“Hi,” Layla said, and he straightened up, turned to face her—the warm, smiling aliveness of her, something pleased and sheepish in her eyes.
He did not forget about Emily, about Sara Beth, about Michael.
But he did focus.
“You get something?” he asked, and she nodded, the sheepishness in her expression turned more teasing.
More tempting.
She had a small bag dangling from her fingers, swinging gently, but she said, “I’m wearing it.”
He took her elbow, drawing her to him and spinning her so her back was pressed to the building, so he could crowd her again like that first time he kissed her.
He dropped his face, tucked it against her neck, and took a deep inhale.
The best breath of his life.
She sighed with pleasure. He recognized the sound of herpleasure now, and it sent blood straight to his groin, but he didn’t press that part of himself hard into her, like he wanted to.
“Lily,” she said, not too close to his ear. “White musk, and—”
He pressed his lips against her neck.
“I forget,” she breathed.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said, because it didn’t. He thought she would smell good to him no matter what. She could’ve said,lily and ash heap, and he would’ve thought,It works on you.
“Do y—” She broke off when she felt his tongue touch gently, quickly, against her neck, then tried again. “Do you like it?”
He had an answer. Of course he had an answer. But he thought maybe it was the wrong question, the amicable question, and after everything she’d told him, Griffin didn’t want Layla to ever feel like she had to ask him any of those.
“No,” he lied, but he kept his face right there. He breathed it in again.
He felt her smile. She said, “Well, I don’t care. I do.”
He lifted his head and kissed her once, hard.
“Good,” he said, and then kissed her again, and again and again, too much for the street, no nighttime, no doorway to protect them now, but neither of them seemed to care.
When they finally stopped, both of them out of breath, Layla glassy-eyed with her head tipped back against the black facade, he knew their hour was up—they had to get back to the hotel, get changed, get over to the open house. He sensed that she knew it, too; he watched awareness gather back into her eyes.
He felt as though they were standing still against some threshold, a gate he didn’t want to give a name to: on the other side, Emily and Michael, the ghost of Sara Beth. Jamie and what he’d seen last night, Jamie and the rest of the MacKenzies and the way they looked at Layla. The way she looked at all of them, too.
The column of her throat moved in a swallow.
She said, a slight catch in her voice, “You do like it, though, don’t you?”
He looked at her, long and searching. He thought something he had not thought in years and years, or maybe ever.
He thought,You need me, but for once, it didn’t have anything to do with his money. It had to do with how he would answer this question. It had to do with his shrewdness, his ability to see her, his opposite-of-amicability way of moving through the world, which had only ever been a survival tactic until now, himI don’t care–ing himself through the half-life he’d been clinging to. It had to do with the way she needed to be reminded of what she didn’t owe—what she wouldneverowe—to anyone else.
It had to do with how Layla, for too long, had been telling people what they wanted to hear:It’s okay that you changed your mind; of course we’ll still be family; yes, I’ll come to the wedding.
He thought,I am needed, and for all the scanning of his body he’d spent all these years doing, he couldn’t decide, in the moment, whether it made him feel heavy or light.
So he just smiled at her, for once not thinking of what it did to his face.
“I hate it,” he said.
