Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 76381 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 382(@200wpm)___ 306(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76381 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 382(@200wpm)___ 306(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
But this, this felt like sunlight was beaming through my body, lighting me, and warming me up.
By the time we broke apart, Colter and Raff were gone, disappeared into the clubhouse, giving us privacy.
“Heya, darlin’,” Riff said, giving me that familiar, lazy smile, but his eyes were burning. “I missed you,” he said, making my heart feel all gooey.
“I missed you too,” I told him. I meant it down to my bones. “How was the, ah, trip?” I asked, enjoying the way his hands were absentmindedly rubbing across my lower back.
“Too long,” he told me. “What have you been up to?”
“Everyone has been keeping me busy,” I admitted. “I took a class with Nyx. And I had a personal yoga lesson at the gym.”
“Good for you, V. That’s awesome.”
“We should probably go inside,” I said, realizing I hadn’t even bothered to put my coat on in my excitement, and the cold was starting to slice into me.
“Yeah,” he agreed, sliding his arm around my hips, and walking me inside.
“Oh! Coach and I built a window ledge for Vernon. You want to see it?” I asked as we moved inside, finding the men in the kitchen talking in low voices to Slash.
“Absolutely,” he agreed, leading me up into our shared room.
He oohed and ahhed over the ledge for a moment as Vernon hopped onto it to show off its stability.
“You’re freezing,” Riff said as a little shiver racked my system.
He led me over to the bed, pushing me onto it, and pulling up all my blankets to create my little cocoon.
“Sit with me?” I asked, and the way his shoulders relaxed suggested he’d been waiting for that invitation.
He toed out of his shoes and moved around the bed to climb in with me. Wanting him closer, I slipped him under the covers with me, then scooted in at his side, resting my head on his chest like I’d been craving since he’d left.
“I haven’t slept well without you here,” I admitted as his hands automatically went to my hair.
“I’d much rather share a room with you than my brother,” he told me. “He kicked me out for an entire night.”
“Why?”
“He had… company,” he told me as his fingers went from sifting through my hair to rubbing gentle circles across my scalp.
“Oh,” I said, stomach twisting at the idea of Riff kicking out Raff to have company another night.
As if sensing the direction of my thoughts, Riff took a deep breath. “All I could think about was you,” he admitted.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, leaning over to press his lips to the top of my head. “Listen, I am not here to pressure you about anything. But I feel like I need to tell you that there’s… interest on my part. And that if you feel the same way, I’m in. No matter how long it takes for you to feel comfortable with the idea of dating again.”
“There’s interest,” I told him, belly wobbling a bit at the admission. “I talked to my therapist about it, actually.”
“Yeah? That’s good. I’m glad you have someone to talk to about it. I know things might be… really complicated for you.”
“She said that there’s no wrong time to date again, that it’s really just up to me and how things feel to me.”
“I know that it might be a long time before you feel comfortable with more than this,” he said, tightening his hold on me. “But that’s okay with me. I’m fine with waiting. I don’t want you to feel any pressure.”
“I don’t. You feel safe,” I admitted. It was the one constant in my life since the shed. Riff was safe. And I wanted to be with him. “I know you would never push me.”
His head tilted to rest on mine for a moment, both of us just enjoying the moment, coming to terms with this new reality of ours.
Then, “Oh, I have pictures to show you,” he declared, reaching for his phone. “I got a picture of a beaver,” he declared, voice excited. “A fucking beaver,” he added, shaking his head as he scrolled his pictures to find the ones he was looking for to show me. “These aren’t as exciting to me, since I’ve been to wildlife reserves in Florida a few times now, but I figure you have probably never seen a flamingo. So I got pictures and videos.”
He had lots of wildlife pictures to show me. An alligator walking down the sidewalk like some pedestrian. A giant iguana sunning itself on top of someone’s car. And an adorably strange armadillo.
“I think I would like to go on another road trip one day,” I decided when I was finished looking at all of his pictures.
“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “It was nice seeing all the different states and the bison.”
“We could plan a bookstore road trip,” he suggested. “Map out a path where we hit all of the best bookstores in each state.”