had given him a bite of a chocolate chip cookie, and looked at him with those eyes that seemed to be the last thing he saw in his mind before he went to sleep.
It wasn’t that. If there was one thing he was certain of, it was that Iris wasn’t... He couldn’t imagine her being into that kind of casual thing. She seemed far too sincere. And anyway, she hardly had the wardrobe of a siren.
Seems to be working well enough on you...
Yeah. Well, he was hard up. Whether he wanted to admit it or not.
Honestly. Grief was a bastard that kept on giving. If it could just be there and insulate him from wanting anything, then it would be all right. He could just come up here and hang himself on his cross, work himself to death, suffer but live as a tribute, everything would be fine.
Not fine. But alive, at least. There was a comfort in wanting nothing.
In having no appetite.
There was control to it.
But now all of a sudden his body wanted things. And he decidedly did not.
The grief hadn’t faded. It was still there. It was still telling him the same things.
Not that he was a married man. He wasn’t. That wasn’t the issue.
But he was alive. Mel was gone.
And he didn’t know how the hell he was supposed to keep living, enjoying that life, when she couldn’t.
When her smile and her laugh were gone from the world, and he remained.
He knew how to survive.
It was the rest he wasn’t sure about.
“Well,” he said. “You’re just going to fix a pipe.” He sighed heavily. “And you’re talking to yourself. So you really have reached a good space.”
And he couldn’t deny that the realization he would be talking to Iris in person soon made his blood run hotter.
Couldn’t deny it, no matter how much he wanted to.
* * *
IRIS HAD PUT on the sexiest thing she owned. Which she felt wasn’t that impressive, in the end. A pair of faded blue jeans and a scoop neck T-shirt that revealed just a hint of cleavage wasn’t exactly going to set the world on fire. Or Griffin, for that matter.
She had put on lip gloss, though.
It was the only makeup she had.
She felt a little bit frustrated by that tonight. It would have been nice to be able to fix herself up a little bit more, but Pansy wasn’t really a makeup girl either, and she wasn’t sure Rose even owned a comb.
She could have talked to Sammy, that was true. Her sister-in-law was a feminine goddess, who wore makeup, or didn’t, who wore dresses, or denim with the same amount of ease. Who let her blond hair dry naturally and fly wild around her, or occasionally straightened it if the mood took her. Sammy wielded her femininity with ease. Let it take whatever shape she felt like in the moment.
Iris admired that.
It scared her a little bit, though. And, she hadn’t wanted to talk to Sammy, because Sammy was no longer a safe space. Because if she told Sammy, Sammy was going to tell Ryder.
That had always been a little bit of a tricky situation. But Iris had never had any secrets to keep from her brother.
She did not especially want him to know that she was intent on trying to seduce a man in the apartment she was going to move in to.
She hadn’t even told him that she was moving.
After the reaction she had from Rose, she hadn’t really wanted to get into it.
A text popped up on her phone and she looked down at it.
I’m at the front door. You have to let me in. I don’t have a key.
Her heart scrambled up into the base of her throat, and before she could chicken out, before she could talk herself out of it, she flung the door to the apartment wide and scrambled down the stairs inelegantly. Then she righted herself, fussing with her hair before heading toward the door.
There he was.
She just stood there for a moment, inside the empty shop, staring at the broad, tall figure on the other side of the glass. He was wearing a black T-shirt, and a black cowboy hat. The sight of him made her shiver, even though she wasn’t cold.
Not at all.
If anything, she was a little bit warm.
She realized, suddenly, that she had never seen Griffin outside his natural habitat.
The cabin, the wilderness. She did think of it as his natural habitat. It was hard to