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Chapter Twenty-Four

Ruby

Fucking oxytocin.

Eventually, I’d blame that for everything. For the fact that waking up with my face pressed into the broad expanse of his chest had me imagining that this was heaven on earth. For the way his arm banded around my back, holding me against his side, was the most poignant and bittersweet of anchors.

Not the kind of anchor weighing me down, but keeping me in a safe, warm place, making sure I didn’t float away into nothing. He was my gravity, and there was no denying it anymore.

After a brief trip into the bathroom to pee and clean up (no one needed a UTI), Griffin tugged me right back toward the bed. There was no time to worry about where I’d sleep or what might happen, because he slipped one of his T-shirts over my head and pulled me straight into his side with a contented grunt.

Sleeping next to him was like having a giant purring cat as my own personal pillow. He snored lightly, and I lay there in the weak predawn light, studying the line of his profile as my rib cage squeezed uncomfortably.

He smelled so good. Was so warm and solid. My hand was still settled on his stomach, where it rose and fell with his steady breaths. It said a lot, really, that my first thoughts after waking weren’t about the sex itself, though that nipped straight on the heels of my more innocent musings.

Because the sex ... oh, the sex.

World-scrambling, off-the-charts, I-might-never-walk-normal-again sex.

That was the real reason I was lying there, staring all moon-eyed at the line of his jaw and the curve of his lips and the stubble on his chin, and wondering beyond those physical features, why he was alone after all these years.

It didn’t make sense, knowing the kind of man he was and how thoroughly he’d taken care of me. Taken care of me in ways that I hadn’t even been able to articulate.

Careful not to wake him, I raised my hand and skimmed it lightly over the line of his bottom lip. My eyes burned with a sudden press of unshed tears because of how badly I wanted to kiss him again.

It was the oxytocin, I told myself. That powerful little chemical released in a sharp spike during orgasm, but more importantly, released during moments of affection. Even small ones like this. One of the things I’d found when I researched sex was how often people confused the flood of oxytocin with real, deep feelings about the person who’d unleashed it.

There was a natural order to that—viewing Griffin as a symbol of these new things I’d never felt before. Even if it seemed impossible now, I might have felt this with anyone.

Liar.

Filthy little liar who lies to herself.

The voice ripped through my head before I could stop it, and I slammed my eyes shut. In the wake of that whispered warning, I had a vicious memory of my parents sitting by my hospital bed with pinched faces, the perpetual exhaustion stamped on their features after years of worrying about me.

It didn’t take much, with powerful chemicals seeping through all the cracks and crevices of my brain, to slide Griffin into that memory and feel the clench of my chest in return. To imagine him worrying and tired and parked in a hospital chair while I struggled to breathe easily or fought some simple infection that shouldn’t sideline a woman of my age.

A tear slid down the side of my nose before I could stop it, and I wiped it away before it dropped to his chest.

I wouldn’t feel this with anyone. But neither would I sentence him to living out a bleak future with a murky end date. Loss came in dozens of ways when you experienced what I had. Loss of a future. Loss of possibilities. Loss of physical strength and emotional bandwidth. Maybe I hadn’t handled all those different kinds of loss perfectly, but neither would I allow selfishness to color my decision-making.

It was the cold truth of logic, something I could easily apply to this situation with the sleeping man at my side. I refused to see him be hurt. To see him sad. Letting him walk away without knowing how easily I’d fallen for him was the best gift I could give.

He slept on while I eased out of his embrace, and I breathed out slowly as I sat on the edge of the bed and speared my hands into my hair. My legs were bare, and I grimaced when I realized that I wasn’t entirely sure where my underwear was.

I froze.

“Fucking oxytocin,” I hissed quietly. I hadn’t worn underwear. Lauren, in her infinite wisdom, had told me to show up with as few barriers as possible. Sure enough, we didn’t have many. Not even a houseful of people, as it turns out. My face was hot as I remembered how his hands had played with the hem of my dress on the dance floor.

Past Me—driven by that very powerful, almost magical chemical force—had made some really questionable decisions.

Not that I was shaming myself for wanting sex with him. That would’ve been stupid and steeped in rampant misogyny, but it was more about doing things that weren’t like me.

They were like me, though. It was me who had shown up at his party. Me who’d let him kiss me at the table, in plain view of everyone there. Me who’d slipped easily into his arms.

It was me ... with Griffin. A side of myself I’d never known before, and damn it, I liked that version of Ruby Tate.

