Good. I wasn’t the only one feeling what I was feeling.
The cloth moved across my collar bone, over the swell of my breast before going lower. Across my stomach, just brushing between my legs before sliding the length of my leg. I felt the weight of his touch everywhere—deep in my core where I was still tender and still wanting him.
He dropped the cloth.
His hand slid beneath the water, fingers spreading my pussy open without hesitation, his thumb finding my clit and working it in slow, deliberate. My hips lifted. The water sloshed. I grabbed the edge of the tub.
“Sore?” he asked.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Good. I want you to remember the feel my cock every time you move today.”
I opened my eyes. “You’re not supposed to say things like that.”
“Says who.” He pressed deeper, rubbing my clit harder, watching my face with that focused attention. My hips were moving against his hand now, small and involuntary, chasing the pressure. “I’m glad I was the first, Keely. And I’m damn well going to be the last.”
Not a question. Not a line. Just Griffin stating a fact.
Within moments I was coming. Arching my back, letting the feel of my release wash over me. He pressed a kiss to my forehead, soothing his hand over my thigh.
I reached out and put my wet fingers against the scar on his jaw—the one I’d been looking at for weeks, winching inwardly at how much pain he must have endured. He went still under my touch the way he’d gone still last night when I’d first put myhands on him. Like being touched gently was something he’d forgotten how to receive.
“I know,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Really looked—no wall, no careful distance, just him. Something moved across his face that I’d only seen once before, last night when he’d discovered I’d never been with a man, when the possession in his eyes had changed to something rawer, deeper.
“Keely.” He hands gripping the sides of the tub.
“Yeah.”
“I’ve been in this town for months I didn’t talk to anyone for the first three. Ate alone. Worked alone. Went home alone every night and told myself that was fine. It wasn’t fine. I didn’t have anything to compare it to until you.”
“Griffin—”
“I’m not finished.” His free hand came up and gripped my chin, tilting my face up to his. Gentle. Immovable. “I walked into that diner, ate, drove home and lay in the dark for hours trying to talk myself out of going back. I came back the next night anyway.”
“I know,” I said softly. “I noticed.”
He put his hands on my face and I held my breath. I knew something was about to change the same way you sometimes knew when a storm was about to break.
“I love you.” He said it the same way he said everything—certain, sure, and completely without performance, like it was just a thing that was true and he was tired of not saying it. “I’ve loved you since that first night. I didn’t know what to do with it and I tried to leave it—you— alone, but I couldn’t.”
I felt my eyes go bright and hot and I blinked hard because I was not going to cry in this man’s bathtub, I absolutely refused. \
“I love you too.” My voice only broke slightly on the last word. “I think I loved you when you told that kid he didn’t get to touch me. Like it was a law. Like it had already been decided.”
“It had,” he said simply.
He leaned in and kissed me—slow this time, different from last night’s heat and urgency. This was something deliberate. His mouth moved against mine like he was making a point, like this was the kiss that meant something different than the ones before it, like he was signing his name to something. I kissed him back with everything I had, my wet hands coming up to grip the back of his neck, pulling him closer, the water sloshing against the porcelain.
When he broke away, he pressed his forehead to mine and we stayed like that, both of us breathing hard.
“You’re going to get your sweatpants wet,” I said finally.
“They’ll dry.”
I laughed—a real one, surprised out of me—and felt him respond to it, felt the tension in his frame shift into something easier. This man who checked sightlines, carried scars inside and out—
