Playing with Dynamite by Leanne Banks

commitment,” she said, exasperation leaking into her tone. “The whole situation would have driven you crazy.”
    â€œMaybe,” he conceded. “Maybe not. I wish you had asked. I would have liked to meet your family.”
    Brick felt her stare at him.
    â€œAre you saying you would have gone?”
    â€œI don’t know,” he said carefully. “I would have made the effort if I thought it was something you’d wanted. Weddings are about family too.”
    Lisa shook her head and folded her arms. “I don’t believe you.”
    Brick felt a jab of temper as they neared the construction site. “But you don’t know, do you? Because you never asked me.”
    â€œYou wanted everything nice and easy. No strings.”
    â€œI did,” he confessed, and pulled the car to a stop. When he saw that she wasn’t going to look at him, he tucked his thumb under her chin and coerced her into meeting his gaze. “But tell me one time I wasn’t interested in you. As a friend, as a businesswoman, as a lover. Hell, as a woman who backs her car into something new on a weekly basis. Name one time.”
    Her eyes were wide with trepidation. He wanted them wide with wonder. He wanted to kiss her, to match her mouth to his and cut this silliness between them.
    Guided by an innate awareness of her sensuality, he did the next best thing to a kiss and rubbed his thumb across her lips. Back and forth, back and forth, until he gently pressed his finger into her mouth. She instinctively pursed her lips around it, and his loins tightened.
    He slowly removed his thumb and lifted it to his lips. “You can’t name a time, because there’s never been one,” he whispered hoarsely. “In a minute, we’re getting out of this car, and I can’t think about you anymore. I can’t think about how much I want to hold you. I can’t think about how I’d like to kiss you for the next hour and not come up for air. I can’t think about how you feel underneath that T-shirt and those jeans, and how much I’ve missed touching you, or I could screw up this job.”
    Staring into her turbulent aroused eyes, he took a deep breath and grabbed the hard hats on the dash. “Here’s your hat. I’ll introduce you to the super, and then I want you to watch it all. I want you to notice what the foundation looks like before and what it looks like after. And after it’s all over, we’ll talk.”
    Wrapping his hand around hers, he tugged her out of the car and toward the site. Lisa automatically followed where he led, but her head was spinning. She didn’t know what to think or say. At the moment, she could only feel. Her lips still burned from his touch and her heart was beating so hard, it felt as if it were clanging in her chest. God help her, she didn’t think she’d ever recover from hearing Brick say those things.
    For the first time, Lisa wondered if this meant that no matter what she’d said about breaking off their relationship, Brick wasn’t going anywhere. Her stomach twisted at the notion. She fought a wild elation at the same time she told herself that it didn’t matter. She and Brick were miles apart when it came to the future.
    Somehow she responded to the superintendent’s greeting, but her mind was still on Brick. What he’d said wouldn’t go away. It was the kind of declaration she’d dreamed of. The only words missing had been “I love you,” and “Will you marry me?”
    Lisa bit her lip as a cold, hard dose of reality hit, because she knew she wasn’t likely to ever hear those crucial missing words.
    Two trucks pulled into the gravel parking lot, and the drivers immediately called for Brick. An instinct for emotional survival kicked in and made her deliberately stop thinking about what Brick had said. Instead she took stock of her surroundings. At this time in the morning,