by KaLyn Cooper
“Grace, it’s just a date, not an interview for your next husband.” Katlin swung her legs off the edge of the bed. “Wear the pretty outfit we picked out for you.” She pointed to the clothes and jewelry on the bottom of the bed as she passed. “Get to know Griffin better. If it leads you to his bed tonight, enjoy his body. Sex can release a lot of hidden tension, I can assure you.” With a knowing smile, her friend disappeared through the doorway.
After the death of Katlin’s husband, she never dated for over three years. If she hadn’t accidentally run into her former college lover, Grace wasn’t sure if her friend still wouldn’t be celibate.
At least Grace had put herself out there, dating a few men. None could live up to the comparison of Kevin…except Theodore. Grace closed her eyes wishing she could erase those two months of her life that had ended in such a disaster.
From the moment she had entered the grandiose old church with twenty-foot ceilings and tall stained-glass windows, Grace had been in awe. She’d slid into an empty seat close to the front, feeling more comfortable there since her father had required their entire family to fill the front pew all of her life. When a handsome man had taken the seat beside her, she thought little of it, wanting to concentrate on the service itself to help her decide if this was the church she wished to attend when she was in D.C. She allowed herself a closer look as they shared a hymnal. Her alto voice blended nicely as she took harmony to his baritone. It had been easy to peek. She knew all the words by heart but pretended to use the book so she could get a better look at him.
He followed her through the receiving line, but when she mentioned that her father had a church in Ames, Iowa, the minister pulled both of them to the side and introduced her to Theodore Stansberry. As an active member of the church for several years, the minister suggested he show her around. After a tour of the large building, he took her out for breakfast.
Theodore—not Theo, and definitely not Ted—had been such an attentive man. His nearly golden eyes never strayed when they were together, even to the buxom waitress who seemed to know him. He sent Grace flowers after their first date, calling when promised, and appeared to understand when she got called away to work. Thankfully that had only happened once and her team was able to resolve the mission within a week. Her father would have loved Theodore.
Their passion had grown with each date and two months later she found herself in his bed. She’d confessed that he would be the first since her husband died, and only the second man she’d ever allowed into her body. Their first time had been awkward. Her head hadn’t been in the right place, but he hadn’t tried very hard either. He’d come rather quickly and left her unsatisfied. After apologizing, he promised he’d do better next round. While he recovered, he used his fingers rubbing hard on her bud of passion to excite her again. She rose to the peak quickly, but before he’d let her come, he grabbed for the condom.
She’d never forget the surprise and heat on his face as she plucked the small packet from his hand and rolled it down his hard shaft. Kevin had liked that, so she thought Theodore may too. She wanted to please him after her initial failure. When he didn’t touch her immediately and just lay there on his back, Grace decided to take control of the situation. She straddled his hips and slowly lowered herself onto his erection. Although she and Kevin never made love that way, Grace would be sure both she and Theodore were satisfied. She started to ride him, raising her hips up and down his short shaft. As she gazed into his eyes, checking to be sure she was doing it right, what she initially thought was intensity turned out to be anger.
In one swift movement, he rolled them over, back into the missionary position once again. She was so close she just wanted to finish. She begged him, “Don’t stop.” When he thrust into her as far as he could go, she bent her knees and lifted her hips, demanding, “More.”
He almost immediately stiffened and arched his back, letting out a little grunt.
It was over.
So were they, as far she was concerned. He had done nothing to help her orgasm.
But she was not prepared for what happened next.
When he rolled off her, he continued until he stood by the bed. “You whore.”
Grace wasn’t sure she’d heard right.
“God made women to be under her man,” he declared. “You need to know your place in a relationship.”
Then he had the gall to question, “What kind of a man was your husband if he had allowed you to be the one on top during sex? Only a whore would put a man in that position.”
Grace had been speechless as she grabbed her clothes and ran, not to the master bathroom, but to the small one down the hall. Quickly dressing, she wondered if his words were true. Was she not worthy of a good man like Theodore? Had God taken Kevin away from her because she was not good enough for him? Was she a bad person? She’d always been sure that she was doing God’s will in her job, protecting the American people and rescuing the defenseless. Maybe she was just not mother and wife material.
She’d escaped his apartment without ever setting eyes on Theodore again. Once home, safe in her own bathroom attached to her bedroom in the D.C. condo, she scrubbed fervently until she’d washed away the feel of his hands on her naked body. Part of her dreams of motherhood and white picket fences slewed down the drain as well.
Dressed in her demure cotton nightgown, she padded to the kitchen and poured a glass of wine before joining her teammates in the living room. As they dragged the details of her disastrous night out of her, they surrounded her with the love only women who’d been there could give. Girlfriends, wine, and chocolate had chased away all her self-doubt.
Grace shuddered shaking off the bad parts of the memory but holding on to the lesson.
She was worthy of a good man, and God willing she’d find one…eventually.
In the meantime, she would go out with Griffin Mitchell. She might not be worthy of a good man, she was certainly worthy of that bad boy. Maybe they’d end up having satisfying, gratifying sex. Wouldn’t that be a delightful change?
