Page 59 of The Grump I Married
I pulled back, catching him in the chest with my hand. “Weston.”
“Don’t use that tone on me, woman,” he growled playfully, nuzzling the stubble along his jaw against my cheek. “I’m the boss, and I’m giving you permission to faff about for the rest of the afternoon.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “This faffing specifically relates to you?”
“In this bed,” he agreed. “Exactly.” He stroked a lock of hair from my cheek. “The office won’t implode after a few hours without us.”
“It might, in fact,” I argued. “I don’t know if you remember that you’re the CEO of a global energy company?”
He nipped at my skin. “And as CEO, I am conducting very important field research for our next project,” he said, slowly tugging the sheets down my naked body.
My head said to stop, to beresponsible, but everything else inside me screamed for his touch, and a wave of goosebumps trailed down my arms and across my stomach. Anticipation had never tasted so sweet. “I don’t think you put in a proposal for this field research.”
“I’m doing it as we speak,” he said, tugging the sheets down farther, exposing my breasts. “And I propose that instead of studying boring legal jargon, we should spend today studying more of each other.”
“Is that so?”
“Mm-hmm,” he mumbled.
I brushed my hand down the side of his face and over his shoulder, catching on a knot just behind his shoulder blade. It was a thick, knobby scar. I frowned. “What happened here?”
“Scraped it badly falling out of a tree.” He smiled even as he said it. “Lachlan, Alistair, and I got it into our heads to build a fort one summer in one of Grandad’s giant yew trees. I was climbing down for supplies when I lost my footing. Skidded all the way down the damn trunk and caught my shoulder on a particularlynasty branch. Thought the stick was going to go all the way through.”
I winced. “Ouch.”
He shrugged. “Felt a little like I’d been stabbed.”
“The way you say that so casually has me concerned.”
Laughter escaped him. “I think what I was most pissed about was the fact I was in a sling for the rest of the summer. But at least the scar made for a good story.”
His hand brushed down my abdomen. His thumb trailed along a thin raised line, the horizontal scar running along my bikini area. “I must have missed this before,” he said. “I was a little too occupied withotherthings.”
I forced a smile.
“Is there a story here?” he asked, letting his fingers drift along the scar over and over again. My heartbeat sped up with every pass.
“Umm…it’s from high school,” I said, trying to fend off the heaviness of the memory. “I was in a car accident with my boyfriend at the time.”
“A bad one?” he asked, his eyes narrowing.
I nodded, running my hand through the fine hairs at the nape of his neck. “I don’t actually remember much of the accident itself.” It was all a blur of noise that never really resolved into anything that made sense, no matter how many times I played it over in my head. My first clear memory after all of that was of waking up in the hospital, with my sobbing parents beside my bed. “I was in recovery for weeks after it happened. I even missed graduation.”
“That sounds…” Weston grimaced. “Quite miserable actually.”
“It was. While I was in the hospital, all anyone could talk about was the physical recovery, but no one said anything about the toll it would take on my relationships.”
“You mean with your friends?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, some. After the initial well wishes and visits, a lot of the other people I considered friends sort of fell off. They all had big plans for the summer before college—trips and parties and all of that. There wasn’t any room in their plans for the girl who was recovering from major surgery, and I guess it was just easier to stay away.”
“So you were dealing with that all on your own?” he asked, his voice soft.
“Not really. I had Tess—she always showed up for me. And my parents were there…but things with them were tricky in other ways.”
“I’m sure they were shocked to hear you were in an accident,” Weston said, running his thumb across my cheek. “They were probably terrified.”
“Oh, they were,” I agreed. “I still remember the first day Tess showed up to take me out shopping. I thought my mom was going to leap out of her skin. They didn’t want me in a car with anyone but them.”
