The sky is a vibrant orange with pastel pink and purple clouds. It is a romance movie sky. A backdrop for two leads to kiss against. But Grace awkwardly nudges the toe of her shoe into the cement, her arms wrapped around herself like a straitjacket, and I rock from my heel to my toes and back again, unsure what to say.
“Sorry I didn’t woo you.”
Grace snaps her head up, forehead wrinkled, and then she bites her lip and smiles. “Sorry I didn’t earn it.”
She doesn’t have to earn it. She deserves it.
“You did.”
“You’re too nice.”
She takes an ambling step closer to me. I’m not sure if it’s on purpose or just a coincidence.
“I’m really not. Maybe normal nice, but not too nice,” I say, rambling.
I don’t want Grace to leave because I’m not sure when I’ll see her again. If she’s going to fix things with Sebastian, then we won’t run into one another on the train. Even then, I don’t want fifteen or twenty minutes with her on our evening commute. I’ve only known her for a few hours, but I know I want more than that.
We’re only a few feet apart now, and when she looks up at me, the sunset is casting her in a golden glow. I can see freckles under her eyes and across her nose that I hadn’t noticed before, and I wonder how much more there is of her to discover.
“Well,” I say, looking away because the thought hurts too much to dwell on. “Best of luck with the upcoming wedding. And, I suppose, congratulations.”
Her face falls, and she takes a half step backward. “I wish things could be different.”
They can be. I want to scream it at her, but this is her decision to make. Grace has to decide what is important to her. Sebastian’s money could change everything for her, but I know she could change everything for me. She just has to make the choice.
I try to press these thoughts into her, send them into her mind telepathically, and I wonder if it isn’t working when her eyebrows flick upwards and her lips part. But then, she nods and begins to turn away, and I realize it couldn’t have worked. Because if it had, if Grace knew what I was thinking, she wouldn’t be leaving. She couldn’t.
Before I can stop myself, I reach out and grab her arm. She jolts in surprise, but I’m pulling her against my chest before she can say anything. She’s walking away because she doesn’t understand her options. She can’t make a choice until she knows what she is deciding between. So, I’m going to show her.
I wrap an arm around her waist the way I did on the roof, and she softens into me, her back arching and head tipping back. I brush my thumb along her cheek and down across her jaw, and she exhales softly, the sound coming out like a sigh. Her green eyes are wide and searching, but she isn’t moving, isn’t pulling away, isn’t doing anything except looking up at me and waiting. So, I curl my hand around the back of her neck and lower my lips to hers.
The moment our lips touch, there is fire. No warm-up, no sparks and flickers, just a blazing heat that rips through my chest and leaves me breathless. Grace drags her fingers up my back and grabs at the material of my shirt, pulling me more tightly against her. It’s everything I imagined it would be.
I let my hands slide down Grace’s sides, smoothing my fingers down the curve of her waist and the flare of her hips. She is warm in my hands, and I want to pull her shirt free from her skirt and toss it on the pavement. I want to slide the pencil skirt down her legs until it is a puddle around her feet. I want to touch her skin and see if her face is the only place she has those adorable freckles.
Grace sighs against my mouth, her fingers sliding up my neck and curling in my hair. She pulls me closer until we are crushed against one another, both hungry for more.
Someone coughs, and we pull apart. My hands are still gripping Grace’s hips, and her fingers are still in my hair, but we look at one another. Her pupils are blown wide, cheeks flushed, lips swollen from kissing. She looks beautiful.
She looks over my shoulder, and I turn to see a middle-aged man with a briefcase eyeing us.
“I think we’re upsetting the general public,” I whisper, turning and pressing my forehead against hers.
She laughs. “I think so.”
I don’t want to let her go. I don’t want to walk away from her. How can I, after that?
She stretches up on to her tiptoes, her body sliding against mine as she twines her arms around my neck and presses her lips to my chin and my nose. My heart is hammering against my chest like it is Morse code typing out every bad thing I want to do to her.
