Total pages in book: 158
Estimated words: 154037 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 770(@200wpm)___ 616(@250wpm)___ 513(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 154037 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 770(@200wpm)___ 616(@250wpm)___ 513(@300wpm)
The man was a mountain hewn of rugged stone.
A beast barely contained.
My burly bear covered in tats.
There was no questioning it with the way the ground shook with every step he took. A rolling thunder that moved through me in battering waves.
He’d cut his hair, one side cropped short and the other a little longer, and a day of scruff covered his strong, brutal jaw.
But what made my insides quake were his eyes. A piercing, entrancing blue that always made me feel as if I’d been speared to the spot. As if they could carve and cut and see right down to the depths of me.
The man would be wholly terrifying if it wasn’t for the constant smirk he wore at the edge of his mouth and the tease that was never far from his tongue, though I knew well enough he was as deadly as the rest of my brother’s crew.
Only I was pretty sure the smirk currently sitting on his striking face was forged right then. “Ah, playin’ with fire tonight, are we?” he grumbled, his voice coarse and just loud enough to be heard over the deafening decibel of the music.
Otto stepped forward and snaked an arm around my waist, moving in time the way we always did.
Fire raced beneath the surface of my skin.
I’d been almost nineteen when he’d taught me to dance. It was after he’d been sent away to prison and then had been released. When everything had changed for me. When the feelings I’d always felt for him had amassed into something bigger, and I’d fully understood what they meant.
I knew for him, it had been innocent, but it’d never felt that way for me. It’d felt salacious. Like stolen touches that weren’t meant for me, but I wanted to take them for myself, anyway.
He dragged me closer and leaned in close to my ear. “You keep it up, and I’m going to have to haul you out of here over my shoulder.”
My spirit throbbed against his threat.
A very foolish part of me begged him to do it.
“You wouldn’t dare,” I told him instead.
“Try me, darlin’.” His smirk spread. “It seems you’re looking for a whole lot of trouble…dressed like that. Every man here has to be losing his damned mind.”
God, he was impossible. Warning me over the truths that I gave him, as if I didn’t have the right to my own needs—to my own desires—and then turning around and drawing me right back into them.
But it’d always been like that with him. Since I was eighteen and I’d been ignorant enough to believe there was a chance that he would look at me the same way I’d always looked at him. The only thing I’d ever wanted was for him to look at me, and when he did, for the void I knew lived inside him to pulse and glow. For him to feel it. For him to know I was supposed to be something so much more than his friend.
So much more than his baby sister.
Just the thought of that title icked me out.
But this was the relationship we’d slipped into. This man who felt like a piece of my fabric, but our stitching had never quite come together.
“I’m here to blow a few minds.” I twisted my voice into a tease, my belly trembled at his proximity.
“Just like I thought. Nothing but trouble,” he murmured. “What am I supposed to do with you?”
“Dance with me?”
“One of my favorite things to do,” he said, and he tucked me even closer.
His aura surrounded me.
Patchouli and warm apple pie. No man should smell that good.
I wanted to sink into it.
Disappear.
“Think I might keep you…just like this.” His words were a warm vibration that slithered across my flesh.
What I wouldn’t give to fully fall into it. Have him wrap me completely in those massive arms. Hold me the way I’d always dreamed of him doing.
But I knew better than getting my hopes up for that. The only thing it’d ever done was set me up to get my heart crushed. It was time I grew beyond it.
I’d been trying. Trying to escape the cage where I’d been trapped.
The problem was, every time I attempted it, I freaked out. My exterior might come across as bold, but it was the inside that shuddered at moving on.
But Otto didn’t need to know that.
“I’m not that great, am I?” I went for light as I peeked up at his rugged face.
A deep chuckle rolled through his chest. “I think you know exactly how great you are, Raven Tayte.”
“How great?” I pressed through the razzing.
“Oh, the greatest.”
“Is that so?”
“Mmhmm…”
I was sinking, melding into his form as we moved to the rhythm.
“We’re out of here.”
When the voice hit us from the side, Otto jerked back like he’d been caught committing a mortal sin.