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)
I won’t let her this time.
Lori
I blink awake to the plane shaking and jerk upward, only to have a strong arm and a hard body impede my escape. “Easy, sweetheart,” Cole murmurs, nuzzling my neck, that wicked wonderful spice that forever clings to him invading my senses in all the right ways. “It’s just turbulence. All is well.”
All is well. Yes. In this moment, with this man holding me, all is well. My hand comes down on the light stubble on his jaw. “How long was I asleep?”
He kisses my neck where he’d just been nuzzling it and then I’m fixed in those dreamy blue eyes of his that make me want to sigh and perhaps moan. He’s gorgeous, and by his own declaration, mine, well at least for now.
“Four hours,” he says.
I blink. “What is four hours?”
“That’s how long you slept, actually, how long we slept.”
“I slept four hours?”
“You did. We did.”
“I’m lying on top of you. Can you even feel all of the parts of your body right now?” I rise up on my elbow and reach over to rub his bicep that I was using as a pillow, partially for him but a lot for me, too. It’s a really nice bicep.
“All of my body parts are alive and well,” he assures me. “The only way I’d be better right this minute would be if you were with me in my bed back home in New York.” He brushes my hair from my eyes. “Lay back down. We can sleep another hour.”
“I can’t lay back down,” I say, as I shift slightly and have a realization. “I have to pee really, really badly.” I try to scoot out of the seat and struggle. Cole hits the button and the seat starts to rise but the plane jerks. I yelp and grab Cole. “Is that normal?”
“Yes. And I promised to save you if the plane starts to go down, remember?”
“Do not even talk about that while we are in the air.”
He laughs, a low, dirty, rich sounding laugh that makes my sex clench, but my need to pee takes over. I kiss him. “Don’t laugh at me.”
“Or else what?”
“I’ll find a way to punish you.”
“I can’t wait. Own me, sweetheart.”
My sex clenches yet again but the effect is quickly ruined. “I have to pee too badly to have any kind of sexy or challenging reply to that.” I turn away from him and climb out of the seat with more of that laugh of his following, but it doesn’t merit a retort this time. I’m on a mission down the aisle, toward the back of the now thankfully calm plane.
I pass a half-moon shaped table, a small sitting area, and then, bingo: a bathroom in a tiny hallway. Maybe private planes aren’t so different from commercial after all. I enter the tiny space, do my business, and then look at the mess that is my hair. My God, it’s everywhere. I glance around, pleased to find a bagged toothbrush and toothpaste and a tiny comb. A little quick work and my morning breath is gone, and at least my hair doesn’t look like a wild animal crawled into it.
I inhale then, the scent of Cole on my skin, and I press my hands to the sink. I love that smell. I love sleeping with him. How has this man become so much a part of my life in a tiny window? I’m falling hard for him and too fast. I need to just deep breathe and enjoy Cole, not fall in love with him.
Right. I can do this.
I open the door and Cole is standing in the hallway, or rather leaning on the opposite wall. The minute he sees me, though, he in fact does stand, leaning forward, his arm on the wall beside me. “Feel better?”
He consumes me that quickly. I smell him, feel him—I can almost taste him, and he’s not touching me. “You’re very large,” I say, because he is, maybe six-foot-three? And he’s broad and tall, but more so, his personality, his energy, his everything, consumes all that is around him, most certainly me.
He narrows those baby blues on me. “Is that bad?”
“There’s really nothing bad about you, Cole Brooks,” I dare to say. “Not yet at least.”
“You’re expecting there will be?”
“Yes,” I say honestly.
“Why?”
“Because then you can’t disappoint me, and you can still surprise me in a good way.”
“I can live with that,” he says.
“You can?”
“Of course I can. It’s honest, Lori, and my experience is that it isn’t as common or expected as we’d all like to believe. I like honest.”
I think back to him talking about his ex cheating with his friend. He’s been burned, and worse than me in many ways. The plane shakes and I end up flat against Cole, with him holding me. “That was normal, too?” I ask urgently.