Page 10 of Nice to Meet Boo
I set my hand over his on my waist, not to remove it but to anchor it.
“You have thirty seconds,” I breathe. “Make them count.”
“Oh, I intend to,” he says, and something dark and amused flickers in his eyes.
He lowers his forehead to mine in the softest touch possible—a hover, a kiss that isn’t yet—and the crowd hushes like a church before an amen.
“Ten seconds,” the emcee stage-whispers, and Grant huffs a sound that might be a laugh.
“Now?” he asks, like I have a say. Like consent is choreography.
“Yes,” I say, and it’s not for the crowd.
He kisses me.
It knocks the breath out of me, like I’ve just run three miles.
But then, it builds slowly at first, then deeper, a press that sets something low in my stomach to sparking. I moan into his mouth.
His hand tightens on my waist in surprise, as if he wasn’t expecting this, and I’m gone, hands fisting in his shirt to pull him closer. The room goes bright. The crowd goes loud. Someone wolf-whistles. I don’t care.
He breaks first, just a breath, forehead still against mine. We’re both laughing—caught, a little stunned.
“And that,” I say, breathless into the mic we forgot was there, “is how a saint meets a sinner.”
The place erupts. I think I hear Cyrus actually whoop out loud.
We step back into the half-dark offstage and lean on each other like the floor changed elevations. The emcee launches into voting and I blink back to reality, cheeks hot, mouth tingling, heart completely unreasonable.
“Hey,” Grant says, voice rough.
“Hey,” I echo.
“You okay?”
No. Not even a little. “Yeah.”
He studies me like he’s measuring a cut. “We should probably talk strategy for the prize if we win.”
“Fifty-fifty,” I say, brain grateful for math. “Unless you want sixty-forty for the swagger. It did half the work.”
He finally gives me one of those real smiles—creases at the eyes, soft at the mouth—and I catalog it greedily. “Fifty-fifty,” he says. “But if we lose, I get your confession.”
“Which one?” I ask, reckless.
“Any you want to give,” he says, and the way he says it makes it sound like there’s time to collect them. Not tonight. Not only.
The emcee shouts, “And your winners by obnoxiously loud applause… Sinners in the Hands!”
The bar goes wild. I don’t move. Grant doesn’t either. For the second time tonight, we’re not pretending.
“Hot,” I say faintly.
He nods once, eyes on my mouth. “Hot.”
And this time, when I lean in, he doesn’t wait for a countdown.
FOUR
