Initiative (Suncoast Society #31)(14)

Grant and Darryl had pooled their money—with help from their parents—and had surprised her with a shopping trip to the mall to buy her a dress, which they’d picked out for her after having her try on several ones. They’d bought her prom ticket, paid for her dinner, and rented a limo to take them to prom and home again.

It had been the best night of her life, until her honeymoon night with John.

And it still ranked up there in the top two nights of her life, even this many years later.

Both men had looked at her like this that night when the limo picked her up. They’d both gotten out and walked to her front door to get her.

Somewhere, she still had their prom picture, the three of them together, the men standing behind her with their arms around her, their chins resting on her shoulders.

Susan was that eighteen-year-old girl again, desperately in love with her two best friends and terrified to admit it for fear of them rejecting her, or it ruining that special bond they had.

Now what was she supposed to do with that?

With his gaze fixed firmly on hers, Grant gently curled his fingers around her hand, brought it up to his lips, and brushed a kiss across her knuckles. Those damned gorgeous ice-blue eyes that she’d fantasized about so many long and lonely nights as a kid.

“We’ve missed you, Susie,” Grant said. It felt like the world fell away around them. Like there wasn’t a pool deck full of half-drunk nearly forty-somethings splashing and talking just feet away from them. “You have no idea how glad we are you came this weekend.”

It was just her and Grant, and sitting on her other side, Darryl. Unseen, since she felt impaled by Grant’s gaze, but the heat of Darryl’s body right there next to her washed through her.

She slowly nodded. “Me, too.”

He still hadn’t released her hand, still gently clasped in his on the table. “We’re glad you live locally, too. I feel badly that we didn’t know what you were going through.” Now his gaze changed, shifted. Concerned.

It was nearly enough to make her cry, but she’d had a lot of practice over the past two years keeping a game face on at work.

Darryl gently stroked her bare shoulder. “I hope you’ll think about joining our game,” he said.

“The D and D game?” she asked, feeling weak and helpless against them but in the good way.

Grant’s smile widened. “Sure. That, too.”

Oh…wow.

Holy crap, that sealed it. Time warped, changed, shifted. She was no longer Susan Costello, thirty-eight. She was Susie Carson, eighteen, and just as helpless against Grant Delaney as she had been back then. Lucky for her he hadn’t been an * in high school, or he could have easily been inside her pants.

Instead, they’d had some never-ending not-quite-sexual tension between the three of them.

Grant closed both his hands around hers, gently, yet possessively. “This is going to be a fun weekend,” he said, lightly squeezing her fingers.

She nodded. “Yeah.”

Boy, howdy.





Chapter Five


It wasn’t that Susie didn’t want to spend time catching up with Corey and getting to know his wife, but she wanted to be alone with Grant and Darryl.

Really alone.

If she was reading this entire situation completely wrong and the men had simply been innocently teasing her, she’d need more than a margarita to help her get over her disappointment.

And she couldn’t remember if she’d brought any Xanax with her that weekend.

Gauging by the look on Grant’s face, however, she instinctively knew she wasn’t reading this wrong.

If anything, Grant now appeared to be getting off on deliberately toying with her the longer they talked, dropping little things here and there that the average nonkinky person wouldn’t likely pick up on.

And he wouldn’t stop touching her. Neither of them would.

Not that she wanted them to.

One of them always had an arm draped around her shoulders, or was holding one of her hands, or had a hand resting on her thigh. It felt like the music pounding through the speakers on the pool deck was attached to a subwoofer hooked directly to her clit.

Hello, libido, my old friend. It’s good to f*ck with you again…

She’d finished the first margarita and Darryl had jumped to get her a second drink before she could even ask for a refill. After Darryl left, Grant stroked her right arm, almost an imperceptible little tap with his finger to get her attention.

Time folded and merged and it wasn’t just from the Sauza in her margarita, either.

They were back in the lunchroom in high school and Grant was subtly getting her attention the way he had countless times before, or in class without the teacher catching on, or during a D and D game without alerting anyone else.

Her eyes focused on his finger, where it rested on her arm before her gaze slowly rose.

Somewhere deep in her brain the mindless bassline thump of the dance music faded out and mirror image of the soundtrack from Hannibal the TV show faded in, only without all the discordant percussion strokes and jarring notes. A more melodic, soothing tune as she followed the flow of Grant’s bare arm, smooth, still lithely muscled, over his shoulder and to the hollows at either side of the base of his throat, up his neck, along his strong jaw…

The eyes. Those damned ice-blue eyes.