Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 102731 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 514(@200wpm)___ 411(@250wpm)___ 342(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 102731 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 514(@200wpm)___ 411(@250wpm)___ 342(@300wpm)
Spotting the twinge of worry in his eyes, I laughed. “But we need to get me home, I know.”
The truth was, I didn’t blame Lewis for being a little nervous. My stepdad, whom I thought of as my dad dad, was a former Royal Marine and built like a brick shithouse. He probably knew how to kill a man and get away with it. Lewis might be a newly minted black belt in tae kwon do (as was I), but there were very few people who could go up against Walker Ironside and win.
With one last kiss, I rolled out of Lewis’s arms and got up to get dressed. In the end, we helped each other dress, copping a feel here and there, kissing and laughing, and taking twice as long to do it.
Eventually, we snuck out of the annex and got onto our bikes. Lewis never let me cycle home alone, even though it was only a six-or seven-minute bike ride. It was the height of summer, so it wasn’t fully dark. This far north, between May and August, there was no true nighttime. And between the end of May and the end of July, there was no astronomical twilight. Tonight, the sky was the dusky dark blue of nautical twilight.
We’d switched on our bike headlamps, anyway, in case we passed a vehicle, which we did. But soon we were cycling into the quiet street that housed my parents’ bungalow. Slowing a few houses down, I hopped off and curled my fingers into Lewis’s shirt to bring him down for a kiss. He was six foot three and still growing. My boyfriend bent his head and kissed me voraciously. Skin flushed hot, I reluctantly broke the contact.
I couldn’t wait to have sex with him again, and I could see the same thought in his eyes.
“Mum and Dad are going to Inverness tomorrow to buy a new car, and your mum is taking Harry and Morwenna to the petting zoo,” I whispered, referring to our respective younger siblings. “We’ll have the house to ourselves.”
“What time?” Lewis asked gruffly.
“I’ll text you when they’re getting ready to leave.”
He nodded and bent down for another kiss. “I can’t wait. I love you.”
I smiled against his mouth. “I love you too.”
Lewis waited until I’d settled my bike against the side of the house and slipped into the front door before he left.
I could still feel the throb of him between my legs as I toed off my shoes and crept quietly down the hall toward my bedroom. My brother, Harry, slept in the room across the hall from me, but that boy could sleep through a rave.
Mum had texted me earlier to ask when I was coming home, and I’d lied and said we were watching a late movie with Lewis’s parents. Hopefully, that lie wouldn’t come back to bite me in the arse.
The tiptoeing was pointless, because when I walked into my bedroom, it was flooded with light and my mum sat on the bed, her back against my headboard.
Guilt flushed through me as she stared like she could see right down to my soul.
For a long time, it had been us against the world. And then we’d moved here, and a shit ton of bad stuff happened that I didn’t like to think on too long before Mum and Walker fell in love. Walker quickly made me fall in love with him, too, and he’d been Dad ever since.
He’d legally adopted me after he married Mum because they both wanted peace of mind that if something were ever to happen to Mum, I couldn’t be taken away from Walker. And when Mum fell pregnant with Harry, I was even more glad to legally be my dad’s. I wanted us all to have the same name and feel like a real family, without any half-sibling labels or feeling like I maybe didn’t belong to him the same way Harry and Mum did.
Mum and I were still as close as two peas in a pod. When she’d first told me she was pregnant with Harry, I was excited but also a bit afraid that it would change our special bond. It hadn’t. Not even a little. And only for my love of Lewis Adair would I lie to her.
“You didn’t need to stay up,” I whispered as I crossed the room to open my chest of drawers. Pulling out my pajamas, I couldn’t quite meet her eyes.
“I wanted to make sure you got home all right.” She still had a strong American accent. There was a slight inflection of Scottishness on the ends of her words, but that was about it.
“Lewis made sure of it.” I sat down on the bed, waiting for her to get up.
I was practically my mum’s spitting image. She fell pregnant with me when she was sixteen years old and had me at seventeen, so she looked way too young to be mother to a seventeen-year-old. We had the same long blond, wavy hair, same eye shape, and the same nose and apple cheekbones. The only differences were my mouth, which was slightly fuller, and my eyes were light blue while hers were brown.