Total pages in book: 145
Estimated words: 138274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
But maybe he was also a male ready for some rough sex with a partner who liked it that way—
Without warning, Nate stopped in the street and looked down the line at her.
As she sucked in a breath, the quiet sound was like the blare of a car horn—
Oh, wait. That was a car almost mowing him over. Not that he gave a shit. As the front grill of an EV stopped a foot from him, and the driver leaned out of his window to start shouting, all Nate did was meet Nalla’s stare.
Not that he seemed any more happy to see her. Did he ever smile?
And now that she could see him like he was on center stage, he was bruised and battered as if he’d already been fighting—Shuli, too. The other male had blood on his fancy suit.
Somewhere, off in the very far distance, she heard the women directly in front of her laugh at some joke, and behind her, there was a whispered curse that may have been a shout. But her ears weren’t working right as her eyes took up all of the bandwidth of her consciousness—
Shuli stepped in to the pissed-off driver, all kinds of calm-down motions making the male look like he was trying to fan out a fire with his palms. Which she supposed he was. And then he hooked an arm through Nate’s and dragged him away.
With the departure, she felt as though something vital in her had been unplugged, and as a sagging occurred, she realized… that she didn’t like the guy.
Because she didn’t like how she felt when she was around him.
Rubbing her face and trying to convince herself that nothing had just happened, she hated the way she had to recalibrate back to normal and resented the hell out of the male—and herself. Who was he to her? Nobody. And she sure as shit wasn’t the kind of female who lost her mind and her own life at the foot of some black-leather’d fighter she didn’t know and didn’t give a crap about.
She was better than that.
As she dropped her hands from her face, her eyes immediately went back to where he’d stopped in traffic. He and his well-dressed mouth-flapper were nowhere in sight, probably because Shuli had dragged their argument into that alley at the other side of the club.
“Goddamn it,” she muttered.
Fucking biology. What the hell was she doing even thinking like—
“What the hell are you doing?”
As she jumped and looked toward the sharp, disapproving voice, she wondered if the Scribe Virgin had decided to come back to Caldwell and deliver some destiny to her for all the rose-colored glasses her libido kept forcing on her face. Or maybe it was a time-out for getting bitchy with Bitty earlier.
Oh. Great. The night was getting even better. It was not the mahmen of the species. It was a six-foot-tall female in a black bodysuit and thigh-high boots, whose sheen of straight blond hair fell to the contours of her absolutely perfect ass, and whose face sucked up all the attention of the men and women around them.
Okay, some of the would-ya-look-at-that was no doubt also her spectacular, gravity-defying tits that clearly were not bra’d.
Nalla couldn’t even fake a smile. If she was deflated before, she felt positively run over by a sexy semi. “Hey, Mharta.”
“Why are you waiting here?” The female sported the expression of someone presented with a particle physics equation and no scratch paper. “We don’t wait.”
She didn’t wait. Mharta could probably get paid to go into the club.
“Come in with me.”
Nalla shook her head as so many humans continued to look over. “No, it’s okay. If they can wait, I can, too.”
“But you don’t have to. And if they didn’t have to, they wouldn’t, either.”
“Will you keep your voice down,” Nalla hissed. “And you don’t know that.”
“Are we talking about the same crowd of people here?” Mharta kept her volume right where it was, unyielding in the way the beautiful were—thoughtlessly because they didn’t have to be thoughtful. “There are no altruists in this line. Or they wouldn’t be trying to get into a club. Now, come on—or are you going to insist I smudge their memories so their fee-fees don’t get hurt?”
When her arm was taken and she was pulled out onto the sidewalk, Nalla went along because it was better than continuing the argument in front of the very bunch of frozen-Popsicle Bathe-ers who were being run down. And the fact that both she and Nate were being piloted by someone with a mouth going was the only thing they were ever going to have in common.
So let her little heart cozy up to all that romance.
“I don’t agree with manipulating their minds,” Nalla muttered as they skated down the line.
“Well, aren’t you a purist.”