Arm Candy (Real Love #2)(15)

I have a different plan in mind.

“Are you serious?” she asks, that dent deepening. I nearly grin.

“About the champagne?” I ask, purposely being obtuse. I lift her hand to my lips and kiss her fingers before moving to the refrigerator. “Let me check.”

I emerge with a chilled, corked bottle. “Champagne.”

Her shoulders droop, and the smile she wears is uncertain. I like her uncertain. I like surprising her, and I can’t surprise her if I do what she expects.

I brandish two flutes from the cabinet and fill them halfway with the sparkling wine. I hand over her glass and we toast silently, tapping the edges of the glasses together before drinking. Grace glances around my place and I wonder what she’s thinking. I don’t have to wonder long.

“You have a clean sense of style.” She walks to the living room, running her fingers along the arm of my L-shaped gray couch. She pauses in front of the glass coffee table and a decorative bowl filled with large smooth rocks to admire my view. My apartment window faces a park. It’s closed this time of night but you can usually spot the end of a lit cigarette or dark silhouettes walking through the trees.

I click on a lamp in the living room. “The windows are tinted. No one can see in.”

She peers at me over her shoulder, her uncertainty fading some.

“You know, if you were interested in”—I take her glass and set it down with mine on the coffee table—“making faces at the people below or something.”

Grace offers a light laugh as I touch her waist. Her hands cover mine and when she studies me with her cool, green stare, she’s the Grace I remember from the first time I spotted her in McGreevy’s.

Bawdy.

Confident.

Brash.

The women I normally date are demure and unsure and use their sexuality as a way of getting what they want. Grace isn’t like that. She doesn’t try to be sexual to get something. She is sexual. It’s part of her identity, interwoven with the way she carries herself, the way she moves closer to me.

“What’s your game, Davis?”

See? Bawdy. Told you.

“No game.”

“Why aren’t we naked yet?” She fingers the open placket of my shirt, stroking my collarbone.

I lift my eyebrows. “Are you in a hurry?”

“I—” Her mouth opens, then closes before she frowns in thought. “I just thought—”

“You thought you had me figured out.”

“I’m pretty good at categorizing men, yes.”

“Let’s hear it, then. Who is Davis Price?” I deliberately pull away from her an inch.

“Okay. Um…” Her eyes skate across the room and to the darkened upstairs before meeting mine again. “You live alone. No pets. You are a serial dater and bring home lots of blond women. Lots of drunk blond women,” she adds in a whisper.

I maintain my poker face. She’s not getting a comment from me until she’s through.

“I know part of your MO. Drinks at McGreevy’s and sometimes they choose one of your packages. Judging by what I’ve seen, your dates find you charming. You come back to your place after clarifying the rules of your hookup….Jury’s out on if there are contracts involved or not.”

Smart-ass.

“Then the sex happens.” She shrugs. “From there, you tire of them and they go away forever. Unless one of them approaches you at the gym for a repeat.”

I was right about her jealousy over the gym girl. I bite the inside of my lip to keep from rewarding her with a smile for her quick wit and abject charm.

“Am I close?” she asks.

“Spot on.”

She blanches, her gaze jerking left then right.

“And now you’re wondering why you’re not getting that same treatment,” I guess.

“Okay. Fine. I am wondering that.”

I move her arms so that they wrap around my waist. Pushing her hair away from her ear, I lower my lips to kiss her lobe, then pepper kisses down the side of her neck. Grace tilts her head, giving me room to explore. I taste her skin, closing my teeth over her pulse before soothing the bite with a wet, soft kiss.

“You requested the full package, Gracie,” I whisper in her ear. “You’re getting it.”

Her hands tighten at my waist, wadding my shirt in her fists. I return to kissing her neck, drawing slow circles with my tongue, skimming my hands up her rib cage and stopping short of cupping the swells of her breasts.

Her breaths grow shorter, a moan coming from deep in her throat as I grip her neck and run my tongue over her ear. She whimpers and I know she doesn’t mean to. A woman like Grace would never play up her pleasure for a man’s sake. I prove myself right when I pull back. The confusion in her eyes is her trying to reconcile what she thought would happen with what is happening.

I bend at the knees and run my fingers up the inside of her knee to her inner thigh. Her eyes widen as I grasp the back of her neck and tilt her face to mine. My lips hover over hers as I inch my hand higher, higher.

“You’re soaking wet,” I mutter. The lace of her panties is damp against the pads of my fingertips and I stroke her once. Twice.

When her mouth opens and her eyes close, I slide my tongue along hers and continue teasing her most private part with my fingers.