Total pages in book: 137
Estimated words: 138642 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 693(@200wpm)___ 555(@250wpm)___ 462(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138642 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 693(@200wpm)___ 555(@250wpm)___ 462(@300wpm)
The same pages I’ve touched lovingly time and time again.
I’m happy to sit down at her bedside and read it to her until she falls asleep. One hand stretches across the covers, quietly reaching for me.
I curl my fingers in hers and hold them gently for a while, just feeling their warmth, watching her sleep.
She’s not mine, no. A few weeks ago I didn’t even know who she was.
But I could easily see myself loving this little girl and getting completely wrapped around her little finger just like her uncle.
The door creaks open softly and Grant peeks in.
“She asleep?” he whispers.
I smile, carefully disentangling my fingers from Nell’s.
“Out like a light,” I whisper back, standing up.
He’s changed in the time it took me to put Nell to sleep, standing in the doorway with a pair of loose blue-and-white striped pajama pants straining to keep their hold on the thick breadth of his body.
The drawstring stretches to its limit and the knots in the cords barely hitch on the holes at the waist.
There’s almost no difference in the definition of his naked chest above the pajama pants and the details I can make out below them.
The ink snaking up his arms and lining his shoulders.
The hard muscle of his iliac crest and brawny thighs imprinting the thin fabric—and imprinting me as I draw closer to the doorway and he slips an arm around my waist.
He pulls me in with an effortlessness that makes me feel as light as a feather.
“We should probably follow suit,” he says with a hopeful lift of his eyebrows. “If you’d like to join me.”
I bite my lip on a smile, walking my fingers up his chest. “Is that your way of asking if last night isn’t a one-time thing?”
“Might be.” A rumble wells under my fingertips. “I could be more direct and just ask you to fuck.”
I gasp.
Just hearing him shift to something so dirty does terrible things to me.
“For the record, you don’t have to ask.” Stretching up on my toes, I brush my lips to his. “Take me to bed, Gra—ANT!”
His name becomes a squeal.
He doesn’t even let me get the words out before he’s sweeping me up in his arms, carrying me against his broad chest and the wild beat of his powerful heart.
I barely clap my hand over my mouth to silence myself, pulse pounding, before I accidentally wake up Nell. Grant’s smirk makes me want to shove him and kiss him all at once as he carries me down the hall.
But as he elbows his bedroom door open and tumbles me down on the bed, hovering over me with his body blocking out the light and the moon’s glow gliding along his shoulders, I know which one I’ll choose.
My body goes slack as his mouth attacks mine.
This time, I’m so ready with an anticipation that’s been building my entire life.
My nails rake his shoulders as I draw him in, mating my lips with his.
15
ONE OF A KIND (GRANT)
You can’t imagine what the fuck it does to me when Ophelia kisses me first.
It’s a wild thing, a fireball affirmation that she wants me just as bad.
Hell, the fact that she’s here in my bed, in my arms, willingly and eager and soaked knocks something loose in my head.
All those years I thought she hated me after I ran my mouth—when really she was just waiting for me to stop being a dumbass and make my feelings clear.
I still remember how she writhed under me last night.
And I’m hard in an instant at the thought, especially when I feel her flesh yielding under me as I sink into her kiss, twining tongues before I take the fuck over.
I’m a demanding fuck in bed.
I need to be.
Need to own her, to possess her, to claim her, to make every inch of her mine.
I’m hardly aware I’m shredding her clothes.
She hisses when it bites into her flesh before being dragged away.
I’m pure hunger tonight, ravenous as hell to have her skin under my fingers.
And Philia’s so soft to the touch.
My fingers sink into lush thighs and curving hips, the hot round swells of her breasts.
I goddamned well devour her with my hands, never breaking away from a kiss that leaves our mouths wet as I savage her with teeth and needy tongue-thrusts, starving to taste her.
In mere seconds she’s thrashing under me in total sweet surrender, her mouth slack and needy, her nipples hard against my palms.
I can’t fucking wait.
I feel like I’ve got ten damn years to make up for and I want to brand her into my flesh until my hands remember the feel of her even when we’re apart.
So I touch her everywhere, finding the forbidden places that make her moan against my lips, that shake her apart. Everywhere that makes her go so tense she’s trembling.