And this time, when he kissed her, he took the brakes off like they’d never been there in the first place.
It was a high-octane, reckless descent into madness.
It was perfect.
She wrapped herself around him and everything imploded. Just burned away like there was nothing but her. But this.
Through the white-hot haze of desire, Griffin was aware that they fit together with a certain sleek rightness, the way he’d tried so hard to pretend he hadn’t noticed ten years ago. He kissed her again and again, and she met him each and every time. He felt her delicious breasts press against his chest. He bent her back over his arm and tasted his way along the line of her neck. She made greedy little noises of pure abandon that almost undid him, and he claimed her mouth again, not surprised when he found he’d managed to move them over toward the long kitchen island that separated the kitchen from the rest of the great room. He lifted her up and stepped between her legs, closer. Closer.
But when he slid his hands beneath the hem of her shirt, she stopped him.
“Absolutely not,” she said, and when he pulled back to look at her and tried to rein himself back in, she was grinning, her brown eyes dancing. “If there’s going to be nudity tonight—”
“There is.”
Her grin widened. “Then you’re going first. I have a very serious personal policy of never stripping all by myself.” Her eyebrows arched up. “Childhood trauma.”
“Your childhood trauma is one of my fondest memories,” he managed to tell her. “Though in my memories, I should be clear, you’re definitely not crying.”
She put a hand over her heart. “That’s almost romantic.”
Griffin shrugged out of his hoodie and let it drop, never shifting his attention from Emmy. He reached over and grabbed the back of his t-shirt, then pulled it over his head, and when he cleared the wall of fabric he saw her eyes had gone a little bright and were focused on his tattoos.
He waited.
Eventually, she looked up, and flushed. “You have more tattoos than you used to.”
“I do.” He felt wicked and powerful at once, and he knew it had everything to do with that look in her eyes. “Want to see them all?”
That delicious heat. It licked through him. It marked him. He thought that if she kept looking at him like that, he’d transform into pure energy right then and there. Like his skin couldn’t hold him in.
And then she reached over and ran a finger over the griffin tattoo that covered his heart, and he became nothing at all but fire.
Chapter Five
Griffin Hyatt was dangerous enough fully clothed.
Naked, he was heart stopping. Mythical, like the bright creature he wore on his chest. Like his name. Emmy actually felt her heart stop inside her chest, then burst back to life like some kind of grenade.
“You better stop looking at me like that,” he warned her as he kicked his boxer briefs aside and stood there with the supreme confidence of an athletic male, his green eyes glittering and hard. All of him was hard.
And his tattoos were glorious.
They swirled and danced across his skin, some of them clearly separate, some interconnected, all of them beautiful. He was a taut male canvas, beautiful in the way dark, forbidden things were beautiful. Seductive and masculine and almost too much to bear.
“I don’t think I can stop,” she murmured.
“Then this might be a short night.” He sounded so lazy, so amused, that Emmy found herself smiling. He still stood there, the bright kitchen lights shining down on him like a spotlight, and looked anything but uncomfortable with it. “And I can’t help but notice that you’re still wearing all your clothes.”
“Imagine if I ran out that door, never to be seen again?” But there was no heat in it, no intent, and she shifted closer to him as she said it.
“We’re not kids anymore, Bug,” he said in that low growl that moved in her and tied her into knots all up and down her spine and deep into her belly, like that once-hated nickname was an endearment. “I’d catch you before you went too far.”
“Maybe that’s what I should have done ten years ago,” she murmured. She ran her hands over his chest again, then bent to press a kiss against that griffin that guarded his heart. His sigh was a heavy, lustful thing, and it made a molten sort of joy wash through her. “Chased you across the Grans’ land, totally naked, then down into Paradise Valley. Hell, all the way to Yellowstone. I wonder what would have happened then.”
“Exactly what’s about to happen now,” he replied, and she could feel the rumble of his voice beneath her hands as she slid off the counter and explored him. The thick planes of his pectoral muscles. That hollow between them. The ridged wonder of his abdomen. “And then you would have left for college the same way I did, and it all would have been that much worse.”
She shook her head, and frowned up at him. “You’re so conceited. What’s wrong with me that I think that’s hot?”
“Not conceited. Just confident. With reason.” He grinned. “You’ll see.”
Emmy turned her attention back to the perfection of his body, because she was afraid he’d see all that naked longing in her gaze. Maybe it would scare him away. She knew it was close to terrifying her. She leaned over and tasted him. Not the griffin this time, but lower. She set a random course across the shapes and swirls that marked his chest, tasting him wherever the urge took her. Salt. Man. The clean scent of his skin, warm to her touch.
And when she got to the proud thrust of the hardest part of him, she didn’t think. She took him in her hand and when he blew out a breath, she sank down to her knees and thought she might die if she didn’t taste him there, too.
“Stop.”
Emmy tilted her head back, but she didn’t let go of him, and she could feel how little he wanted her to stop. She could feel the hard need in him, the wild pulse of passion, just as she could feel it moving in her, changing her, making her not at all surprised that he looked different as he gazed down at her. Harsh need had stripped away the laughter from his gorgeous face, leaving something stark and raw in its place.
