I wipe my hands on my tank top, wishing I'd had the forethought to wear an apron.“Mac and cheese. Per your daughter’s extremely adorable request.”
“Ah,” he says, a chuckle bleeding into his voice. “You’ve fallen victim to the pout, I assume?”
“Unfortunately.”
Penelope wriggles until he lets her down, then immediately starts talking at him about her day, the coloring she did atschool, the fact that I apparently almost committed a war crime by threatening asparagus. He listens, smiling and fully attentive, shrugging out of his suit jacket and tossing it over the back of a chair.
I open the fridge to get out the bits I'd bought for a side salad when Penelope declares that she can't just simply explain the picture she colored at school, but has to show him instead. The second she disappears up to her bedroom, Gray moves in behind me.
I only get half a breath before his hand circles my waist and turns me just enough to face him. My pulse spikes immediately, but then his mouth meets mine and my brain suddenly feels like it's been replaced with a swarm of bees.
It’s quick, just barely more than a peck, but it startles me like nothing else. Penelope is here, awake, probably frantically searching through her backpack, and his hands are on my waist in the middle of the kitchen like this is normal.
He looks entirely too pleased with himself.
“What was that for?” I whisper, feeling the heat flood my cheeks.
His shoulder lifts. “Just felt like it.”
Then he steps back like he didn’t just short-circuit my brain and reaches past me for a wine glass, slipping right back into normalcy.
Penelope comes skipping back in with the picture, and I turn to the counter before either of them can see the stupid way my mouth keeps trying to smile.
Dinner is easy after that, or at least it looks easy from the outside. Penelope chats. Gray asks her questions about school.She declares my mac and cheese better than any restaurant’s, which is objectively untrue but still enough to make me genuinely happy.
And all through it, I can feel him looking at me.
Every time I glance up, he’s already there, watching me over the rim of his wine glass with that unreadable, heavy-lidded look that makes me feel like the room is closing in.
By the time Penelope finishes eating and vanishes toward the living room with a pop-up book and full access to the TV remote, I’m already wound tight for no good reason.
Grayson waits until something starts playing through the television before he leans back in his chair and meets my gaze for what has to be the fiftieth time in the last thirty minutes. “Ran into your ex last night.”
I blink at him. “What?”
He lifts his glass and takes a sip like we’re discussing the weather. “At Cole's brewery. Was going to tell you when I got home, but you were already asleep.”
My stomach gives a weird little drop. “Aaron?”
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
Gray’s expression barely changes. “He was drunk. Loud. Tried to convince me that I should come clean.”
“Come clean about what?”
His mouth tilts, like a bitter smile. “About the fact that, apparently, he doesn’t believe you and I are actually dating.”
I shouldn’t be surprised. He barely believed it weeks ago, but I didn't think he'd go so far as to tell that straight to Gray’s face.“God,” I mutter, pushing my hair back from my face. “I'm sorry.”
He sets his glass down. “It’s fine. He was just trying to get a rise out of me. Told me he knew this whole thing wasn’t real. That he knew you. That you weren’t—” He stops there, jaw tightening just slightly. “Doesn’t matter.”
It matters. I can tell by the look on his face that it matters. Whatever Aaron said, Gray hated it, and knowing Aaron, it couldn’t have been nice. I don’t even want to know what it was. “What did you say?” I ask quietly.
His eyes meet mine. “I told him that I had no idea what he was talking about, and that we’re together.”
From the living room, Penelope loudly announces that whatever she'd put on is boring and she's going to change it, but it sounds far away. Grayson gives her a loud,“Okay!”before turning back to me.
