Total pages in book: 150
Estimated words: 142818 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 714(@200wpm)___ 571(@250wpm)___ 476(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 142818 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 714(@200wpm)___ 571(@250wpm)___ 476(@300wpm)
As would your panties.
Okay, so maybe not everyone would be turned on by standing in front of a six-foot something biker with muscles and a thousand-yard stare from icy blue eyes. A man two decades older. With a carob-colored beard that I wanted to scratch the insides of my thighs.
Yeah, I had all of those feelings the second I laid eyes on Elden.
I had all of those feelings despite everything going on in my life at the time I met him. And I had a lot of things going on in my life when I met him.
He didn’t say anything when his boots landed in front of the chair I was sitting in. That didn’t surprise me. Elden was a man of few words. Very few. In the short amount of time I’d known him, I’d only heard his low, gravelly voice a handful of times, uttering only the bare minimum words needed to get his point across.
None of them had been directed at me. He’d seemed to have made a concerted effort not to make any kind of conversation with me. Yet still, he was always close by, always somewhere, always unnerving me with his nearness and his forced disinterest in me. And it was forced. I may not have known the man, but for whatever reason, I knew that he wanted me. And I wanted him. Despite everything.
And everything was a word that encompassed a fuck of a lot.
I was disgusted that I could be so … wanton in desiring a man so forbidden while my body was not entirely my own.
I didn’t know why he came to the roof tonight. Maybe he didn’t even know I was there. Maybe that was where he went to get some peace when the craziness of the club parties became too much. But that wasn’t likely. Though Elden was older than most of the men who engaged in the craziness, he wasn’t that much older. The club had varied shapes and sizes of men patched into the Sons of Templar, all from different backgrounds but all searching for the kind of freedom the cut offered.
The cut. The leather vest they all wore at all times that signified them belonging to this club.
The one that had become my mother’s family at some point while I was across an ocean, ruining my life.
He was standing in front of my chair, looking down at me. His figure was imposing, all encompassing. He blocked out the moon and stars, took over my vision. Though I didn’t have measuring tape on hand, he had to be over six foot. If I stood, I’d come up to his shoulder, maybe his chin.
And he wasn’t just tall, he was wide. All muscle.
His shoulders were broad, biceps stretching the fabric of the tee he was wearing. I had the urge, a very strong urge to lick the sinewy muscle of his forearms. His dark hair was pulled back into a low bun, and not in a hipster man bun, but a bad ass biker man bun. Silver threaded through that dark chocolate hair, and the goatee that should’ve, would’ve looked insane on anyone else—well, apart from Jeff Bridges of course—but made him look rugged and chiseled at the same time. There were creases in his forehead, the kind of creases that made a man looked weathered, wise and impossibly handsome. Creases that communicated he frowned often, and not many lines on the edge of his eyes that hinted that he smiled rarely.
And I had real life knowledge to back those claims up, in the time I’d spent here, I had yet to see him smile, his default expression seemed to be a glower that should’ve scared the pants off me. Instead, it melted my panties.
Those eyes. That was what drew you to him. Okay, the height, the muscles, the impossibly sexy man bun and goatee drew you to him. But the eyes held you captive. Mediterranean blue, endless pools of intensity, of a masculinity that I should’ve bristled against. Eyes that rooted you in your spot.
I had to do something about the way Elden was looking at me. Either to stop him from wanting me or to stop him from thinking I was some perfect, pure thing he couldn’t touch… I wasn’t sure which.
“I had an abortion this week,” I said, looking straight at him.
I needed to say the words out loud. Needed to stare into his icy irises as I said them. And though it didn’t make a whole lot of sense, I needed to tell him. Needed this one stranger to know the thing I hadn’t said out loud. Not even to my closest friends.
Not even to my mother.
My first instinct, that morning in her bathroom when seeing those two lines, was to go running to her.
As much as I liked to think of myself as grown up, as a woman who had been living and existing in Europe with her older French boyfriend, traveling across the world, digesting all sorts of life altering information and not breaking down—it was in that moment, realizing I was pregnant, that I was confronted with how much of a child I still was.