Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 73043 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 365(@200wpm)___ 292(@250wpm)___ 243(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73043 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 365(@200wpm)___ 292(@250wpm)___ 243(@300wpm)
“Yeah,” Elliott agreed. “But mine always get back up. I think it’s because everyone else has bigger hands. Mine are big, but they’re not big. You know?”
I couldn’t help it. I looked down at my hands.
Then Elliott started to laugh.
“We’ll see y’all later,” James muttered.
“Wait,” Janie said, causing me to turn and watch them retreat.
None of them stopped.
“Wait!” Janie repeated, this time on a yell. “At least take him with you!”
I snorted when Max turned back, brushed past Janie and then me, and reached down to hook Tegan around the jacket collar.
“Are you sure you want them to be alone with a man that just called you a slut?” I asked carefully.
I mean, I was all for it. But Janie was a soft soul. It’d hurt her if she found out later that she was responsible for Tegan’s untimely demise.
“Oh,” she breathed. “Dad, wait!”
“Hurry up!” Elliott hissed.
Max drug the little prick the rest of the way into the elevator just as Elliott was busy pressing buttons.
I couldn’t help it.
I laughed.
Seeing all those men crammed into that elevator with a man at their feet as the last one in urgently tried to get the doors to close was quite comical.
Janie, however, didn’t find any of it as hilarious as I did.
Which she informed me of as she slammed her way into her hotel room, and not mine, moments later.
I followed her, easily slipping in my universal key card—which I’d obtained the last time I’d stayed in this hotel—and walked right in.
I found her with her dress tossed up as she tried to shimmy out of it.
I walked up behind her and helped her, lingering a little longer than was necessary on a few sets of buttons close to her ass.
“You’re not helping,” I heard her grit through clenched teeth.
I grinned—something I’d done more in the last half hour than I’d done in the last three months—and growled out a, “Turn around.”
She did, clutching the loosening dress to her chest.
“I don’t like this dress,” I said to her, trailing my fingers along her chest.
It was bare. Not a necklace or a skin imperfection dotted the line of her neck, and that bothered me.
I wanted to mark her as mine in some way, and I wanted every man in the world to know it.
“I don’t like it either,” she admitted. “I got it at a discount place in Tyler. It was on sale for ninety-nine dollars.”
I snorted. “The next one—the one you wear for me—is going to cost fifty times that.”
Her mouth fell open, and she forgot that she was holding up her dress, which worked for me.
“T-the next one?” she whispered, her eyes on me.
I nodded. “The one where you and I walk out man and wife. The one where you don’t fucking leave me at the altar, and the one where I make sure that you’ll forever be mine.”
“But Rafe,” she hesitated. “We don’t really know each other all that well.”
I winked. “I’ll give you a couple of months to get to know me. Then you can announce to your family that you’re engaged.”
“Rafe, that’s not how this works,” she whispered.
I trailed my finger down her side, lightly touching just the tip of my fingernail against her delicate skin, and snorted.
“This is how it works in Raphael Luis’s world. Soon, you’ll be Mrs. Raphael Luis. Soon, you’ll be mine. And I’ll make you forget that you were anything before me.”
She started to laugh then, momentarily distracting me from what I was about to do.
I looked at her with a raised brow. “What?”
“I don’t think you understand,” she teased.
“Understand what?” I questioned.
“The part of how I’ve never been anybody but yours. From the time I was twelve and I first met you, you had my heart. The only time you didn’t have it was when you forgot about me. But even then, you had it. You just didn’t know it.”
Grinning at the thought of her always being mine, I placed a single kiss on the inside of her knees.
“Rafe,” she breathed.
I looked up from where I was down on my knee and raised a brow at her. “Yeah?”
“Can you do it harder this time?”
I couldn’t help it.
I grinned.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I think I can handle that.”
***
“So how are you going to fix this?” she whispered against my chest two hours later.
We’d left the hotel since that would be the first place Tegan would think to look when he finally came to. Not that I thought Janie’s father would be letting him go anytime soon. Maybe a few days. If he was lucky.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I’ll figure it out.”
And I would.
Right after I got out of bed.
“Ok, what are we going to do?” she pushed, poking me.
I sat up in the bed and leaned against the headboard, knowing this wasn’t going to get pushed under the rug. At least, she wouldn’t let me get away with it.