Sin With Me

46

I exhale slowly, smothering the violent urge to flip her onto her back and show her just how much of a ba-ba I need. “You’re lucky I’m trying to be your friend right now, Slick. That’s all I’m gonna say.”

“My ‘friend’? That sounds ominous.”

When I don’t answer, she muses, “I’ve never had a male friend.”

“Exactly.”

“I didn’t mean it as a good thing.”

“Well, it is.” She props herself up on her elbow and looks down at me. “Is this your way of telling me you don’t want to have s*x with me?”

“I want to have s*x with you more than I want to survive to see another day. More than I want Ben Affleck to stop making superhero movies. More than I want flying cars to be a real thing. That’s not the point.”

Her forehead wrinkles. “What is the point?”

My d**k is throbbing so hard I actually don’t know what the point is. I have to use all my willpower to focus and try to get some blood back up into my brain. “I think the point is that . . .”

She waits, her brows lifted.

“The point is that I already told you the point. I don’t want to f**k you—yet. I mean, I do, desperately, but I won’t.”

Her brows return to their normal position. “Hmm.”

“Okay, that sounded ominous.”

“I’m trying to decide if that’s romantic or just dumb.”

“Gee, thanks.”

She lays her head on my chest again and snuggles up against me.

Then she starts to toy with the hem of my T-shirt.

It seems absentminded, the way her fingers accidentally skim my bare skin just above the waistband of my sweatpants, but this is Grace Stanton we’re dealing with here. Nothing she does is by chance.

When she draws a series of slow circles around my belly button, I warn gruffly, “Grace.”

“I know,” she whispers. “I felt that, too. Do you think he’ll chew a hole clean through your sweats?”

“I can’t believe we’re talking about my c**k like he’s an inmate about to make a prison break.”

She slides her thumb under the elastic of my sweats, and my d**k bucks like a rodeo bull right before the bell sounds and the gate flies open.

I feel her smile on my chest. “It’s a good analogy, though.”

She presses a kiss to the side of my neck, just under my ear. A bolt of lust surges through me, so strong it steals my breath.

Grace says, “Whoa. Even I felt that.”

I wrap my hand carefully around her wrist. My voice comes out raw. “It would be probably the most selfish thing I could do to f**k you right now. I’d feel like a total asshole after. We’re not going there.”

The tone of my voice or my hand restraining her from moving does something to her, because a little tremor runs through her body and her breathing goes all ragged.

She whispers, “What if I told you it’s exactly what I need, though?”

Something in her voice brings back Chloe’s words like cold water splashed on my face. Grace isn’t the girl who wants the roses and the love poems and the happily-ever-after. She told me that the day Abby was born, the same time she told me Grace’s parents had been killed in an accident.

But now I have another piece of the puzzle, because I know the reason why Grace doesn’t want the happily-ever-after, why she’s chosen to live every day as if it’s her last.

She doesn’t think she’ll remember any of it.

And she doesn’t want to hurt anyone her memories might leave behind.

I roll her onto her back, take both her wrists in my hands, and press them into the pillow so she can’t randomly fondle me and weaken my resolve. We’re chest-to-chest, nose-to-nose, crotch-to-crotch, staring into each other’s eyes, breathing each other’s breath.

If there’s anything more perfect in this world, I’ve never found it.

“I don’t want this to be like anything else either one of us has had,” I say. “I don’t want it to be casual. I don’t want it to be only about the s*x. I don’t want to jump into a physical relationship before we get to know each other. I want it to be special, because it is special. I’ve never . . . with you I feel this weird . . . there’s a connection. I don’t know why, there just is. And I don’t want to f**k it up.

“I meant what I said outside. Whatever this is between us, it’s real, Grace. It’s f*****g real, and I’m gonna respect it by giving it a little room to breathe and grow before I go sticking my d**k in it.”

Grace’s eyes are wide and unblinking. I can’t tell if she’s horrified, surprised, or about to bolt from the room and never look back.

She says flatly, “Oh. My. God. You’re totally in love with me.”

It’s only after the mischievous smile flits over her face—there then instantly gone—that I realize she’s messing with me.

Naturally I can’t let that stand.

With a straight face I answer, “How could I be in love with you? You’re probably the most hideous woman alive.”

Her lips twitch. She’s trying not to laugh.

“It’s not funny, Grace. You’re revolting. I don’t know how you don’t get arrested for public indecency when you leave the house. It’s like you fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.”