"Grant—"
"Sweetheart, we're just getting started."
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
He kissed her again. Slower this time, the desperation of the hallway distilled into something deliberate and ruinous. His mouth moved against hers like he was learning her—the shape of her bottom lip, the hitch in her breathing when his teeth caught it, the way her whole body responded to pressure against the small of her back. His hands slid up her thighs and Emmy’s fingers found the collar of his shirt and pulled him closer and the chair creaked ominously beneath them.
“Up,” he said against her mouth.
Not a request. Emmy’s stomach dropped.
He stood from the chair with his hands under her thighs, lifting her with him, and her legs locked around his waist out of instinct, out of the particular intelligence of a body that had apparently been planning this mutiny for months. Two steps. He set her on the kitchen counter and the cold granite hit the backs of her thighs through her leggings and she gasped, and he stepped between her knees, and the new angle put her face level with his for the first time and she looked straight at Grant,herGrant, and?—
Oh.
His eyes. She’d cataloged those eyes a hundred times across restaurant tables and sidelines and her own living room, had filed them understeady, unreadable, annoyingly composed. They were none of those things now. They were dark and blown and half-wild and focused on her mouth with an intensity that made her feel hunted in the best possible way. His lips were swollen. His breathing was ragged. His hands gripped the counter on either side of her hips, knuckles white, like he was holding himself back from something and the effort was costing him everything he had.
Grant Knight, who never lost composure. Who processed chaos for a living. Who moved through the world like nothing could unbalance him.
Wrecked. Because of her.
Emmy cupped his face in both hands. Traced her thumb across his cheekbone. He turned into the touch—involuntary, eyes closing—and the vulnerability of it, this huge, disciplined man leaning into her palm like she was the only steady thing in the room, cracked something open in her chest that she would never get closed again.
“You’re shaking,” she whispered.
“Yeah.” He didn’t deny it. Didn’t deflect. Just looked up at her with those ruined eyes. “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, Em.”
She kissed him. Slower than the hallway, deeper than the chair, her fingers sliding into his hair, and his hands finally left the counter and found her—ribs, waist, the curve of her hip where his thumb pressed hard enough to bruise. She pulled him closer with her legs and felt him against her, the full hard length of him, and the sound she made was involuntary and desperate and she didn’t care because his mouth had left hers and found her jaw, her throat, the spot below her ear that made her hips roll against him and her fingers tighten in his hair.
“Grant—”
“I know.” His mouth dragged along her collarbone. His hands were under the hem of her cashmere top, palms flat against her bare stomach. “I know.”
He pulled back. Looked at her. His jaw was tight, his chest heaving, and his eyes tracked down her body with the same focused intensity she’d watched him bring to a defensive formation—reading, processing, deciding—except what he was reading now was her, every flushed and trembling inch.
“Lie back,” he said.
Emmy’s brain shorted. “On the?—”
“Lie back, Emmy.”
His voice had dropped into something she’d never heard from him. Low, rough, certain. Not Grant in a press conference. Not Grant on a sideline. Grant stripped down to the thing underneath all of it—the man who ran an offense for a living, who made decisions in fractions of seconds, who knew when to be patient and when to take the shot.
She leaned back on her elbows. The granite was cool through the cashmere. The Christmas lights she’d strung above the kitchen window caught the edges of his face, amber and warm, and she watched him look at her laid out across her own spotless kitchen island—the surface she kept immaculate, the centerpiece of her curated little apartment—and something hot and defiant flared through her.
Good. Let him ruin it. Let him ruin all of it.
Grant’s hands found the waistband of her leggings. His eyes held hers. He didn’t hesitate. His eyes held hers the whole time, steady and sure, and she waited for the self-consciousness to arrive—the instinct to angle her hips, to suck in, to perform. It didn’t come. Grant was looking at her like she was the answer to a question he’d been asking for years, and under that gaze she couldn’t find a single thing to hide. What he did insteadwas pull her leggings down with a deliberateness that bordered on cruel, watching her face the whole time, and the control of it—the patience laid over something barely restrained—made her breath come apart.
He tugged the leggings off one leg, then the other. Her underwear went with them. And then she was bare from the waist down on her own kitchen island on Christmas Eve and the air hit her skin and she should have felt exposed except Grant was looking at her like she’d knocked the breath from his lungs.
“Jesus, Em.” His voice was barely there. “You’re so pretty.”
The words landed somewhere beneath her sternum. Notbeautiful—not the word men used when they were performing. Pretty. Simple and wrecked and honest, like it had fallen out of him before he could dress it up.
His hand settled on her knee, slid up the inside of her thigh, and his thumb traced a slow line along the crease where her thigh met her hip and she jolted like he’d put a current through her.
He leaned down. Bent over her, hands sliding under her thighs, pulling her to the edge of the counter.
