Total pages in book: 164
Estimated words: 156728 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 784(@200wpm)___ 627(@250wpm)___ 522(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 156728 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 784(@200wpm)___ 627(@250wpm)___ 522(@300wpm)
But she wasn’t taking. She was just... there.
Three heartbeats. Four.
His chest tightened.
Pressure built behind his sternum, vast and terrifying, rising like floodwater against a dam. He wanted to pull away. But also wanted to never stop. Never change.
A sound escaped him, wounded and involuntary, dragged from something hidden deeper than his lungs.
She pulled her hand away.
The absence of her touch hit harder than the contact. His knuckles chilled. Exposed. Ugly.
He shot off the bed. “I’ll get you a clean shirt.” The words came out strangled.
The dressing room swallowed him like a held breath.
Cedar and wool met the faint ghost of cologne. He tried to remember how to breathe.
What are you doing?
His hands shook, flicking away the sensation of her touch. But it clung to him. He stretched his fingers, splaying them wide, then squeezed his hands into popping fists.
He couldn’t keep steady. This was more than tremors. His fingers vibrating with tension, his body couldn’t contain. His whole frame buzzed like a struck bell, every nerve still singing from the phantom pressure of her touch.
He pressed his palms flat against the gilded mirror fastened to the wall. Felt the cool glass against his overheated skin. Tried to anchor himself to something solid, something real, something that wasn’t her.
He fumbled for his phone and checked the time. 3:47 AM. Soon, the sky would shift from black to sapphire, then purple to gold. Three hours, maybe less, until the final bells rung.
Three hours until she walked out of his life.
Three hours until the charter plane carried her back to London.
Three hours until she became a memory, a ghost, a woman he’d touched but never truly…
Never truly what?
He stared at his reflection in the darkened mirror. The glass threw back shadows more than features, but he knew what hid beneath his clothes. Raised ridges. Silver tissue puckered like braille. Marked. Ruined. Branded like someone’s property. Chattel. A boy sold for beans.
No one had ever looked at his scars without flinching. He couldn’t bear the thought of her pity or disgust. Even the doctors—the expensive private practitioners who took his money and asked no questions—eventually averted their eyes.
But she had looked.
In the bathroom. In the mirror. Her gaze had traced the ruins of his back, and she hadn’t flinched. She saw him. Read him like a story she couldn’t quite translate.
Never before had he wanted someone to figure him out. To find his secrets, feel his pain, and know.
But why her? What made her so different? So unique?
There was an unspoiled innocence to her. A goodness that hadn’t yet hardened. A virgin. And that was how she was going to leave.
As he stared at the rows of finely tailored options before him, he thought back to her essay.
It would be a luxury if, for just one day, I could breathe air that doesn’t smell of hunger.
He knew that air. Had choked on it for years. The stench still coated his core memories. Some days, he could still taste it.
It was a lingering flavor of rot that contoured him into the man he was today. And it spoke to him on a deep level that she might be sewn from the same tattered thread.
He snatched a clean dress shirt from the rack and paused, looking back at his blood-spattered collar. No part of Hadrian Welles belonged here.
He changed quickly, forgoing the jacket and waistcoat. He stowed his gun in the safe, grabbed another shirt for her, and left the dressing room, rounding the corner of the alcove and—
Every resolution crumbled to dust.
Perched on the edge of the bed now, legs dangling over the side, his ridiculous black socks bunching below her knees, she sat with ruined shirt open—buttons undone, fabric parted—exposing the pale valley of skin between her breasts.
His gaze slid down her throat, where a purple bruise started to form. His stare caressed the gentle slope of her breasts, the concave indent of her waist, falling softly into that golden nest of curls.
She wasn’t looking at him. But she knew he was there. Knew he saw her.
The shirt slid off her arms, falling down her back to the bed.
Jack swallowed, unable to move, forgetting how to breathe.
The clean shirt slipped from his fingers.
Blood in his ears in a deafening roar. His pulse thundered as his breath left his soul.
Tangles of wild blonde framed her face in a halo of chaos and survival. Firelight painted her skin in amber and gold. Freckles scattered across her shoulders like cinnamon sprinkled on cream.
Violence mapped across her beauty, trespassing in ways that filled him with such rage he wanted to punish whoever dared to mar her. This was his doing. His crime. Bruises marbled her ivory skin in faint watercolor stains. Scratches slashed her collarbone, her shoulders, and face in thin lines of red.
She was a work of art. Small, perfect breasts, pale as cream, tipped with nipples pink as dawn. A calm breeze traveled from the window, and her delicate flesh tightened in the cool air.