Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 100090 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 334(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100090 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 334(@300wpm)
“Have you always been interested in the stars?” I ask him and then feel my eyes go wide. “Oh, shit, are you going to be one of those billionaires who builds a rocket ship to go into space? Don’t be that guy, Ryan.”
He laughs and shakes his head. “No. I’m not going to do that. If I want to go to space, I can pay to do it. I didn’t always find it interesting. I was in Hawaii a few years ago at the largest and highest observatory in the world, and it just fascinated me. So, like I always do when something sparks my interest, I dove into the science and read up on it as much as I could. There’s so much I’ll never know because I just don’t have the time to learn, but this telescope is great because it has an app that allows me to plug in what I want to see, and it adjusts itself to show it to me. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of it.”
“That’s cool.” I sip my wine and admire the telescope. “Can you see Saturn?”
“I can see past Saturn,” he says. “I’ll show you when it gets a little darker up here.”
“How often do you take quiet days like this?” I sip my wine, lounging back in the soft pillows, watching him. “No work, no calls, just a little fun on a horse and looking at the stars?”
“I don’t know if I ever have. But I like it. I should do it more often. Arthur would have a heart attack.”
I laugh with him and slip my feet out of my sneakers so I can tuck them under me. “What did he do today?”
“He mentioned spending it with his husband.”
“Good for him. I hope he had as good of a day as we did.”
Ryan reaches for my hand. He never goes long without touching me. “I do, too.”
He pulls me into his lap and smiles softly down at me, pushing my hair off my cheek. He takes my glass from my hand to set it aside, frames my face, and pulls me in for a sweet kiss.
“You’re good at the kissing,” I murmur against his lips. “Like, really good at it.”
“It takes two,” he reminds me as his hand roams over my T-shirt, down my side, and under the hem to touch me, skin-on-skin. I feel the goose bumps and he must, too, because his eyes flare as he stares down at me. “You’re fucking incredible.”
“Aw, shucks.”
That makes his lips twitch with humor, and he points up to the sky. “Do you see that bright star?”
I look up, settling against him. “Sure.”
“It’s not actually a star. It’s Venus. It doesn’t wink like the other stars do, and it’s brighter.”
“Okay, show me in the telescope.”
I hop off of his lap, and, to my surprise, Ryan pulls glasses out of a little cubby where the iPad lives and slips them onto his face. Black-rimmed, they make him look even sexier than before, and I would have said that isn’t possible.
He taps the screen of the iPad, and the telescope begins to move.
“Have a look,” he says, gesturing toward the amazing machine.
I lean in and peek through the viewfinder and feel my breath catch. It’s yellowish, with brown stripes, and it glows.
“It’s hard to see Venus when it’s super dark,” Ryan explains. “Because it’s so close to us, and the sun is shining on it. So, during twilight, like right now, is the best time to look. Okay, back up.”
I do, and he taps the pad again, then nods for me to look once more.
“What is this?”
“Jupiter.” He’s quiet as I take it in. “It’s massive and beautiful. It would take just over a year to fly there.”
“That’s a long road trip,” I mutter and pull back to look up with my naked eye. “Can we see the Milky Way in this thing?”
“You can see the Milky Way without anything at all in about an hour,” he replies with a grin. “The show is just starting.”
“I didn’t even bring any popcorn.”
“If you want snacks, we can go get some and hunker down for a while. I can show you some amazing things.”
“Will you show me while naked?”
He pauses. Blinks. And I laugh.
“I’m kidding, although that would be fun. Maybe sometime when Jake’s not here.”
The next thing I know, my back is pressed to the side of the house, my legs are wrapped around Ryan’s waist, and his lips are on mine, hard and demanding.
“We’re going to see how quiet you can be,” he says against my ear.
“I’m not making any promises.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
RYAN
I’ve been trying to take things at a slower pace. It pissed me off that Polly thought that all I wanted from her was sex. She’s worth more than that.