She felt that, too. God, did she feel it.
“But I want to,” she whispered, and he breathed out an invocation to the heavens above.
Then, in the next breath, Griffin leaned forward and pulled her to her feet.
“And if you do, you’ll make me a liar,” he told her. “In about three seconds.”
“If you have to be a liar, that’s the kind of liar you’d want to be, I’d think,” she teased him, and then let out a little yelp when he simply hauled her up into his arms like she weighed about as much as one of his drawings.
The cabin twisted like a kaleidoscope around her for a moment, with only Griffin’s green gaze at the center of it to anchor her. It took her a moment to realize he was stalking across the great room and shoving his bedroom door open. And another to register it when he tossed her into the center of his unmade bed—but by the time she really processed that, he was stretched out above her.
“I’d take you up on that, but I don’t want to hear about it for another ten years.” But he was smiling slightly as he said it.
“Griffin—” she began.
But she forgot whatever it was she was about to say, because Griffin was moving. He slid his hands beneath her shirt and found her breasts with his palms, and all Emmy could do was arch into him helplessly, giving him everything that easily. Anything he wanted, she wanted, too.
Desperately.
He took his time. He kissed her and he teased her, moving from her breasts to her belly and then back again. He unsnapped her jeans and undid the zipper, but made no move to pull them off of her body. He only reached down between them and stroked a finger into the soft heat there, but stopped when she shuddered against him.
“What are you doing?” she asked him when it was clear he was content to stay like this. He was doing something insane with his tongue against the soft skin behind her ear, an
d she felt it like a desperate heat everywhere else.
“I figure you’ll get naked when you’re ready,” he murmured, making no attempt to hasten her along or hide that current of laughter in his voice. “When you feel like it’s safe.”
Emmy might have cursed his name. She definitely called him a few. And she was out of her clothes and completely naked and kneeling there in the center of his bed like a wild creature in about four seconds, either way.
“You really are the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said, his voice like reverence, and Emmy couldn’t let that get to her, couldn’t let it spill over from all that too-hot emotion she held behind her eyes.
“Less talking,” she ordered him as sternly as she could, and he laughed.
Then he reached over and curled a hand around the nape of her neck, hauling her toward him with more of that beautiful strength of his that reduced her to jelly. He pulled her down to the bed and then he put his mouth to hers, and everything turned to lightning.
He kissed her, and she kissed him back, and they rolled over and over each other, and neither one of them was laughing anymore when they pulled apart again. Naked skin to naked skin, everything got very serious. Tense and awed and quiet. Emmy was shaking and she saw something like astonishment in Griffin’s hot gaze.
She wanted to say something clever or even mean to break the spell before she lost herself in it—in him—but she couldn’t seem to find her voice. Griffin looked faintly unsteady when he reached over to fumble in the drawer of his bedside table, and that moved her in ways she couldn’t quite handle.
It didn’t feel like sex any longer. It felt sacred.
He sheathed himself and then he rolled them over again, settling her on top of him, and Emmy braced herself above him with her hands flat against his chest.
“Lazy,” she whispered, in some rendition of her usual smart-ass self, and he only grinned, though it didn’t touch the stark need in his gaze that made her feel so raw. So utterly undone.
“Something like that,” he agreed, his hands wrapping around her hips, and then he simply held her where he wanted her as he thrust deep inside of her.
Deep. Hard. Perfect.
Finally.
Emmy shook. She felt the slick perfection of him all the way down to her toes, in the suddenly painfully hard peaks of her breasts, in the rush of yes that rolled through her and over her and around her but didn’t quite—
He pulled back, did something with his hips and thrust again, and Emmy simply dissolved into a thousand dancing flames, spilling light and need all over him. As if their entire long history was all the foreplay she needed. As if she’d been made to burn that brightly, that intensely, for Griffin alone. Like he’d made her into some kind of comet.
When she could see straight again, she was slumped over him, her mouth to his shoulder, and he was still hard and hot and deep inside of her. That fact alone made her shiver all over again, making that same curling thing inside of her burn anew. He ran a faintly callused hand down her back and made it worse.
“Are you with me?” He sounded much too smug and far too male and she was so far gone she could only smile at that.
“Theoretically,” she managed to say, and then everything spun again as he rolled them over until she was on her back and he was braced above her and still so deep inside of her. She pulled her knees up and he sank even deeper, and when she pulled her lower lip between her teeth against the rush of it, he grinned.
And she felt that, too. Like a tattoo across every inch of her skin that he touched.
“You might want to hold on,” he told her. “This might get crazy.”
“Promises, promises,” she managed to say, and he laughed.
But then he moved.
And everything shifted all over again, then stayed liquid and malleable, as if there was nothing in the world but this magic. This dance. This sweet perfection that made all the fantasies she’d ever had about this man or this act seem like pale pretenders.
This was better. This was perfect.
He set a slow, ruthless, devastating pace. He dropped down and used his mouth, his teeth, his hands. He tore her apart again and again, and only when she shattered another time, only when she sobbed out his name and begged him, did he finally relent—taking her with him when he hurtled them both over the edge of the world and into that sweet oblivion, calling out her name as they fell.
