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“Girl, you’re gorgeous. Just go talk to him. Flirt a little. He’s played with me before and I’m not exactly supermodel material.”
“You’re beautiful!”
“I’m a bit of a shrimp.”
Echo frowned. “You don’t have to be tall to attract a man, right Master Grant?
“No,” Grant said, his voice a low rumble. “No, you don’t.”
Echo nodded decisively and gestured to Grant as though he was an authority on the subject. “If anything, I think dominant men love the idea of being with a submissive woman who’s substantially smaller than them because it’s easier to physically control them.”
Echo’s gaze flitted across the room, her expression determined. She didn’t even notice the starving way Grant was watching Dex, or the way Dex was melting in response.
Echo said her good-byes and drifted off in Tak’s direction.
“Will you come to my office with me?” Grant asked carefully. “Nothing sketchy, I promise.”
“Hey, I’m all about sketchy.”
“I heard that about you.”
She grinned at him and would have shoulder checked him for old times’ sake, but the fact that she wasn’t wearing anything on her upper half other than Xs of electrical tape over her nipples made her feel like it might be inappropriate, considering. She deliberated whether to go back to the changing room to grab a shirt, but decided not to bother. If he couldn’t handle it, that was his problem. It wasn’t like she had anything he hadn’t seen before.
“I don’t even think I’ve set foot in your new office yet,” she admitted. That was a sad statement considering the grand reopening had been months ago.
“No one has been in my office except for Will. Hell, I’ve barely spent any time in there.”
“Hard to believe we used to play poker in your office at least once a week.”
“I guess sometimes when life changes it’s fast, and in completely unexpected directions.”
Was he talking about them, about Will raising Bethany’s baby, or about something else entirely? It was hard to know. Maybe he was referring to all of it.
It was true.
Over the past while everything had changed. Some of the changes were good, though, like the fact that their businesses were doing well and none of them were in danger of becoming homeless anytime soon. Some of the changes were horrible, though, like Bethany dying. Like Dex losing Grant’s friendship.
She sighed, still feeling weird that no one in her not-so-new-anymore life even knew about Nigel and Mia. Two best friends in a row—gone out of her life like someone had taken an eraser to them both and left a yawning, blank space where they’d been.
If it wasn’t for her brewery, Evil Pixie, she wouldn’t have anything.
At least business kept her busy.
She should be going home to get work done, yet here she was, lusting after a man she shouldn’t be thinking about. They didn’t want the same things, but he wasn’t the only one who wished things were different.
They got to Grant’s office and he went around his desk and settled into the seat.
Wow.
Will’s fiancée, Juliet, had redesigned the club to look classier, but there was something ironic, yet damned sexy about Grant sitting behind a huge executive oak desk while wearing a Kink Monsters T-shirt and beat up-jeans. He kicked his booted feet up onto the desk and then put them down again as though he wasn’t comfortable enough with her to relax that much.
Grant had that irritating, hypermasculine self-assurance that men possess when they knew they could have any woman they wanted—cocky, arrogant, irresistible. She used to find it funny, but now it turned her on.
He crossed his arms over his muscled chest and studied her as she took the chair opposite him. It all felt very formal, as though she’d been called into the principal’s office. Now there was a role-play she wouldn’t mind trying with him, although with all of the tattoos and the long hair he might really have to work to make it believable.
“What’s up?” she asked, determined to ignore her imaginings of him in a suit looking severe and disapproving. He had the severe and disapproving thing down cold. The suit would just be window dressing.
His lovely green gaze dipped to her breasts then back up to her face. Wordlessly, he reached a hand between his shoulder blades and yanked his T-shirt off over his head and threw it at her.
