Chaos & the Geek (Grace Grayson Security #1) - Elizabeth Stevens Page 0,32
wanted to.”
I pulled myself onto one of the barstools and ran my hand through my hair.
We’d talked for a while the previous night over a couple of glasses of whiskey. Dinner had been a comfortable silence, but then we’d slowly started chatting. As in, we actually chatted and she’d legitimately laughed out loud a couple of times and she’d teased me the same way she teased Hawk. It meant we were both running on very little sleep, but I could live with that.
For the first time in years, we’d got along. I was going to say, with almost complete confidence, that she didn’t hate me anymore. I still wasn’t confident she liked me. But she didn’t hate me.
I hated that that was the moment we’d shared that got us to that point. I hated that she was hurting. I hated what had happened to her. But I was happy that I’d been able to help her, I was happy that she’d let me, I was happy that she’d asked for more, and I was happy that it had got us to the point where she looked almost completely natural in my kitchen.
“Oh, yeah. Sorry about… I was up later, then showered longer… And I wasn’t sure what time you’d be up. So I wanted to…before you were up,” she rambled, and I couldn’t help but smile.
“It’s fine. You live here, too. Be comfortable.”
She shot me a quick, sincere smile before she got some milk out of the fridge. As she closed it and stepped away, the towel fell off. Well it obviously got caught in the fridge door and, as she stepped away, it was pulled off her. The semantics, at the time were lost on me, though.
And I think the sight I got was actually worse than if she’d been completely naked under there. She was wearing this skimpy little bright red lingerie and it fit her to perfection in every way.
Last time I’d seen that much of her skin…she would have been… Fuck. Maybe fourteen? She’d barely had boobs and certainly hadn’t had hips. Nearly ten years later, she had both in abundance and I couldn’t drag my eyes off her.
Her hips were wide, curving up to a gorgeous waist. Her breasts were large, firm and perky. It had been a while since I’d had to worry about inconvenient boners. But this wasn’t just inconvenient. She might not have hated me, but she certainly didn’t like me and there was the small matter of her being my best friend’s little sister, so there was nothing appropriate about it even if it was just a purely biological reaction. I might have envisioned a few moments in the last few days, but that was hardly justification.
She’d closed her eyes and held up a hand to stop me saying anything. But I don’t think I would have been able to anyway.
“I know. I know,” she sighed. “But it’s all I had left. Okay. No. It was the least scandalous of what I had left.”
Because that was going to help the raging hard on in my pants.
I was over trying to tell myself it was inappropriate. Amber wasn’t just an attractive young woman, she was also sweet and witty and had a razor-sharp mind, and she’d survived something horrible with all of that intact. So I wasn’t going to torment myself for being attracted to her. But I was a grown arsed man and I could keep them to myself – I hoped.
She bent down and grabbed the towel, wrapping it back around herself.
“I just wasn’t thinking when I stormed out of there. I, for some reason, cleaned out my lingerie drawer, grabbed a few pairs of pants and some jumpers.” She rolled her eyes at herself.
“The rest of your stuff is there still,” I said, and I hadn’t heard my voice that strangled since I was about seventeen. I wasn’t even sure if it was a statement or a question.
How the hell did I not know that Amber was hiding that under all those oversized jumpers? How the hell had I not noticed last night? And more interestingly, I’d still been thinking inappropriately about her before I knew it was there…
She looked at me from the corner of her eye as she went back to breakfast. “Yeah. The rest of my clothes, my books, my console, my…everything…” she huffed, then was sliding two plates full of bacon and eggs towards me before she finished coffee.