Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 68735 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 344(@200wpm)___ 275(@250wpm)___ 229(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68735 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 344(@200wpm)___ 275(@250wpm)___ 229(@300wpm)
“I think if anyone has a right to be mad, it’s you,” he whispered against my forehead. “One day, we’ll look back at that time, and see it for what it was—a bump in the road. But until then, we’re going to fake it ’til we make it.”
I giggled, pulling back so I could see his face. “I love you, you know.”
He wiped away my tears with his big, rough, working-man hands.
God, he was so damn sexy.
“You ready to see my scar now?” I asked, tasting the salt of my tears on my lips.
His eyes were on fire, so damn green it hurt, when he said, “You can show me your toe bunion, and I’d be so goddamn happy.”
I gasped. “That was one time, Audric!”
He laughed, his arms tightening around me.
I waited until he was finished with his guffawing, then stood up.
His hands were reluctant to let me go, and even though I’d moved off his lap, his fingers still lingered at my thighs, ready to touch me again if I moved even an inch.
Taking a deep breath, I pushed off my high-rise panties, revealing the ugly scar there.
“Whoa,” he said as he moved so close his nose was nearly touching my pubic bone. “That’s a gnarly scar. I thought they were a lot smaller.”
“Normally, they are. But there was a complication, and I was a small kid with no birthing hips yet. And Damon was huge. Almost eleven pounds,” she breathed.
That wasn’t surprising.
My rapist was a big guy, too.
Just another reason to hate the motherfucker.
“My survivor.” He pressed a kiss to the scar.
And damned if I didn’t start crying again.
That was not how I expected this night to go.
Maybe tears of joy, but definitely not tears of sadness.
God, how I loved this man.
My fingers threaded through his hair. “You need a cut.”
“On my list,” he said. “Maybe if I don’t fly to Hawaii with you again next week, I’ll get one.”
I pouted, and he winked. “All you have to do is find me a ticket and I’m there.”
I’d find him a ticket.
I found that I liked having him there.
Plus, this next time was a weekend, and I wouldn’t be flying back until two days later, giving me plenty of time to enjoy my time in paradise with him.
That was a later conversation, though.
Now was a time for other, more pleasurable things.
With my panties now kicked off and littering the floor of his amazing bathroom, I walked back toward him, this time crawling into his lap with my legs dangling over the back ledge of the tub.
His cock felt huge against me, and I idly wondered if it was as big as I always thought it was.
The boy Audric used to be was obsessed with sweatpants, and as a young, impressionable teenager who was in love with him, I noticed everything about him.
Even his penis size.
I may not have been able to see it in all its naked glory, but there wasn’t much you could hide behind a pair of sweatpants with no underwear on.
We’d done enough random swims in the river and the lake in our time that we’d all gone braless or underwearless a time or two.
Needless to say, I knew he had a sizable appendage down there, and to my knowledge, they didn’t get much bigger past your teen years.
His hands cupped my ass as he pulled me in until there wasn’t a single inch of space between his body and mine.
“Swear to Christ, we move at your speed,” he promised me, his eyes boring into mine from so close that I could see all the striations.
“We’re moving at the speed I’m good with,” I said. “I have one small issue, though.”
His eyebrows rose. “What’s that?”
“I don’t do condoms.” I winced. “They freak me way the hell out.”
After what was done to me, that was the one thing that I remembered so vividly that I tried really hard not to think about it.
He ran his thumb along my jaw, his big hand cupping almost half of my face, as he said, “Not that I care about having babies with you but…”
“We can do everything but that,” I suggested. “I know we’re not quite ready for that, yet. With…I was on birth control. It’ll take me about a month to be safe with that aspect, because I was just able to get on it last Friday. But until then…”
Until then, he could very easily get me pregnant if we weren’t careful.
But the thought of having Audric’s child didn’t scare me.
Something inside of me had understood what I was saying to Gunner when it came to Lottie.
A piece of me would always live in fear that something would happen to another child like it did to Damon, but that wasn’t fair to me.
I couldn’t keep living half a life, hoping that nothing hurtful would ever touch me again.