Total pages in book: 87
Estimated words: 82480 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 412(@200wpm)___ 330(@250wpm)___ 275(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 82480 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 412(@200wpm)___ 330(@250wpm)___ 275(@300wpm)
But there was no one else in her ear now.
It was just her and this man who was looking at her like he’d found something that surprised him as well.
“I want to kiss you,” she whispered.
“Yes,” he purred.
Darius’s broad hand brushed her cheek and then lingered at her chin. And then he didn’t have to draw her forward. She moved to him on her own, leaning into him, tilting her head.
The first contact was gentle, and his lips felt foreign in a shocking and tantalizing way, everything so soft and velvety. And in spite of his size, which seemed to quadruple before her very eyes, she wasn’t threatened at all. On the contrary, she wanted to keep going from this electric starting place. She wanted him on top of her, his weight pressing her down into the mattress, her legs split around his hips, their bodies no longer clothed…
Darius inched back. “Is this okay? I don’t want to push you.”
Exploring his lower lip with her fingertips, she smiled. “If I’m honest, I’ve wanted to kiss you from the second I met you.”
“Even in the back of that car, on the way to the hospital?”
“Okay, maybe the next night in my kitchen, how about that.”
His hooded eyes flashed under those thick lashes. “Works for me.”
When he eased forward once more, she met him halfway again, and their mouths re-fused. The plying sensation, the heat, the live-wire charge of the kissing disappeared the whole world, and she wanted the amnesia. She was starved for this removal from everything, from Bruce, from Thurston and his check, from Charlie in the back hallway, from Miss Martle and the beautiful receptionist with the coffee offer. She wanted no more of the bruises and aches that were dogging her, no more of the sense that she was working five days a week and paying her mortgage and not really getting ahead.
Her life had been a lonely dead end, and then everything had gotten scrambled in a bad way.
But kissing Darius felt like something truly good was happening in her life—and the hope and excitement were what had been absent from everything, including from the beginning with Bruce.
As they continued to learn each other’s mouths, Darius’s hand snuck around the nape of her neck, and things deepened, his tongue licking into her. God, what was that cologne he was wearing? It was the best thing she had ever smelled—
With a sharp jerk, he moved back and looked to the door. Which seemed to have magically shut itself.
“Fritz will be bringing down dinner soon,” he said in a raspy voice.
“Oh, sorry—”
Without missing a beat, he took her lips like they were running out of time, and then he pulled her onto his chest, demanding something she was impatient to give him. The exploration over. Now it was bonfire time, the sexual burn engulfing them.
And suddenly, it wasn’t just that the world went away.
The whole galaxy disappeared.
Wanting even more, Anne stretched out and urged him onto her, his upper body rolling in on command, a hint of the heft of him making her breath get tight—or maybe that was the raw need clawing into her core. The fit of him against her, his pecs pressing into her breasts, his shoulders so broad, his mouth insistent… it all felt inevitable, as if everything from the moment of impact in that street to this incendiary instant right now was on a single string of destiny, drawing them together.
Entwining them.
When he moved back now, it was slowly, with regret. “I could do this all night.”
“Me, too.”
His eyes were the most vivid blue she’d ever seen, and they got even more intense as he stroked her hair back with a delicate touch. That huge, powerful body of his was coiled with anticipation, but he held himself in check, chaining all that she could sense inside him.
She wanted him unleashed.
“Listen,” he said quietly. “I know that you’re just coming out of something that was at best complicated, at worst downright abusive. Me? I haven’t had a serious relationship in… well, longer than I can remember. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I am really attracted to you, and I hope you’ll give me a shot when you’re ready to think like that again. Even if I’m just a rebound, I’ll take it.”
As she could only stare up at him, because she couldn’t believe the good fortune of it all, he flushed and laughed awkwardly. “Too much? Too soon?”
She shook her head. “No. Not at all.”
“Are you sure?”
“I was already wondering how to ask for a second date without coming across as desperate.”
His chuckle rumbled in his chest. “Well, frankly, I’m impressed I waited this long—I was tempted to drop that speech over the soup in your kitchen last night.”
Anne had a quick memory of him in the ER, sitting in the little chair next to her folded clothes and her one shoe, the shuffling hustle-and-bustle on the far side of the draping a dire kind of backdrop to what had felt, even then, like a movie with an epic romance. And then she remembered him standing outside her kitchen, on her little porch, her missing loafer in his hand, his face shadowed, yet full of what she now recognized as something she herself was feeling… namely the fragile hope that this was the beginning of something special.