. I have. You don’t qualify.”
He exhales slowly, like he’s counting to ten.
I don’t give him time to reach it.
I rock up on my toes and kiss him.
It’s not neat. It’s not cautious. It’s everything I’ve been holding back all day, poured into the press of my mouth against his. For one wild second, I wonder if he’ll push me away.
He doesn’t.
His hand snaps to my hip, fingers tightening, and he hauls me closer like he’s been waiting for an excuse. The other curls around the back of my neck, angling my head just where he wants it. His mouth slants over mine, heat and control and frustration all tangled together.
There he is.
I sigh into him, the sound swallowed by the way he deepens the kiss. My hands slide up his chest, over the faint roughness of sawdust clinging to the cotton, then around his neck. I feel his pulse jump under my palm.
He tries to keep it measured. I can feel the effort in the way he holds his body, in the control of his grip. It only lasts a few beats.
Then he loses his patience.
His lips part, and the kiss turns hot, hungry. He takes my bottom lip between his, teeth scraping lightly, and a sound I barely recognize rips out of me. My back meets the frame of the bay door, cool metal shocking against heated skin where the strap of my dress has slipped.
“Cade,” I breathe, half plea, half curse.
His mouth skims down my jaw to the curve of my throat. “You have no idea what you’re doing to me,” he says against my skin, voice rough.
“I think I do.”
He huffs out a laugh that feels like it’s been dragged from somewhere deep. “You’re playing with fire.”
“You already told me I’d get burned,” I remind him, fingers digging into his shoulders. “Then let me.”
He lifts his head, eyes locking onto mine. For a moment, the world narrows to that look. The workshop, the yard, the town, all of it falls away.
“You want this,” he says. Not a question.
“Yes.”
“You’re sure.”
“God, yes.”
Something in him settles. Not the calm he wears like armor but something heavier. It looks like acceptance.
“Then we’re not doing this half in a doorway,” he says.
Before I can answer, he reaches up, grabs the chain, and drags the bay door the rest of the way down. It rumbles shut behind me, sealing us into the dim, warm space that still smells like cut wood and the day’s work.
My heartbeat is in my ears now.
He turns back, closer in the half-light, all broad lines and steady intent. “Last chance to change your mind, Kels.”
I lift my chin. “Not changing it.”
One corner of his mouth curves. “Good.”
He backs me toward the workbench again, slower this time, our mouths brushing in between steps, each kiss a little more deliberate than the last. His hands trace the line of my sides, memorizing. When I bump into the edge of the bench, he pauses.
“Up,” he says.
Heat shoots through me at the command in his tone.
I push up onto the bench, the wood solid under my thighs. He steps between my knees, palms gliding over my legs, skimming the hem of my dress. His touch is firm. Confident. Not fumbling or unsure. A man who has definitely done this before and intends to do it again.
I swallow, suddenly aware of every place our bodies touch. “You always this bossy?”
“You haven’t seen me bossy yet,” he murmurs.
My breath catches.
His fingers find the straps of my dress, sliding them off my shoulders one by one. He doesn’t yank. He doesn’t rush. He just bares me inch by inch, eyes never leaving my face, watching every tiny reaction.
The power of that almost knocks me flat and I close my eyes.
“Open. Eyes on me,” he says quietly, thumbs brushing my skin. “If you want me to stop, you say it.”
“I won’t.”
“Then let me take care of you.”
The way he says it makes my stomach flip.
His hands move with steady intention, mapping me like he’s learning a terrain he plans to travel again. Every pass of his fingers leaves behind little trails of heat. Every drag of his mouth over mine, over my throat, over the newly exposed skin, pulls another sound from my chest.
He murmurs things against my skin between kisses. Low, sinful things that make my cheeks burn and my pulse trip.
“Been thinking about this all damn day.”
“Look at you. All that wild for everyone else, and this for me.”
“Tell me what you like. I want every bit of it.”
