State of Grace Read Online Free Page B

cursed.
    If he’d doubted his attraction to her before, he now had rock solid proof about to burst out of his pants.
    “We can’t stand each other,” she said flatly,  “I don’t know what game you’re playing at right now, and quite frankly, I’m too exhausted to play this time.” Even though her voice was soft, he could hear the accusatory note it held before she turned back to watch the waves.
    “Don’t look away, Gracie,” he commanded softly. She stubbornly kept her gaze trained straight ahead, and he sighed deeply. “I don’t know why I expected anything else,” he muttered as his hand shot out to grasp her chin and turn her towards him once again. He dropped his fingers so they embraced her throat, and he lazily rubbed the pad of his thumb against her wildly racing pulse. Her pretty mouth set in a mutinous scowl, but she didn’t pull away.
    He took it as a sign of encouragement.
    “I don’t hate you. Never did. You just make me crazy,” he said simply.
    Her scowl deepened, and her eyes turned from tired to flashing silver before he could get out another word. “I make you crazy? Me?” Incredulous, she pointed at herself.
    Even though he was completely aware that getting her worked up was counterproductive to his bizarre goal of getting her to soften towards him, he couldn’t help himself from treading into dangerous territory. That was simply how nuts she made him. 
    He shrugged. “Yeah, you. We can’t be together for more than thirty minutes without you ranting about how my car is a gas guzzler or my dates are bimbos.”
    He noted with a perverse sense of amusement that the rise and fall of her beautiful breasts was getting deeper and quicker. A dull flush began to crawl over her exposed skin.
    “Face, Sean. Face,” she snapped heatedly. “Can you concentrate on my face while we’re talking? See, this is exactly what I’m talking about!”
    “What?”
    Finally, she scooted back from him. She lifted her hand, and he knew without fail that hand would end up in his face, wagging a finger at him. He sat back and grinned.
    “First of all,” she shook her finger at him, and it was all he could do not to laugh, “I only said you drove a gas guzzler after you called my Prius a wimpy, wuss car. Second of all, you constantly pick on anyone I’m dating – you who have absolutely no room to talk. It’s not my fault if your dates have the same IQs as their silicone implants!”
    Although he privately agreed with her, he wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of knowing he felt the same way. It was getting tiresome going out with women who were only interested in the newest fall collection or celebrity gossip.
    “You told me that you’d found my test results for low sperm count on Lucas’s desk and moved it into my bedroom in front of my date and the whole family during Thanksgiving dinner,” he ground out.
    “That was only after you accidentally turned on the sprinklers in the freezing cold on my date as he was walking up the drive! The poor guy ended up with a cold for three weeks and refused to see me after that!”
    Sean remembered it clearly. He’d seen the shmuck she was dating the night before with another girl. When he’d realized that was Grace’s boyfriend the next day, he only did what any decent guy would do. Little did she know that the idiot had stayed away from her because Sean had threatened him as he sat shivering in his car.
    At the recollection of the memory, his chest rumbled with laughter, and he faintly heard a low growl from her throat as she shot up from her place beside him. She wobbled a bit, feet shaky in the sand, and he stood up to catch her.
    Still, laughing, albeit not as hard, he bent his forehead toward hers when she placed her hands against his chest to break her fall. Instead of his mouth meeting hers, he was caught by an unpleasant wave of shock as he fell backwards, ass landing in the sand.  His hands on either side of him, he shook his head and