“Please, Grady. I’ll give you the paintings at the end if you help me out with this.”

He dragged his gaze off her mouth and raked it over her face, the hunger replaced with twin lasers of doom, hot and piercing. If he was taken aback by her offer, he didn’t show it as his mouth settled into a grim line. “Nope.”

A moment of panic set in at Grady’s definitive answer. Shit…what now? The last thing she’d expected was for him to walk away. She’d felt sure the paintings gave her rock-solid leverage. But then a truly inspired thought took form in her brain.

It seemed panic was the mother of invention for Suzanne. Or of snap decisions anyway.

“Fine, then, I’ll give them all to Annie to hang in the diner. She’s after some art for her walls. It’s win-win.”

Grady’s pale-green eyes changed from indifferent to frosty in one blink. “You can’t do that.”

Suzanne shrugged. “They’re my paintings. I can give them to whomever I like.”

“They’re. Of. Me.”

Grady enunciated each word with the kind of menace that had probably stopped many a bull in its tracks. But as ticked as he was now and as untouchable as he liked to come across, he had stared at her mouth before. And there had been hunger. That had been real. She’d felt it.

She’d felt it in her breasts and her belly and the backs of her thighs.

“As long as I don’t sell them, I can do whatever the hell I want with them.”

The angle of Grady’s jaw blanched so white, Suzanne worried for a second that it might shatter. “They’re of me,” he repeated, his voice quieter this time but no less commanding.

Suzanne gave a casual shrug. “Maybe people won’t notice.”

“I’ll notice,” he ground out.

“So…help me.” She placed the wineglass down and leaned forward. “Please,” she added huskily, begging him with her eyes, appealing to his better nature.

Surely there was one underneath all that gruffness?

He stared back, his gaze hard, and the three feet of bench between them somehow felt like the Rio freaking Grande.

“Look…Grady. If you think I want this, that it’s some kind of master plan to get myself a husband, you’re full of it. I don’t.” She’d rather kiss up to a rattlesnake. “And I’m sorry I lied to my mother. More sorry than you’ll ever know, but I did that as a favor to you—”

His loud snort interrupted her flow. “Jesus, Suzanne, stop doing me favors.”

“To keep them away from the ranch,” she continued, ignoring his interjection. “To put them off coming. And it backfired, and I really am sorry. But…my parents’ marriage is in trouble, Grady. They’re talking divorce. And my mom…she sounded so lost and devastated, and she isn’t any of those things. Ever. They need a circuit breaker, a change of scenery to get things back on track, so if you won’t do it for the paintings, maybe you can dig deep and do it for two people who just need a little hand in finding their way back to each other. They’re my parents, Joshua, and trust me when I say this: I wouldn’t ask if I weren’t desperate.”