Chapter 6
“Do you have a whole list of questions for me in that purse of yours?” Griffin smiled at the beautiful woman across the table. Dancing candlelight made the scattered copper strands in Grace’s auburn hair glimmer around her oval-shaped face. She had the most intense green eyes he’d ever seen. Sometimes they were a light peridot and other times they seemed a rich jade. He wondered if they darkened when she was aroused.
He held out his hand. “Just give me the list, and I’ll answer them all for you. That way we can get past all this and move on to enjoying our supper.” Out of habit, his eyes quickly swept the room looking for danger. Satisfied, his gaze returned to hers.
Grace opened her small purse, turning it so only he could see inside. “See, no list.” A lipstick tube rolled out and started across the table. In a flash, he snagged the cylinder. When she reached to take it from his fingers, a round compact and nail file slipped out. She nervously gathered the items and quickly stuffed them back into the gold bag, most likely so no one would see the small Glock. She snapped her purse shut and placed it next to her hip. Inside the Capital Beltway, very few people were allowed to carry a concealed weapon. He was wearing two guns and had two knives in pockets, but didn’t give a damn about laws. He refused to go unarmed. Obviously, she felt the same or perhaps her status with Homeland Security allowed her to carry a gun.
“Grace, sweetheart, this feels like a first date arranged by mutual friends. We’ve known each other for over a year.” He lowered his voice. “I’ve been in firefights with you and—”
“But we don’t really know each other. Tell me what it was like growing up in Georgia.”
A living hell. “See, you already know I’m from Georgia.” Griffin avoided the question. He had been on hundreds of dates and never talked about his childhood. For damn good reasons.
“It’s a big state,” she pressed. “Did you live near the ocean? Close to Atlanta? I picture
Georgia with huge southern plantations and grandiose mansions.”
Griffin immediately thought of his grandparents’ magnificent home, where he preferred to stay rather than with his frigid parents. “So, you’ve never been to Georgia?”
“I went to jump school at Fort Benning in Columbus. But our training was accelerated. We were only there for ten days rather than the usual two to three weeks. We had our own black hats, that’s what they call the instru—”
“I know,” Griffin interjected. “I went to jump school there, too. Ours was a bit longer because we did several high-altitude jumps.”
“Oh, trust me. So did we.” She put her forearms on the table and leaned in. “I was so scared the first time we did a HALO at night. Breathing through that little oxygen bottle and just falling, and falling, and falling before we could finally open our parachute. And the blackness, I don’t think many people live in that part of Georgia because I didn’t see hardly any lights.” She sighed heavily. “I have to tell you, I was so happy to see the landing zone and put my boots on terra firma.” She flashed him a broad smile showing two rows of straight white teeth. “I couldn’t wait to do it again, though.”
Griffin remembered his first High Altitude Low Opening jump. “I felt the exact same way.”
“They’d only let us do one of those per night, but they flipped us right back onto different aircraft for low-level jumps all night long.” Grace sat back in the secluded booth and sipped her water as she watched a new couple enter the restaurant. He, too, tracked the young man and woman. FBI was Griffin’s guess. Their body language indicated they were watching two men in a booth on the far side of the restaurant.
When his gaze met Grace’s, she smiled. “They’re tag teaming those two guys.” She tilted her head toward the L-shaped bar, crowded with men and women in dark suits. “You probably missed it from your angle, but the handoff took place in the big mirror.”
Yes, he had missed it. She’d caught it, though, and never hesitated a beat in their conversation. He wondered if he was just that out of practice or if she was simply that good.
“You’ve evaded my question long enough…Georgia…your childhood?” She encouraged.
He glanced around the room one more time as he gathered his thoughts. When he looked into her deep green eyes, he decided she deserved the truth. “Technically, I am Parker Griffin Mitchell the Fifth.”
Her eyes went wide. “You actually have a V at the end of your name?”
A corner of his mouth drew up. “Yeah, it’s right there on my birth certificate. You see, my dad goes by Park, my grandfather by Mitch. My great grandfather, who was still alive when I was brought home from the hospital, decreed that I would be called Griffin, after his father.”
“What name did they call your great-grandfather?”
“Mostly, Governor.” Griffin thought her eyes were going to pop out of her head. He internally shrugged and figured he better get the rest of it out there. “My family has been in politics for generations. My grandfather was in the House of Representatives for several years then became the Senator from Georgia. After a heart attack in his mid-50s, he called it quits. He became what they call in his circles, a gray eminence. He controls money and political power. More accurately, they do. My grandparents were the original Southern power couple. Grams brought both to their marriage, but the Mitchell’s had plenty of their own. If the Mitchell name backs a candidate or a cause, it’s a winner.”
“They…uhm…sound…uhm,” Grace obviously struggled to find the right words.
Griffin reached across the table and grabbed her hand. “They are the most wonderful, loving grandparents on the planet. I wouldn’t say they spoiled me and my sisters, because they made sure we saw and understood the strife of others. Every holiday, Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, the whole family would deliver food boxes to the poor and elderly. Gramps always thought it was important that we see that not everyone has the advantages we do. At Christmas, we’d get a list of names, ages, sizes and we had to shop for Christmas gifts for those people. The older we got, we were expected to spend our own money.”
