He sighed. “I’d at least like a challenge, Story.”

I laughed and he groaned into my neck.

“Are you…” I trailed off. I could feel him hard against my back. “I only laughed!”

He buried his face into my neck. “I want to kiss you. I want to taste you until my taste buds groan.” His lips moved against my neck with his words, so close to a kiss, but not quite right. Goose bumps rose along my skin.

“I want to eat you until your voice is broken from screaming.” His breath heated my skin, a whisper, a promise, lips not kissing but the promise sending tingles.

“I want to fuck you until you can’t walk.”

He slid his hand under my jacket, on the bare skin, just beneath my breast.

Skirting a dangerous line that I wanted to cross.

He spun me around, so I stared into his earnest eyes. “Let me hold you tonight. Just hold you, nothing more. I promise.”

I nodded, unable to speak.

He gave me a wicked, curling grin. I couldn’t stop staring. It was so beautiful. So bright. Like the sun had come out after a year of unrelenting storms. This was Grayson Crowne, the rose without the thorns, the boy without the heavy armor, Atlas freed.

He arched a brow. “You’re staring.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile. Not really.”

He closed his lips, but the smile stayed, and the warmth in his eyes. The softness. I wanted to kiss him. I wanted this moment to be different, for us to not be strangled by circumstance.

“This has been the most amazing, magical dream of my life,” I said. “I don’t want to wake up.”

He pushed the hair behind my ear, hand staying. “You don’t have to.”

I woke to a pair of pants in the face.

“We have to go,” Grayson said.

He tossed more clothes at me, some of them not mine. I looked outside. It was still dark. Only a few hours, if even that, had passed. Grayson scrambled around the penthouse, dimly lit by one desk light and the glittering sea outside.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“The Crowne papers came out,” he said absently.

“They have that in Italy?” I wondered.

Gray made a face. “I get them delivered everywhere I go. If you don’t own them, know them…” He said the last part absently, almost like they weren’t his own words.

He dropped the papers on the foot of the bed, reaching for phones I didn’t even know he’d brought. He must’ve had five cell phones, and they were all going off. Grayson looked like he’d been hit with a bomb. I wondered what could have been so terrible. A terrorist attack? Something with Crowne Industries?

While Gray frantically buttoned up his shirt, a cell phone on either shoulder, I reached for the paper.