Such a Rush(54)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“I do.”

My body lit on fire with a new wave of the awareness I’d felt since I’d been here. But Grayson was manipulating me. Rolling on my back and staring up at the exposed pipes in the ceiling, I murmured, “You have a funny way of showing it.”

He was moving by the dark wall. For a second I thought I’d made him mad, and he would stomp out into the storm.

But then he was kneeling beside me, one hand very close to me on the cot. “Leah, I’m sorry about tonight with Mark. Patrick ran into the house to tell me Mark had grabbed you. I was afraid he’d hurt you. I may have overreacted, but”—he opened his hands, giving up—“that’s just what I do sometimes. You can’t hang out with Mark, okay? You’ll be really sorry.”

“Right,” I grumbled. “You care about me so much that you shove me toward your brother.”

Grayson sighed in frustration. “That’s for his own good. All of this is for him.”

“Tell me why,” I insisted.

“I can’t.” Grayson focused on me and his face was full of concern. “If I told you, you’d change the way you act around him, and he would know it was all for show.”

“Is he sick?” I guessed, hoping not. That would be too much for both of them to take.

“No!” Grayson said so vehemently that I believed him. “He just needs some help remembering that he’s human. I guess we all do.” He moved his hand from the side of the cot to my cheek.

Our gazes locked. Electricity formed in my cheek and zinged straight down, through my whole body.

He blinked slowly. Up close, his face was an elongated version of Alec’s. His long, blond lashes were the same. But his eyes were completely different from Alec’s innocent blue ones. They were stormy gray, swirling with heat.

Suddenly I knew why he’d been hiding behind his shades or looking down at his phone whenever I was around. Why he’d taken potshots at me yesterday for flirting with Alec, even though he was the one making me do it. He couldn’t have me. That would ruin his plans for me and Alec. But he wanted me.

We paused there on the edge. His thumb stroked my jawbone as he leaned closer. I closed my eyes.

And then we were kissing, panting, kissing again, his lips hard on mine, his hand sliding down my bare skin underneath the blanket.

Wow. Earlier that night and the night before, kissing Alec would have been nice if not for all the baggage with it. It felt good, and he acted like a gentleman. Grayson did not act like a gentleman at all. Kissing him was an adventure, a journey, a battle, every movement of his lips and hands sparking new explosions all over me.

“Oh,” he said, drawing back. Then he changed his mind and kissed me again. His hand cupped my bare breast, his thumb rubbed across my nipple, and I was not going to tell him no. I didn’t need to. He would make a fist and exercise the impulse control he’d been taught in five, four, three, two, one.

He broke the kiss and sat back on his heels. His hand moved from my breast to the center of my chest, over my heart. “Leah.” He was breathing hard. “I’m sorry. I do care about you. Please know that. I just… I don’t know what to say.”

“Tell me I don’t have to date Alec anymore.”

“What?” His face hardened against me, and he withdrew his hand. “No.”

“Tell me why I have to date Alec.”

“No.”

“Then f**k off.” Hugging the blanket tightly around me, I rolled over with my back to him.

Much later I woke again and sat up suddenly, alarmed at the weight on my chest. The lights were still off, but I could see in the dim glow through the cellar window that both blankets covered me. Grayson lay sprawled across the cement floor with no blanket at all, his wet T-shirt balled under his head for a pillow. I watched his smooth, muscled chest rise and fall for a few peaceful breaths. Then I lay back down.

“Leah,” he whispered. “Hey. Wake up.”

As I opened my eyes, he was moving his hand away. My scalp tingled like he’d been stroking my hair.

“Get dressed,” he said. “I’m waiting outside for you in the truck.” He climbed the stairs in his damp clothes and disappeared through the door.

The light was back on. I slipped my own cold clothes on, wishing for the warm blankets, and followed him up the stairs. Outside it was still night. The rain had moved away, leaving a heavy white mist in its place. The airport looked ghostly and abandoned but intact. I wondered why Grayson had woken me.

“What’s the matter?” I asked as I hopped up into his truck. “Did the tornado touch down?”

“Not around here,” he said. “A couple of people were killed in a trailer park a few counties west of here.”

Nothing unusual. A chill passed through me.

“But the storms are gone,” he said, “so I’m taking you home.”

“Couldn’t you let me sleep through the night and then walk home?” I grumbled.

“No, Alec might get here early in the morning and see you.”

“Why couldn’t you tell him the truth? That you didn’t want your employee to die, so you brought me into the storm cellar and slept on the floor across the room from me, and we made out for a few minutes but didn’t do it?”

The truck bumped from the highway to the gravel road through the trailer park. He said quietly, “It would look like we did it.” Gravel crunched under the tires as he stopped the truck in front of my trailer. “If I told him about it, he would figure out that I wanted to. He knows me pretty well.”

Though my fingers and toes were frozen, my blood heated as he whispered this.

He sighed, dismissing the thought, back to business. “Sleep late tomorrow if you need to. I’ll make up an excuse to tell Alec. Or take a nap on break. What matters most is other people—” He touched his thumb.

“Then me, then the airplane, then the banner. I know.” I jumped down from the truck and crossed the dirt yard, unhealthily pissed that every time Grayson and I were about to make an actual connection, he brought up business. Or Alec. They were one and the same for him.

I tripped over the edge of a miniature canyon the rain had carved into the dirt. That was the only difference the storms had made. In Grayson’s headlights, the trailer shone dully. Like a cockroach after a nuclear war, it would still be here when we all were dead.

fourteen

“Is he really asleep?” I called to Alec, just loud enough to be heard over the drone of the fans in the hangar.