All He Really Needs Read Free Page A

heard
Dalton and Griffin leaving the apartment. After that, she dressed quickly,
barely giving herself time to towel dry her hair and apply a quick, but
necessary, coat of mascara before grabbing her purse on her way out. But she
stopped short with her hand on the front door of Griffin’s apartment.
    Crap. The key.
    Going back to the bathroom her steps were slower. The key to
Griffin’s condo sat on the marble countertop, the brass gleaming against the
black-veined white marble. She stared at it for a long minute.
    “Ugh. Stop being such a wimp. It’s just a key.”
    She grabbed it and stalked to the front door, carefully locking
the door before dropping the key into the change pocket of her wallet as she
walked down the hall to the elevator. She pointedly did not put it on her key
chain. It wasn’t that kind of key. She and Griffin didn’t have that kind of
relationship.
    No, they had a very casual, sex-only kind of thing. A
no-key-exchange kind of relationship.
    She punched the down button with a tad more force than was
necessary. She was just being responsible. Like when they’d first started
sleeping together and he’d presented her with the test results of his most
recent physical, proof that he was drug and disease free. At first, she felt
weird about it. Like it was wrong having that kind of information about someone
she barely knew—even someone she was sleeping with. Sure, the information was
nominally about sex. But there was other information in there, too. She now knew
his cholesterol number and that his last tetanus shot was in 2010—from the time
he’d gotten snagged with a hook while deep-sea fishing, she’d later learned.
    But she hadn’t wanted to know about the tetanus shot any more
than she’d wanted to know the origin of the tiny scar on the side of his neck.
Any more than she’d wanted a key to his apartment.
    Which was why, when she got out to her car, she sat there for
several minutes, sucking in deep, panic-reducing breaths.
    What was she doing?
    When was she going to stop fooling herself?
    Sex with Griffin was a bad idea. Very bad.
    When they’d first started sleeping together, it hadn’t seemed
like a bad idea. It hadn’t even seemed like an idea. More like…an accident.
Like when she’d accidently adopted her cat, Grommet. She’d come home to find the
poor, malnourished kitten huddled on her front porch to stay out of the rain.
She couldn’t just leave the pathetic tabby there, so she brought him inside. But
he was wormy and sick and even had to have part of his tail amputated. The vet
had recommended putting him down instead of taking him to the shelter. A
thousand dollars plus weekly allergy shots later and she was the proud owner of
the ugliest cat on earth.
    Sleeping with Griffin was kind of like that.
    Except not at all. Because Griffin wasn’t pathetic and he
wasn’t tame and she most definitely was not allergic to him.
    But when it came to adopting Grommet, she hadn’t meant to keep
him. It was supposed to be just for one night. That’s what she’d told herself
about Griffin, too.
    Last summer, in the middle of a record heat wave, fresh on the
heels of an awful breakup with her fiancé, Brady, she’d slept with Griffin.
    It was Brady’s fault, really. Nine months before their
wedding—a date it had taken him two years to agree upon—he’d reconnected with
his high school girlfriend on Facebook. He’d apologized profusely for breaking
up with Sydney. But how could she feel anything past the burning indignation of
finding out the guy she’d been with for six years was in love with another
woman? So much in love that he quit his job and moved halfway across the country
to be with her, when he hadn’t even wanted to sell his condo to move into
Sydney’s house once they were engaged.
    She’d wanted to punch him. It was the first and last time in
her twenty-seven years of life that she wanted to do physical violence to
another human being.
    Instead, she’d