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)
He couldn’t get close enough.
His tongue swept across her lower lip, demanding entry, and when she let him in, a sound tore from his throat. Animal. Starving. The pained groan of a man who’d denied himself a lifetime of sustenance, finally granted a feast.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Conquer
His mouth crushed hers with bruising intensity, teeth catching her lower lip, tongue invading without permission. One hand fisted in her hair, angling her head where he wanted it. The other pressed flat against the mattress beside her skull, caging her beneath the weight of his body.
Daisy’s heart slammed against her ribs. He didn’t kiss like a lover. He kissed like a conqueror.
This was nothing like the kisses she’d read about, nothing like the fumbling encounters when she was a teen. This was consumption. Devastation. A man trying to climb inside her skin and claim every inch of her.
His hips ground against hers, the rough fabric of his trousers abrading her bare thighs. The hard length of his erection pressed into her belly through layers of wool and cotton, hot even through the barrier. She gasped at the contact and he swallowed the sound, his tongue sweeping deeper, stroking hers with a rhythm that promised darker things.
Too fast. Too much.
She turned her head, breaking the seal of their mouths, and his lips immediately found her throat, his teeth scraping the tender skin below her jaw, his breath escaping in ragged gusts against her pulse.
“Jack, wait.” The strangled plea was barely audible, but he stilled.
For three heartbeats, neither of them moved.
His chest heaved against her bare breasts, the fine cotton of his shirt rasping her sensitive nipples. His hand remained tangled in her hair, fingers trembling against her scalp.
Then he released her.
The loss landed like a physical blow, cold air rushing into the space where his warmth had been. He shoved off the bed, body rigid, face a mask of controlled anguish, jaw clenched so tight muscles jumped beneath his skin.
“I’m sorry,” he choked, looking away. “I didn’t mean to…” He raked a hand through his hair and paced, chest heaving, hands balled into fists at his sides. The collar of his dress shirt was open and askew.
A man undone.
His eyes held the wild, hunted look of an animal caught between fight and flight. As if he expected her to scream. To run. To look at him the way people must have looked at him before, when the monster beneath the mask slipped free. But she’d witnessed enough of his tenderness now to somehow counter the aggressive sides he so adamantly tried to hide.
She sat up slowly, acutely aware of her nakedness and the ridiculous black socks pooling at her ankles. The fire crackled in the hearth, painting her scratches in unforgiving light, then graceful shadows.
She should cover herself. Reach for a pillow, a blanket, anything to shield her body’s response to him. She still felt him in the heat of her cheeks and the swollen tingle of her lips.
“Jack?” His name fell softly between them. A question and an offering, but he flinched as if she’d struck him, further proving something was wrong.
He struggled for composure, fists clenching and unclenching at his sides. He silently muttered, as if berating himself.
“Jack, look at me.”
When he shook his head, a look of pained dismay twisting his otherwise beautiful face, understanding bloomed slow and terrible in her chest.
He was alone up here. Not down with the other hunters, prowling the grounds, taking their fill of willing flesh. He’d been watching from a distance all night. Observing. Judging. But never participating.
Why?
There was something wounded beneath his aggression. Something longing that he seemed only able to express through violence, as if tenderness were a language he’d never been taught.
Several times tonight, she caught him straining toward softness, only to retreat the moment he got too close.
“Jack,” she said again, softer this time, not knowing the full question pressing in her mind.
His breath caught. His grey eyes, storm-dark and fathomless, locked with hers across the firelit distance.
“I’m trying to understand what you want.”
“I don’t—” He stopped. Swallowed. Looked at her like a lost boy trapped in a man’s body. “I wish…I knew.”
“Try. Maybe if you talk to me…”
He stilled, every line of his body rigid with tension. Silence stretched between them, filled only by the pop and hiss of burning logs.
“I…” His voice emerged so quiet she had to strain to hear. “What if I want to touch you?”
The question hung in the air like smoke. Not a demand. Not a command. A query—almost a plea—from a man who clearly wasn’t accustomed to asking for anything.
Daisy’s heart clenched.
She thought of the scars she’d glimpsed in the bathroom mirror. The topography of destruction mapped across his back, raised ridges and silver furrows that would have taken years to amass. She thought of the way he’d flinched when she touched him, the haunted shadows that lived behind his eyes.