“Hey.” He pulled the goggles off and set them on the board, then gestured to the one strip of mirror he’d placed on the longest wall. “I just put a piece of the glass up for you to see before I went on. And I need to know how high you want the dance bar.” His gaze turned to the plans. “After seeing how flexible you are, I think the height called out in here is too low.”
She strolled in, set the chair down facing Josh, and, still standing, bent at the waist and crossed her arms on the curved back. The move made her breasts fall forward and the cape drape open. “I couldn’t care less about the bar’s height at the moment.”
His gaze darted up, immediately lowered from her face to her chest, and slid away again, but not before the fiery burst of lust lit them from within. He cleared his throat. Licked his lips. Turned his back to her. “We can talk about it after you change.”
He wanted her. Not only could she see it in his expression and hear it in the tone of his voice, she felt it in the air—a crackling, thick, hot desire filling the room. She turned and slowly strode to the doors, but instead of leaving, she closed them. Then turned the dead bolt and pressed her back against the wood.
Josh turned with a look of confusion. But as soon as his eyes met hers, a nervous tic pulled at the skin beneath his left eye.
She’d only seen Josh nervous once in all the years they’d known each other—when she’d asked him to move in with her while he recovered from shoulder surgery. The expression he’d had then was the same one he had now, one that said, I-want-that-but…
With determination fueling her steps, Grace started a slow, sexy walk toward him, extending her legs, crisscrossing her boots, holding the I-want-to-fuck-you sultry look she constantly required of the dancers.
“You left before the number was over.” She laid her hand on the gypsum board, toying with the edge with one finger. “Missed the best part of the show.”
He was fighting to keep his gaze on her face, but it kept slipping, and the heat there deepened. “If that’s true,” he said, his voice low and rough, “I’m glad I left when I did, or I would have definitely embarrassed myself.”
She stepped close and purposely met and held his gaze as she pressed the tip of her index finger to the center of his chest. “So…you didn’t hate it.”
She let her gaze follow her finger as she drew the tip upward along his sternum. The barely there white mist cleared to show tanned skin beneath. Then she arched to the left, creating a curve around the top of his pec muscle and dragged her finger down at an angle sharp enough to brush his nipple as she passed. The nub hardened beneath her finger, and Josh sipped a little breath of surprise. She continued in a slow, downward angle until her finger touched the waistband of his jeans. And, yes, there was definitely a substantial bulge there. One she desperately wanted to explore.
“Seeing me dance like that doesn’t…I don’t know…disgust you on any level?”
She scraped her lower lip between her teeth and placed the tip of her finger at the original starting point. Then followed her previous pattern, this time, arcing to the right.
“The opposite,” he murmured, voice rough. “Seeing you own that stage is ridiculously hot.”
Her smile deepened, her confidence soared, and with it, her lust broke free, spilling through her body like glitter.
This time when she brushed his opposite nipple, gooseflesh broke out over his chest, and his eyes closed for a brief second. She finished off the nearly invisible shape of a heart where her finger met his jeans again. Fisting the waistband, she pulled him around so his back faced the chair, then pushed him into the seat.
His breath whooshed out on a soft grunt. Before he could speak, Grace planted her heel on the seat at his hip, gripped his face in both hands, and leaned in until her mouth was a breath from his and whispered, “I’m about ready to own you.”
Instead of kissing him, she stroked his bottom lip with her tongue. He opened and leaned forward, his mouth searching for hers, but she pulled back with a teasing smile. “On my terms.”
This power trip was a surge of lusty goodness, and she wondered if this was how the dancers felt on stage in front of dozens of men. She took two steps back, shrugged the cape, and let it fall to her elbows. The throb of Korn’s grungy beat of “Coming Undone” pulsed through the walls, and her body moved easily, smoothly, and without any conscious thought. For Grace, dancing was built into her muscle memory. What she needed to concentrate on now was tantalizing Josh out of his mind.
Turning her back to him, she let the cape slide off her arms, let her upper body fall forward, exposing her ass beneath the short little skirt for Josh’s view—just out of his reach.