Total pages in book: 173
Estimated words: 163328 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 817(@200wpm)___ 653(@250wpm)___ 544(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 163328 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 817(@200wpm)___ 653(@250wpm)___ 544(@300wpm)
“No.” With a hard push against his chest, I broke his hold and staggered backward.
The muscles in his jaw flexed, tensing with frustration. Then a determined gleam rose in his eyes, flickering like silver stars in the dangerous dark of night.
He would never force himself on me. He wouldn’t have to. The look on his face glowed with chilling self-assurance. Because he knew.
He knew how easily he could seduce me, knew exactly how I liked to be touched, and the moment I slipped, he knew how to do things to my body that would splinter my mind and make me forget my own name.
“Don’t touch me.” I retreated until my backside bumped the desk. Meanwhile, my insides heated and tightened, silently screaming for him to finish what he started.
An ordinary predator would’ve prowled after me, rubbed up against my space, and unleashed an arsenal of seductive weapons to shatter my resolve. But Priest wasn’t ordinary.
He hooked a thumb in his waistband and reclined against the wall at his back, lounging like a great cat as he managed, quite successfully, to touch every part of me without touching me at all.
I shivered. “What are you doing?”
“You’re within eye-shot, which naturally requires that I do what any man would do in my position. I’m looking.” His leonine gaze took a timeless stroll along my transparent undergarments, pausing on my throat, stroking my breasts and abdomen, and darkening on the apex of my thighs. “Although, most certainly, I’m not just any man. As your husband, it’s my privilege to explore you with more than my eyes.” He pulled in a long breath, flaring finely chiseled nostrils. “You’re the most strikingly beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”
He was a rake. God only knew how many beautiful women he’d explored with more than just his eyes. I meant nothing to him.
“You disgrace the one person you vowed to love and call yourself a husband? A man?” I gave him a scathing look up and down. “I’m twice the man you are.”
“You won’t feel like a man in a moment when this distance between us starts to bore me.”
I gripped the edge of the desk, needing more than three meters of separation. “I feel naught for you.”
“The devil you don’t. I know you’re wet. That infernal ache between your thighs must be growing increasingly uncomfortable. I don’t see why we can’t commence with the part where I assuage that ache.”
A gentleman wouldn’t dare speak to a lady like that. But Priest had never censored his ill-bred language around me. Nor had he ever treated me like a craven fragile flower. The fact that he considered me his equal was one of the things I loved about him.
But it wasn’t enough.
“You’ll assuage nothing.” My body—lustful thing that it was—trembled in disagreement. “You’re a soulless bastard who keeps a wife on retainer while you chase something better. Two years later, you return to your backup plan, your second choice, and kiss her as if she’s the only one you ever wanted. But you kiss them all like that, don’t you? It’s no wonder you want to hurry this along. What, with women waiting for you in every port, all those opportunities are beckoning. If you fuck your wife tonight, you could be inside another wet, warm body by the morrow.”
“Wrong as usual.” His gray eyes iced over, his beautiful voice a steel blade. “You’re the only one. Second to none.”
“Hmm. Where have I heard that? Oh! I know. Right here in this cabin. The night you asked me to wed you.”
With all the hindsight of a woman scorned, I wanted to reach back through time and strangle the lovesick twat who said I do to the king of libertines. Had my mother been alive, she would’ve stopped me from making such a disgraceful mistake. Hell, my father wouldn’t have even allowed a man with Priest’s reputation anywhere near his daughter.
And there it was, the deep, sucking hole inside me, trying to drag me into its misery. I missed my parents with soul-bleeding agony. If only they were here now. I needed their counsel, their strength, their love.
“I made a promise to my father.” I blinked back the tears before they formed and raised my chin. “If I ever married—”
“You promised him I would be a man of his fortitude and spirit. A man who loves you above all else. Only you. And we shall be blinded by our love for life and beyond the ends of the sea.”
I snapped my mouth shut and stared at him in shock.
He remembered? How? It’d been so long since I’d whispered that promise into the warmth of our post-coital cuddle.
“You said those words the night Murphy finished your bed.” He directed his gaze across the cabin, studying the ornate box bed that had been built into the wall.