Total pages in book: 48
Estimated words: 45943 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 230(@200wpm)___ 184(@250wpm)___ 153(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 45943 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 230(@200wpm)___ 184(@250wpm)___ 153(@300wpm)
I nod and stride out onto the balcony, closing the door behind me and looking down upon the city. I grip the handrail and force my breathing to come slowly.
Otherwise, I’ll let out a savage roar that’ll bring every single building in the city crumbling down.
I need to get myself under control.
Because there’s no world where I can make a move on Jade Clark.
She and Yasmin are too close.
They’ve been best friends for years.
But as I stand here, my cock just now beginning to soften, I know that I can’t let her go.
It’s already too late.
She belongs to me.
Chapter Three
Jade
We sit around the absurdly large dining table, the surface sleek wood, and the air smelling of the vanilla candles that Yasmin likes to light. We rarely eat in here when it’s just the two of us, preferring to hunker down on the couch with our trays in our lap.
But this is a special occasion, the return of Jamie Jensen, Yasmin’s billionaire father.
And the man who seems to be angry with me for some reason.
I feel almost naked under the glittering chandelier light, the stark lights doing nothing to help the feeling of exposure. The dining room table is big, but we all huddle around one end so that as Jamie glares at me there’s not enough space in between us to stop the force of it.
I sneak looks at him in between the deliciously cooked steak, my eyes roaming over him in his steel gray suit and his black and iron peppered hair. His eyes are just as pale and eerie as I remember them, but now he’s let a light sprinkle of salt cover his square, strong jaw.
His body is as muscular as I remember too—as I see sometimes in my illicit dreams.
His biceps bulge as he cuts his steak, as though any second they could erupt from his suit jacket.
I find myself thinking of his ex-partner, Yasmin’s mother, the woman who fled to Europe to live a life of Bohemian abandon, deserting Jamie and Yasmin and never coming back.
How could she leave this man?
What dark secrets are buried in that stony chest?
I have to focus hard on cutting my steak, my hand trembling as I focus on the movement. My body is sending up a flurrying riot of sensations, my skin tingling, my sex pulsing as I sit here and try to tell myself that Jamie Jensen isn’t glaring at me.
But every time I look up and his gaze is on me, I see the flaring blue fire in his eyes, as though he hates me for being here and ruining his reunion with his daughter.
Their conversation passes over me as though it’s coming from far away. It’s like I’ve locked myself inside a translucent soundproof box, a defense mechanism to save myself from having to hear Jamie telling his daughter how angry he is that I’m here, how I should’ve found my own place the day I turned eighteen, how he’s not going to support me leeching off his daughter anymore.
“Jade?” Yasmin says, tugging me from the reverie.
I look up to find that they’re both staring at me. Yasmin has a smile on her face, but Jamie looks like I’ve just slapped him. He grimaces firmly and for a crazy second, I let myself imagine that the grimace might mean something else, that he’s imagining doing sinful wonderful things to me.
Obviously not, I scream in my mind, assuring myself sharply that the thought is downright insane.
“Yes?” I murmur.
“Dad asked you a question,” she says. “But as usual you were off in the clouds. See, Dad, I told you … she’s a typical writer.”
Yasmin rolls her eyes and grins at me, the same way she smiled at me when I was just a little girl and she was this cool-as-heck teenager.
She beamed her support for me from those pale blue eyes back then, and suddenly I feel like screaming that I’m sorry.
I shouldn’t be having these traitorous thoughts.
I want to beg for forgiveness.
Instead, I try a smile of my own. It comes out shaky. The skin around my mouth feels tight with the effort of holding the false expression.
“I’m sorry?” I say.
That just gets Jamie grimacing even harder.
His eyes sear into me as he leans forward, his fists clenched slightly, resting on the table like two weapons ready to do their work. I’ve watched his MMA fights more times than I can count, a young Jamie Jensen stalking into the cage and dismantling his opponent like there’s a lion living inside of him.
I especially love his first title fight with Tyron Kirkenwell, a heavyweight champion that everybody thought was unbeatable. Jamie knocked him out in fourteen seconds, one of the fastest in history. Perhaps it’s macabre of me, but there’s something primal about him in those videos, something downright beastly.