“That’s wonderful,” Grace exclaimed. “We did a similar thing in our church. We called it the Angel Tree. Some people didn’t have time, or they didn’t know the right clothes to buy children of a particular age, so they would just donate money. Mom would take me and my sisters shopping to be sure everyone got actual gifts rather than give the money to the parents.” She leaned forward and almost whispered. “Some people would take that money and spend it on themselves and those kids wouldn’t get any Christmas at all if it weren’t for us.”
“Unfortunately, I’m sure that happens all too often.” It touched Griffin’s heart the way she wanted to defend the little children.
“Did you do this together as a family, too?” Hope beamed from Grace’s eyes.
Griffin chuckled. “At first. A couple of times a camera crew went with us.”
Grace’s perfectly arched brows rose halfway to her hairline. “Really?”
Shrugging, he tried to explain, “I told you my whole family was in politics. We were often filmed doing everything from the mundane like playing catch in the backyard, to the special stuff like shopping for disadvantaged children. Someone in my family was always running for office. My father was in the state legislature then took my grandfather’s vacated seat in Washington. He did two terms but didn’t run for a third when my mother took ill.”
Grace started open her mouth, surely to give her condolences, but Griffin remembered his promise to himself to tell her the truth. “Mom wasn’t sick. Maybe sick at heart, but I’m not sure she has one. The truth is, his challenger discovered his affair with one of his staff—who is younger than my little sister, and I’m quite sure it wasn’t his first dalliance—and the opponent threatened to make it public if he ran again.” Griffin chuckled. “Mitchell’s have always been above scandal, which means dear old dad couldn’t buy his way out of that one. So he came home and took over Gramps’s seat running Mitchell, Mitchell, and Mitchell Attorneys at Law.”
“So, your parents stayed together even after he’d had an affair?” She shook her head. “I would never tolerate that, not for one second.”
“I’m not sure Mom cared who he fucked as long as he kept it extremely discreet. They haven’t slept in the same bedroom since I was in middle school.” Griffin had been too busy playing sports to care. He was just glad he didn’t have to dress in a suit and stiff shoes to be paraded all over the state as a symbol of the youth his father was saving the world for. “Since Dad was such a junior senator, Mom was a small fish in a big pond in Washington. Here in Augusta, she’s the wife of the CEO of one of the largest law firms in the state of Georgia. She plays tennis several times a week at the country club in their neighborhood and golf at least once a week on the Augusta National Golf Club where Gramps sits on the board.”
Griffin didn’t see a single flicker of recognition when he name dropped. “You ever heard of the Masters Tournament?”
“I’m sorry, but I’m not really into golf,” Grace admitted sheepishly. “It wasn’t something they taught in my high school and in college I focused on other sports that didn’t require a king’s ransom in equipment.”
“Well, it’s a big deal in my family.” Maybe too big a deal as far as Griffin was concerned. “My great-grandfather helped establish the club and a Mitchell has always maintained a seat on the board of directors. It’s very exclusive with only three hundred members, mostly CEOs of Fortune 500 companies or politicians.” He grinned. “It was literally a good old boys club up until 2012 when they finally admitted two women.”
“I know all about the last bastions of male dominance. The general public has no idea of our training in special operations. Our team faces resentment every time we walk into Homeland Security Section 7.” Grace shook her head. “There are still so many men out there who don’t realize what an asset our team is to this country.”
Griffin had
to admit; even he had harbored biases until he’d seen Grace and her friends in action. They were damn good. He had no doubts they could accomplish any mission they were given and was also sure that fact pissed off the men she worked with. “They are all idiots. You ladies are awesome and I can personally attest to that point. We’ve dodged bullets side-by-side, and I trust you to always have my back.” He squeezed her hand before being forced to let it go when their meals arrived.
He instantly missed the connection. He liked the way her soft, long fingers curled into his much larger ones. He could almost feel them raking through his hair as he kissed her, tasting her with every thrust of his tongue into her mouth. His brain instantly went to that same motion between her legs. He could only imagine her taste as she came around his tongue.
Grace moaned, low and deep, just as he had dreamed she would do as he licked her to ecstasy.
Fuck. He was hard as a rock. Thank God this restaurant had long table cloths.
When she whimpered, his gaze flew to her angelic face as she chewed with her eyes closed. Bliss radiated from her whole body. He hoped to put that same look on her face in a few hours.
“This has to be the best prime rib I’ve ever had in my life.” Grace then opened her eyes and caught him staring at her. “I grew up in the Midwest, cattle country, and I’ve eaten steak all over the world, but this is practically melting in my mouth.” Using her fork to point, she suggested, “Try it. I know you’re going to love it.”
Griffin’s brain was still back on the idea of melting in her mouth. He pictured her on her knees in front of him that pretty little bow mouth wrapped around his cock, her soft hair tickling his thighs as she bobbed up and down. When the blood rushed from his brain to his crotch, it must’ve left the speech center first. He couldn’t manage to formulate a word.