Total pages in book: 135
Estimated words: 131916 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 660(@200wpm)___ 528(@250wpm)___ 440(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131916 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 660(@200wpm)___ 528(@250wpm)___ 440(@300wpm)
“What happened back there?” I demanded.
Surprise flashed through her expression before she shuttered it in feigned confusion. “What are you talking about?”
I eased forward, getting so close that I could hear the rushing of her pulse, the careening in her veins, the clanging of her heart.
She panted short, shallow breaths, and I inhaled every single one.
Cinnamon and spice.
Like the whiskey that still coated my tongue.
I angled in, words tremoring with fury. “I won’t pretend I didn’t see whatever the hell went down out there.”
“And what was that?” She lifted her chin in that fiery defiance, with a challenge, like she was physically raising a metal shield in front of her spirit.
Refusing access.
A barricade.
My hands burned with the need to bust right through it. Fingers desperate to sink in.
I edged forward until there was only an inch separating us.
I towered over her, eclipsing her in my shadow. Shivers rolled through her body.
“I saw you run. You were scared.” Could barely force the words out around the rage.
She seemed to swallow over the barbs that tremored her throat, and she shook her head and huffed. “I wasn’t scared. I was ready to leave.”
Didn’t believe her for a minute.
“Is that so?”
“Yes.”
“It seemed to me you were having a good time.”
The laugh she released was riddled with disappointment, and she dipped her attention toward the ground. “And then I remembered who I am.”
Felt like I got scalded when I reached out and took her by the chin to force her to look at me. “Yeah, and who’s that?”
She rocked her head back on the wood, gazing up at me with that disorienting, enthralling gaze, the subject clearly shifting from whatever had sent her running to this.
To the tension that strained and the desire that flooded.
Lust so full in the air I was pretty sure both of us were suffocating on it.
This thing about her so intense there was no making sense of it.
“Someone who doesn’t do this,” she breathed.
I needed to shun it. End it. Step back and walk away.
Instead, I was dipping down and murmuring my lips along the soft edge of her jaw, whispering, “Maybe you should.”
An earthquake rocked her, and I nearly fucking came at the force of it.
“You already warned me you aren’t the type of guy I should be mixing with,” she rasped.
“I’m definitely not. But I can’t stop thinking about you. How’s it you got under my skin?”
My mouth traveled the delicate column of her throat when I said it, there but not quite touching.
“How’s it that I was the one supposed to be marking you, and you’re the one who left the imprint? And now I can’t stop thinking about marking myself all over you. Writing myself on every fuckin’ inch of this sweet little body.”
She inhaled a sharp, needy sound, her shoulders hitched to the door as her chest bowed out like she was begging for the connection.
“And I’m terrified that you make me want anything at all,” she whispered.
She should be.
She should be terrified.
She should shove me off and tell me to stay the hell away from her.
While the only thing I wanted to do was wrap her up. Slay whatever fucking demon had chased her here.
“What is it you want?” I rumbled at her jaw.
Her nails sank into my shoulders. “I don’t know…to feel good. To forget for a little while.”
“I’d make you feel so good, sweetheart. So good you’d forget your name.”
A whimper rolled out of her, and her scent was invading.
Cinnamon and spice.
I gripped her by the waist, and my palms rode up her sides, following the ripple of desire that rolled through her body.
“You want me to make you forget?” I grunted, kissing along her jaw.
“Yes.”
My hand curved around the back of her neck and glided up to tangle in her hair.
Angling forward, I took that sweet, sweet mouth in a possessive kiss.
Energy crashed between us, and she whimpered as she sank her nails deeper into my shoulders.
My dick grew fat and hard as lust kicked up a path through my veins.
I needed more. I needed all of her.
I licked at the seam of her lips. She gasped as she opened, and I stroked my tongue into the hot well of her mouth.
I inhaled, and fuck, she was the sweetest thing. Soft against all my hard. I pressed myself closer, needing to disappear into the goodness of who she was.
Wanting to forget for a little while, too.
Who I was and why I could never really have her.
Except she suddenly froze beneath me.
Brittle, shattered stone.
Then she started fucking shaking.
Shaking and shaking.
Getting slammed by some kind of panic attack. Her terror was palpable as it zipped across her flesh.
I ripped myself back, and I pressed my hands to the door on either side of her head as I searched her face. She squeezed her eyes closed in an effort to keep me from seeing.