Total pages in book: 116
Estimated words: 110624 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 553(@200wpm)___ 442(@250wpm)___ 369(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 110624 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 553(@200wpm)___ 442(@250wpm)___ 369(@300wpm)
He looked up at me with both palms on my belly, then gently brushed his finger lower over my c-section scar. “Don’t ever hide this from me again. This is where my baby was, where my other babies will come from. It’s precious to me, and it’s beautiful.” He kissed it one last time softly. “You’re beautiful.”
For the first time, I believed him when he said it.
He stood up, towering over me. His hair was disheveled, and a stray piece fell over his darkened green eyes. His erection was straining through his beige cargo shorts, and he was looking at me like he was about to attack. He then took my bottom lip into his mouth and sucked it hard, slowly releasing it. I was growing impatient with need and tugged at his black Nine Inch Nails t-shirt trying to pull it over his head. I jumped when he abruptly moved my hands off of him.
Then, he walked away.
“Go feed your son. I’m going to take a shower.”
CHAPTER 32
JAKE
I turned the lever to make the water colder. I needed to calm the fuck down. I didn’t know what came over me out there, but it wasn’t good. Even though she was encouraging it, if I had taken another step forward, it would have been like a tornado touching down. I felt incapable of being gentle and knew the end result of the possessive urges flowing through me would have scared the shit out of her.
I had snapped tonight, and it was about more than just her shielding her body from me. It was the fact that from the beginning, I never felt like I deserved her. Aside from the past couple of months, she had always wiped away that doubt with her love and her strong physical need for me. When the postpartum stuff happened, almost out of the blue, she started to push me away, and all of my insecurities moved to the forefront, growing like a cancer I couldn’t stop.
Every single day of those two months, I felt like I was losing her more. We were supposed to be happy because we finally had everything we wanted, right? The baby was healthy. The divorce was final. But that was when everything started to crumble. I wanted the old Nina back, and these past few days were the first in weeks that I started to believe she was slowly returning to me.
On the car ride from Jersey to the hotel, I started thinking about maybe proposing to her again tonight. I knew she could tell something was off with me from the way she was looking at me in the hotel elevator. My doubts had gotten the best of me. I had myself convinced she’d only say no again and couldn’t bear to hear it one more time. Not to mention, I vowed never to ask her again. So, I made a decision to hold off, and that put me in a shitty mood because I wanted nothing more than to hear Nina say she’d be my wife. I wanted it for A.J., but mostly on a selfish level, I needed to know that she belonged to me in every way.
Just when my mind had calmed down a bit from overthinking everything, she came out of that shower gripping her towel closed so tightly you would have thought I was a grizzly bear. That was when I cracked because it felt like a major step back, like any minute she was going to be telling me not to touch her again.
That would have killed me.
When I saw how badly she seemed to want me, I knew I had overreacted. But by that time, my desperation for her was so strong, I had to just take a step backwards and cool down. If I gave in to that kind of sexual energy, fueled by anger and frustration, I knew I would have been too aggressive. Given how vulnerable she was lately, I needed to get a grip before I scared her away for good.
When I got out of the shower, she was still in the other room feeding A.J., and I was sitting on the bed, staring at the closed door, thinking that I wouldn’t have blamed her if she never came back out. I could only imagine what she was thinking now that she had time to ponder my fucked up behavior.
When the door opened about ten minutes later, it had felt like I had been waiting forever. I sat up straighter on the bed as she walked toward me, and without hesitation, she unbuttoned her pajama top throwing it on the ground. She then slipped out of her underwear and threw them behind her. She was now standing before me completely naked. It took all of my willpower not to touch her, but something told me to wait, that she was in the driver’s seat.