Chapter 7
chapter
seven
Gracie
His mouth is on my neck.
That's the first thing I notice. The warm, deliberate press of his lips against the place where my pulse lives, just below my jaw, just above my collarbone. I’m pretty sure I’ve never given that spot on my body much consideration until this very moment.
Until Henry’s breath ghosts across it and every nerve ending in my body stands up and pays attention like they've been called by name.
His hand is on my hip. Not resting. No, he grips my flesh tightly.
Fingers press into the curve of me through thin cotton, pulling me closer, erasing the space between us with a slow, purposeful drag until my back is flush against his chest. I can feel every inch of him—the hard planes of his stomach, the solid width of his ribs, the unmistakable heavy ridge of his erection at my backside.
Every place I feel the heat of him searing me, like a brand.
“Gracie.” His voice is low. Rough. Wrecked in a way I've never heard it. As if he’s been holding my name in his mouth for years and he's finally letting it go. “Come here.”
But I’m already there. So close, it feels like we’re breathing as one.
He says it again, though. “Come here.” Then his hand slides from my hip to the bare skin of my stomach, palm resting against the curve of my belly. My spine arches on instinct, pressing back into him, and he makes a growling sound against the back of my neck.
His thumb traces the line of my lowest rib.
Slow. Torturous. The kind of deliberate movement that means he knows exactly what he's doing and he's planning to take his time doing it. His mouth drags higher to my earlobe, then up to the shell of my ear, where it’s nice and sensitive.
His teeth catch, just barely, just enough to make everything south of my belly button dissolve into liquid heat.
“Tell me to stop,” he murmurs.
“I don’t want you to stop,” I breathe.
“Thank fuck.” His hand slides up my shirt and palms one of my bare breasts. I arch into his touch and he rewards me by pinching my nipple and rocking his erection against my ass.
I moan and the sound jars me. Now, I'm awake.
My eyes snap open. My heart thunders inside my chest.
I’m in Henry’s bed.
My pulse is hammering. Not the sleepy, disoriented thump of someone startled awake by an alarm or a noise or the standard-issue anxiety dream about showing up to a health inspection naked.
This is the hard, driving, full-body percussion of a woman whose subconscious just staged a one-act play that would make a romance novelist blush, and whose body has not yet received the memo that it was fictional.
I'm hot. Everywhere. The sheet is tangled around my legs like I've been fighting it, and my sleep shirt has ridden up to my waist, and there is a very specific, very insistent ache between my thighs that I am absolutely, categorically not going to think about.
Then I realize the source of my heat. Henry’s big body presses against my back, one heavy arm slung over my body, his palm resting against the rounded part of my stomach.
It’s perfectly normal. People shift in their sleep. Gravitate towards warmth.
His arm tightens around my middle, and that’s when I register the hard pipe pressed against my backside. Clearly, the impetus of my dream.
Sleeping Henry is completely unaware that two minutes ago, dream-him had his hand under my shirt and his teeth on my ear and was making sounds that are now permanently etched in a part of my brain I will never be able to access in polite company again.
His breathing is deep and even. The slow, rhythmic cadence of genuine sleep—not the performative version we were both doing when we first came to bed.
Meanwhile, my body still thrums with need. I swear I can still feel the phantom pressure of his mouth on my neck like a sunburn.
I need to leave.
I need to leave this bed, this room, this house, possibly this county.
I need to be somewhere that doesn't smell like Henry. Somewhere, I’m not tempted to lift his hand further beneath my shirt so he’ll touch my breast. Somewhere, I can’t roll my body over to straddle that erection and rub myself against it until my needy ache is sated.
I need to go to work.
Thank God. Thank God I have a job that requires me to be vertical and functioning at four in the morning.
Thank God for yeast and flour and commercial ovens and the merciless, indifferent demands of sourdough starters that don't care if you're in the middle of a sexual crisis brought on by your fake husband's sleeping hand on your bare skin.
The bread doesn't care. The bread needs to proof.
The bread is the most emotionally uncomplicated relationship in my life right now, and I am going to go have a very productive morning with it.
Carefully, I lift his hand. His fingers are heavy with sleep. Warm. Slightly callused at the pads, exactly what you'd expect from a man who's spent fifteen years working a ranch with his hands. I hold his wrist for one second too long. Feel his pulse. Slow and steady beneath my thumb.
I set his hand on the mattress. Gently. He makes a sound. Just a low, unconscious murmur. His brow creases. His hand flexes once against the empty sheet, but then he settles.
I slide out of the bed like I'm escaping a crime scene. Feet on the hardwood—cool, grounding, the opposite of everything happening inside my body. I stand there in the dark for a three-count, making sure he doesn't wake, making sure the mattress doesn't betray me with a creak or a shift.
He sleeps on.
One arm still extended across my side of the bed. Face half-pressed into the pillow. Hair wrecked. T-shirt rucked up just enough to expose a strip of abdomen above his shorts that I look at for exactly one second and then forcefully redirect my gaze to the ceiling fan.
The ceiling fan is my friend. The ceiling fan is a safe space. The ceiling fan has never made me feel anything inappropriate.
I grab my phone from the nightstand. 3:47 a.m. Thirteen minutes before my alarm. Normally, I’d roll over and relish those extra minutes.
Today, though, I quickly gather my clothes in the dark.
Jeans and a t-shirt. The early-morning bakery uniform for comfort and functionality.
I take everything to the bathroom, close the door with a soft click, and get dressed, avoiding my own reflection because I already know what I'll see: flushed cheeks, pupils blown, the unmistakable face of a woman who just had the best sex of her life even though nothing actually happened.
I brush my teeth. I wash my face. I pull my hair back into a ponytail because I don’t have the patience right now to do my usual braids.
When I ease back through the bedroom, he's rolled onto his stomach.
Both arms now occupy the full width of the mattress, like his body expanded to fill the space I vacated.
The quilt—his grandmother's quilt, tumbling blocks, blue and gray—has slipped to one side, and his breathing has shifted into something deeper.
I don't look at the naked expanse of his back when I leave.