“You said you lived close?” she asks, eyebrow lifting in a question.
I grab her hand and pull her down the street behind me. No time for words.
Chapter 9
Grace
There are too many sensations overwhelming me to focus on whether this is a bad idea or not.
Leon’s hand is warm and wrapped around mine. I can still feel his dark stubble rubbing against my cheeks, his lips sucking on mine, teasing me, and his hands carving lines down my sides. I can feel the way he looked at me in the restaurant—before I told him about my arrangement with Sebastian. He looked at me like I was precious, special, something to be cherished.
It’s not like I’m some wounded woman who has never known love. I’ve had nice boyfriends in the past and a great father figure, but the way Leon looked at me felt different.
It’s the same way he is looking at me now.
He’s a few steps ahead of me, leading me down the street in the direction of his apartment, and I’m almost jogging to keep up. When he turns and looks at me over his shoulder, his blue eyes are stormy. Blue like the night sky rather than the day. His mouth turns up in a smirk, the dimple in his right cheek pressing in, and I feel like I could run a marathon to get to his apartment, high-heeled shoes be damned.
“This is me,” he says, pulling me towards a set of stairs.
The building is brick and dated. Nothing like the all-glass tower I imagined.
“You live here?” I ask.
He unlocks the front door and pushes it open. “No, I’m just excellent at picking locks.”
“I mean, like…you live here all the time?” I roll my eyes and step into the lobby. It’s clean and updated, but nothing exceptionally nice. Mailboxes cover the right wall, stairs are to the left, and an elevator is straight ahead.
“I only have the one apartment,” he says, pressing a hand to my lower back and urging me towards the elevator.
His fingers drum against me while we wait for the painfully slow elevator to make its way back down to the lobby. Anticipation bubbles out of me in the form of an incessant toe tap, and Leon leans down and presses a kiss to my temple before whispering against my skin.
“We could take the stairs, but I might find it difficult to climb stairs and ravish you at the same time.”
His words send a shiver through me, but I try to suppress it, keeping my face unaffected. I lift a shoulder in a shrug.
“It’s a skill few men have mastered.”
He slips his hand from my lower back to my hip, squeezing the soft flesh there. “Is that a challenge?”
The thought of the two of us falling upwards, tangled in one another, is almost enough for me to grab Leon and sprint for the stairs, but just as the thought crosses my mind, the elevator dings and the doors open.
We tumble inside, and thank goodness the lobby is empty because we are on one another before the doors even close. Leon presses a hand into my back, pulling me against his chest, and then walks forward until I’m wedged between his body and the metal wall—not a bad place to be. His lips are surprisingly soft considering the aggressive way his mouth slants across mine. Then, he pulls away.
I claw at his shirt and shake my head without opening my eyes.
“If we want to make it to my apartment, I have to push the button,” he says softly.
I hook a leg behind his knee and run my hand down his chest. “I’m fine here.”
His eyes
narrow for a moment before he shakes his head and reaches over to insert a key card and press a button. “You keep talking like that, and we might not make it to the apartment.”
I laugh, but the realization that I have that kind of control over a man like Leon fills me with a sense of power I’ve never felt before. He wants me.
I tighten my leg around his knee and arch my body into his, but before I can really drive him wild, Leon grips my hips and lifts me into the air.
I yelp in surprise before my body’s instincts kick in and I wrap my legs around his waist and my arms around his neck. In this position we are face-to-face, and we stop and stare at one another for a moment.
Everything about Leon, from the way his dark hair falls forward onto his forehead in a thick wave to the cut of his jawline and square of his jaw, is perfect. He has a small bump in the middle of his nose, but somehow, even that is perfect.
If I’d met him before making my deal with Sebastian, I would have fallen for him. How could I not have? Just like he said on the train, he would have wooed me. He would have asked me out on a date, and I would have eaten from his hand, lapping up every word. Because he is beautiful and thoughtful, and he sees me the way I wish I saw myself.
