Total pages in book: 183
Estimated words: 174715 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 874(@200wpm)___ 699(@250wpm)___ 582(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 174715 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 874(@200wpm)___ 699(@250wpm)___ 582(@300wpm)
Our eyes meet, a collision of heat and a battle of wills, a challenge between us that I cannot even fully define, but it’s there, a crackle of electricity with a life of its own. It lives, it breathes, it drives this night, or at the very least, the here and now. Seconds tick by in which my hands want to reach for him, in which my nipples pebble and ache, heat pooling low in my belly. I’m back to moments before. I’m back to the list of wants.
I want his hands on my body.
I want my hands on his body.
I want to lick him—everywhere.
I want him to lick me—everywhere.
I want and I want and I want and I haven’t allowed myself to want in so long. Not anything at all.
The idea that I’m here, with him, because I want him, because I choose to be here, feels powerful. But the idea that despite all my drive to stay focused on my mission to secure my future and that of my mother’s, I’m still here, that he has that much control over me makes him powerful. I love and hate this about him to the point that despite all the high and rush of the challenge I’ve professed, I am most likely a little fucked up, but he doesn’t give me time to let that idea mess with my head.
His hands shackle my waist and he drags me to him. “Are we really doing this? The whole push and pull?”
“I’m enjoying it,” I say, my palms flattening on the hard wall of his chest, the heat of his skin hot beneath my touch, seeping through his expensive white shirt, and radiating up my arm, and across my chest. “Aren’t you?”
“I am,” he says, sliding his hand to my hair, yanking away the clasp there, and the instant my hair is free, he tangles rough fingers in the long strands. “And with good reason. I have a plan for you, Lori whoever-you-are. Since I don’t get a promise of a last name and a phone number,” he says, dragging my mouth to his. “I get everything else.”
“Everything?” I ask, my belly clenching with all the possibilities that word holds.
“All of you,” he says.
“Define all of me.”
“For this one night,” he says, leaning in, his lips near my ear, the rasp of his light stubble scraping erotically along the delicate skin of my cheek. “I own you.”
Chapter six
Cole
Iown you.
With those words, my words, my intent in the air, and my fingers still tangled in Lori’s hair, I kiss her, a deep, possessive kiss meant to claim her, take her, make her mine, if only for this night. And she knows it too, because when my lips part hers, she pants out, “No one owns me.”
“Then, sweetheart, you’ve never been properly fucked.” I slide my hands under her jacket, settling my palms on her shoulders.
“I guess that depends on how you define properly.”
I turn her to face in the opposite direction, dragging the jacket down her arms and tangling it around her wrists, and then I lean in close. “As dirty as possible,” I promise. “And with you on my tongue, in as many ways as we both find possible.”
“Is this how you own me?” she demands. “By binding my arms?”
“As much as I’d like to have you at my mercy, sweetheart,” I say, tossing the jacket aside, and turning her to face me, “I’m selfish enough to want your hands and mouth fully available, in any way, shape, or place you so choose to use them.” I walk us backward, toward the oversized chair made perfectly for the kind of hot, wild fuck in our near future, before my hands fall from her waist. “I want to watch you undress.”
“When do you undress?” she challenges.
“We have one condom, sweetheart. Let’s make it last. Undress for me, Lori.”
Her teeth scrape her bottom lip, and for just a moment, her eyes cut, but not before I see the flicker of nerves in her stare. And right then, I know that I’ve read her accurately up to this point. I know that her control is both a necessity and a wall that protects her. I know that no one has made it safe for her to leave those things at the door. No one has ever seen her really truly naked and the only way that happens, is to do exactly what I’m doing. Push her out of her comfort zone, pull her into the moment, where she forgets the walls, and lives nowhere but here in the moment. That’s the place where nothing exists but the two of us.
Her eyes meet mine again, and I see the decision in them. She’s not going to run like she did on the street tonight. She unzips her skirt, and caresses it down her slender, but curvy hips. It pools at her feet, and she kicks it aside, allowing me to admire her long legs in lacy thigh-high hose, my gaze catching on the slender strip of lace in the vee of her body.