The relief that washed through her was so powerful, she was glad she was sitting, otherwise her knees would have buckled and she would have fallen.
Then, as if to prove he meant what he said, he leaned toward her, kissing her again.
And again.
For the next hour, they remained exactly like that, curled together on the couch, kissing, talking…and eventually, even laughing.
While Wren didn’t have much experience with this kind of night. At least not any positive experience. It reminded her of the late nights in high school when Lark would come home from a date, sharing far too many details about her make-out sessions with her boyfriends.
Wren gave herself over to it, instead of thinking about what might go wrong.
She didn’t worry about tomorrow and she wasn’t waiting for a disaster.
She was simply happy.
That was when she realized that her cozy apartment had never truly felt like home until this moment, sitting there with Grayson, wrapped in his arms.
Suddenly, being normal didn’t feel like a pipe dream.
It felt possible.
Chapter Sixteen
Life had become a routine. The kind that snuck up on him without him even realizing it, then suddenly felt as necessary as breathing.
Every single day since the Harvest Festival dance three weeks earlier, Grayson had seen Wren.
Every. Single. Day.
Once a week, she met him at the winery tasting room after they finished work, where they shared dinner on the patio until the light faded over the vines.
The rest of the time, he drove to her apartment, usually carrying groceries, and they cooked together in her tiny kitchen, bumping hips and arguing over recipes.
Then they ended up on the couch, watching whatever happened to be streaming, talking and laughing.
And touching.
Jesus. The touching had practically become its own language. It felt as if they’d spoken volumes without ever opening their mouths.
He loved the soft pink bloom that heated her cheeks whenever he placed his hand on her knee. Or how that flush went to vivid red when he wrapped a hand around the nape of her neck and pulled her in for a kiss. He loved the way she curled into him whenever she got sleepy, resting her head on his shoulder, her arm lightly resting on his stomach as if he was her own personal body pillow.
And she wasn’t the only one impacted by their touches. Grayson spent most of his time around her sporting a serious hard-on. All she had to do was playfully tickle his cheek with her nose or tangle her fingers with his under a blanket as they sat side by side watching a movie, and he spent the rest of the night covertly trying to adjust his suddenly too-tight jeans.
For the first week, he kept the touches innocent, because it was clear there was some trauma in Wren’s past that was holding her back.
He’d seen glimpses of that same kind of fear on Gretchen’s face when she’d first started as event coordinator at the farm. Her eyes had carried the shadows of something truly terrible, something only his brother, Theo, had been able to drive away.
Grayson had had several conversations with Gretchen in the past year about the abusive relationship she’d escaped, though he knew she held back a lot of the gorier details from him. Probably because after a year on the farm, she’d learned all the Storm men were cut from the same cloth, and while her ex was no longer a threat, that didn’t stop Grayson, Theo, or any of their brothers from wanting to give the asshole a taste of his own medicine whenever they heard about the ways he’d physically abused Gretchen.
Gretchen had joked the last time they talked about her ex that she’d learned to temper her stories, lest she rile up an angry mob. Given the smile that accompanied that comment, he could see how truly amazed and pleased she was to know she had an army at her back if needed. She and Theo had dropped enough tidbits that it was obvious she hadn’t had the support of a family until she’d joined theirs.
So when Wren had shut down the night of the dance, breaking off the kiss and pushing him away in a blind panic, he moved fast, recognizing the flash of terror she thought she’d hidden from him.
He didn’t know who hurt her, but as God was his witness, there would be a day of reckoning for the asshole when she finally trusted him enough to confess her secret.
Until then, he was moving slowly.
Or at least, that had been his intention.
