“You’re sure?” I asked, scrutinizing his face, looking for even a hint of doubt.
He nodded. “It’s been a long week. I needed a break.”
The weariness I first sensed when I opened the door reappeared. He did seem tired. Working undercover had to be taxing. It was a twenty-four-hour job. He never got a break.
I tilted my head to the side and studied him. “Do the lines ever get blurry?” I asked thoughtfully.
“Blurry how?”
“Between the good and the bad. Between Blue and Gray. It seems like pretending to be someone else all the time could be dangerous. It could make you forget who you really are.”
“I guess sometimes, yeah,” he replied. “Sometimes people commit crimes for reasons they think are honorable. It doesn’t make it right… but I understand it.”
I nodded. “What about you?” I whispered. “How do you keep track of who you are?”
Blue’s gaze was penetrating. The unfathomable color of his stare was so intent and measuring that my chest tightened. It was almost as if he were stripping me bare. Not stripping away my clothes or thinking about me in that way… but looking past the way I looked, past the sexual tension that hummed around us like he was looking for something specific, something that would determine his answer.
Based on the answer he gave, I would wholly assume that he found whatever he was searching for.
His voice practically became my oxygen. I breathed him in. His voice. His presence. His words. “Sometimes it does get hard. Like when I’m surrounded by people who have their own specific code for life, one that I don’t understand. Or when it’s really late and I’m really tired and it’s so dark in my room the only thing I can do is think. Sometimes my thoughts blur… and I can’t tell who is Blue and who is Gray.”
“How do you figure it out?”
“I think about you.”
Everything around me ceased. There was nothing. Nothing but those four words.
“I call up the memory of your laugh. I think about your hair and how it always looks like you just crawled out of bed. I pretend it was my bed and I’m the one who made your hair look like that. I remember how you felt in my arms that night we danced in the rain and how I thought I had finally found someone I never wanted to let go of.”
My chest felt tight. Physically tight. It was hard to breathe because so much emotion welled up inside me.
“Do you know why I picked the name Gray, Julie?”
“Because you were going with a color theme?” I squeaked.
He flashed a quick smile and shook his head. His arm stretched between us and the pad of his thumb stroked along my cheekbone and curved beneath my eye, slightly tickling the fringe of bottom lashes. “Because that night after our date… the only thing I could think about were your eyes. The color of a cloudy sky on a winter’s day.”
He named himself after my eyes.
He named himself after my eyes.
I pinched myself in the arm. Hard. When I winced, Blue frowned. “What did you do that for?” he asked, snatching up my arm and studying the red welt.
“Because I sure as hell must be dreaming.” Guys didn’t say things like this in real life.
He threw back his head and laughed. He looked back at me, a twinkle in his eye. “Did you wake up?”
I shook my head. Butterflies were swirling around inside me like a mini tornado, sweeping everything around and causing my head to spin.
“Maybe this will help,” he said and swooped in.
The arm lying across the back of the couch came forward and his hand gripped the back of my neck. He leaned forward, crowding my personal space and bringing his face so near that I could feel the warmth of his breath against my lips.
Before I could adjust to the overwhelming closeness, his lips claimed mine. The kiss was urgent and demanding—like he’d been holding back for too long and just couldn’t stand another second. I gripped his shirt in my palms and yanked him closer, crushing my lips against his. He kissed with fevered ferocity that lit fire to my blood and caused the inner muscles deep inside me to clench so tightly they began to quiver.
Moisture slicked my crotch, coating my secret place with a lubricant that would welcome his body as part of mine. I groaned, the feeling of my body readying itself for him was almost too much.
His tongue swept between my lips, sliding over my teeth and then delving deep into the confines of my mouth. Our tongues circled lazily, the slightly rough textures of them rubbing together, creating sparks of friction that ran along my nerve endings and threatened to sizzle my brain.
I opened my knees and scooted closer, he wound his arms around my back and yanked me forward. I came up against him abruptly, but our kiss never broke. The second I felt his body against mine, I started moving, my hips grinding against his middle, searching—no, demanding—everything he had to give.