Total pages in book: 101
Estimated words: 94436 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 472(@200wpm)___ 378(@250wpm)___ 315(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94436 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 472(@200wpm)___ 378(@250wpm)___ 315(@300wpm)
Until he was the one who caused it. Until he was the one who broke her trust.
He’d punish himself for that later.
“Stella.”
She blinked, still staring at the ocean, but he knew she’d heard him. Fuck, he wanted to touch her, but everything in her body language cautioned him from that. Ordinarily, Jay wouldn’t have given a fuck about what Stella’s body language cautioned. He’d spent long enough without her, being unable to touch her. If his woman was close enough, his hands were on her.
But he’d hurt her if he touched her. Something about the way she held herself made him afraid that she’d shatter the second he laid his hand on her.
“Stella,” he repeated.
She looked at him with empty eyes. Jay restrained a flinch.
“Stella, we need to go.” He wanted to add ‘home’, but that was a sore subject. That wasn’t safety for her. Not anymore.
Because of him.
He held out his hand, and she looked at it with a blank stare.
Jay waited. She was well within her rights to ignore him, ignore his touch. He’d hurt her enough.
But after a few beats, she put her small hand in his.
Jay sighed inwardly in relief, even though he shouldn’t have been so fucking satisfied that his woman was so willing to hold onto him, even after he’d hurt her so much.
But he was.
Stella
Jay packed for me. He put me in the shower, washed me and then picked out an outfit for me to wear. It was the first time ever that I’d been naked with his hands on me and it hadn’t ended in an orgasm. Hadn’t ended up with him inside me. Though there was a latent need hidden somewhere inside of me, it was buried deep below the layers of numbness I was currently hiding underneath.
Jay didn’t try to touch me in that way, his brows furrowed in worry and his jaw hard throughout the process. But he took care of me. Gently. With patience. With love. With compassion I hadn’t thought him capable of.
But there were a lot of things I hadn’t thought him capable of.
I did manage to dress myself and brush my own hair. I gulped down the vodka he brought me, wincing at the sharp taste but thankful for the burn down my throat.
Then I got in the car, rode to the airport and got on the plane he’d organized. I didn’t ask where we were going. Just like I didn’t ask him how he’d found me or how he’d known what was going on. He was Jay.
It wasn’t until we were thirty thousand feet in the air that he stopped being okay with my silence. Even though my mother had just died, parts of my brain were still stuck on what had happened before all of this.
Felicity.
What was wrong with me? Was I really that selfish?
All I wanted was to curl up into Jay, wanted to cling to him as the one safe, stable thing in all of this. But he wasn’t. I couldn’t cross the chasm between us because I hadn’t forgiven him. Didn’t trust that he was safe anymore.
“Stella,” Jay kneeled in front of me, hands on my legs. His face was pinched, brows furrowed and voice clipped. He was worried, that much was clear.
“I need you to talk to me,” he implored when I didn’t answer.
“You need me to talk to you?” I repeated, my tone dead. “Why, because you’re worried that I’m losing myself in sadness or despair over my mother being dead, or because you’re worried about what your lies have done to us?”
He flinched. That should’ve been a victory, but it wasn’t.
“Because going this long without hearing your voice is making me fucking crazy,” he deadpanned. “I don’t need you to forgive me. Don’t expect you to. I fucked up. I fucking hate myself for hurting you. Hate myself for this bullshit coinciding with when you need me. And it’s my fault.”
It was then that he stood. I missed his hands on my thighs.
He ran his hand through his hair, the motion frantic, manic for a man like Jay. His brows were crumpled, mouth downturned. He’d taken off his suit jacket which was thrown haphazardly over one of the seats on the plane, his shirtsleeves shoved up messily, the veins in his sinewy forearms protruding.
“I don’t know how to help you,” he gritted out the words as if he was in pain. His eyes darted around the interior of the plane, looking anywhere but at me.
I watched in fascination as my man, my rock, my steel unraveled before me.
Irises like green marbles finally settled on me. “I can kill a man, Stella. Easily. Without mess. Without remorse. I can make it so he never fucking existed in the first place. I can ruin lives. Hurt anyone. I can make you come. Make you beg for me. Somehow, I’ve made you fall in love with me, but that isn’t a skill, it was an accident of fate.”