Chapter 35

From a super villain’s lair to Grant’s spaceship sheets, the change of place couldn’t be more different. The man, the feelings, the sense of coming home, that all stays the same. I knew as I jumped off the rockface of the skull that Grant would be there for me just as surely as I know it now when he lays me down onto his bed.

It doesn’t matter what I do, how robotic I am, how obsessed with winning I am, how utterly off-putting I am, he’ll still love me. To Grant, all of that is charming window dressing. He and he alone can see past all that to the real me inside.

Turns out I needed an optimist all along.

Except, he’s not looking optimistic right now.

No, right now he’s looking like a brooding, scowling dagger, sharpened to a deadly point. His chocolate eyes have lost all warmth as he narrows them, taking in every inch of my sprawled-out form across his bed.

He’s always sexy as hell, but when he smolders like that, it goes to another level.

I shoot him my best come hither eyes, which only makes him scowl more deeply.

“You’re in trouble,” Grant warns in a voice like thunder.

“Probably,” I admit. “At least until the reset.”

I’m no expert, but I think it’ll take at least a day for Reinhold to summon a hitman or the like. At least I hope so. I know I’ll still reset, but dying really sucks.

Grant climbs onto the bed, his arms bracketing me on either side of my head. He leans forward and stares so intently that my skin breaks out in goosebumps.

“I meant from me.”

His words run through me, making me shiver.

“From you?” I ask, breathless.

“You nearly gave me a heart attack. Jumping off the cliff like that. You could’ve died.”

He continues to glare at me, his eyes intense and piercing. His messy hair falls in front of his eyes, and I want nothing more than to reach up and push the hair away from his face.

I want to cup his ticking jaw in my hand and pull him in for a kiss.

I want to pull him against me and feel him inside me.

Now that I’m not denying it, I can feel this primal attraction, this deep-set need for one another pulsing in my core. Every second that we spend not coming together is another second spent fighting our magnetic pull.

Staying away from him is like trying to deny air.

Like trying to fight gravity.

“I would’ve reset,” I say, reaching up to soothe some of the furrowed lines on his face.

Grant grabs my hand, pulls it away from his face, and pins it against the bed.

My heart races, but not because I’m scared. Between him holding me in place and the seriousness in his eyes, my desire for him is growing into a need. As his chest heaves with intensity over top of me, my panties dampen and my cheeks flush.

Grant’s eyes rove over my body as he leans over me, taking in the squirm of my hips and the blush on my face. His jaw ticks again, but there’s no cooling in his burning eyes.

“I don’t care if you’ll reset, dying is not an option,” he growls.

“No?” I ask, deliberately poking at the beast inside of him. I reach up with my other hand and trail my fingers along the waist of his pants. “I knew you’d catch me, in any case.”

Grant continues to glare at me as the tips of my fingers dance across the front of his pants. When they reach the hard bulge, I stroke my index and middle fingers in hard circles until I’m rewarded with the beginnings of his precum seeping through.

With another growl, Grant grabs that hand and pins it on the other side of my head. His eyes are feral with intensity as he lowers his body against mine. His hard cock pushes against my throbbing core. Nudging at me slightly, my body trembles in response to the feel of him against me.

He doesn’t give me more, though.

He just continues to stare into my very being as I pant with need.

“I don’t think you understand how intensely I feel for you.” He pushes himself against my throbbing clit again, rubbing himself up and down my quickly soaking sex. He stops when a moan escapes me. “I am a very laidback guy—except when it comes to you. When it comes to you, something snaps inside me. I would sooner carve out my own heart than let you get hurt. The rest of the world can burn, everyone else can rot, everything can crumble to dust, if it means keeping you safe.”

“Because you love me.”

Grant’s eyes burn and his nostrils flare. His fingers tighten on my wrists, which makes me squirm against him even more. By now, my panties are drenched and my breath is ragged with need for him.

“You’re finally catching on?”

“Slowly,” I say, wrapping my legs around him to pull him flush against me. Grant rocks against me, making me moan again. This time he doesn’t stop. “Dr. Debbie didn’t have a chapter on supernatural love connections, so I’m having to figure it out as I go.”

“There’s nothing to figure out.” Grant shifts one of my hands over so that he can grip both wrists in one hand. His other hand, he trails down the length of my arm down to my ribcage. His large hand spans half my body. His thumb strokes at the bottom of my breast. “You’re mine, I’m yours, and I’ll do anything to protect you—even from your own stupid plans.”

“My plans are not stupid,” I protest.

Grant narrows his eyes some more. His fingers rove over to the top of my shirt and rip it open, scattering buttons across his floor. He pushes down my bra and grips at my breast, toying just on the cusp of too roughly with my nipple.

