Total pages in book: 150
Estimated words: 142818 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 714(@200wpm)___ 571(@250wpm)___ 476(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 142818 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 714(@200wpm)___ 571(@250wpm)___ 476(@300wpm)
Oh, and my kind of boyfriend I’d brought home.
And I didn’t feel guilty. Not even a little. It … excited me.
I marveled at Elden as he walked back into the room, buttoning his jeans. His muscles, his beard, his gait. The way he held himself. This man had just fucked me. Fucked. If you look up the definition of that word in the dictionary, there would be a picture of Elden.
His eyes brushed over me with a look that made me feel like a woman. Not just a woman, but one with power.
There was no going back now. No question as to whether he considered me too young. He’d made it clear he considered me a woman.
His woman.
And though I’d promised myself I would never be defined by what I was to another man, it felt fantastic.
Elden didn’t speak for a while. Nor did I. We just stared at each other.
“You’re gonna go back in there.” He motioned to the door. “Without your panties, with your pussy drippin’, claimed by me. You’re gonna sit next to that fuck. You’re gonna make sure he doesn’t lay a hand of that skin I just made mine.”
He put his hand between my legs, cupping the bare, sensitive skin there.
I shivered, already hungry for more, already ready to abandon all reason and beg him to fuck me again.
But his hand skimmed upward, finding my skirt which was still bunched at my hips, then he pulled it down carefully. Gently. In direct dichotomy with how beautifully brutal he’d just been.
“Don’t care how you do it,” he continued softly. “Just do it. Because you were wrong… I will punish him if he thinks he can touch you. I won’t make a scene, ’cause I am too controlled for that. But I’ll follow him all the way back to his parent’s fuckin’ mansion. I’ll make him hurt in a way that he won’t heal right. No one will know it was me. Except you. You’ll be walking around knowing I did that for you.”
There was nothing I could say to that. Not one single thing. I could barely breathe.
He would do it. Elden would hurt an innocent boy for merely touching what he didn’t know wasn’t his to touch.
“Go now,” Elden ordered gently.
But my feet stayed rooted in the spot. I had to know something. Something that had kept me up many nights. Something that I shouldn’t want to know.
“Did you sleep with her?” I asked.
Elden stiffened. He didn’t ask me who I meant. He knew who I meant.
He wouldn’t lie to spare my feelings. I knew that.
So I should not have asked.
Ignorance was bliss and all that.
Except I’d spent my entire life ignorant as to what was going on in my own house. There was no way I was going to spend the rest of my life like that. I wanted the truth, even if it hurt. Even if it was ugly.
Ugly truth was better than polished lies.
“No,” he said finally. “I was plannin’ on it. But couldn’t stand the thought of some other bitch chasin’ away the taste of you. Memory of you.”
Okay, that was not a polished lie. But somehow it hurt too.
“Go,” Elden said, nodding to the door.
I did as he asked.
Chapter Twelve
Somehow, nobody noticed me walk back into the common room on unsteady legs with mussed hair and red cheeks. Nobody noticed that I’d transformed into an entirely different person than I had been when I walked in.
Bennett was all the way in the corner. Macy and Freya had obviously taken pity on him and were laughing with glasses of wine in their hands, keeping him entertained and comfortable. They were the safest people for him to speak to. They wouldn’t challenge him to a fistfight, bomb making competition or whatever it was that the Sons of Templar did to outsiders to make them prove their worth.
I needed to find a way to pull myself together before I spoke to him or encountered my mother, who thankfully, was sitting on a sofa with Swiss who was whispering something into her ear that made her blush.
I had time.
I also had to figure out what the fuck I was going to say to Bennett to make him leave, not touch me and not humiliate or hurt him all at the same time. I was pretty sure there was no way to do all of that. Many women had tried all kinds of polite, kind, considerate ways to break up with men, yet there were still a lot of angry, dangerous men out there, blaming their ‘crazy’ exes for all of their problems.
Bennett didn’t seem like the type of guy to go crazy, but they never did. My father was much beloved around town and likely to be thought of last on a list of men who might secretly beat their wives.