I try to cover my reaction with jokes. It’s what I do.
“Careful, Lawson,” I pant. “Talk like that and I’ll think you actually like me.”
His gaze cuts up, pinning me. “I do like you. That’s the problem.”
The words land in my chest like a flare.
My fingers curl in the back of his shirt. I drag him closer, refusing to think about what happens if I let myself believe him. “Then show me.”
He does.
He takes his time, which is somehow worse than if he’d rushed. His hands are practiced, reading my body like he’s following a manual no one else bothered to open. He listens to every shift in my breath, every arch, every choked-off sound, and adjusts until I am nothing but sensation.
There is no crowd here. No audience. No one to see me but him.
And he sees everything.
His hand slides under my skirt like he’s been waiting for this exact second, fingers dragging against the inside of my thigh before they find the edge of my panties. He slides them aside with a slow, deliberate motion that steals the breath from my lungs.
I gasp when his fingertips touch bare skin and slick heat, before he presses in with a pressure that makes my knees shake for half a second.
“You feel that?” he asks, voice low and rough, his mouth brushing my cheek as two thick fingers pump inside me in a steady motion.
My body tries to twist away from the intensity out of instinct, but he catches my hip and pulls me right back against him, holding me exactly where he wants me.
“Yes.” The word breaks out of me, strangled, helpless, nothing like the bravado I walked in with.
His thumb finds my clit, slow and sure. “Good girl.”
My entire body lights up at that. Embarrassing. Unfair. I tighten my legs around him like that will somehow hide my reaction.
“Thought you liked being the wild one,” he says, lips brushing my ear. “What happened to the girl who could drink everyone under the table and laugh it off?”
“She’s busy,” I manage. “Check back later.”
His chuckle rumbles through me. “No. She’s right here. She just doesn’t have to work so hard with me.”
The tenderness under the heat scrapes something open. My chest feels tight. Unfamiliar.
“Don’t… analyze me while you’re doing that,” I mutter, shivering when his mouth finds a particularly sensitive spot along my neck.
“I’m not analyzing,” he says. “I’m paying attention.”
“Same thing.”
His hands slow, one palm settling warm and broad over my ribs. He leans back just enough to see my face. I want to look away. I can’t.
“You don’t have to play wild for me, Kelsey,” he says quietly. “I already see you.”
The words slice right through the last of my defenses. No one talks to me like that. Guys tell me I’m fun, hot, crazy in bed, all surface. No one says they see me like it’s a good thing.
“Careful,” I joke weakly. “You keep talking like that, I might think you’re a good man.”
He huffs softly. “Too late.”
I search his face, trying to find the trap. “You really think you see me?”
“I know I do.”
“What if you don’t like what’s under all this?” I ask, gesturing vaguely to my own body, my dress, the invisible costume I wear around everyone else.
His gaze doesn’t waver. “I liked you when you were laughing too loud at the fire. I liked you when you were shaking and trying to pretend you weren’t. I like you now.” A beat. “There isn’t a version I’m not interested in.”
The air feels too thin.
Vulnerability claws at my throat, and my instinct is to smother it with flirtation. To turn this back into a joke. Into heat without weight.
“Big talk for a guy who called this a mistake,” I say.
His jaw tightens. “The mistake is me thinking I could stay away from you,” he admits. “Not this.”
The floor inside me gives way a little.
Before I can say something stupid, he cuts off my reply with another kiss. This one is slower. Deeper. Less about control and more about connection.
My hands slide under his shirt, fingers skating over warm skin and hard muscle. He shivers, just once, and the victory that surges through me is almost enough to drown out the nerves.
Almost.
Come back tomorrow for chapter Four
Copyright © by LS Phoenix
No portion of this story may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
Published by LS Phoenix
New Hampshire, USA
https://linktr.ee/authorlsphoenix
First Edition: November 2025
Cover Design by LS Phoenix
