CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
After sending everybody home, including Miss Javits and his entire household staff, Grayson ordered the guard on the gate to keep all employees out.
He didn’t know who was behind the attack, and he wasn’t taking any chances.
He wanted his entire downstairs cleared of people.
Then his entire attention was on Latoya.
She was seated on the sofa inside his private residence as he handed her a glass of wine.
“But it’s too early for wine.”
“You need it. Drink it,” he ordered her, and she did take a sip. She was still so shaken by the events she’d just endured that he could see the tremble in her hands as she held onto the glass. He sat down beside her.
“I feel like I’m struggling to make sense of what happened,” she said.
She was seated on the edge of the sofa, with her legs folded, while he sat all the way back with his legs crossed too.
“One minute I’m in your car driving to your office building when one car hit me one way, then another car hit me another way.
At first I’m thinking it must be an accident.
Until I realized it can’t be. So I speed away, trying to get away, but both of those cars followed me.
But even that wasn’t so bad, because I was driving a fast car, but then they started shooting at me. ”
Grayson felt a pain in the pit of his stomach when she made that statement.
But she kept telling it. “That’s when I knew they weren’t just trying to scare me or run me off the road. They were trying to kill me. So I had to drive even faster and even more recklessly. And I could hear the bullets hitting the car and it was just awful.”
She was trembling even more. But he needed to hear the whole story.
“Then the next thing I know I’m spinning out of control while one of their cars is flipping out of control. That’s when the other car speeds away.” Then she looked back at Grayson. “They said the man in the car that flipped died.”
Grayson nodded. “He did, yes.”
Toya shook her head and then leaned it back. Then she looked at Grayson again. “I can’t understand why this is happening. Why would somebody be targeting me?”
“They weren’t targeting you, honey.”
Toya stared at him. “How would you know that?”
“You were driving my car. They apparently thought I was driving it. They were targeting me.”
For some strange reason, hearing they were targeting Grayson concerned Toya even more. “But why would they target you?”
He looked her dead in the eye. “Because my father has many enemies, and I’m my father’s son.”
“Oh. But are these enemies from his days as governor?”
Grayson wished it was that simple. “And beyond, yes.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“Security will be beefed up. You’ll continue to stay here with me until we get this resolved.”
“But how will it get resolved?”
“When we find out who’s behind the attack.”
“But the police is acting like I’m the problem. They didn’t wanna even hear what I was saying. I’m sorry, Gracie, but if you’re relying on those cops to solve the case you can forget it. Those cops aren’t worth a damn.”
“That’s why I’m not relying on them. I have somebody on the case.”
“Already?”
“Yes. Already. You needn’t worry about anything.”
But he could tell Toya was worried about everything.
She was still so filled with tension that when she went to take another sip of her drink, she had to pull the glass back down because she was shaking so badly.
Which Grayson instinctively knew wasn’t going to get any better until he made it better.
He stood up, took her glass and sat it on the side table, and then he reached out his hand to her. “Come with me,” he said. “You’ve got to release that.”
She didn’t know where she was going with him, and what he was talking about, but she took his hand, stood up, and allowed him to escort her to his bedroom.
It wasn’t until he undressed her and put her in bed, and then he undressed himself and got in bed beside her did she realize what he was talking about.
Because when he pulled her into his arms and began kissing her, and then as he began massaging her pliable body as he kissed her, she could feel that anxiousness and stress and that heavy tenseness slowly began to calm down.
And when he entered her, he didn’t enter her with a burst of passion and urgency. He moved in so slowly and so tenderly that she felt it even more acutely than she would have felt it had he thrust into her.
As he moved inside of her, he still kept it slow and sweet.
And the more he moved, the less stressful she felt.
She couldn’t forget what happened. It was still playing in her mind even as he did her.
But she was able to stop trembling because of what happened.
She was able to stop being afraid that it was all going to fall apart after what happened.
His decision to let his body do the talking for him worked.
It calmed her down. It slowed her hammering heartbeat.
And it made her trust him more because everything he seemed to do was focused on her. Even now. He was doing it for her.
But when she began to orgasm, he couldn’t help but feel it too. And then he came too. And for both of them, it was as electrifying as if they were in the throes of a passion that was verging on uncontrollable. They both came long and hard.
And when he finally stopped moving inside of her after he was all spent out, she wrapped her arms around him even tighter. She loved him. She realized, in that moment, that she truly loved him.
But just as she was coming to that realization, Grayson was having an epiphany of his own.
And unlike Toya, who dared not say a word because she wasn’t sure if her feelings for him were mutual, Grayson wasn’t holding back another second.
This woman almost died because of her connection to him.
He could either back away for her sake, or go all in for her sake.
He decided to go all in.
And that was when he pulled back from her and looked her dead in the eyes.
Toya was suddenly concerned, because his eyes looked as if they read her thoughts and he was going to make it clear to her that she was wasting her time.
And that her love for him was misplaced.
She was ready for another letdown. Only she knew this letdown was going to land differently.
This wasn’t about her career. This wasn’t even about her freedom.
This was about her heart. And the heart of the matter was always the hardest matter of all.
But Grayson didn’t tell her any of those things she feared. He looked her dead in her beautiful, expressive eyes and told her his truth: “Jameesha Latoya Morgan,” he said to her, “I want you to know, I need you to know, that I love you dearly.”
She wanted to leap for joy. But she was hesitant. Was his other words going to be I love you dearly, but I’m not in love with you? She’d heard those words from previous relationships too many times before.
But not so with Grayson. “And I say this from the bottom of my heart,” he added: “I am deeply in love with you.”
Instead of her heart breaking, as she was bracing herself to deal with, it soared. She could not have hoped for more.
“Oh, Gracie, I love you too!” she said, equally heartfelt, and had tears in her eyes as she threw her arms around him.
He pulled her tighter against him and held her with that loving feeling so embedded in him now that he knew she was the one. She was his life partner. She was the only person alive that he could trust with his heart.
When they kissed this time, it was filled with so much passion on top of love on top of passion that he was entering her once again.
Only this time it wasn’t about relieving stress or tension. It was only about love. They made hard, pulse-pounding, passionate love.