Total pages in book: 141
Estimated words: 142783 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 714(@200wpm)___ 571(@250wpm)___ 476(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 142783 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 714(@200wpm)___ 571(@250wpm)___ 476(@300wpm)
Shifting, she pressed her mouth to my palm, kissed it gently, lingered there for the longest time.
She held my hand to her face like her haggard breaths could heal our wounds.
I eased down onto my knees, took her face in my hands, and stared at her through the lapping shadows. “Did you feel it? Did you feel me?”
Tears slipped from her gorgeous eyes, the moisture seeping into the webs of my fingers.
“You are the only thing, the only one, I’ve ever felt.”
“Aster.” I leaned forward and pressed my mouth against hers.
Aster inhaled like it was the first time in years she could breathe. Then her hands spread over my chest and up around my neck.
I kissed her slow. My lips in a constant press and pull with hers. Soft laps and tiny flicks of tongue.
Without breaking the kiss, she fumbled through the buttons of my shirt.
The first.
The second.
She moved faster the farther she went.
She gasped a little sound when she got the last one free, and she pressed her palms to my bare chest and ran them up over my shoulders to push back the fabric.
I was quick to wind out of it, needing to feel her heat, the touch of her hands, the raking of her eyes.
They flew over me like a storm. Like annihilation. This one single girl who held the power to destroy me. She’d done it before, under the covenant of a thousand secret kisses, so I should have known better right then.
But yesterday didn’t matter. This moment was the only one I could control.
My skin was unmarred except for the single tattoo that ran up my side from my waist to my ribs.
She whimpered when she saw it.
GREED.
Aster edged back a fraction, and she glanced at me once in question before she turned to watch as she ran her fingers over the ink.
“It stole you from me.” I could barely hear her heartbroken words over the crash of her heart. The pound, pound, pounding that ravaged and shook.
She was wrong.
“Everything I ever had belonged to you.”
Everything I’d ever done had been done for her.
Every lie told in her favor.
She looked back at me. “Our worlds have always been against us.”
I set my hand on the side of her face. “Then let’s burn it down.”
She leaned forward, and she was kissing along my bare chest, over that rampage that beat against my ribs, over the hatred that churned in my soul, over the word that had cost it all.
Greed. Greed. Greed.
Who I was bred to be.
What my father created.
I’d stolen. I’d manipulated. I’d contrived.
But this time…this time, the gain had taken new shape, and I wouldn’t stop until she was mine.
My hands drove into her hair as she kissed lower, and I lifted as she went, until she was dipping her tongue along the band of my pants.
I almost came undone right there.
Lust buzzed in my ear. Stampeded like gasoline as it sped through my veins.
Every muscle in my body went hard.
It was a greedy sound that rumbled up her throat when she undid the button and pulled down the zipper.
The sound reverberated through the room. Banged the walls like a promise.
“Aster.”
It was a grunt.
She was heading in a direction she wasn’t ready for.
Aster sat up so she could push the tips of her fingers under the material. “Please. Just let me touch you. Let me feel you. I know it’s temporary but—”
I cut her off by closing my hand up around her throat. “Don’t fucking say it.”
It killed the words right there, and her eyes rounded in fear.
I knew she wasn’t afraid of me, but she was terrified of what I might do. The lengths I would go. I’d promised her freedom and I fucking meant it.
All the way.
“Please,” she said instead, sagging forward with her mouth finding my chest again. She worked her way down in frantic, frenzied kisses. “Please.”
She left a trail of flames. A fire in my gut. A burn across my flesh.
I grunted when she made it down to my hip bone on the left, and she followed the line of it with her tongue as she pushed my pants and underwear down to the middle of my thighs.
My cock sprang free and bobbed against my stomach.
Hard as fucking stone and set on possession.
“I want you so fucking bad, Little Star. Do you have any clue? Any idea the times I thought of you? Imagined you?”
“I hope as many times as I thought of you.” It was a whimpered confession.
She leaned over and licked my head right over the slit before she returned those gorgeous eyes to me. “I can’t believe I’m looking at you like this. On this day.”
My chest tightened.
I wanted to suppress it. Shun what she was referring to. Like either one of us could forget that night.
A moan got free as she curled both her hands around the base of my dick, and I reached out and pressed my thumb between her plump, wet lips. I pushed it in and drew it out. “Are you going to fuck me with that sweet mouth?”