Page 35 of Not Home Alone

Her eyelids are so heavy. She’s leaning into me. “When was the third time?” she asks, voice barely above a whisper.

“When I Googled you two years ago.” I hook my index finger under her chin, tilting it up. “I even looked at your LinkedIn profile. Please forgive me, Merrily Tucker.”

“I’ll never for⁠—”

I close the distance between our lips before she can finish lying to me, kissing her so softly. With so much patience. As if I haven’t been waiting ten damn years to kiss her again. She tastes like peppermint lip balm and malt.

Cupping her face in my hands, I carefully part her lips with my tongue, barely grazing her tongue, and then kiss her softly on the lips again. Stroking her cheekbones with the tips of my thumbs, I pull back the tiniest bit to gaze at her. Her eyes are closed, glossy lips still parted. I dip in to kiss her again because there’s a good chance I’ll fuck things up and won’t get another chance. But then I pull back again because I can’t do this—we can’t do this.

Her eyes are still closed and she sighs.

When her eyes widen and she looks up at me, I watch as it registers on her pretty, flushed face that I just made her swoon.

I definitely can’t do that again. “Or at least that’s what I would say if we were actually dating…” I have to force myself to lie and break the spell with a convincing smirk.

Narrowing her eyes at me, she huffs. Her nostrils flare, and she wriggles away from me, infuriated. “You’re the worst.”

TWELVE

GRANT

“What?” That’s all I have to offer my lawyer, Wyatt Finch, when he calls my cell phone as I step off the elevator. I’m not going into The Moody Group offices yet. We have a board meeting this morning, and I am not up to making small talk with Ava and Todd or any of the other bozos my father recruited onto the board of directors.

“Wow. I would have expected a slightly more upbeat greeting from the man who’s dating Merrily Tucker.”

“Who told you?”

“My assistant. She’s friends with her. And then I heard someone who was walking by my house talking about it on her phone. And then the janitor in my office building told me his wife told him.”

“Please tell me the general reaction to my dating her was ‘Wow, Grant Moody must be an incredibly down to earth, likable, and forgivable guy if Merrily Tucker is dating him.’”

There’s a brief pause, and that’s my answer. “I can’t tell you that.” Wyatt is my only friend in Holly Grove, and he cares even less about being liked than I do.

I don’t need the population of this town to like me; I need them to trust me. I don’t need them to trust me enough to invite me over to their house for dinner—that is exactly the opposite of what I want from these people, or from any people. I just want them to stop thinking of me as the guy who was a dick to Little Miss Sunshine.

“Well. Good talk,” I say. “Is that it?”

“Seriously, why are you extra grouchy today? Did he tell you already?”

Wyatt is my friend and my lawyer, and I could probably tell him about my arrangement with Merrily if I needed to. But he works with my dad’s lawyer—who also happens to be Wyatt’s father—so we don’t usually talk about much besides business. I don’t think Wyatt talks to anyone about anything besides business.

But I definitely can’t tell him I kissed Merrily last night, made her swoon, then made her so mad when I claimed to do it as retribution that she retaliated by going to her room and making… sounds. Loud, not at all family-friendly, Meg Ryan in the deli scene type sounds. Probably with that Santa toy. He doesn’t need to know that I had to take two ice-cold showers and only got about three hours of sleep because I was obsessed with the way Merrily’s lips tasted, imagining how they’d feel on my cock, haunted by her little gasps and sighs.

He doesn’t need to know that I’m finding it hard to think about anything other than the woman who spent the entire night down the hall from me. The woman I should have kept kissing. The woman I should have made scream in pleasure instead of a device. The woman who was probably—who am I kidding?—she was definitely faking those orgasms just to get under my skin. And it worked.

So much so that I wasn’t really paying attention to what Wyatt just said. “Did who tell me what already?”

He exhales. “Okay. He definitely didn’t tell you, and I can’t tell you before he does. Have you made a decision yet?”

No. I definitely shouldn’t have sex with Merrily, but I haven’t decided that I definitely won’t. “Made a decision about what?”

“Are you kidding me right now?”

“Oh. I have not decided if I will take over as CEO yet, no.” I look through the glass doors through to the waiting area of the executive offices. My dad’s assistant, Martha, peers out, looking for me. When she spots me in the hallway, she taps at an invisible watch on her wrist and waves me in. “I should go. Meeting’s about to start.”

“I know. My dad’s there. I’ll be at the office if you need to talk after.”

“When are you not at the office?”