Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 68937 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 345(@200wpm)___ 276(@250wpm)___ 230(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68937 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 345(@200wpm)___ 276(@250wpm)___ 230(@300wpm)
The burning end of a cigarette.
I glanced that way, which was a rookie mistake, and felt my heart flip when the burning ember illuminated a masked man standing in an alley. He was leaning against the exposed brick wall, shoulders against it, and one booted foot up against the wall.
My heart picked up speed because from what I could tell, the masked man had a great body.
He was wearing fitted pants, a pea coat, and the mask.
It was too hot out for a mask, well over eighty degrees, and not nearly cool enough to need a mask like that. And, since I had a sense of self-preservation, I didn’t dally for long.
But my thoughts were on masked guy for the rest of the night while I got our first two patients set up for the night.
A solid hour later, I met up with Dorie in the lab in the middle of the rooms and touched base.
Since she really was the only friend I had—outside of my brothers and Cutter’s wife, Milena—I, of course, opened my mouth when I shouldn’t have.
Then we were talking about our kinks all of a sudden, and I was blurting out things it’d taken me an entire year to work up the courage to even tell my therapist—who, might I add, was bound by law not to share my information with anyone.
Dorie, however, didn’t have that same code of conduct.
This was what happened with coworkers. They knew everything about your life.
Then again, I knew more about her life than I thought necessary.
Like right now, she was telling me that she wanted to fuck a werewolf.
“I think it would be really cool,” she said. “I mean, werewolves are awesome, right? I think my desire to do that stems from Beauty and the Beast. I mean, he was so dreamy as the beast, wasn’t he?”
I didn’t get the chance to answer before she was continuing on.
“I think you should go with it,” she chirped. “You know Craig?”
Of course I knew Craig. Everyone knew Craig.
He was a doctor at the sleep center that we worked at.
“Yes…” I drawled out.
“Well, Craig has a certain kind of…” She hesitated, trying to find the right words. “Okay, well, you can’t tell him that I told you, but Craig belongs to the elite sex club here. It’s called Torment.”
I’d actually heard of that one.
In fact, it’d been a place that I was willing to go to to feed this clawing need inside of me.
I just craved something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, and I thought Torment might actually be a place that could fix what was broken inside of me.
To hear that Craig was a part of that place…
Normally, I’d take everything that Dorie said with a grain of salt.
Lately, she’d been super, duper salty about my brother, Cutter, breaking up with her.
She’d thought they were going to go all the way. I’d known differently.
Though, Dorie had helped it along when she’d told Cutter that saving money for when Copper got out of prison was stupid when he was living in a hovel.
Truthfully, Cutter didn’t care if he lived in a hovel. He loved where he lived, which was on a houseboat on the lake.
It was something that was given to him by our grandfather, and he’d adored that place—even if I hated it because it reminded me of times that I didn’t want anything to do with.
But I digress.
Cutter didn’t fix his place up because nearly half of his income went into a savings account for our brother, Copper, to use when he got out of prison.
All of us had agreed that we would put our extra money into an account, and we had, for seventeen years now.
That account was very, very healthy, and Copper would be set up for life when he got out.
When Dorie found out that months after breaking up with him, Cutter had met and married a woman he barely knew, it set her off.
I had to work with her every day, and at one point, I’d thought for sure that our friendship was going to die.
But then one day she’d come into work with a new boyfriend, and it was like she was back to normal.
So I didn’t think she was vindictive enough to lie to me about Craig.
“You should ask him,” she said. “I’ll bet that he’d be willing to indulge that fantasy.”
I liked Craig.
He was a very sweet guy that was quite attractive.
Sure, he didn’t give off the “fuck me” vibes that I craved, but he was safe, and I was nothing but aware of how dangerous this world could be.
Exploring things with a nice, safe guy sounded like the way to go.
“Ugh,” Dorie said. “Speaking of assholes.”
I didn’t need to look up to know who she was talking about.
And though we hadn’t actually been speaking about assholes, but nice men, I didn’t bother to correct her on it.