First Comes Love (Love Comes To Town)

“You’ll see,” is all he’ll say.

And though I want to leave it at that, and should, I can’t seem to sit in silence tonight for some reason.

“What if I guess where we’re headed?” I say. “Your place, some restaurant, a fancy bar I can’t afford… are you even going to tell me if I guess correctly?”

Greyson grins. “No.”

I sigh. “I guess I shouldn’t complain. I do like surprises.”

No point in mentioning how the biggest surprise of all is how I feel when I’m around him. Safe yet dangerous. Excited yet frustrated. Giddy yet earnest.

We get there a few minutes later. Wherever ‘there’ is. To me, it just looks like a nice but weirdly dark-windowed condo building.

“Are you taking me here to kill me?” I ask as we walk into the lobby. Greyson presses a card to a box and the first set of doors opens up, to show a grand total of nothing.

“Not yet,” he says, taking my hand. “Trust me.”

“I don’t want to be ungrateful, but when you said surprise, I didn’t really have in mind some abandoned building,” I admit. “Even if it is nicer than any inhabited building I’ve ever been in.”

“It’s a condo my dad bought and was about to open for buyers. He died before he could, though. Apparently there’s a few electrical and permit issues that he hadn’t quite sorted out either—another damn thing my brothers and I have to sort out now.” He frowns as he presses the button of the elevator. “Forget it. I didn’t take you here to complain.”

I give him a cheeky smile. “Don’t worry about it. It’s nice to learn that rich, powerful people have real-life problems like the rest of us.”

He chuckles as we step into the elevator and ascend.

Once we step out in the penthouse, I begin to understand.

“I took you up here to see this,” he says simply as we walk out onto an open-air rooftop patio.

“Wow,” is all I can think to say.

We have to be hundreds of feet above ground, with a view of the city that must cost millions. All around us, lit-up skyscrapers reach for the sky as the streets below buzz, a grid-work of tiny lit-up movement.

We walk over to the balcony, and as I look out at it all, Greyson wraps his arms around me. “What do you think?”

“I think… good surprise.”

I ease my body into his. It feels so good. So warm. So right.

His nearness is making me horny, too. Right here and now, if he just lifted my dress and kissed my neck and even did more, I’d let him.

His breath is hot against my ear. “You hungry?”

Jesus, he turns me on.

But just as I’m burrowing into him further, he steps away. “I got you something.”

I resist the urge to sigh. Get it together, Harley, every minute with this man can’t be a sex-fest. Even ‘I got you something’ sounds different on his lips. I’ve had guys try to impress me by buying me things before and it always left me cold. But with Greyson…

He holds out the bag of caramel corn, and I laugh. “I was just talking about this today. How did you…”

“You were raving about it when we were drunk one night. Nayara Springs didn’t have any caramel corn. You were swearing up and down that you would do anything for some, even UberEats some from the US and foot the bill.”

I laugh. “Nothing like a good thousand-plus UberEats bill to cancel out a week’s salary.”

Greyson opens the bag, takes out a handful, and raises one to my lips. “Better late than never.”

I close my lips onto a piece, close enough to his finger to suck the tip.

“Harley,” he says quietly.

He must feel it too. The sexual charge in the air.

He pries himself away from me and goes over to sit down on a pillowed metal couch I hadn’t noticed before. He pats the spot beside him. “StormTV episode first. Then…”

I like the sound of ‘then’, but I go to sit beside him with just a smile for response. I really am excited to see the show, no matter how distracting he is.

Greyson gets a laptop out of his bag and plugs the little USB stick into the side. Then, we watch.

It’s the weirdest thing, watching the episode. The weirdest and best. Of course I’ve watched my stuff on a screen before, but this is different. The professional editing, the gloss and care taken over every shot—the show looks and feels so, well, good, that I have trouble believing I was the one who filmed these scenes, even though I remember the fear rippling in the pit of my belly as the baby alligator swam towards us and how excited I was to get both of those sloths in the shot.

“It’s something, isn’t it?” Greyson says quietly, as we watch.