Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 72543 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 363(@200wpm)___ 290(@250wpm)___ 242(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 72543 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 363(@200wpm)___ 290(@250wpm)___ 242(@300wpm)
I’m not really sure what that means for him or me, but my arms fold around him, and I offer myself to him, a shelter in the wildness of a storm I believe has raged in him far longer than I ever imagined. And right now, he needs someplace to put it all. He needs me. And I need him. But there must be something he tastes on my lips, in my reaction, in the way I’m responding to him, that undoes him, because he tears his mouth from mine.
He presses me against the bedpost again, a mix of dark passion and shadows in the depth of his eyes that I can only call haunting, but he says nothing. I say nothing. But then the time for words has long passed, and the burn of possession and the need for control radiates from him. The charge between us is a live wire, and when his gaze rakes over my naked breasts, my nipples pucker and my sex clenches. I ache to feel him press inside me, to fill me, and yet still he just stares at me, one second more. I reach for his shirt. He catches my wrist, his grip snug but not painful.
“One day you’ll run away just like you said you should in the living room.”
He’s afraid, I realize now. Afraid for me to see the truth of who he is, and that’s almost impossible for me to wrap my head around. This is me he fears, not some stranger, but I say the words I know he needs to hear, “What if I don’t? And will you ever know, if you keep pushing me away?”
“You think you can handle it.”
“I know I can.”
His eyes narrow, darken to almost black, and then he presses my hands to the post behind me and says, “Let’s see what you can really handle. Show me you trust me. Do what I say and nothing else.”
We’re back to his need for power, and my need to give it to him, which I’ll analyze in the morning. “Okay then,” I say.
He steps back from me, no longer touching me, the very act of him standing there, fully dressed, and me here naked, hugging a pole, and not him, as submissive and arousing as anything I’ve ever known.
My chin lifts. “Now what?” I whisper.
“Keep your hands right there. Understand?”
I wet my parched lips and nod, warm all over, my nipples rock-hard pebbles. “Yes,” I whisper.
“Good,” he replies, and I am rewarded for my compliance as he reaches for the buttons on his shirt. Finally, he will be naked with me, and true to that expectation and hope, a moment later his shirt is open enough that he’s tugging it over his head. He tosses it aside, the flex of muscle and man a delicious answer to my compliance. But just when I hope and hunger for him to fully undress, he closes the space between us.
Instinct has me reaching for him, and he catches my hands and presses them back against the bedpost. “I told you, baby, don’t move.”
Somehow there is a contrast of tenderness and command in his voice that is as arousing and confusing as everything else about Damion. “Or else what?” I ask, daring a bold question that pulls us deeper in this power play.
His hands settle on my waist, fire against my skin, and he leans in close, his warm breath a fan on my neck as he says, “I’ll be forced to punish you.”
For some odd reason, my belly trembles with this promise, and it’s all I can do not to touch him. I don’t know this part of Damion, but I’m not afraid as I suspect he thinks I will be. I’m not even a little afraid. “How?” I ask instead.
I can feel him smile against my skin a moment before he eases back and says, “I’ll spank you, Alana. And I’ll enjoy it, as will you. So feel free to break the rule. Move your hands. Give me a reason to turn you over my lap.”
Chapter eleven
The little girl in me that grew up next door to Damion wants to laugh at his promise to turn me over his lap, but he’s not laughing at all, and I have no idea why I’m suddenly ten times hotter than I was moments before. I’ve never done such a thing in my life. Never had a man touch me as he suggests he will or talk to me in such a way. I feel young and naïve and really quite vanilla when we are nearly the same age. But then, I remind myself that I was never really all in with anyone in my life, but Damion.
Either way, I don’t know what I feel right now, or what his intent is behind such an erotic statement, but it doesn’t feel as simple as it seems.