Total pages in book: 123
Estimated words: 116597 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 583(@200wpm)___ 466(@250wpm)___ 389(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 116597 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 583(@200wpm)___ 466(@250wpm)___ 389(@300wpm)
He waited.
The fucking gentleman that he was, he made sure. He wasn’t going to let me get by without using my words.
I hated him for it almost as much as I…
“You’re wrong,” I finally croaked, still shaking my head even as I clawed at him and wordlessly begged for more. “I do want to hear it. And I do feel the same.”
The words broke out of me like water from a shattered vase, and Carter’s face lit up with disbelief at their existence. But it was only a moment, a pause in the turning of our planet before his hands were on me again, more insistent this time, his kisses heated with pure need.
It was all in flashes after that.
His hand at his buckle, unfastening, unzipping.
My dress hiked up, thong yanked to the side.
A rock and a gasp, a moan that vibrated through the very foundation of who I was and brought all my walls down in a thundering crash.
Carter sank inside me like an anchor, flexing hard and wrapping his hands around my shoulders to pull me down farther, as if there was an unreachable depth he was determined to find.
I didn’t know when it happened. I didn’t know if it was in the searing moments of teaching him, in the honest moments of him opening himself to me and me feeling safe to do the same, or in the inconsequential moments, the ones where we were floating on a board side by side or laughing at a bar or sneaking glances across a room crowded with our friends — but I had fallen for him.
It scared me more than anything, and yet I didn’t have the will to fight the truth.
I could have pushed him away. I could have invoked the contract and reminded him what he signed up for, what he agreed to. I could have reinforced my walls and crawled back into my lonely hole of safety.
But I didn’t want to.
Claiming me against that wall, Carter was no longer my student, no longer timid or unsure. He seared me with every thrust, marked me with every kiss, scarred me with every shuttered moan of my name.
And he was right. I did know the safe words.
But I didn’t reach for them.
Instead, I leaned over the edge and into the free fall, into him and everything he was promising.
My past screamed the whole way down, begging me to reconsider.
But it was too late.
I was his.
I only hoped it was warm, welcoming water at the end of that dive and not cold, hard concrete.
Spinning Out
Carter
It wasn’t lost on me that the bike fan wasn’t the only thing spinning out.
Like a cannon blast from a barrel, the season had shot back into action just two days after Will and Chloe’s party. The 4 Nations Face-Off was complete, the season resumed, and like a break hadn’t even happened at all, we were back in the race for the playoffs.
It was easy for the week to fly by, a blur of practice, travel, and games. What wasn’t easy was keeping my mind on hockey when all I wanted was to get wrapped up in Livia Young.
She’d come home with me the night of the party, neither of us satiated by the quick, frenzied claiming of one another against the side of Will’s house. I’d kept her up until well into the morning hours, and it still hadn’t been enough. And when she was leaving the next day, her lips swollen from me and eyes a happy kind of tired, I hadn’t wanted to let her go. I’d kept pulling her back into me for another kiss, like everything we’d whispered to each other would disappear the moment she walked out the door, the spell broken.
And it was beginning to feel that way.
Here we were a week later, and I hadn’t seen her since that night.
It made sense. I’d jetted off to St. Louis and then to Jacksonville with the team, and as soon as we’d returned to Tampa, it was with just enough time to prepare for tonight’s game — which we’d lost. It was brutal, to be within reach of the playoffs, but also teetering on the edge of not making it. Every loss felt dire, every win like just a Band-Aid trying to hold together a wound that clearly needed stitches.
And I knew I wasn’t the only one busy.
Livia had been struggling to keep her head above water even before the party. It was the sole reason I’d taken her out to the springs, to clear her mind and give her a little rest. Even on our lazy day off together, she’d had to field calls from the office, as if they couldn’t function without her for even twenty-four hours.
Now, here I was on a bike in the team gym trying to flush out my legs after a grueling three periods, but it was my head doing all the sweating.