Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 73311 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73311 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
The clubhouse was pretty simple. Living room and dining room the size of a small gymnasium. Kitchen the size of a postage stamp. Twelve bedrooms.
It was a mini mansion that was an old cotton plantation—or had been originally. The place had been built using old, reclaimed wood from one. It needed fine-tuning, and was slowly getting the facelift that it needed, but that’d all been done by Stone.
He’d been a master at carpentry.
The rest of us were okay, but all the fine details that Stone had put into the outside, as well as the living room, wouldn’t be in the rest of the house.
None of the others in the club had the same skill set, and it would show when we finally started fixing it up again.
“Tired.”
I looked down at the woman in my arms, my sadness floating into the back of my mind as I stared.
“You’re staying with me tonight,” I told her.
“M’kay,” she agreed. “Gotta text Mom, though.”
I pushed through the final door that led to the bedrooms, and headed straight for the back bedroom, the one furthest away from the rest in the house.
I was thankful that I’d gotten this back bedroom. It was quieter than the others, and it also had the best airflow—something that I’d found I had to have due to my night terrors. Having the room cold tamped down the feeling of being trapped and burned alive in a car—I viciously shut those thoughts down.
There was a time and place for thinking about that day…and with a snuggly woman in my arms wasn’t one of them.
And she was snuggly.
She was curled up in my arms, her face smashed into my pecs, and both arms tucked into her body, like she didn’t have a single care in the world.
When I placed her in my bed, she immediately shivered.
I kept it cold.
Very cold.
It was colder at my place, but in deference to the other men that lived in this house, I kept it at sixty degrees instead of the fifty-five at my apartment.
Though, at first the thermostat wouldn’t get that cold. I’d had to do some hacking into the box—as well as a little breaking and entering into the super’s place—to make it possible to get it as cold as I wanted it.
“Need to text Mom,” Imogen repeated.
She rolled over to her belly, both arms underneath her in an effort to get warm, and in doing so, gave me better access to her phone that was in her back pocket.
Slipping it out of her pocket, and extremely careful not to touch her ass in the process, I tried to open it but stopped short for two reasons.
The first one was the background picture.
It was of Thor.
Literally, a picture of Thor, holding his hammer up high in the air, was her background photo.
The second thing that stopped me was her passcode.
Not thinking it was going to work, I typed the obvious ‘1111’ into the phone, and then immediately shook my head as it opened up.
Resisting the urge to tell her she needed to change her passcode, and in turn waking her up, I tapped her messages and immediately found the one labeled ‘Mama Bear.’
Typing out a quick ‘I’ll be gone for the night. Don’t wait up.’ I placed the phone on the nightstand, plugged it into my charger, and went to the bathroom.
After relieving myself and brushing my teeth, doing all this without looking into the mirror or even turning on a light, I headed back into the room only to stop short when I saw her cocooned in not just one blanket, but all the blankets, sheets included.
The only thing poking out beneath the mound of bed clothes was her boots, which I divested her of about twenty seconds later.
The last things to go were her socks, which were bright pink with white polka dots.
Socks that fit her personality perfectly.
The moment the cold air hit her feet, though, she roused.
“My pants, too.”
I froze.
There was no way in hell I was taking her pants off.
“You want those off, sugar, you’re gonna have to take them off yourself,” I told her, tossing her socks to the ground next to her boots before I followed suit with my own boots and socks.
The next thing to go were my jeans, which I immediately replaced with a pair of sweats.
I didn’t normally sleep fully clothed, but I had a feeling I needed all the layers of protection I could get when it came to this woman, especially when she kicked her pants out of the hole at her feet only moments later.
The belt clinked loudly on the floor with a resounding crack, and I had a premonition of things to come.
Things that I wasn’t quite sure I was ready for.
But did that stop me from getting into bed with the woman?