Total pages in book: 149
Estimated words: 138217 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138217 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
“A kiss,” he said, leaning in until their breaths mingled.
Theo closed the distance between them without warning.
Lips on lips, her breasts crushed to his chest.
Groaning, he’d shoved her even harder against the wall before he could stop himself, the ridge of his erection thrusting against her stomach. Fuck, she felt good. All soft and warm and Bozhe but he wanted her with a raw desperation that would have her pinned up against the wall in ten seconds flat if he didn’t get a grip on it.
It took everything he had to pull back, keep it slow.
He initiated the second kiss, this one a little wetter, but with both their mouths yet closed. When her hand landed on his chest, and she fisted his T-shirt between her fingers, his chest rumbled with the bear’s approval.
Yakov had thought he knew all about kissing—hadn’t he stolen his first kiss when he was a juvenile of barely thirteen? But this kiss, it was a bullet straight to the heart, visceral and hard. The intensity of it hit him with such fury that he had no hope in hell of resisting it.
Perhaps in some deep corner of his brain, he’d convinced himself that it would be a letdown, that his dreams had been nothing but a confused bit of foresight that had come through the genes left by his great-grandfather. That he’d misunderstood the meaning of it, and that all he’d been foreseeing was that Theo would one day come into his life.
Well, he’d been wrong.
This kiss was better than anything in the dream. It was all breath and heat and her and it took hold of his changeling heart and squeezed. Until he had no air and the lack didn’t matter if he could keep on kissing her.
But when she tore at his T-shirt, he cupped her cheek and took a single step back. Just enough to look into her eyes, shake his head. “We are not rushing this.” Not their first time.
Not her first time.
A hiss of air from in between her lips, her eyes flashing to blue flame.
Oh yeah, his Theo was going to drive him to distraction. But tonight, he had to hold steady, had to be the anchor.
Before she could snap at him that she’d already told him she knew what she wanted, he tugged off the hand she’d clenched in his T-shirt, lifted it to his mouth, and pressed a kiss to her knuckles. “Let me love you slow and with great attention to detail, pchelka moya.”
Her pupils swallowed up her irises, her chest rising and falling in a ragged drumbeat. “I don’t want to lose this chance.” An edge of desperation. “I don’t know what tomorrow will bring.”
Yakov’s jaw tightened. He trusted her more than she trusted herself, but he knew that nothing he said would change her mind until they had proof. So he kept it to the here and the now. “We have all night. Hours and hours.” Leaning close, he nuzzled her throat, licked her up. “Endless minutes.”
This time, he tasted her shiver before he pulled back and took another kiss that was a drug to his senses. They were both breathing harder, faster when he broke the kiss to say, “Do you want me to take off the T-shirt?”
* * *
* * *
THEO didn’t have to think of her answer to Yakov’s question. “Yes. I want to touch you.” She didn’t know how to be anything less than blunt when want was a crushing weight on her skin, a turbulent spiral in her veins.
A gleam in the amber before Yakov pulled off his T-shirt and threw it so it landed on the back of a chair. The groan that came from her throat was unbidden, feral in its lack of control.
She had her hands on him a moment later, but despite the desperation riding her, she didn’t claw and scrabble. No. She spread her fingers on the silken ridges and planes of him, and she soaked him in, this man of beauty and power and warmth. So much warmth. Inside and out, Yakov Stepyrev was created of warmth.
It was stark need that had her pressing her lips to his skin. She wanted to absorb him into her, keep him forever in a place where no one could steal him from her. He tasted of the wild, salt, and heat, and the scent that was his. She might not be changeling, but she knew she would never mistake his scent for any other man’s.
It aroused her, comforted her, made her want to cry with the loss to come.
When he put his hands on her hips, she was expecting—was ready for—a demand. But he nuzzled her throat, then nipped, and nuzzled again. Her eyes grew hot, burned. Squeezing them shut, she swallowed hard as she ran her hands over his chest. “Dimples,” she managed to say when she could speak again.