How to End a Love Story(56)

“Would you ever want to do your own show?”

Grant laughs. “Sure, that’s the dream, isn’t it?”

“Why don’t you?” Helen drops her chip near the middle.

“It’s not that easy convincing people with power and too much to lose to trust you with millions of dollars and years of their lives,” he says, and drops his chip to the right of hers. Then, with a flash of humor in his eyes, he adds, “Congrats on getting them to do it on your first try, by the way.”

She tries not to preen at the compliment and studies the board.

Grant shuffles his remaining chips. “Anyway, I don’t mind helping other people realize their visions. Maybe I’m better at it than coming up with my own.”

Helen drops a chip to the right, and he immediately counters it.

“I think you’d be good at the top job,” Helen says. “When you run the room for Suraya, we get more done.”

She drops a chip, and he drops his own immediately on top of hers. He reaches out and taps a diagonal pattern of black chips with his index finger—one, two, three, four.

“Ah,” Helen says. “I guess that means I lose.”

Grant lifts a brow. “What do I win?”

There’s a bitter twist to his smile, and she wonders what he thinks she’s trying to do here. She has the distinct impression that he believes she’s in control of this—whatever it is that’s come up between them. And she feels more like a pilot realizing miles after takeoff that the navigation system is on the fritz and they’re flying into a storm.

Helen suddenly wants nothing more than to wipe that too-knowing, slightly sad smirk from his face.

She stands and walks around the coffee table. He watches as she places one knee on the couch cushion next to him, testing her weight, before she straddles him and settles into his lap. His hands rest at his sides, deceptively still while his heart beats rapidly against her palms on his chest.

She leans in to press a slow kiss to his earlobe—fair play, he did the same in his office.

She feels him inhale sharply at the contact.

Helen turns her head to brush her nose against his. His lips barely brush by and she imagines she can feel the shifting of the molecules in the air between them. She lingers there, daring herself, daring him. He makes a strained sound at the back of his throat.

“Don’t . . . tease me,” he says.

“I thought you liked when I tease you,” she says.

He laughs shortly and his eyes flit to her lips.

“I can only take so much, Helen,” he murmurs. “I’m just a man.”

The gravelly need in his voice does something to her insides and she leans forward, giving him a quick, impulsive kiss on the lips. His lips are soft and warm and gone—she pulls back before he almost catches hers again. He exhales slowly and looks up into her eyes. She wonders if he sees what she’s seeing in his—darkness so inviting, she wants to dive in.

Then in a swift motion, he captures her by the wrist and pulls her down for a second kiss—her eyelids flutter shut and she falls into the sensation of being thoroughly, deeply kissed. She feels like she’s sinking and evaporating at the same time. It’s slow and drugging and when she starts to retreat, Grant makes an insistent noise as he chases her lips. You don’t get to run this time.

His tongue pushes into her mouth and she whimpers as she remembers what that tongue did in his office. She answers his implied challenge and shifts in his lap, and his bottom lip falls away in a gasp. She nips lightly at his lower lip and he laughs, then he cups her face with his hands and kisses her slowly, persuasively, as if they have all the time in the world—before he slows down the kiss that she’s already starting to call the best damn kiss of her entire life and it retreats from present tense into memory.

Her breaths are coming out in short puffs as he pulls back, his face flushed with exertion, a familiar hardness pressing into her from below.

“You’re killing me,” he says finally, and his hands run down her shoulders to her hips to her shins, roaming, kneading, squeezing along their path.

“Maybe that’s the end game,” she says.

Grant lets out a short “ha” of air, then looks up at her.

He brushes a stray piece of hair from her face and tucks it behind her ear, and she remembers the heat of the scotch she drank that night in Kevin Palermo’s kitchen, the way it traveled a warming path from her mouth to her insides. Grant pulls her back to the present with a slow, insistent back and forth brush of his thumb on her Achilles.

“Serious question,” he says. “Is there an end game?”

Helen huffs and bends to kiss him. The end game is to kiss him as many times as possible. He submits to one, two, three—ha, almost four—kisses, then pulls back. “Helen?”

She suddenly feels very exposed. She swallows, studying the micro-movements of his face. Her hands itch to unfurrow his brow and smooth out the tension around his grim mouth. But she keeps them fisted at the neck of his T-shirt, as if they’ll help her hold on to him better this way.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Does there have to be?”

He draws slow circles on the backs of her thighs, and she feels like she’s sleepwalking off a cliff.

“I don’t like surprises,” he says. “If you have a destination or an expiration date in mind, I’d rather know now.”