He chuckled and took another sip of my coffee. “You’re grouchy in the morning.”
“I am not grouchy! I just enjoy my personal space.”
“Name five things you know about me and I’ll give you all the space you want.”
I glared at him. “You’re the most arrogant man alive. That’s one.”
“I don’t know if that’s a fact so much as your opinion on the matter, but I’ll let it slide. Next.”
“You went to Harvard to study Criminology and Forensics.”
“Next.”
“You have two younger brothers,” I said smugly. “Twins.”
“I just told you that twenty seconds ago.”
“So?”
“So, that doesn’t count.”
“It totally counts. You didn’t stipulate any rules regarding how long I’ve had to know these personal factoids.”
“Fine,” he conceded, eyes flashing with amusement. “You’re up to three. Let’s hear another.”
Hellfire, he was attractive when he was being playful. It was hard to hold onto my train of thought. I dug my teeth into my bottom lip to ground myself in reality. Unfortunately, this only caught Graham’s attention; his gaze dropped to my mouth and stayed there, fixated.
“Stop that,” I muttered, fighting against the fierce flush that was threatening to turn my cheeks the same color as my hair.
“Stop what?”
“Looking at my mouth.”
His eyes flickered back to mine. They were incredibly green. “Why? I like your mouth.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s a great mouth, babe. I like looking at it. Especially when it’s firing insults at me.”
I blinked, stunned momentarily silent.
“Think I’d like doing other things to it, too,” he murmured, before I had a chance to formulate my thoughts.
“Wha— That— You—” I was spluttering. “You can’t say things like that!”
“Just did.” His hand, the one planted on the butcher block beside my hip, shifted. Before I could blink, his finger was tracing the outline of my bottom lip, soft as a whisper. “Every time you talk, I find myself distracted. Watching your mouth move. Wondering if your lips are as soft as they look… what they’d feel like on my skin.”
I was no longer breathing.
His thumb pressed harder against the supple pillow of my lip, forcing it into a pout. He stared, hard, for another few seconds before he finally pulled back and looked at me. “They are, for the record.”
“What?”
He leaned down, until his mouth was only a millimeter from mine. When he whispered, I felt his exhale against my lips — tiny, torturous puffs of air that set my nerve endings aflame. “Just as soft as they look.”
Gaia, help me.
My head was spinning with exhaustion and exhilaration at his nearness. I couldn’t think straight when he was so close. I couldn’t even breathe when he was staring at me like that. “Um…”