Leon reaches out and brushes his thumb down my nose and across my lips, pulling on my bottom lip before letting go. “You’re beautiful, Grace.”
I smile and tighten my arms around his neck, pressing our noses together. “I was just thinking the same thing about you.”
The elevator dings, and Leon turns around and walks out without putting me down. I struggle in his arms for only a moment before accepting my fate and laying my head on his shoulder. When I feel a strap against my chin, I follow it down to my laptop bag banging against his leg, his suit jacket thrown over.
“You grabbed my laptop,” I say, realizing I would have left it at the restaurant.
He laughs and shrugs his shoulder, silently asking me to help him take it off. I grab the bag and slide it down his arm, dropping it onto the floor.
“You seemed a little preoccupied, so I grabbed it for you.”
“Only a little,” I say, laying my head back on his shoulder and then scooching forward until my lips press against the warm skin of his neck. He is like a personal space heater, blazing heat through his clothes, and I can’t help but kiss a line up his neck to the sensitive skin behind his ear.
Leon’s grip on my hips tightens, his breathing becoming more ragged. “I was going to take you to the kitchen and make you a cup of tea. Or a cocktail. Or…something to let you know I’m a gentleman, but when you kiss my neck like that…”
I pull back, biting my lower lip. “You don’t need to try and fool me, Leon. You already told me the truth at the wedding.”
“What truth?” he asks, eyes tearing across my face, his hips circling softly against mine.
I lean forward until my lips are pressed against his ear, whispering against his skin. “We both know you’re no gentleman, so why pretend?”
He is already moving towards what I presume is the bedroom when my lips clamp around his earlobe, sucking and teasing. We burst through a door, and in a second I’m laying back on the most comfortable bed I’ve ever felt. Leon is hovering over me, his hands pressed into the mattress on either side of my face.
“I’ve wanted to take you out of these clothes since the moment I saw you,” he growls, finding the zipper on the side of my skirt and sliding it down my thigh.
I gasp when his fingers dip under the waistband. “That would have been quite a show for the other passengers.”
“Yeah,” he laughs. “Maybe the woman with the sketchpad would have been drawing you instead of me.”
“You saw that?” I ask, wrinkling my nose. His ego didn’t need that extra stroke.
He tugs the skirt down, and I lift my hips to help him. “I almost bought it off of her. It was a good likeness.”
I don’t tell him I had the same idea. “Not so good.”
“Oh?” he asks, eyebrows raised as he slides the skirt over my heels, leaving my legs bare. “What were your specific complaints?”
“Well, for one,” I start before my words devolve into breathy gasps. Leon is kissing his way up my leg, his hands cupping my calf and sliding up my thigh. Every nerve ending in my body is firing, and it is all I can do to lay still.
“For one?” he teases, barely holding in a laugh. He knows what he is doing to me.
“For one,” I start again, doing my best to keep my voice from trembling. “She didn’t capture the bulge in your nose.”
His hand leaves my thigh and runs across his face. “I wouldn’t call it a bulge.”
“And second,” I continue. “She made your eyes way too smoldery.”
Leon pauses at my knee, kissing around to the backside and blowing air against the sensitive skin. I hiss and resist the urge to grab his collar and pull him on top of me.
“You don’t think I have a good smolder?”
“Nuh-uh,” I breathe out.
His fingers are inching towards my panties now, and I feel like I’m crawling out of my skin. Then, they stop. I lay there, expectant, for several seconds before finally opening my eyes and looking down at him.
Leon is staring up at me from beneath his dark brows, his blue eyes silver in the darkness. He looks like a picture. Like a perfected, photoshopped picture of the ideal human man.
He runs a hand through his hair, pushing it back from his forehead, and I can’t resist reaching out and tugging my fingers through his thick locks. By the time I realize what I’m doing, it’s too late. Leon is grinning at me, his eyebrows dancing.
“Got ya.”
