Is that your type?
No.
You are.
His confession threw me for a giant, rollercoaster-sized loop. Unspoken tension—this quiet, torturous attraction—was one thing. But speaking it out loud made it…real.Actionable.Showed me that his neurons are just as lit up for me as mine are for him, and they’re done trying to deny it.
Yet here he is, stiff as a board, fingers tight around the wheel like the worn leather is all that’s keeping him from losing it.
“The wine was delicious,” I say, wading into safer territory.
“It was.”
I try for a joke. “Your brother’s risotto makes my chicken look like cheap takeout.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
Oookay, then.
The truck bounces as we enter his driveway. When I open my door, the shadowed woods around his property sing with crickets and cicadas that haven’t gotten the message about strangely moody Grayson.
And I can’t stand moody Grayson, so I take a page out of their book and keep talking. “I’ll be up and out early tomorrow morning to go for a swim.”
This one, Grayson acknowledges with a flick of his eyes, but then he leads the way to the front door without a word.
To hell with dancing on eggshells. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No.” He unlocks the door, swings it open, and holds it for me to enter first.
“Did your brother?”
“This isn’t about my brother.”
Entirely confused, I brush past him, trying to read whatever’s in his eyes and finding them too shadowed to discern.
“Then why are you upset?”
He follows me inside and closes the door, flicking the low entry light on. Every plane of his face is pulled taut as he says, “You’re misreading me.”
“WhatshouldI be reading?”
Instead of answering, his gaze leaves mine, dragging down to my lips. Pausing there, then descending my neck to the lines of my collarbone and thin straps of my dress. He’s three feet away, stock-still except for his roving eyes, but every nerve ending he scans goes sharp with keen awareness.
Those honeyed eyes drag back up, slow and deliberate, before gripping mine.
Now, in the soft glow of the entry light, I can see the intent in them. The ardent, single-minded focus as he disregards my question and asks, “Are you at least considering the job?”
The gravelly edge to his voice, the stiff stillness of his body, gives his question an uncompromising weight it wouldn’t otherwise have. Like the wordsyesandnostand at the edge of a cliff, each one with the power to tip some invisible scale.
Or break it altogether.
Which is why, as my response forms in my mind, I take a single, small step toward him. It’s maybe ten inches, but with the way my pulse kickstarts, I might as well behurdling across a ravine. Landing somewhere I can’t return from.
It’s there that I say, “Yes.”
His nostrils flare, and his eyes roam again, following the same path they’ve already blazed. Except this time, they don’t return to their starting point.
They stop on my lips.
