He didn’t. He did, however, tug off his shirt and toss it onto a lounge chair that occupied a corner of the room beside a reading lamp.
At the sight of his trim, muscled outline in nothing more than his boxer shorts, I became acutely aware of my own attire. Without the energy to properly explore the many new clothes awaiting me, I’d slipped into a sheer camisole and panties—that was it.
I was still debating whether I should get up to look for something additional to wear when he climbed into the bed and drew the covers up over us. Instantly, like a dumbass, I went rigid—as if we hadn’t touched a million times before—but I was suddenly unsure where any of my body parts were supposed to go.
The heat from all that incredible bare skin of his radiated into me, making him seem too close and not close enough all at once.
His hand brushed against mine, and his fingers threaded through my own across the space between us.
When Istilldidn’t relax, he tensed, his hand squeezing mine. “Is this too much? I can sleep on the floor if you prefer.”
He tugged his fingers away as if about to get up, but then I finally got my brain to stop reacting so intently to the feel of his naked skin so near my own.
I tightened my hold on his hand. “No,” I said a bit too forcefully. Softer, I added, “No, please stay. I just … it’s weird to have you in my bed now that I … think of you differently. Doesn’t mean I want you to go, though. I just need a minute to adjust.”
It wasn’t as if I hadn’t thought of what it’d be like to have Griffin in bed with me before. I’d fantasized about his hands, mouth, and body all over mine, his bodyinsidemine, enough that I was close to being able to call it a damn hobby lately. But then, before, he hadn’t known I thought about him like that.
I hadn’t known he thought about me like that.
Fuck. Has Griffin jerked off while fantasizing about me?!
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” he said in reaction to … whatever I was doing while fantasizing about him fantasizing about me.Shit. “This is too much for tonight. It’s been a long, fucked-up, crazy day for all of us, and you’re still healing.”
I shook my head, my damp hair rubbing along my pillow, no doubt getting it wet. “No, Griff, stay. I really do want you here. I want to get used to this.”
“Sleeping with me?” he asked with a hint of surprise.
“Well, I mean … yeah?”
What sparse light filtered in through the closed blinds wasn’t enough to illuminate the planes of his face that I knew by heart. Ifelthis smile more than I saw it.
He rolled onto his side to face me, his pleased grin palpable even in the darkness. “You want to get used to sharing a bed with me?”
The smug bastard was fishing for more admissions. “I just said it, didn’t I?”
He chuckled at my sudden attitude. I wasn’t fond of putting myself out there first. We both knew it.
“Well, good,” he said. “I’d like that too. We have a lot of new things to try out and get used to.”
I wasn’t one to blush or to flush. I was about as much of a shrinking violet as Layla was. But fuck if I wasn’t blushing furiously now and thankful for the cover of darkness.
When a deep, sexy laugh rumbled through Griff’s chest, I knew I wasn’t fooling him.
“We know each other too well,” I grumbled, turning away from him with a pout I didn’t entirely understand.
He slid across the bed so that his body curved around mine, little more than a few inches of air between us. “That’s only going to make everything between us that much more amazing. I know it will.”
I harrumphed without a single good reason I could discover, and he chuckled. Then his fingers alighted on my waist, tracing gentle circles across the skin between my camisole and the lace waist of my cotton bikini panties.
“Are you still hurting?” he asked.
“Mmmmmmm, from what?” His fingers were light as a feather across my skin, but his touch was sending tingles weaving through tissue and muscle till I could feel him all over me.
His fingers paused before starting up again. “Um, from the five fucking bullets you took to the chest just three fucking days ago?”
“Oh, right.” I’d never thought of myself as a dreamy romantic before, and maybe it was the drugs or that I’d been half asleep, but being here with him made all that ugliness seem so far away. As if it were part of someone else’s life, not mine.
“I can barely feel any of that now,” I said. “The scars are shrinking, and the skin doesn’t even tug or itch anymore.”
