Total pages in book: 101
Estimated words: 98767 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 494(@200wpm)___ 395(@250wpm)___ 329(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 98767 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 494(@200wpm)___ 395(@250wpm)___ 329(@300wpm)
I backed up, moving toward the boardroom table. “Did I do something wrong?”
“Yes.”
“I did?” My breathing accelerated as he advanced, pushing me backward with his will power alone. “What?”
He didn’t talk, but his body did. His shoulders screamed at self-control. His jaw clenched in self-denial. His nostrils flared in tension. His steps heavy with deliberation. He was a walking poster for alpha authority, and it did the strangest things to my insides.
I still wanted to bow at his feet—even stronger now we were alone than in company—but for the first time, it wasn’t just fear compounding me to slip into submission but desire.
I wanted to please him.
I wanted him to know I looked up to him, respected him, and would do everything I could to fit into his world because I never wanted to leave.
That thought froze me.
Where had my goals to return home, find my mother, tell my story to the police gone? I shouldn’t be here of my own free will. I should be doing all I could to call for help.
But as Elder stalked me deeper into the room, and my butt crashed against the table, I couldn’t remember why. Why would I want to leave when he scared but protected me? Why would I want to run from his cruel honesty and go back to a home I no longer fit into, to a mother who didn’t want me, and fight to survive in a world that no longer understood me?
Elder was my doctor, shrink, and coach all in one. He was training me to live again just by being himself. How could I give that up when I so desperately wanted to be the woman he expected me to be?
“I’m sorry,” I breathed. “For whatever I did wrong.” My fingers latched around the table behind me, the ledge digging into the back of my thighs.
“You’re not. But you will be.” His face etched with dangerous desires. “I don’t ask much of you, Pim. In fact, I give too much of myself in return for nothing from you. But then you fucking shy away from me. You look at me with worry after everything I told you last night. That is not acceptable.”
“I told you, habits are hard to break.”
And I told you, I wouldn’t break mine.” Having me pinned didn’t stop his advance. “Yet here I am. About to fucking break them.”
My chest rose and fell as he erased the final distance, placing his hands on either side of me on the table. His flat palms made his long fingers splay out, showing silver scars and graphite scribbles from previous battles won, along with the newer abrasions from this morning.
How much violence had he seen? How much love had he lost? Questions swarmed my mind like locusts desperate to be fed.
Dark eyelashes hooded dark pupils as his gaze dropped to my lips.
I licked them, breathy and paused, ready but not ready all at the same time.
“Do you want me to kiss you?”
My tummy leapt.
I nodded slowly.
“Answer me other than with silence, Pim.” His eyes tightened. “Speak because you have no fucking clue what that does to me. But take that away—after I’ve had the gift of your voice—and I won’t be accountable for what I’ll do.”
I gasped as his hand left the table and looped around my neck.
Old memories of ropes and strangulation made me stiffen and tears prick. My throat was still hardwired to a past that I slowly cracked the chrysalis off and spread newly minted wings. Those wings were wet and useless, though, still drying in the sun and not quite ready to fly.
His thumb pressed over my pulse, his jaw clenched and lips pressed. “You still doubt me. Your heart is racing like a rabbit.”
I swallowed, feeling the pressure of his fingers as I forced myself to remember this was Elder not Alrik. This was chemistry, not slavery.
“I don’t doubt you.”
His mouth parted to inhale. “Yet you fear me.”
I couldn’t lie, not while my blood gushed beneath his touch. My veins and arteries were a perfect lie detector, and he was the sonographer programed to read them.
“I do.” My voice tangled with breath. “But there’s more than just that.”
“There is?” His tone drifted into coaxing sex. I didn’t think he’d done it by choice but merely slipped into the heavy fog rapidly deleting the outside world and amplifying him and me and whatever it was that grew between us.
The unsaid things. The secrets. The bargains. The dangerous need growing quickly past controllable. We were on opposite ends of the scales. He couldn’t let himself go because he would go past sanity. And I couldn’t let myself go because I honestly didn’t know how to be a woman who wanted a man’s touch and not want to scream and die at the same time.