With a sigh, I tiptoed across the room and picked through the pile of clothes nearest the foot of the bed, exhaling in relief when I found my dress. Before I slipped his shirt off, I brought the neck up to my nose and inhaled deeply, my eyes rolling shut.

God, it wasn’t fair.

When it was lying in a pile on the floor and I’d tugged my dress into place, I eyed that shirt briefly, wondering if I could steal it without him noticing. Just, you know, sleep in it every night until the scent disappeared.

I’d almost reached down to grab it when he shifted on the bed, emitting a low groan that had my thighs pressing together.

“No,” he moaned in a raspy voice. “Why are you getting dressed? Come back into bed, birdy.”

Pasting a small smile on my face, I turned. “I have to work today.”

Griffin stretched his arms over his head, and my mouth watered at the way the sheets pooled around his waist. There was a distinct bulge underneath the sheet, and I tore my eyes away, blowing out a short, forceful puff of air.

“Work is overrated,” he said, leaning up against the headboard and devouring me with those I’m-going-to-eat-you-alive eyes. “I think you should call in sick since it’s my last day.”

At the reminder, my eyes slammed shut. “What time do you have to be in Denver?”

“Doesn’t matter too much,” he answered. “Steven said his cleaners will get here around five, so I just need to be packed up before then. Come on, birdy. Let’s play hooky, and we can have a Jane Austen marathon. I’ll even let you paint my picture again.” He grinned—crooked and playful and so freaking attractive that I felt like bursting into tears.

A thick sob threatened to crawl up my throat, but I swallowed it down.

The suggestion was a nice one. A really nice one. But when it played out in my head, all I felt was sick to my stomach. Like playing house when I damn well knew that nothing was going to come from it.

Nothing was going to come from this. From us. The more I forgot that, the worse it would be.

His phone dinged on the nightstand, and he made a growling sound under his breath when he read the text. “Fucking Steven,” he muttered.

“Something wrong?”

Griffin smacked his head against the headboard in a brief show of frustration, his jaw clearly tight. “He wants me at the facilities at ten. Shit. I need to hop in the shower. Marketing department wants me to do some social media stuff, and I had ... I had something I wanted to do before I left.”

“Oh.” I wrung my hands together and fought the clammy sensation of panic as it dug its claws into my skin. This was it, then. My entire life felt like it had been upended, someone sneaking in when I wasn’t looking and ransacking the perfect order of things. I’d say goodbye to him and try to figure out how to pick up the pieces.

Naive. So very, very naive.

Increasing the distance between our bodies wasn’t erasing the powerful grip that the sex chemicals had on my brain. It was a helplessness that made me imagine myself getting sucked into a dangerous current in a dark-blue ocean. The kind that looked smooth and straight and was incredibly dangerous. My head was hardly above water, and no matter how hard I thrashed to get free, the allure of this man snaked me right back in, like a hook to my waist.

I gritted my teeth and pulled up my metaphorical big-girl panties.

It was just sex, and I was capable of leaving it that way. I’d better be, since the entire arrangement was my idea anyway. “Maybe that’s for the best,” I told him. “I have to get home and let Bruiser out.”

Griffin nodded, his eyes flitting over my face. My back teeth were clenched tight, and the beginnings of a headache bloomed behind my eyes as I struggled to decide what a more experienced woman would say in a situation such as this. Someone who wasn’t naive. Someone who was confident and clear about the stakes we’d laid at the beginning of all this. Someone who promised that the feelings would stay safe and out of harm’s way.

“Last night was fun,” I told him lightly. The words felt like lead coming out, reducing our incredible night to something so small and insignificant. Over and over, he’d reminded me that fun was what we had. Fun was what he could offer. But saying it felt like the worst sort of betrayal to how he’d actually made me feel. To what he’d become in my life. “Thank you.”

Griffin’s chin dropped to his chest, a muscle jumping in his jaw, and for a moment, I worried that I’d offended him.

“Fun,” he said quietly. When he looked up, I almost lost my breath at the intensity I saw there.

Clutching the sheet around his waist, he prowled off the bed and strode toward me, not stopping until he was towering over me. Without the help of my heels, I had to tip my face up to look at him. At this proximity, the clean, spicy scent of his skin had my head swimming, and I fought the urge to sway into his chest, press my nose against his sternum and just breathe.

“That wasn’t fun,” he said in a low, dangerous voice.

I blinked a few times, my throat going tight. “It wasn’t?”

