“Ah. Right. Fair enough.”
I shot him a pointed look. “And how didyousleep?”
“Soundly.”
“Mmm. I could tell from your thunderous snoring.”
He scoffed. “I don’t snore.”
“Oh, you do. It was reminiscent of a freight train. Or a woodchopper.” I suppressed a smile at my blatant fabrications. “What? Your exes didn’t tell you? Maybe they didn’t want to hurt your feelings. That last one — Mara, was it? — seemed to think you farted moonbeams and sneezed watercolors. What ever happened to her, anyway? Too nice for you?”
There was a marked pause. “You seem rather fixated on my past love life. Been keeping tabs on who I date?”
“I couldn’t care less who you date.”
Okay, so, this wasn’t strictly true. I had a tendency to take notice whenever Graham had a new girl in his life. Which, seeing as he was Graham, and he looked the way he looked, happened pretty regularly. He wasn’t a serial dater or anything, but over the past year and a half, he’d brought a handful of different girls around as his plus-one to barbecues and boat trips on Desmond’s speedboat. Always gorgeous, always charming, always looking at him like he’d personally hung the sun in the sky just for them to get a tan.
But they never stuck around for very long. It was rare to see them at more than one consecutive social engagement. Having seen his perfectly ordered loft, I wondered if he was too much of a control freak to let anyone invade his space for very long before cutting them off.
“Uh huh,” he said, bringing me back to the present. I could hear the smug smile in his voice, but I purposefully didn’t look at him, fixated on my lukewarm coffee instead. “And what about you?”
“Me?” I squeaked. “What about me?”
“You haven’t dated anyone in… what? Six months? Why is that? Sworn off men?”
“Who I date — or don’t date — is frankly none of your business.” I took a deep breath, working up the nerve to meet his stare agin. It was amused, crinkles feathering the skin around his eyes. “Do you have my phone?”
“Why? Want to check your Tinder matches?”
I rolled my eyes. “I need to check in with my barista, tell her I’m going to be late to open the store today.”
He walked across the room to the couch, where he’d left his leather jacket the night before, and pulled my smartphone from the pocket. He frowned down at the screen as he returned to me, his bare feet moving soundlessly across the hardwood floors. In the pale pink light of sunrise, he looked like some sort of fallen angel — all dark, chiseled angles and dangerously attractive edges. Lucifer incarnate, the devil made flesh. I swallowed the lump in my throat as he passed me my phone.
The screen said 6:49AM. The battery bar said 8%. The notifications said 24 MISSED CALLS.
“All from Florence,” Graham noted.
“I’ll call her back. She’s probably worried.”
“She knows you’re with me.”
“Exactly. She’s not worried about the kidnapping; she’s worried I caved to my baser instincts and smothered you in your sleep.”
Graham’s chuckle was drowned out by the sudden vibration of the phone in my hand. I peered down at it, not at all surprised to see FLORENCE LAMBERT flashing across the screen in bold letters.
“Hi, Flo,” I said as I lifted it to my ear.
“Hi! Let us in!”
“What?”
“We’re outside! Des and me. We brought breakfast.”
I glanced at Graham. He was leaning back against the kitchen island, watching me with that inscrutable expression he so often wore, arms crossed over his broad, bare chest. His brows lifted in question.
“Florence and Desmond are at your front door,” I told him, shrugging lightly.
If he was shocked by this information, he didn’t show it. He merely pushed off the counter, muttering, “I’ll buzz them in.”