Total pages in book: 91
Estimated words: 86768 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 434(@200wpm)___ 347(@250wpm)___ 289(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 86768 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 434(@200wpm)___ 347(@250wpm)___ 289(@300wpm)
He brings one hand between my legs, closes it over my sex and shifts his gaze to mine.
I suck in a breath as his fingers spread my lips and find my clit. He then draws those fingers through my folds and up to my ass.
“Santos,” I start, embarrassed and aroused and I don’t know what else. I don’t know what the fuck just happened.
He looks at me for a long moment and I feel like he’s warning me.
He finally draws his hand away and presses himself against me. I shudder, feeling the length of him through his slacks. And I admit, as much as I hate myself for it, I want him.
“Should I show you again how hard you’ll come for me? This time with my cock stretching your cunt, because you’re fucking dripping.”
My face burns and I’m sure he sees it. “I fucking hate you, you know that?”
“I think you hate yourself more, sweetheart. Because you want this as much as I do. Remember, for years you’ve been wearing my scent on you of your own free will. You were begging to be mine. You want me to take you, to make you mine, as much as I want it. As much as I want you—and that’s not how this is supposed to work.”
I turn my face away because I can’t look at him… because he’s fucking right.
The minute I stop fighting him, he releases me, almost as if he’s stopped fighting me, too. I flop down onto the bed, roll onto my back and watch as, keeping his eyes on me with his expression impassive, he gets off the bed and pulls the remnants of his shirt off his shoulders and lets it drop. The instant it does, I gasp, my hand coming up to cover my mouth.
He stands still and watches me as I sit up and look at him, unable to drag my gaze from his thickly muscled chest, which is covered in scars. Fucking covered. His upper arms are lined with old cuts that have turned into thick scar tissue, and so are his shoulders. I can see where he’s had stitches on his sides, one clearly from a knife wound. The other a bullet?
“Uglier than you hoped for?” he asks.
I meet his eyes, shift my gaze down then up again to his. “It’s the truth, isn’t it? The ugliness?” I ask, not meaning it the way it sounds, the way it wounds, but knowing I’m doing it all the same.
He looks down over himself, then back at me. “Remember, I tried to keep you from seeing it. Now turn around and get on your hands and knees.”
I force myself to hold his gaze.
“I said turn around, Little Kitty, and get on your hands and knees.”
“Why? Can’t stand to look at me when you do it?”
I slip off the bed and go to him, standing so close that I can smell him. The cologne is subtly different when he wears it. It’s the way his skin interacts with it. It’s the thing I was missing all along—that scent of him beneath the cologne.
If he wants to fuck me tonight, he will look at me when he does it, and he will definitely get those claws down his back, exactly as he’d said.
“No,” I say, looking up at his beautiful, cruel face. I think I must be a masochist because even as I reach out to touch one of the scars on his chest, I know all it will earn me is pain.
He catches my hand roughly. We stand still, both of us watching the other. He clearly didn’t expect me to touch him. He was probably expecting me to cringe back at the mess that is his chest. He doesn’t know me, though. No one does. What did he say about secrets? I have my own.
“I’m not afraid of a little truth, Santos.” I need to show him that I’m not afraid of him, that I won’t be cowed. I’m not weak.
He grins. “No?”
I shake my head. It’s his turn to search my face now, to want answers from me that he won’t get. He releases my hand and stands still as I trace the first scar, the deepest one. He shudders, muscle rippling beneath my fingers, almost as though he’s not used to touch, and I remember what he said about being celibate for the last ten years.
“What is it?” I ask, curious, although I’m saving the most interesting ones for last.
“Hunting knife.”
I look up at him, still surprised even though I kind of guessed. It’s the violence of it.
“This one?” I ask, sliding my hand over hard muscle and soft skin toward the rougher tissue of another scar.
“Bullet.”
“You’re not easy to kill.”
One corner of his mouth curves upward. “Are you going to try?”
I don’t answer. He steals a kiss then, and I’m caught off guard. He swallows my gasp as I taste him, taste myself on him. This man… There’s something about him, and there has been since day one. I need to be careful with him.