Page 17 of Brother in Law with Benefits

He's forty-three, I think — not as a caveat but as information I'm absorbing, running my hands over the body of a man who has lived an interesting life and it shows in the best possible ways. The solidity of him. The steadiness. He knows who he is in a way I don't fully yet and I feel that in every deliberate motion, in the unhurried way his hand slides down to grip my hip and pull me flush against him, letting me feel exactly how much he wants this against my stomach.

"Bed," he says, voice wrecked in a way that undoes something in me. "Now."

We make it to the bed.

He settles me against the pillows and stays above me, looking. Just looking, for a moment, eyes dragging over every inch of me like he's committing it to memory.

"You're beautiful," he says. Like a fact.

"You don't have to—"

"I know I don't have to." He lowers himself, one hand sliding down my body, over my ribs, my stomach, lower. "I want to say things I've been thinking. You're going to let me."

I make a noise that means yes, I'm going to let you do anything you want, and his hand finds where I'm already wet, and he makes a low, quiet sound, almost a groan, like the confirmation of it costs him something.

"Sophie. You're soaked."

"I told you. I've been waiting five years."

He works me with his fingers while I stop being a coherent person. He finds what makes me gasp and does it again, adjusts when I shift, pays attention in a way that makes me suddenly, vividly aware that I have apparently been doing this wrong for a while, or rather, I've been doing it with people who were doing it wrong.

For half a second, somewhere underneath all of it, a small cold thought surfaces —this is Chris's brother, this is the boy in the photo on Patty's mantle, this is a line I am currently in the process of erasing— and I let it surface, and I let it go, because whatever this is between me and Chris's family stopped belonging to Chris the day the divorce was finalized, and because nothing about the way Grant is looking at me right now feels like a mistake, no matter what it might look like from the outside. I push the thought under and stay exactly where I am.

"That's it," he murmurs, watching my face like he's reading a book he doesn't want to put down. "Let me see what you like."

"I like—" I lose it as he curls his fingers. That. "—that. That specifically. Don't stop."

"Baby girl." His voice drops, rougher than before. "I'm not stopping."

The endearment does something to me that I wasn't anticipating. A warm rush of it, all the way down, pooling low and insistent. I hear myself moan and I don't even care.

"How long?" he asks. His fingers are still moving, maddening, curling deep and slow in a way that has my hips already chasing his hand. "Since someone made you feel this way?"

"Over a year." My face heats even while the rest of me is melting. "More than a year."

"A year." He shakes his head like this is a genuine offense, dips his head to press an open-mouthed kiss just below my navel. "That's not happening again. Not while I'm around."

He works me higher and then slows down when I'm close, deliberately, and I make a very undignified sound that he seems to consider a success because he smiles against my hip.

"Patience," he says.

"You have enough for both of us, apparently."

“I really do.”

He proves it. His two thick fingers sliding deeper, slow and exact, the heel of his hand grinding against me so every small movement lands right where I need it. He watches my face the whole time, learning the precise angle that makes my breath hitch, the pressure that makes my thighs start to shake.

“Please,” I finally say, hips lifting into his hand, voice cracking. “Grant, I need—”

“What do you need, baby girl?”

“You. Inside me. Now.”

He holds my gaze for one more second, then shifts between my legs. The blunt, heavy head of his cock presses against me—hot, thick, already slick from how soaked I am—and my breath catches hard before he’s even moved. He’s bigger than I let myself imagine all those nights I shouldn’t have been thinking about him.

“Look at me.”

I do.