His hand shot out and gripped the back of my neck, and the sheer possessiveness of it yanked the breath from my lungs. He dipped his head down, speaking against my mouth. “That was fucking phenomenal.” When he didn’t kiss me, I exhaled shakily. Unmoving, he held there, his eyes locked on mine. “Don’t think it’s always like that, baby. Because I promise you, it’s not.”

My chest felt like it was going to explode, and I struggled to pull in a full breath. There was no possible way he could know what those words did to me, how thoroughly they wrecked me. Hollowed out the space between my ribs until the beat of my heart echoed against absolutely nothing.

Somehow, I managed a nod, my nose brushing against his as a tear slid down my cheek.

Not kissing him felt like a crime, so I cradled his jaw and pushed up on the balls of my feet to seal my mouth over his in a possessive kiss that came from somewhere deep inside me, someplace secret I’d never tapped into before this man. His hand tightened on the back of my neck, his jaw opening as he brushed his tongue over mine and let out a small, pleased grunt.

My arms tightened around his neck, and his arms banded around my waist to lift me up against his chest. I didn’t even dare stop to breathe, thankful for the way he shared oxygen with me during that endless, searing, world-altering kiss.

He broke his mouth away from mine, resting his forehead against my own before carefully setting me back down. Griffin licked his bottom lip while he stared at me.

“You’re right,” I told him. “It wasn’t fun. It was ... it was perfect, Griffin. You were exactly what I needed.”

For the briefest moment, there was a breathless sort of heartbreak in his eyes. I set my hand on my stomach and stared down at the ground, unable to look him in the face for much longer.

No.

There was no shying away from this.

No shying away from him and how fucking hard this was.

When I looked up, he looked like Griffin again. There was no lingering sadness, no unspoken thing, just a cocky curl to his delicious lips. With his mussed, golden-brown hair and the endless expanse of skin on display, he looked like sin incarnate. Temptation that I’d never move past. Never get over.

“Thank you,” I told him again, carefully setting my hand on his bare chest as I swallowed against a dry throat. “I don’t think you understand how much this meant to me.”

“Anything for you, birdy.” He curled his fingers around mine and squeezed. Griffin’s smile softened into something more genuine, and my pheromone-drenched brain captured it like a photograph. I wanted to frame it. Paint it. Put it somewhere as a permanent reminder that I was the one who made him smile like that.

After a thick beat of silence, he let go of my hand, and I cleared my throat. “Well, if I find myself watching football this fall, I know who to text if I have any questions.”

Griffin’s eyes bounced between mine. “I hope you do.” Then he held up a hand. “Oh, hang on.”

With a rueful grin that made my chest clench, Griffin quickly reached down to grab his boxer briefs and tugged them up his legs, then tossed the sheet aside before he jogged around to the other side of the room. For the record, I did not stare at his ass when this was happening. Not really. When I dragged my eyes up from ... certain areas, I felt my stomach flutter.

There, on the large solid-wood dresser, was a small stack of books.

He stared down at them in his hands for a second, his back expanding on a deep breath before he walked toward me again. His crooked smile was almost my undoing as he extended the library books in my direction.

“Read them all,” he said proudly. “Does this mean I’m smart like you now?”

I exhaled quietly, too small to be considered a laugh. “Which was your favorite?”

The thick line of Griffin’s throat worked on a swallow, his eyes intent on mine. “The one you recommended. The World War Two book.”

My lips tilted in a pleased smile. “Really?”

He nodded. “Really. The legacy we leave behind is important.” His brow furrowed slightly. “You left one hell of a stamp on me, birdy. I hope you know that.”

“You did too,” I whispered.

For a moment, I worried that my body would reject my brain’s command to leave. Simply refuse. I worried that the chemicals still coursing through my blood would protest anything except crawling back into bed with him and letting the day pass without any thought of the repercussions.

We still have things to learn! those chemicals screamed. We haven’t felt sweet and slow. We haven’t experienced what his skin is like in the shower. Or how it feels to be on top of him.

We should have started sooner, I thought with a quick spike of my pulse. If we’d started right away, we would have had two weeks to enjoy each other’s company.

That was the thing, though, wasn’t it? It would be so easy to create a list a mile long of all the ways I still wanted Griffin. It would never end. Not unless I was the one to end it before anything soured. Or worse.

With one last smile in his direction, my feet moved. So did my legs. And with the distinct knowledge that I’d lied deeply to myself to believe that I could get through this unscathed, I walked out of the room, then out of the house and into my car, with a numb sort of disconnect I’d never felt before. Not even after my surgery, when my whole body felt like it belonged to someone else.

With that thought, in the safety of my quiet car, I sank my head into my hands and cried.