she murmured, kissing my chest as she stretched like a cat.
The way her body arched lifted her breasts up like an offering, and I ducked my head to kiss each one. "Morning."
"It's early, isn't it?"
My mouth found hers. "Mmhmm."
"You're insatiable," she said with a grin.
"Me?" I kissed along her jaw. "I distinctly remember someone in this bed telling me around three o’clock in the morning that they'd die if I didn't touch them again. It was so very dramatic."
Grace laughed, flopping onto her back and tugging the sheet up her body. When I frowned, she laughed even harder. "We need food. Or coffee, at the very least."
I plucked a piece of her tangled hair off her shoulder and lifted it to my nose. Grapefruit and mint. "And maybe a brush."
She shoved at my shoulder. "I'd like to see how tidy your hair would be after four rounds of sex in one night."
"I don't know, I feel like someone yanked about half of it out of my head last night during round two."
Grace stretched her arms up and groaned. "Someone did. It was a good round."
I kissed her again. "I'll go start some coffee."
She whistled at the sight of my bare ass, so I picked a pillow up off the floor and chucked it at her head. Out of the top drawer of my dresser, I snagged a pair of gym shorts and tugged them up over my hips.
The smile stayed on my face while I measured the grounds and added water. I scratched my chest and yawned, taking a moment to appreciate the dusky blue darkness over the tops of the trees, the slow lightening of the sky that accompanied sunrise.
Grace's bare feet shuffled over the kitchen floor, and I turned to drink her in. She'd tugged on one of my T-shirts from law school, and seeing Vanderbilt stretched across her chest like that, it did the same strange thing to my chest that always happened when I looked at her.
"It is completely unfair," she said, twisting her hair into a sloppy bun.
"What?"
She sighed, eyes tracing my chest and stomach and arms. "Look at you. You should be illegal, Mr. Haywood."
I felt my cheeks burn at her heated perusal, which made her grin. She stepped up to my chest and wrapped her arms around me. The coffee maker dripped steadily while we stood like that, my hands sliding up and down her back.
"I wish you didn't have to go to work," she said, voice muffled by my skin. "I wish we could hole up here for days and just eat in bed and watch movies and watch the sunset in your backyard and drink coffee right here."
"I wish that too," I told her, setting my chin on the top of her head. "If there was any way I could disappear for a day or two, trust me, I would. But it's too precarious at the office."
Grace lifted her chin to look up at me. "What happened?"
My hand followed the curve of her shoulder and moved down her back again. There was no way for me to tell her without unloading a metric ton of guilt onto her plate for the current state of Haywood and Haywood. And in reality, it wasn't her fault, just like it wasn't mine, but I felt guilty all the same. "Some client stuff that's got my dad pretty on edge."
The look in her eyes was so observant, so astute, that I held my breath and waited for her to push me on my answer.
"I'm sorry," was all she said.
Hiding away in my house with her sounded extravagant. And perfect. And impossible.
"Something changes in your eyes when you think about work," she told me. Grace reached up and cupped the side of my face. "You look exhausted, just from the mention of it."
I hummed, turning so I could drop a kiss into her palm. "I don't doubt it. I still can't get over that you're the first one to see it, Pretty Girl."
"People see what they want to, for the most part. And if they're never corrected on those assumptions, there's not much point in looking deeper."
"You did though." I pressed her fingertips to my mouth and thought about that day at the fairgrounds. "You saw through me like I was cellophane."
Her smile was a little sad.
"What's that face?" I asked, tucking my thumb under her chin.
"Just thinking about how you have to go off to a job you hate, because you feel like you have