Total pages in book: 162
Estimated words: 156796 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 784(@200wpm)___ 627(@250wpm)___ 523(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 156796 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 784(@200wpm)___ 627(@250wpm)___ 523(@300wpm)
He stiffened as he had when my fingers had been tracing his scars. Because my words were doing the same.
He didn’t speak for the longest time. Long enough that I’d resigned myself to the fact that this was just another time when Gage spoke with his silence.
“You looked at my demons, saw me without my mask, and somehow you fell in love with the beast instead of the man,” he rasped. “What made you stay was the very thing I thought would chase you away.”
I glanced up, tears prickling behind my eyes at the emotion rattling in his tone. “Nothing is going to chase me away.”
He didn’t meet my gaze. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
And he hadn’t let me respond to that troubling statement. Instead he fucked me into silence. Into oblivion.
For the time being.
And then we landed on the sofa, with Gage’s ‘naked’ edict fully in place. I’d thought in theory that such a thing would be uncomfortable. That I’d be crippled with anxiety about those dimpled spots on my thighs, that little pooch in my stomach that never went away. The way my breasts had started to drop, just slightly, almost magically when I’d turned thirty.
Wrong.
Those little insecurities still whispered at me, but Gage’s gaze, his worship, quietened them, much like he did my demons. And I quickly found the benefit to the edict when he bent me over the kitchen counter, slamming into me while slapping a wooden spoon hard and fast against my ass.
The spot stung with every move.
And it was glorious.
“Why don’t we go to my place?” Gage repeated my question, hands running lazily through my hair. Where I had a book, he did not. I knew he loved to read, because I remembered his shelves at the club, and his intense perusal of my own collection. He’d run his eyes over it for at least a solid fifteen minutes. He didn’t touch a book, just looked at the spines. And only a true book lover knew the joy that merely looking at the weathered spines of classics and favorites could provide. A book lover also knew that you could tell a lot about a person by their collection.
But he wasn’t reading. He was just sitting, running his hands through my hair. He was a man content with just sitting. I asked him about it, and he said it was a new thing.
“Because I don’t count when I’m sitting with you. And I like to bathe in those little moments, those pockets of peace a man like me has been starved of.”
Hence me finding it hard to read because my boyfriend—such a lackluster word for what we were—was running his hands through my hair, the same hands that killed people, that provoked violence, that built fricking bombs, and was at peace.
Because of me.
“We don’t go to my place because we’re at my place,” he finally answered.
I blinked. Did we move in together without me noticing? It had only been weeks. Less than that since Gage and I finally had sex. Granted, he’d stayed over every single night since then, showered here. But he went home to change.
To the home I’d never seen and was infinitely curious about, hence the question. I was pretty sure we hadn’t moved in together—though the thought filled me with warmth and comfort—and I was about to query his response when he kept talking.
“You are my place, Lauren,” he said.
He obviously didn’t notice my heart fricking stopping, because he kept talking.
“And this place, it’s saturated in you. I know you’ve worked fuckin’ hard to make it your sanctuary from the ugliness of the world. Somehow you’ve made it mine, not because of your fuckin’ ridiculous pillows or kickass sofas, though I do approve, but because of you.”
“But I want to see you,” I whispered.
His face changed, turning unreadable, as it had now and again throughout the past week. Something flickered, something I itched to tease out of him. A pain that ran along his arms, that ran inside his soul. But it was gone too quickly to hold onto. And I couldn’t force it. I knew that. If I wanted to know Gage’s pain, I had to wait until he was brave enough to show it to me.
He was the bravest man I knew, but standing up to the horrors of the world took a different kind of bravery than standing up to the horrors of one’s soul.
“You see me, babe,” he murmured, yanking me to his body. “You see me better than anyone else does.”
Again, as if he sensed my broken heart could take no more, that he’d found the limit of my pleasure and pain in his words, he gently pushed me up so he could stand.
My book went tumbling to the floor.
Not because of the motion of him pressing me upward, but because he was standing in front of me.