Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 97875 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 489(@200wpm)___ 392(@250wpm)___ 326(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 97875 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 489(@200wpm)___ 392(@250wpm)___ 326(@300wpm)
“Well.” His jaw popped. “You’ve got me all figured out, don’t you?”
“I’m not . . .” She wet lips that were rapidly drying out. “The last thing I want to do is hurt your feelings, especially after y-you showed up here in a Boston University T-shirt and you . . .” Her voice fell to a whisper out of necessity. Talking was suddenly difficult. “I’ll never forget you did that. I mean, ever. You’re actually my hero right now.”
His eyelids slid closed. “Skylar.”
“The possibility I’m hurting you is giving me the worst stomachache. I guess I’m just worried you’ll change your mind after some time passes.”
His nostrils flared. “I won’t.”
“I never wanted to change you.”
“I’m changing me.”
“Robbie . . .”
“Okay.” Resigned, he nodded. Planted both hands on his hips and regrouped. “Okay, I hear what you’re saying. You need time to believe I’m for real. That’s fair, even though I hate it.” He’d never looked this serious. Not since she’d met him. “Just tell me you have feelings for me. Tell me I’m not crazy.”
Oh God. This was like leaping over a ravine full of crocodiles. Admitting she had feelings for him would only encourage him to pursue this relationship—one that would absolutely lead to her getting hurt when he eventually decided to go back to his wild bachelor ways. Hurt was putting it mildly, too. He’d cut her off at the knees, wouldn’t he? Yes. Because she had been developing feelings for him. Sneaky ones. They’d been nipping at her heels since day one. Now they were fully grown, biting her everywhere. Stealing chunks of her preconceived notions about Robbie. Chunks of what might have been her resistance.
“I have feelings for you,” she whispered.
He remained still as a statue for long moments, before the breath came whooshing out of him, his big body falling forward, hands planting on his knees. “Holy shit. I was only giving myself ten to one odds.” It took him some time to straighten and slow his breathing down and all Skylar could do was watch in fascination. This reaction . . . it was all for her? “What about him?” Robbie’s voice had dropped way down in pitch, his eyelids hooded as he observed Skylar closely, seeming to hold his breath again. “You still got feelings for him?”
“I don’t know,” she said, truthfully. And hey, “I don’t know” was a huge downgrade from a couple of weeks ago when she would have willingly thrown herself in front of a train for Madden. She’d just never expected the train to have unruly red hair and an appetite that rivaled the passengers of a medium-sized cruise ship.
The fact that her feelings had been massively—and troublingly—downgraded didn’t seem to satisfy Robbie in the slightest, however. In fact, his jealous expression as he backed her up against the kitchen counter made her shiver, her neck losing any semblance of strength, head falling back when he spoke against her ear. “Give me ten minutes in the dark with your panties off and you’ll know. I’ll get you over him underneath me.”
Several brain cells fried themselves like eggs on a skillet.
“It’s, um . . .” She twisted her hands in the sides of his shirt, struggling to form coherent thoughts when he was raking his open mouth up and back in the slope of her neck. Feels so good. “It’s Wednesday. Main Event parenthesis Maybe isn’t until tomorrow.”
“Believe me, I know.”
“Today is BJ Workshop day.”
He hooked an arm under her knee and drew it up to his hip, higher, higher, only allowing her center to graze his erection, light encounters until she gasped, trying to get closer. To rub on him. “Oh, believe me, I know that, too.” He made an almost humorously desperate sound into her neck. “God in heaven, please just get me alone with this girl.”
The lines were quickly blurring here.
What had started off as lessons to help her be more confident with men was turning into . . . something else. A guideline for giving pleasure to each other. But where would all this leave her when Robbie inevitably came to his senses?
“Can we just keep them . . . lessons for now? Can they stay what they always were?”
His mouth paused on her neck and this time, she visibly injured something inside of him, which was not her intention. She simply didn’t know how else to protect herself. Keep this gorgeous sought-after hockey god interested indefinitely when she’d never been able to retain interest from men in the past? In what world?
Protect yourself. That’s all you’re doing.
“Yeah. Lessons,” Robbie said, voice like gravel, reluctantly disengaging from her as the air horn went off outside. “Whatever you need to tell yourself until you’re ready to think of me as more than a player.”
Skylar wanted badly to correct him. Tell him that’s not how she thought of him.