Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
She reached up and touched his face.
Her fingers grazed his jaw. Light. Trembling. The softest pressure he’d ever felt, and it went through him like a detonation. Her thumb grazed the edge of his mouth, and the expression she wore was half courage and half terror, and she whispered, “Is this okay?”
He didn’t think.
His hands were on her before the word no could form in his mouth. One hand at her waist, the other at the back of her neck, and he pulled her into him and kissed her. Not gently. He kissed her with the force of a year of telling himself no and three weeks of cataloging her every movement across his terrace and twenty-nine years of locked doors blowing open at once, and her mouth was warm and she tasted like the lemonade the club served at the bar, and she made a sound against his lips, a small startled gasp, and then she was kissing him back. Clumsy. Unpracticed. She didn’t know what to do with her hands, and they ended up on his chest and then his shoulders and then the back of his neck, searching, learning, pulling him closer with an urgency that was so honest it gutted him.
He backed her into the garden wall. Stone and shade and the jacaranda blossoms falling around them in purple drifts. Her spine met the wall and she gasped again, and his mouth left hers and discovered her throat. He kissed the pulse point. The skin was hot under his lips and her blood was hammering against his mouth, fast, alive, and the taste of her skin was warm and faintly salt and he wanted to stay there forever, his mouth on her pulse, feeling her heartbeat against his lips like proof that she was real.
Her head tipped back. Her fingers dragged through his hair and she pulled, and the sensation shot down his spine and settled low and hot. He opened his mouth against her neck and her whole body arched into his, a response so involuntary it almost broke him. His teeth claimed the curve where her neck met her shoulder, and she whimpered, a sound so small and shattered that his hands tightened on her waist, pulling her hips flush against his. She must have felt what that did to him, because she went still for one second, her green eyes flying wide, and then her fingers tightened in his hair and pulled him back to her mouth.
He kissed her again. Deeper this time. Her mouth opened under his, soft and uncertain and learning him, and the shy, tentative way she answered sent a bolt through his entire body. His hand slid from her waist up her side, over her ribs, and she softened under his palm and leaned into him, and her body was warm and small and fitted against his like it had been designed to wreck him, and she breathed his name against his mouth, Julian, half air, half ache, and he felt it in his teeth.
He was gone. He knew he was gone. He could feel the last of his restraint burning to ash and he didn’t care; he wanted to burn, he wanted her hands in his hair and her pulse under his mouth and the sound she made when he kissed her throat, he wanted all of it, he wanted her, and wanting was the thing that destroyed people, wanting was the thing his father had made disposable, wanting was the knife you handed someone and hoped they wouldn’t use.
He tore himself away.
The violence of the separation was physical. His body screamed at him. Every nerve ending he possessed was reaching for her, and he stood two feet away with his hands clenched at his sides and his pulse roaring and took in the girl against the wall. Her red hair tangled, her lips swollen, her green eyes huge and stunned and still reaching for him, her fingers curled in the air where his shirt had been.
“Julian?” Her voice was barely there, scraped thin.
He couldn’t face her. If he faced her, he was going to put his mouth back on her throat and not stop. He fixed his attention on the stone wall past her shoulder and waited for his pulse to come down.
“That was a mistake,” he bit out. “I let it happen because I wasn’t paying attention. It won’t happen again.”
Silence. The jacaranda blossoms drifting between them.
“You weren’t paying attention,” she repeated softly. “You kissed me like that because you weren’t paying attention?”
He forced himself to meet her eyes. Forced his face to do the thing it did in boardrooms and negotiations and every other arena where the objective was to win and the cost was someone else’s feelings.
“You’re a nineteen-year-old server at my club.” Every word, a knife designed to make her bleed. “Don’t read into things.”