and I love what a great dad you are.”
“Sydney’s more my parent. I think my only use to her is taste-tester.”
“I highly doubt that.”
“You just wait until you’re there and she yells at me for leaving my boxers on the floor of the bedroom. She shames me.”
Chloe’s laughter was musical as it rang out in the hotel room.
“I like making you laugh,” he said.
“I like when you make me laugh,” she answered.
“Yeah? Well I have this hotel room until tomorrow morning so there’s plenty of time to make you laugh a lot. Hard and fast and slow. Maybe…about three times.”
Chloe bit her lip. “Is this what I have to look forward to with dating a single dad? You using euphemisms for orgasm.”
Grant shook his head. “Nah, Sydney’s smarter than me. She’d see right through them. So, how about those three times?”
She pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “I like even numbers.”
He rolled his eyes. “God, fine. Just give me, like, half an hour of recovery time.”
She hopped off the bed and began digging in her bag again. “Hey,” he leaned up on his elbows, “maybe twenty minutes if you don’t put clothes on again.”
She grinned and pulled out a clear plastic tub. “I brought fuel.”
“Fuel?”
She threw the tub at him and then crawled onto the bed. He pulled off the lid and breathed in the smell of chocolate chip cookies. “Oh my God, I’m getting hard again over chocolate.”
Chloe winked at him and reached into the container, grabbing a cookie and taking a bite. “You brought me treats at my parents’ and I figured I’d repay the favor.”
“I definitely love you.”
“You were unsure before?”
He shoved a cookie into his mouth so he didn’t have to answer that.
When they’d scarfed down several cookies, Chloe rested her head on his stomach. “I thought of you as a Ken doll when we first met,” Chloe said, her breath hot on his chest.
He looked down at her as she propped her chin on a fist to meet his gaze. “A Ken doll?”
“Yeah, you know, all blond-haired and blue-eyed with a square jaw.”
“Did you play with Barbies a lot when you were little?”
She nodded. “They always ended up naked on the rooftop of my Dream House. Because I had a Skipper, too, and what they did on the rooftop wasn’t appropriate for her little eyes.”
His little sex fiend. “Ken’s kind of a hard ideal to live up to, isn’t he?”
Chloe scrunched her nose. “Not really. When I take off your pants, I’m much happier at what I see than when I took off Ken’s pants.”
Grant figured he should be grateful about that. “Poor Ken.”
“Poor Barbie,” Chloe muttered.
He laughed, hard. And Chloe laughed, her green eyes scrunched, her mouth wide.
She sobered then. “Were you serious about coming to grief counseling with me?”
“Of course I was. I’d come with you in a heartbeat.”
“Thank you.”
He rolled onto his side so they faced each other. “Thanks for not throwing me out of your parents’ house when I showed up unannounced.”
“I wouldn’t have done that.”
He tongued the roof of his mouth as he thought about the right way to word what he planned to say next. “You know, I don’t have a problem with role-playing again. Or anything you want to do, really. That was fun, right?”
Chloe’s cheeks stained pink, but she nodded.
“And this… Well damn, I’ve never had what we just did and I think that’s why I was so stubborn about not playing the game anymore, Chloe. Because I didn’t want to just play for your body, I wanted to play for your heart.”
“Grant…” she whispered.
“And I feel like now I got some of it, even if it was just a little bit. And I hope I did what I told you I would. I hope I gave some of mine back.”
Her eyes were wet, really wet, and she was blinking a lot. He didn’t apologize though, because he wasn’t sorry. Not at all.
“You did, Grant,” she said, her voice still a little hard. “You did.”
He kissed her nose, then her lips, then nibbled on her ear, until she began shifting her legs restlessly.
“So, even numbers, right?” he asked.
“Two down, two to go,” she said.
He hummed as he settled between her legs and palmed her breasts. “Guess I got work to do then.”
Epilogue
Chloe snipped off a couple of buds of the rhododendron bush and eyed the plant critically.
Grant’s house, while beautiful, had been severely lacking in the landscaping department. He’d tried to say he didn’t