His pants strained painfully under the table and his chest cramped in ways he absolutely loathed. “Hey, Chlo,” he said, and flicked his eyes back to his measly pair of jacks.
“Are you losing again?” she asked. “Danny said you were on a bad streak lately.”
She slid over to him and bent down to see his cards, and Graves knew that very second, he was fucked. The guys would look at her face, see that little O forming on her mouth, and know that Graves had shit. But he still sat there and let it all happen. Because her minty scent teased his nostrils and tortured his senses.
Strands of honeyed hair fell to his shoulders as she bent to take a closer peek, and then she turned her head so that he could see every golden speck in her lovely eyes. Her stare was full of amusement and pity, clearly saying, You are so screwed, Graves.
Yeah, but she didn’t even know the half of it.
Nobody did.
Because Daniel was his best friend, and Graves was crazy sick in love with his little sister.
Fuck me. How did this happen? Graves was a foster kid from a bad family. He barely even liked to be touched. Chloe was a pampered girl with loving parents who expected the world to kiss her feet and her boyfriends to do the same. Graves might feel like he lived to see those megawatt smiles of hers, but the truth was, he had no fucking idea how to love anyone, much less a princess like Chloe.
It was just better to put a cork on that emotion.
Except for the fact that lately he felt like he was going to burst apart.
“You going out, Chlo?” Luke asked her.
She took a while to respond, meeting Graves’s gaze again, her eyes somehow looking deep into his black soul as though she were carving out his secrets, then she straightened slowly.
“Yeah, I have a date.” She grinned and ruffled Luke’s hair again. “Not with you, of course.”
“Tell me who he is so I can kill the bastard.”
“Or tell him who he is so that the bastard can kill Luke,” Cade said.
“Not until after I get to kiss him, all right? You can try killing him later,” she teased, then stuck her tongue out and turned to Daniel. “Can I borrow your car? Mine’s low on gas and I don’t like stopping at this hour.”
Daniel searched his pockets, then cursed. “Damn, go look in my Armani suit jacket.”
She groaned and stomped away, probably annoyed since Daniel’s room was situated on a separate floor and was basically nuclear-proof, with steel doors and a thousand locks to decode before entering. “Hey, baby girl, you can take mine,” Luke said, dangling his stallion key chain.
She turned with raised eyebrows, but didn’t come fetch the clinking offer. “I wouldn’t know what to do with your Ferrari except stare at it, Luke.”
“Here. Take my car,” Graves said, on his feet, while all he could think was that Chloe was going out with some guy tonight, while Graves had just lost two million dollars because he’d wanted to smell her up close. Since when had he become this smitten imbecile?
Clearly, he hadn’t been having enough sex and needed to fuck Chloe out of his head in any way he could so he’d stop getting these stupid boners every time she so much as batted an eyelash in his direction.
“Graves, I couldn’t,” she said, shaking her head as she watched him. Graves caught up with her at the door and grabbed her hand to push the keys to his Range Rover into her palm. A frisson of electricity bolted through him, and his pulse skittered when Chloe trembled, too.
For a frozen moment, she raised her gaze to his with a beseeching, almost vulnerable expression on her face. His heart turned over in his chest when he recognized the painful need in those sultry green eyes.
She bit her lower lip and kept her hand against his, both of them half clutching the keys. His gut twisted painfully tight as his attention suddenly dropped from her eyes, to her lips, to her shoulders, to her breasts, while every pore and cell in his body screamed for him to touch her. Memorize her. Suckle her.
“You coming back to the game, man? I’m enjoying juicing you out of your last drop of cash, dude,” Luke called.
Graves didn’t even turn, for his gaze was now helplessly strapped to Chloe’s full pink lips as she finally curled her fingers around his keys and pulled them away. Her whisper feathered across his skin. “I’ll be careful with it, all right? Will you be here later so I can give it back?”
It felt so goddamned intimate, talking to her in whispers against the door. Hot, roiling blood pumped headily through his veins. He shook his head, dizzied by her nearness. His cock throbbed so painfully inside his pants he could almost feel a drop of come at the tip, she excited him so much. “Not at this rate, I won’t,” he said, still gobbling her up with his eyes. “But I’ll take your car and we can exchange tomorrow.”