Together.
“Are you enjoying your new roommate?” Gran Martha asked.
Her voice was sweet as sugar as she reached across the table in the FlintWorks Brewery, the new microbrewery that had opened in the last month in what had once been Marietta’s grand old railway depot, helping herself to Griffin’s sweet potato fries.
It was the alarming and uncharacteristic sweetness that put Griffin on high alert.
That and the cascade of images of the very many ways he’d been enjoying his new roommate in the last ten days or so, as dirty as requested and a whole lot of other ways besides, none of which he even wanted to think about it front of his grandmother.
“I’ve always liked Emmy,” he grunted in a way that did not invite follow-up questions. The people who worked for him would have run for cover at the sound of that tone of voice. It was why he’d started using it.
Of course, this was his grandmother. Martha Wetmore Hyatt did as she pleased—always had and always would. Even her husband, Griffin’s long-suffering grandfather, didn’t bother to get in her way anymore. And Griffin loved every part of his Gran, no matter the fact she could on occasion drive him straight up a wall. He hoped he’d greet his own advancing years with the same calm certainty and good humor that Gran Martha did. If he only earned half her many wonderful laugh lines and retained a quarter of the intelligence that shone from the green eyes he’d gotten straight from her, he’d be a lucky man, indeed.
But that didn’t change the fact that he didn’t want to have this conversation with her. Or at all.
“Have you?” she asked now, her clever gaze far too intent on his. “I seem to recall a time when you found Emmy very annoying. You bristled with all your teenaged male outrage whenever she ventured near, which was, if memory serves, often.”
“Girls are annoying,” he agreed, and grinned when she arched a brow at him. “In my old age—” and he laughed at her expression— “I’ve discovered Emmy Mathis is perfectly nice. What do you want me to say besides that, Gran?”
“A great many things I very much doubt you’ll say,” she said wryly, and he didn’t really want to know what she was getting at. He was terribly afraid he knew and no way was he going there. “Though hope springs eternal.”
The band below started playing a song Griffin half-recognized, and he took that as a terrific excuse to turn around and look, peering over the side of the long balcony area that offered a view down over the floor below. FlintWorks was one of his favorite places in Marietta, and it had only been open a few weeks. It was a great open space that managed to feel airy and cozy at once. It offered good food and interesting artisanal beers on tap from the towering brewery equipment clearly visible behind the sheets of glass that made up one wall, including Griffin’s personal favorite: a smooth ale with a sweet finish called Triple C.
Not to mention, the owner, a transplant to Marietta from the Texas oil business named Jasper Flint, rode a particularly badass motorcycle that Griffin would have been forced to admire even if he’d hated the guy. Which he didn’t.
It was a Thursday evening in Marietta in May and that meant the brewery would do a brisk, family-friendly business until closing at 8:30 p.m. in accordance with state laws. It also meant that when Gran Martha had called to tell him that she had a hankering for the burgers at FlintWorks Brewery tonight, he’d had no choice but to bring her here on command, because he was wise enough to know that had been an order, not a request.
And he suspected Gran Martha probably knew perfectly well that Emmy would already be here, participating in one of Marger
y’s annoying and endless bridal activities. She sat at a table down below in a sea of other bridesmaids who all looked—to his admittedly jaundiced eye—like cutout copies of each other. Sleek and manicured and blandly pretty, he supposed, in a rainbow selection of springtime capri pants and tasteful jewelry.
They had nothing on Emmy, who was pretending she hadn’t seen him on the balcony and looked edible the way she always did, with that glossy dark hair of hers clipped to the back of her head and that elegant neck of hers on display. She wore a pair of jeans that fit her too well and a t-shirt with an old soda label that stretched across her pretty chest, and that same blue scarf. So smart and too funny and with that ridiculous ass of hers besides. He was a goner.
Not a goner, he contradicted himself at once. Just enjoying yourself, which you haven’t done in a long time.
But he couldn’t stare at her the way he wanted to do, because they were supposed to be keeping what was happening between them secret. They’d both agreed it was the wisest course, because they knew their families and the kind of commotion it would cause if anyone suspected what was going on in Griffin’s little cabin.
They’d have us married off by the end of the month, Emmy had said, sitting cross-legged on the kitchen counter while Griffin had fed her pancakes for no other reason than that she’d wanted them and he’d wanted to feed her. In a double ceremony with Margery, which, I shouldn’t have to tell you, would make her implode with rage. She doesn’t like to share the spotlight.
Our secret’s safe with me, he’d said. He’d meant that.
So Griffin had no idea why the whole thing pissed him off so much tonight.
“She’s a great roommate,” he said, smiling blandly enough when he turned back to Gran Martha’s too-knowing stare. “Very tidy. Makes more than enough coffee every morning and never leaves the bathroom a mess. A huge improvement over some of the cretins I’ve lived with over the years.”
He’d meant the guys he’d lived with way back in his twenties, but the moment he heard the words exit his mouth he knew exactly how his grandmother would interpret that statement. And cursed himself.