Normally, I would have made some kind of excuse or offered some flimsy insult to save face, but I don’t have the mental energy. Every thought in my head is focused on one thing—getting Leon Knight on top of me.
I grab the shoulder of his shirt and tug him up, up, up, until he is straddling my hips, and I begin undoing the buttons of his shirt. The material is thick and nice, but I want to shred it from his body with my fingernails. When he sits up to shrug the shirt off, I run my hands down the flat, muscled planes of his chest and stomach. The muscles clench.
“Your hands are cold.”
I don’t pull my hands away. “Then warm them up.”
Leon falls back over me, and we are lost in kisses. Deep, sensual kisses that seem to go on and on until I can’t feel anything except my lips. Until I’m half-certain the rest of my body has sacrificed itself to lend more sensation to my lips. Then, I feel his fingers creeping up my thigh.
He walks his fingers across my skin, making me shiver, and slips them under the waistband of my panties.
Unlike the night of the wedding, these panties are lace. Myla has a firm “no granny panties rule” in her house, which she apparently enforced by replacing the only pair of underwear I’d brought with me with a pack she kindly picked up on her way home from work. Even the pencil skirt was hers since I hadn’t found the courage to get my stuff from Sebastian’s penthouse yet.
Every thought of Sebastian or our strange situation vanishes as Leon swipes his finger across me. I cry out and arch into his touch like an addict desperate for more. More of him, of his touch, of his kisses. I need more. All. Everything.
His lips never flag or relent while he draws moans and shivers out of me one stroke and swirl at a time. It has been a long time since I’ve been with anyone—since before I moved to New York—but I am confident I’ve never been with a man who knew what he was doing the way Leon does. He has a sixth sense for when to speed up or pull back, for when to increase pressure or circle his thumb over my center. He plays me like a trumpet until I’m shaking on the bed, eyes closed, and handfuls of comforter fisted in my hands.
When I finally come down, my chest rising and falling like there is a wild animal trapped inside of my chest, Leon brushes a gentle hand down my cheek and kisses a line from my lips to my chest to my stomach. My stomach muscles
clench when he kisses near my hip, and then he moves back up, licking over the trail of fire he left behind. When he makes his way back to where he started, he pulls back and wags an eyebrow at me.
“How is that for wooing you?”
I can’t think of a single witty thing to say. “Consider me sufficiently wooed.”
“Sufficiently?” he asks, eyes wide. “As in, you’re done?”
My arms and legs feel like jelly, but I press my palms into Leon’s chest and push until he rolls over and falls on the bed next to me. I hook my leg over until I’m straddling his hips and begin slowly unbuttoning his suit pants.
His lips part, his breathing growing heavy, and he watches me the way a predator watches their dinner, studying and remembering every movement and detail. I crawl backward off the bed and pull his pants down the way he removed my skirt, sliding his shoes off. I reach down to take off my own shoes, but Leon sits up and grabs my hand.
“Leave them on.”
“Is that an order?” I ask, placing a hand on my hip.
Leon devours me with his eyes, spending a considerable amount of time examining my matching black panty set—Myla will be so proud to know her purchase paid off.
“Not an order. Just a desperate plea.”
The bulge in his boxer briefs is considerable, and I slowly climb back onto the bed and settle on his lap, circling myself down onto him. Leon grabs my hips. He doesn’t try to orchestrate my movements or tell me what to do. He simply clings on, his eyes glued to the point where our bodies are touching.
“I wanted to do this that night on the roof.” His voice is hoarse. He slips his hands up my spine and undoes the clasp of my bra with one flick of his fingers.
I slip the straps from my arms. “Me too.”
When he looks into my eyes, nostrils flares, lips parted, I know there is no going back. And I don’t want to.
Leon grabs my waist, lifts me off of him, and drops me back on the mattress. He is up, out of his boxers, and grabbing something from his nightstand before I realize he is gone. Then, I hear the metallic rip and realize this is really happening. Really really happening.
Scandalous Box Set Page 45
