Total pages in book: 180
Estimated words: 168121 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 841(@200wpm)___ 672(@250wpm)___ 560(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 168121 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 841(@200wpm)___ 672(@250wpm)___ 560(@300wpm)
He glanced at his watch. “Three hours.” Straightening, he clasped the latch on the door, but didn’t move to leave.
“What’s wrong? You seem…worried.”
“Should I be?”
Her lips turned up. “Yes.”
He rubbed his eyelids, volleyed another glare at Jay, and closed the door.
She locked the door and turned. Their gazes caught instantly. The physical connection was severed, but the magnetism between them pulsed, beckoning. She swayed closer. Their little vacuum crackled and heated.
Stretching to wrap her arms around his neck, she froze mid-reach. “If I touch you again, will it be like starting over?”
He took her hands in his and lowered onto the bench, guiding her knees to straddle him. “Let’s find out.” He jutted his chin out, the cords stretching in his neck as he stared at her, waiting.
“You put a lot of faith in me.” Her fingers hovered over his throat.
“If you stay close to me, Charlee, my faith will stay close, too.”
Everything inside her melted as she molded her body around his and touched a fingertip to the hollow at the base of his neck. His eyes didn’t shift from hers, his muscles didn’t tense, and a smile lifted one side of his mouth.
Oh, thank God. Kissing his chin, the corners of his mouth, and lingering on his lips, she wedged her hand between their chests, smoothing her palm over his breastbone and absorbing his warmth. “Good?”
“Now I am.”
She went back to his mouth for a deeper kiss. He laughed against her lips and pulled back until his head bumped the wall behind him. “We need to talk.”
Ugh. “Okay.”
With an arm around her back, he laced their free hands together on the seat beside them. Moments passed as he watched his thumb bump over her knuckles, his eyes unfocused. Then he looked at her. “Please don’t be offended by anything I say or ask. I’m making no judgments. I just want the full picture so I can try to help, okay?”
She nodded, hoping he was ready to hear the answers.
49
Charlee choked on the foreboding atmosphere, waiting for Jay to begin his questioning.
“I’m surprised and relieved that you’re willing to be intimate with me after…what you survived.”
She tensed against him. Where anyone else might’ve feared to step, he went rushing in.
He watched her closely, caution gripping his voice. “Your sessions, your openness, whatever it is you’re doing, it works. I should take lessons from you.”
The sudden image of him dominating her in a dungeon sent bolts of excitement through her body. “You shouldn’t be surprised. I don’t know what you survived, but I recognized the pain eating at you the night we met. I suspect your abuser wasn’t so different from mine. Yet, here you are, willing to be intimate.”
Without so much as a nonverbal acknowledgement, he held her through a comfortable silence. Eventually, he stirred, kissing her bottom lip. “I know it’s unfair to ask you to answer my questions and not answer yours. For now, let’s stay focused on you, on what happened between us, okay?”
She nodded. “For now.”
“I’m trying to wrap my head around your sessions. It would make more sense if you were the one with the whip. A submissive position seems like the last thing you’d want.”
His gaze turned introspective and she kept quiet to see what he’d come up with.
“I think you need the pain,” he murmured.
Her throat tightened. Of course, he was right, but hearing it voiced made her want to shove him. “No. That’s not—”
“No? Charlee, the harder I pounded you, the wetter you got.” His timbre remained soft despite the punch of his words.
“The pain helps me focus. It’s just…”
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of. And as soon as we both grasp what it means, and accept it, we can figure out how to make it work. Help me understand. Tell me why you aren’t doing the dominating to take back what Roy took from you?”
“I don’t know. It’s not like I have a handbook telling me what to do. I just go with what feels right for me. And it may seem like I’m yielding, but I’m not. I can stop it when I want. If I topped you—”
His eyes narrowed.
“You would have the control. You could say stop, and I would have to concede.”
“Did this kind of thing appeal to you before you met Roy?”
“I wouldn’t know. I was sixteen when he got me the first time.”
His body turned to stone beneath her and his hands balled into fists.
“No punching the bathroom wall.” She tapped his tense lips until they slacked.
“How did he get you?”
“Craig had a gambling addiction. Owed a lot of money to a lot of people. Most of his debt was owed to Roy Oxford.”
“And you didn’t have a mom.”
“Nope.”
He closed his eyes and opened them just as slowly. “You and I have lived equally lonely lives. I wish we would’ve had each other growing up.”