Page 9 of Manhattan Heart

I paste on a smile, sickeningly sweet. “We’re in the VIP room.”

“Oh.” She quickly checks another booking sheet and looks up. “There you are, I’m very sorry.” She loses some of her snoot now she knows we’re paying top dollar for exclusivity.

“It’s fine. I forgot to put panties on this morning, so shit happens.”

Gray behind me snorts, making sure his crotch grazes on my thigh.

I can’t wait to get him to our private table.

Once we are shown through, we order wine and chose from the menu.

I make sure the hot cake is available.

Gray goes with black pepper steak coated in butter and I opt for the fish.

Not gonna lie, it’s the cake I’m here for, the main course is just a delay in what I really want in my mouth.

“Are we bankrupt?” I finally ask when the waiter takes our main dishes away some time later and I watch his eyebrow wing up as he takes a sip of his after-dinner brandy.

“Say what now, baby-girl?”

I toy the spoon through a river of melted ice cream. My eyes are bigger than my belly, as they always are with the type of personality I am. There’s more than half left, though I’m stuffed, but I’m no quitter and what kind of lunatic leaves cake? Not on my watch. I’ll have round two just as soon as I get answers from Gray.

“You’ve been off all day. I can only assume your shipment of shoes fell out of the plane somewhere over the pacific and now we have to sell the silver.”

He grins really slow. Really fucking sexy that I feel the potency of it pull at each of my belly muscles. I never need yoga to tighten my body, when I have Gray around.

He’sdevastating. A straight shot of cocaine.

Reaching across to my side of the table, he strokes a lone finger over my knuckles and then my set of wedding rings. Around and around he traces the white gold and diamonds.

“Do I need to stand on a street corner and sell blowjobs?”

This time his eyes flash but I still see a twinkle of humor there too.

Like he’d ever let my mouth go anywhere near someone else. The poor fella would be killed by the sweetest man on earth.

“Would you do that for me?”

My answer is instant and set in stone. “Anything.”

“I love you.” He smiles, low lidded. Beautiful as ever.

Still quiet and pensive.

If not knowing how brilliant minded Gray is, I might have believed money worries were a real possibility. Just last month his quarterly profits nearly made me faint. I know for a fact they made my husband happy, because he fucked me so hard on his home office floor, I needed to take the day off from going to hot yoga.

“I love you too, Grayson. Is there something wrong?”

One side of his mouth lifts. It’s his sexy smile…one of them. “I’m with my wife who just mouth fucked a spoon while she ate chocolate lava cake and I’ve been wondering for the last hour if she remembered to put panties on tonight.”

I realize later.

Much later, he didn’t given me a definitive answer.

That’s the Gray effect. He dazzles me one epic smile at a time because those smiles are his superpower, I swear. They’re intense and more often than not, one smile can take the ground from under my feet and keep my heart in that pitter-patter sequence until all I hear, taste and breathe, is him.

Cloud nine is made for a man like Gray Ellison, and for three married years my feet haven’t touched the floor because of him.

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