Logan's expression looked pained now. "I didn't pick up Chrissy," he said, after a few seconds. "I mean, I did, but nothing happened. I changed my mind a few minutes after we left and sent her home."
"Why?"
He shrugged. "It didn't feel right."
I searched his eyes for hints of deception, but found none. I believed him. A wave of relief washed over me, the strength of which was almost frightening. "So why chat her up at all?" I asked.
"I needed to distract myself."
"From what?"
There was a long pause, long enough that I thought maybe I wasn't getting an answer, but then he spoke. "From you."
My stomach constricted. As guilty as it made me feel, it was exactly what I wanted to hear. "Why would you need to do that?"
He ran a hand through his hair. "Fuck, are you going to make me say it?" He stepped closer. "Because I can't stop thinking about you, Grace. Because I'm afraid of what I might do around you. Christ, the other night you poured your heart out to me, and all I could think about was pushing you up against the wall and..." He closed his eyes momentarily and swallowed hard. "Look, I know you don't want the things I want. I didn't mean to hurt you. I was just trying to keep my shit under control. You're doing so well, and I want to keep helping you. I thought maybe that was the answer, that it had just been too long since I got laid. But when the time came, I couldn't do it."
Well, shit. My mouth felt impossibly dry, my skin tingling with the promise of that unfinished sentence. That hunger was stirring inside me again, cavernous and irresistible.
"Who says I don't want the things you do?" I asked, my voice shaking ever so slightly.
He frowned. "You did, a few weeks ago. In fact you went to pains to tell me how you weren't in that place right now."
"Maybe...maybe I've changed my mind."
"You're kidding, right?"
I gave a tiny shake of my head. It felt like a big gesture, one that should have set the earth shaking and the sky falling, but it was strangely liberating at the same time. A moment of clarity in an ocean of confusion. I wanted him. I couldn't deny that anymore. I wanted everything those absent words implied. His hands on my body, his lips on mine. I knew that given a few days, a few hours, maybe even a few minutes, my pain and self-loathing would resurface and start sabotaging this again, but right now I was free of that.
Before I could talk myself out of it, I lunged toward him. He was so tall that I had to stretch up onto my toes, wrapping my hands around his neck to pull his mouth down to mine. It sent a powerful longing through me, that height, that sheer bulk. I normally hate to be reminded how diminutive I am, but I liked how small he made me feel. There was something strangely comforting about it.
His body stiffened and he mumbled a curse against my lips. For a moment, he barely moved. I could feel the war playing out behind his eyes. But then the fight drained out of him, and his arms enveloped me as he began kissing me back with an urgency strong enough to be almost frightening. Part of me expected it to feel wrong, a betrayal of everything I'd had with Tom, but instead my body simply melted against his like it had always been there, and all other thoughts disappeared.
All my other first kisses had been timid affairs, but this was something else entirely, fierce and hungry; an explosion of everything that was simmering inside us. Though I'd initiated it, Logan quickly seized control. This wasn't a man who simply stood by and had things happen to him. Leather-rough palms ran amok across my back and shoulders, pulling me against him as though he was afraid I'd be snatched away at any moment. I moaned involuntarily into his mouth as his tongue darted and teased. In some distant part of me I felt ashamed, but it was dwarfed by the fire that was coursing through my veins. I'd never been kissed like that before. Not by Tom. Not by anybody. It felt like a matter of need rather than want. Life or death.
I'd seen him shirtless plenty of times of course, but the sight was different now. Erotic, sensual, and above all, mine. I could barely breathe for how magnificent he looked. Sculpted and tanned and lit with moonlight; a living breathing Greek statue. I wanted to touch all of him, to feel each inch between my fingers, in my mouth, in every part of me. I'd never been so intoxicated by another human being.
My hands took on a mind of their own, dancing hungrily across his bare chest. His muscles were so hard, like his entire body was just skin stretched over stone sculpture. Everything inside me seemed to clench as my fingers took it all in, the perfectly defined grooves between his pecs and his abs, the mountainous curl of his biceps. He was still slick with sweat and hot from the night's exertion, but that only excited me more. Images played through my head of him in the arena, his body a perfect primal machine, leveling all of that power at his opposition.