“Anything that puts you in danger is a stupid plan.” He pinches my nipple until I cry out in pleasure. “It was doubly stupid not to tell me about your plan before you threw yourself off a cliffside.”

“I’m never stupid. I—” I trail off because his hand has equally trailed off.

With my nipple still tingling from the feel of his attention, he runs his hand down my stomach, memorizing the planes of my body. With nimble fingers, and perhaps a touch of gravity control, he unbuttons my pants easily and throws them off me. His fingers, long and strong, dance down the length of my panties—one finger creeping forward at a time.

“Say it was stupid,” Grant says with a smile playing on his mouth and trouble winking in his eyes.

“No,” I answer because I don’t concede to anyone.

With his hand still holding my wrists above my head, Grant lowers his other hand until his fingers stroke at the soaking wet fabric of my panties. Starting with slow, long strokes, he runs his fingers along the entire underside of my panties. My clit throbs with anticipation, with need, but he lets his hand run its languid path.

I hate it.

And I love it.

Each pass ratchets me up another aching notch until my body is impossibly hot and bursting with need.

“Please,” I beg as his fingers move on from where I need them most.

Grant cocks an eyebrow at me.

“Do you admit your plan was stupid?”

I bite my lip. The fact that he’s asking me something barely registers. I just need more of him.

“It worked,” I spit out despite the fact that I want to acquiesce to whatever he wants from me.

Grant moves his fingers back up my panties and pinches at my clit through the soaking fabric of my panties.

“Wrong answer,” he hums.

For a second, I’m afraid he’s going to stop. That we’re going to have to have one of those dumb conversations where no one tries to win and you have to start your sentences with ‘I feel’.

But he doesn’t stop.

Instead, my panties get flown from my body so that I’m bare before him. With eyes that are set back to full smolder, Grant looks over my fully naked body.

Using his knee to push my legs apart, Grant moves between my legs. His hand runs down the front of my pussy, his first two fingers down either side of my slit. Then, he uses those fingers to splay me open. His eyes devour the sight of my dripping, throbbing, swollen sex.

“You are so fucking sexy,” he mutters. The truth resounds in his voice just as much as it shows in his eyes or with the huge erection that bulges out from his pants.

I squirm under his touch as I eye his cock. My body yearns to be against him. To be close to him. To use his cock to bring me to the climax I so desperately need. Instead, he just tightens his hand on my wrists.

“For someone so smart, you really don’t have any idea where this is going, do you?”

Before I have time to respond, or even decide if I’m physically capable of making words, Grant’s fingers are inside of me. Two of his long, slender fingers slide right into my dripping pussy, making my hips buck with bliss.

“Fuck,” Grant breathes as he withdraws his fingers after a few pumps. Even to my sex-crazed eyes, I can see that his fingers are dripping with my juices. “You’re so wet for me, Sunshine,” he says, moving his fingers up to rub the wetness all over my pulsing clit.

I moan my agreement. My mouth falls open in a wanton pant, caught halfway between begging him to keep playing with my clit and begging him to finger fuck me some more.

“Please,” I breathe.

His thumb flicks out against my clit as his fingers go to dive back into my pussy. That little jolt almost pushes me over the edge.

I’m so fucking close.

So close.

I’m so close that this time, he adds a third finger as he fucks me with his hand. My pussy flutters around his hand, clenching and dripping even more for him.

When I look up at him, he looks at his hand moving in and out of me like it’s the best thing he’s ever seen. His face is rapt and serious and so very in love. That look is what starts the chain reaction. The feeling starts in the very center of me and builds, tensing all my muscles, drawing my body tauter than violin strings before they sound out with the sweet release of music.

And then he stops.

A sound that’s equal parts whimper and growl screech out of me.

“What the hell?” I scramble onto my forearms to look up at him.

He’s released my arms and is sitting back on his heels, looking casual for all the world, despite his raging erection.

Grant smirks, taking in the flush across my body and my ragged breaths. He lifts his soaking fingers up to his mouth and sucks on them, closing his eyes as he savours my taste.

“You feel desperate?” he asks.

I don’t answer him, even as he runs his fingers along my pussy then up to his mouth again for another lick.

“How you feel right now: aching, dying, desperate, is how I always feel about you. I hold it in because I know I’d scare you off otherwise, but that’s what’s raging inside of me. I am always a hair away from madness when it comes to you. You consume my every thought so much so that, most of the time, I can’t think at all. I do know, though, that if you get hurt again, I would shatter. I would shatter and I’d take the whole world down with me.”

He leans forward again to cup his hand against my cheek, his thumb brushing at my red lips and dipping into my mouth.

“So, I ask you again—was your plan stupid?”

If he truly feels even a fraction of the desperation that I feel right now, then there’s only one answer.

“Yes.”

Grant smirks. “Good girl.”