Page 5 of Coached By the Grumpy Gargoyle

"Is that a challenge?" My voice comes out low and husky, grating around the edges like gravel. It does that around her. I try not to think about that either.

Her breath fogs between us. She doesn't step back.

Shit. This feels way too good.

"Careful when “challenging a gargoyle,” I say, "We tend to take these things literally."

She pushes her lower lip out in a slow, exaggerated pout and looks up at me through her lashes, somehow managing to make defiance look indecent. My cock gives another hard pulse against my slacks. She has to know what she’s doing to me. Nobody looks at a man like that by accident.

"Oh no." Nothing in her tone is scared. If anything, she sounds even more bratty. "The big scary gargoyle takes me literally. What's the worst that happens, you loom at me? You've been looming at me for a year, Coach. I've had the deluxe looming package. I'm immune."

Immune. She's standing in my shadow on a frozen sidewalk with her heart going hard enough that I can hear it, an inch of fog between her mouth and my sternum, calling herself immune. She’s full of it.

My gaze drops to her mouth and stays there. Red lipstick. Soft lips. That provocative little pout still lingering at the corners. My cock jerks so hard I have to clench my jaw, and every thought in my head narrows down to one: I want that mouth under mine. Now.

"That smart mouth," I say, "is going to get you into trouble."

"Promises, promises." Her lipstick is red. It has survived the pie, the walkout, the shriek when I landed in front of her, all of it, sitting on her mouth like a dare with a wax finish. This close, she smells like chocolate and vanilla, plus a lightly floral perfume that plays with my sanity like guitar strings. "You want to stop me from arguing with you? Nothing short of kissing me silly is going to shut me up, so unless you've got the..."

I kiss her.

I take her jaw in my hand and I press my mouth to her lush, soft lips.

I don’t touch many people. So this first contact feels like a detonation.

I go rigid. Every muscle locks and my wings snap open in a sharp, involuntary flare. For one humiliating second, I can do nothing but stand there with my mouth on hers.

She doesn't flinch.

Her mouth is soft and blazing warm against mine, coffee, vanilla and chocolate, and instead of pulling back from how cold I am, she leans into it. She comes up onto her toes, and puts her hands on me. One on my chest. One curling around the side of my neck.

Her thumb strokes once along my jaw and my entire stone body instantly warms.

Under her palm, under her mouth, heat spreads through my granite the way it does when a gargoyle in in thrall to the strongest of emotions. When fury or terror gets deep enough to light the core of us. But this time, it's not fury that burns through me. It’s not terror, either, although it comes close.

It’s not even a feeling I have a world for. I don’t think I can formulate a single rational thought in my state, anyway. I make a sound against her mouth that I will deny to my grave, low in the chest, half growl, and she answers it with a small hum of pure satisfaction, smug even now, smug with her hands full of gargoyle.

I stop being careful. Heck, I stop being the civilized, reasonable man I that I am. That I’ve always been.

I wrap an arm around her waist and lift her into the kiss, off her heels, her toes leaving the ground,. She grabs my shoulders and kisses me back like this is an argument and she intends to win it. It's the same thing she does with words.

Push, escalate, never retreat. Fuck if it’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever experienced.

I kiss her slower, deeper, until the smug little hum breaks into something helpless.

Good. I'm not going down alone.

A year of this woman. Her heels coming down the athletics wing, click-click-click past my office window while I pretend to concentrate on game film. Her hands flying when she talks in the staff room. The way she greets half the building by name and somehow makes each person sound like the one she was hoping to see. I told myself that was simply Rory. Warm with everyone. Nothing meant for me.

It doesn't feel like nothing now.

I don't know how long I keep her up there. Long enough for her fingers to find the base of my neck and the edge of my collar. Long enough for the cold to stop existing anywhere she's touching me. Long enough to know that putting her down is going to hurt.

She pulls back first. Barely. An inch of fogged air, her forehead tipped against my chin, both of us breathing like we just ran a marathon.

And the warmth stays.

Her mouth leaves mine, but the heat doesn't. It remains in my lips, in my jaw where her thumb traced, in my chest under her palm. Stone doesn't hold a human touch like this. I know that much.