Page 99 of When We Had Forever
Nothing about Grayson reminds me of the man I spent fourteen years with. Only of the kind of openhearted man IwishMichael had been. The one I thought I saw, but who went into hiding before I could be sure.
Grayson’s fingers inch upward, catching at my socks and tugging them off. He tosses the pile aside, then pulls my other foot into his lap and frees that one, too.
“You just took nine things off me.” I sound breathy, my protest about as powerful as ten-second-old tea. “Who’s playing dirty now?”
“I’m just leveling the playing field.”
“You’re cheating. At least give me one thing in exchange.”
“Fine.” His eyes glimmer. “Boxers or shirt?”
Boxers or shirt. My mouth goes as dry as the Sahara. I can barely get my answer out. “Shirt.”
A half smile digs into his cheek. He pushes my legs apart, then rises onto his knees and pulls his shirt over his head.
It’s like one of those art-gallery scenes in movies. The ones where someone whips a drape off a masterpiece and earns a gasp from the entire crowd.
Grayson Drake is so beautiful it makes my eyes water. There’s a sort of...ruthlessness to him, too, his muscles so crisply defined that the firelight etches shadowed lines across his skin.
He must run like a demon to look like that, I think. I can see it in my mind’s eye—him pushing himself to the point of punishment, sprinting after something he’ll never actually catch. Something that escaped him a long time ago.
He drops onto his hands and knees and stalks toward me. The symphonic grace of all those ridges and angles shifting in concert steals my ability to think.
He flings the game board aside. I don’t look to see where it ends up. There’s just a clatter of plastic and paper, and then he’s prowling through the buffer zone between us like it doesn’t exist.
I barely have the wherewithal to scan the tattoo inked over his heart before he reaches me. One arm wraps tight, lowering me to the floor beneath him.
I gasp. I’m falling, falling and falling and he’s there with me and then I’m flat on my back with my legs hitched up around his waist while his lips dive down to fasten against my neck again and I can’t breathe, I can’t see, I can’t do anything but keep on falling, straight through the floor, all the while wondering if I’ll ever stop. Grayson’s hand twines in my hair until my scalp pulls tight, and when I grind my hips upward in entreaty, he groans, a hot exhale against my ear.
“Grayson...” My hands trail up his bare sides, encountering one rippled ridge after another.
He suckles at my throat until I rasp out a moan, then raises his head to look at me. His pupils are shot wide, little pools of infinity beneath a scar that gleams silver.
“Mina.” He makes my name into a roughened, delicious offering. “I could spend all night listening to you say my name like that. Do it again.”
“Grayson.”
“Mmm. Again.”
“Grayson. Gray—Oh.”
Between our bodies, his fingers hitch into my waistband. Wordless, I raise my bottom and shimmy free. He tosses my pants away somewhere near the game board.
That done, he pulls my shirt up over my head. I help him with that, too, and then I’m lying there, pinned, protected by nothing but a few scraps of black lace and the red-hot glow igniting in the thousand different places my skin presses against his. I’m aching, fluttering, drunk with the feel of him firm and flush against me.
“Do I get a question now, too?” I manage to whisper. “Since I won?”
“Of course.” He stares down like he’s falling into me. “Anything.”
“Your tattoo... What language is that?”
The hand in my hair ravels tighter. “Arabic.”
I cling to my last remaining sliver of sanity. “Oh. You got a tattoo in Egypt?”
“No, Tunisia.”
I scan the foreign characters emblazoned over his heart. Whatever they spell, it’s short, a single word at most. “What does it say?”
