Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 105615 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 528(@200wpm)___ 422(@250wpm)___ 352(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 105615 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 528(@200wpm)___ 422(@250wpm)___ 352(@300wpm)
I should’ve been proud of myself. Who I was, what I’d become. I definitely shouldn’t have been trivializing a life that I’d loved before Jay came in to it. But I couldn’t help it. He had opened so many parts of me. I was deeper now. What had filled up my life previously was now leaving empty spaces.
Jay sat and watched me the entire time I spoke, didn’t interrupt because he didn’t do that. Though the energy radiating off him got thicker and thicker as I spoke, and I suspected his expression would’ve grown measurably more intense, but I made a conscious effort not to look directly at him.
When I was done, though, all bets were off. There was no way for me to avoid his gaze because he moved from his desk to the bookcase, caging me in. Objects clattered to the floor as my back hit a shelf, Jay bracing me against them.
“We should pick those up,” I suggested meekly.
He didn’t respond.
“I’m sure they are incredibly expensive,” I continued. “We should assess the damage.”
“Shut up,” he hissed.
My lips pressed together. I wasn’t a woman who quieted when a man told her to. But before Jay, I wasn’t a woman who would’ve let herself be tied to a bed for an entire night or be whipped with a cane because she didn’t obey her man. I wasn’t a woman who’d thought I’d enjoy any of that.
But I did.
So now I was a woman who stopped speaking when told in that smooth voice by her man to shut up.
“I want to say that’s the last time you’ll say that kind of shit, but making you suppress it is only going to let it fester, and I’m not having that,” Jay informed me. His eyes vibrant, alive, inviting. “So I’m not going to order you to never say that again. You need to talk. Despite how much it boils my blood to hear you speak like that, we’ll hash it out. If that doesn’t help, doesn’t work, you’re going to therapy.”
I raised my brows and forgot that I was meant to be shutting up. “You’re going to try to make me go to therapy?” I asked with a bite to my voice. The bite was to hide the fear I felt at the bottom of my stomach. He thought I was broken. Could he see something inside of me? The start of something irreversible. My biggest, darkest, fear?
Surely not. Jay was a lot of things, but a clairvoyant he was not. He was just very fucking adept at reading people.
Which was why he also heard the bite in my tone.
“I’m not insinuating there’s something with wrong with you,” he replied, voice even, eyes assessing. “In my opinion, you are perfection.”
His hand moved up, brushing the back of his hand across my cheek. “But the goal is to make you believe there’s nothing wrong with you. A professional giving you the tools to understand that. The body is like a machine, Stella. The mind the most complicated part of all. We can’t be expected to know the intricacies of our own mind. Can’t expect to know how to fix the things that broke us. So if you can’t shake those toxic fucking thoughts, I’ll be making sure you ass is in a seat at a therapist’s office, even if I have to tan it myself to get you there.”
His eyes went dark with that promise, and my nipples pebbled in anticipation for it.
“For now, I’m going to tell you what you are,” he continued. “You’re stubborn in a way that infuriates me yet impresses me at the same time. Fearless in that very same way. So hungry for life that you devour it with the ferocity of someone starving, no matter what. You dance at a fucking club like no one’s watching. You clothe yourself in luxury, yet you’re the most glorious when you’re wearing nothing at all apart from the marks I put on you.”
His hand settled around my neck. Tight.
“You think that you have limits, but then you see what’s beyond them, and you’re happy to break them.” His thumb brushed against the delicate skin of my neck, his eyes on my lips.
“I’ve been all over the world, met the best and the worst types of people and everyone in between. I’ve fucked many women. Different women. Thought I knew all there was to know about them. About fucking. Thought I was in control, that I was making sure that there would never be a woman who clawed under my skin.”
His grip tightened slightly before he moved it downward, over my collarbone, brushing my nipple before trailing down to clasp my hip. His head inclined to my neck where he inhaled deeply, smelling me.
Then his eyes were back on mine.
“You are special,” he rasped. “In ways I don’t even know how to explain. In ways that scare the fucking shit out of me. In a way that has me tempted to get you out of my life because you endanger control it’s taken me ten years to grasp this tightly.”