Total pages in book: 59
Estimated words: 55608 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 278(@200wpm)___ 222(@250wpm)___ 185(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 55608 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 278(@200wpm)___ 222(@250wpm)___ 185(@300wpm)
Finally, she falls over the edge and lets go. I slide my fingers from her. She shuffles up on the couch and then looks at me guiltily. I know what she’s going to say. I wish there were a way to stop it. I can’t keep making her come every time she veers close to the truth, even if that would feel so, so good.
She adjusts her dress and sighs. “There’s something else, Duke,” she murmurs.
Goddamn, this is it. It must say a lot about my feelings for Molly that, after everything we’ve experienced tonight, this frightens me the most. It’s the end of us before we’ve even had a chance to begin.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Molly
I can’t believe we just did that. It’s not only the act itself, his finger pushing into me hotly. It’s not just the kissing and the fact that when I told him I was a virgin, he seemed to get more intense and crazier with desire. The orgasm was the most intense experience of my life. I don’t give a damn if my poetry professors would chide me for hyperbole.
I’m still aching, the passion pulsing, but I have to do this now. He risked his life for me. He saved my life. Pathetically, tears try to sting my eyes and slide down my cheeks. I quickly rub my face.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
He leans over, gently brushing his thumb along my cheek. “I already know,” he says, his voice grim. “Ryan told me. Just now. Before I came down here.”
I lean away from him. “He told you, and you…”
He laughs ruefully, but it’s dark, with an edge to it. It’s like he has to laugh, or he’ll roar to release some of the tension. He stands up, hands on his hips, looking down at me with a strange mixture of anger and resignation. “I couldn’t help myself. You’re too damn sexy. Or maybe it’s the fact we could’ve died tonight.”
That last statement might be confusing to somebody else. Why would that make him want to get steamy? But I understand exactly what he means. As soon as we got to safety, there was this burning deep within, this urgent ache as though a deep desire was telling me I had to get his seed now. I had to be with him while I had the chance.
He bites down. It’s like he doesn’t want to say the next part, but he has to. “When you approached me at the bar, did you know who I was?”
I almost close my eyes, remembering when I did it before, during the steaminess. He snapped at me to look at him, saying it was important and he needed me to. “Yes,” I say after a pause, then swallow. “It started as a joke—a sick game, I guess you could say. I was with my friend. We saw you, and then I…”
He sits on the armchair, the coffee table between us. His eyes are hard. “Go on,” he says bluntly.
“We came up with an idea to get revenge on Ryan.”
Duke shows no reaction. He keeps staring at me. I think I see one of his eyes twitch, but I’m unsure. It’s like he’s shutting himself down completely. “Revenge,” he says after a pause. “But you broke up with him, right?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I reply.
After everything that has happened—my underwear is still sticky from our steaminess—I don’t want to heap this on him, too. Maybe he’ll call me a liar.
“It does matter,” he snaps. “Why would you want revenge on him?”
I can’t look at Duke anymore. As I answer, I look at the window and the closed curtains. They’re open just a sliver, showing the street. “We didn’t have a very good relationship. He…” I pause, wondering how to phrase this. “He could be nasty. Very nasty. He’d call me names. He’d belittle me. He’d bully me.”
Duke watches with that infuriating impassivity. “In what way?” he asks.
“He’d call me fat, for example. Or he’d laugh if I said I wanted to write a poetry book. He’d say I didn’t have the talent for it. It was little comments like that all the time, but they stacked up. They hurt. Sometimes, he looked at me like he hated me.”
Duke stands abruptly. He turns toward the hallway with that same look on his face I saw in the bar before he viciously and efficiently beat up the man holding the gun to me. The gun. I almost cry again. My mind is sluggishly catching up to the ferocious reality of what we experienced.
“My son said all of that to you,” Duke murmurs.
“Yeah,” I reply.
“I wasn’t asking,” he grunts. “The worst part is, I believe it. I can imagine Ryan saying all that. He can get real, real nasty sometimes. Real spoiled.” He frowns down at me. “But…”
He leaves the but hanging there for way too long. I know what he’s going to say. He has to say it. This is just too strange. The age gap, and now this… Most people would agree we should end things here.