“Aww, Jitter’s such a good dog. Hey, has he checked his phone? I texted him.”
“Check your phone,” I tell Grey when I realize Zen didn’t mean Jitter needed to check his phone.
Grey looks at the dog, then at me, and he sighs as he sinks to the floor. “My phone stresses me out.”
“He needs to change his number, but he won’t listen to me no matter how many penis latte art pictures I send him,” Zen says. “Oh, yes, there it is. He’s flipped off my latte art in text. He’s fine. Go about your day with a clear conscience, and thank you for your good deed.”
“My—”
The line clicks dead.
“—pleasure,” I finish.
Minor circulation issue? Super Villain Man?
“You can go,” he says stiffly, not looking at me.
Jitter lifts his head and licks Grey’s face.
His whole face.
The whole damn thing.
Instead of grimacing and shoving him away though, Grey half smiles and rubs Jitter behind the ears. “Knock it off, pup. I’m fine.”
Still not looking at me.
I sink to the carpet and cross my legs, watching him. “So, Super Villain Man?”
He sighs and swipes his face. “You’re fired.”
“You’re gonna have to put more oomph behind that for me to believe it.”
“Fine. You’re not fired. But please go home.”
“With or without my dog?”
“Leave him here.”
My heart melts into a puddle of sappy, gooey, warm puddles of lovey-dovey crap that I absolutely do not have the bandwidth for.
I pull my knees to my chest and loop my arms around them, watching him not watch me while he loves on my dog, who’s attempting to climb in the man’s lap again. “I won’t tell anyone.”
Those hooded blue eyes lift and meet my gaze head-on, and my stomach drops like I’m on the best of the best roller coaster. “You have a code.”
“I have to, or I can’t live with myself.”
His focus on me doesn’t waver, and my arms break out in goosebumps.
So intense.
And I like it.
I like him.
Despite every reason I shouldn’t, despite all of my own misgivings about liking anyone, I like him.
He feels like a friend.
A complicated friend, but a friend.
“My best friend and business partner shoved a paper in front of me and told me it was a purchase authorization for a new piece of lab equipment I’d mentioned wanting to acquire,” he says. “It was the authorization to sell off a research project I’d put six years of my life into and a commitment to send the next ten years’ worth of my research directly to a start-up that he’d bought into. I have a code too. It’s simple. Don’t fucking lie to make money off of someone else. And I’ve added read all of the fine print. And don’t trust people.”
It takes everything I have to not launch myself over my dog and hug him.
The thing I’ve learned about people is that they’re never all good or all bad.
Chandler?
He’s on my permanent shit list because he betrayed me, but I get it. His parents have had issues since the dawn of their relationship, and they continuously one-upped each other in gifts and experiences to him instead of being a family unit, giving him an inflated sense of self-worth constantly battling with an inflated sense of guilt. They fucked him up, but it’s on him if he ever wants to be the kind of person who deserves my time again.
Emma?
She has given people the benefit of the doubt her entire life, and she’s been taken advantage of. Laney and I have fended off the worst of what we could whenever we’d see someone taking advantage of her sweet nature, but we—I—failed her at her own wedding.
Laney?
Rule-following angel of a woman who’s taken to starting food fights.
We’re all complicated.
Grey?
People have hurt him. I don’t know all of it, but I’ve seen enough in this world to recognize how much it probably took for him to tell me his side of this part of his story.
I don’t take his trust for granted, and I won’t break it, no matter how much I don’t want his trust.
And that’s my biggest issue with my attraction to Grey.
We’re both complicated. We’re both afraid. And I think we get each other in a way I never thought another human being could get me.
“I didn’t mean to lie to you in Hawaii,” I whisper.
He shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me.”
“We weren’t supposed to be here.”
“But we are.”
God, that gaze.
He looks at me, and I feel like I’m the center of his universe.
That’s how he looked at me in Hawaii too.
For one amazing night, I was his entire focus.
For one amazing night, I thought he was everything I could’ve ever wanted and nothing I deserved.
But now he’s here.
And I don’t want to leave.
I want to know more.
Not because I have to know everything, but because I want to know him.
I want to see the man I met in Hawaii again. I want that Grey back. The funny, self-deprecating, smiling Grey who wanted to do good with me.
“You keep doing good deeds for me,” he says.
“You keep making it easy.”
“I’m behind on my good-deed meter.”
“I imagine being Super Villain Man probably interferes with that.”
“It’s Super Vengeance Man.”
“Justice, huh?”
“I heard you crying earlier.”
I freeze.
Hard freeze.
Only Mom was supposed to hear that.
His gaze still doesn’t waver. “I will fucking destroy him.”
Café au lait, take me away.
I believe him.
And I want to see it.
“But does it have to be at the expense of my café?” I whisper.
When it comes to staring contests, I can win them in my sleep. But holding Grey’s gaze right now is the hardest thing in the world.
He’s wavering. I can feel it.
I don’t even know what Chandler did to him, but whatever it was, it was bad enough that this man who insisted on doing good deeds with me and to me for one incredibly, earth-shattering night is only wavering.
Not breaking.
The steely determination to destroy my cousin is undeniable.
It’s sexy as hell.
The door swings open and Zen strolls inside. “Haven’t stopped breathing? Damn. I wanted your comic book collection.”
Grey still doesn’t break eye contact. He’s managed to pet Jitter to the point that my dog has melted into his lap, and he’s still watching me.
“There has to be another way,” I say to him.
“Find it.”
Fuck.
Just fuck.
I don’t actually know what Chandler cares about.
A month ago, I would’ve said Emma, but since Hawaii, I don’t think he cared so much as he thought it meant he won. He got to marry the prom queen.
She’s not his anymore.
Losing Emma isn’t enough punishment or we wouldn’t be here.
So I need to figure out what would give Grey satisfaction.
And I don’t know.
And what does that say about me? And my relationship with my best friends, when I can’t even tell you what the man she was about to marry cares most about in the entire world?
“I’ll give you two weeks,” he adds.
“What’s going on here?” Zen asks. “I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but I think I preferred the cheese incident.”
“Deal,” I reply to Grey.
Two weeks, I can work with.
One way or another.
17
Grey
The world is upside down. Right is wrong. Left is right. Sweet is sour. Sabrina Sullivan is my new obsession.
She’s filling the space in my brain that’s usually reserved for research projects in a way that no woman has since I met Felicia.
And look how that turned out.
But I still can’t stop thinking about Sabrina.
It’s mid-morning on Monday. Not even a full twenty-four hours after I heard her crying and then she invaded my townhouse to make sure I was okay when I had one of my annoying dizzy spells. I’m actively working on convincing myself that she’s not in the kitchen—and therefore not hiding from the places where she could find what would be a better plan for me to finally get justice on an old wound—when I notice a complete and total hush has fallen over the café.
It's not just a hush.
There’s a weird vibe too.