Total pages in book: 32
Estimated words: 29980 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 150(@200wpm)___ 120(@250wpm)___ 100(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 29980 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 150(@200wpm)___ 120(@250wpm)___ 100(@300wpm)
Blast it all. Put like that, it sounded much worse than he’d ever intended.
As if she could see his scowl, she challenged him, “Would you want me to tell you all about the people I’ve been with?”
“Not unless you intend to say how much bigger I am, and how much harder I make you come.” When she snorted, he heaved a sigh and explained, “I was trying to tell you that you’d enjoy having me. That I would know how to please you.”
“What I heard was that you fucked them and left them.” Her shrug jolted her shoulders against his back. “Why should I think I would be any different to you?”
“Because I haven’t been with anyone since meeting you.”
She stiffened. “What?”
“It’s true.”
“Three years?”
“There could be no one else. Not now. Not ever again.”
She was silent for a long moment. “You should have told me that.”
Relief pulled a laugh from him. “I hardly ever know what I’m telling you. You make me as nervous as a pimply little boy.”
Twisting around, she threw him a quick incredulous glance—as if to see whether he was serious now.
“Truly.” His gaze fell to her lips. “I want to kiss you again.”
“Now? It would be a stupid way to die.”
“The best way to die.” He grinned, and Sarya smashed her mouth to his before settling back to watch the forest again.
Then her hand slid back to grasp his. And so Bannin ate the finest luncheon of his life, watching the trees with their fingers entwined.
“I still have no prevention powders,” she panted against his mouth.
“I’ll still make you come harder than anyone ever has,” he said.
Sarya moaned and slicked her tongue over his, yanking on his tunic—though he didn’t know if she was trying to pull it off or use it to pull him upstairs. Bannin solved both problems by dragging it over his head, then carrying her up to the bed.
The chamber was small and dark, yet he could see just enough of her skin, the gleam of wetness between her thighs when he yanked her breeches free of her feet. He kicked off his own. She reached for him with eager hands, but he pinned her wrists to the mattress and buried his face where his entire life now seemed to pulse, groaning at the slickness that met his tongue, licking until she stopped struggling against his hold and began crying his name instead.
Her entire body surged upward when she came, just as he’d promised she would. Then she fell back to the bed, laughing and liquid, and while she was still breathless he gathered up her legs and held them tight to his chest, then shoved his rigid cock into the slippery wetness between her closed thighs. Stroking his length over her cunt. Over her clit. Again and again, his hips slapping her ass until she was shaking and writhing upon the sheets, gasping, pleading.
This time she came screaming, her head thrown back and tears darkening her lashes, her cunt convulsing against his shaft and drenching his flesh in the flood of her release. And Bannin let himself go, pounding away at the brutal ache that hadn’t ceased since he’d first laid eyes upon her, and that he suspected wouldn’t end until he drew his final breath.
Yet there was some relief in this moment, in the lightning bolt that was the ecstasy of holding her, tasting her, feeling her. Of making her as helpless to this need as he was.
He grunted as it became too much, jolting down through his cock, unleashing his seed in hot lashings from her belly to her breasts. Then he collapsed over her, barely catching his weight on his arms, while she was folded beneath him with her knees near her chin, laughing and breathless again.
“You are a battering ram,” she said.
Bannin grinned and threw himself properly next to her side, his chest heaving for air and his skin slick with sweat. There he kissed her, though it could not last while they were catching their breath.
And he was a battering ram. But he would not ask again—not yet—whether she would leave with him, because there was blunt and there was badgering. He would not nag her into a decision she wasn’t ready to make.
Especially since nagging would likely only push her away.
Yet he wanted to know why she hadn’t yet made a different choice. “Why did you never rejoin the Horse Guards? Clearly you loved what you did.”
“I did,” she said, then lazily stretched and turned toward him, pillowing her cheek on his biceps. “And the simple answer is that Crase was there and it hurt too much.”
In Bannin’s opinion, Crase deserved to hurt too much, too. Preferably from a fist in his face. “What’s the complicated answer?”
Her fingers rose to his chest and she began playing with the curling hair there. “Everyone who used to fight at my side—it was as if they thought I was ten years out of practice, even though no time had passed for me. But it was more than that. The ranks were different, the relationships different…and perhaps if I had stayed, that would have all smoothed over with time. But...”