I hear a soft, nervous laugh just as the door clicks and swings open.
She peeks her head around, bare-faced, with dark hair loose and damp at the ends.
“Close your eyes,” she instructs.
“Why?”
“Because I have your present and I want to do it properly.”
I do as I’m told and hear her cross the room, the small sound of her feet on the floor, and the shift of fabric.
“Okay,” I hear her say. “Open.”
I open my eyes, and my brain stops. Everything in me goes still.
She’s standing in front of me in red lace.
The lace set. The one she mentioned in a car park in a coastal town while I was trying to close the trunk. She has her arms slightly out from her sides, her chin up, watching my face with an expression that lives somewhere between confident and entirely uncertain.
She looks… breathtaking. Not just because of the lingerie, though that would be enough to knock a man out. She looks like herself. Confident and nervous at the same time. Alive in a way that hits me directly in the chest.
“Well?” she whispers.
I don’t move. I don’t breathe. The red against her skin, the dark hair, the face I’ve been studying for two weeks—it’s all too much. She’s beautiful in the way things are when they are exactly what they are and nothing else. Barefoot on a hotel floor at midnight with stage adrenaline still in her blood.
“You got that for me?”
“I told you I did.”
“I didn’t know about the fucking red, Pipes.”
She tilts her head, her fingers fiddling with the strap on her hip. “Do you like it?”
I push off the bed and stand in front of her, so I’m close enough to see the faint freckles on her nose and the rise and fall of her chest. I put one hand on her jaw, tipping her face up, and look at her without managing my expression for the first time all week.
“Yeah,” I say. “I like it.”
She exhales like she’s been holding that breath for an hour. Her hands come to my chest, bunching the fabric of my shirt.
“Griffin,” she says.
“I know.”
“Tomorrow—”
“Not tonight,” I say, cutting her off. I’m not letting tomorrow into this room.
“Not tonight,” she agrees.
I pull her close, my hands tangling in her hair. She rises on her toes, reaching for me as she makes that small sound she makes when I touch her, and I stop thinking about the road or the home we’re heading toward.
We have tonight. I intend to use every minute of it.
Wrapping my hands around her waist, I turn her in my arms, guiding her until we’re both facing the full-length mirror bolted to the closet door.
Piper tries to drop her gaze, the heat in her cheeks clashing with the red of the lace, but I’m faster. I reach around, my thumb hooking under her chin to tilt her face back up.
“Look,” I say, my voice a low command against the shell of her ear.
