Total pages in book: 146
Estimated words: 143842 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 719(@200wpm)___ 575(@250wpm)___ 479(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 143842 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 719(@200wpm)___ 575(@250wpm)___ 479(@300wpm)
It was scored in dark aggression. The mark of a man who didn’t shy away from destruction.
He always came off as carefree.
Heedless, even.
Almost reckless in his detachment.
But that wasn’t close to who was standing in front of me right then.
“You don’t owe me anything.” I nearly begged it, knowing I should put a barricade up between us. Send him away. Stop this before he got any deeper.
But my spirit leaned his direction.
He reached out like he could touch it, and he set one of those big palms on my cheek again. The brush of his thumb was achingly tender as he ran it back and forth along the hollow of my eye.
“That’s what friends do, Hailey. They share the load, and it looks like yours just got a little too heavy to bear.”
Threads of guilt curled around my ribs and tightened around my heart. What kind of friend was I, doing this? Allowing him to invade my space like this? Touch me the way he had last night when I knew the trouble it would bring him? More so, with the way Brooke had felt about him?
But that was so long ago, and this…
Intensity blazed as he traced my face with his eyes, as if he sought to memorize every line and divot and curve. His caress soft and adoring.
I felt beautiful beneath it, the way this man saw me. The way he made me feel. But he didn’t have the first clue what he was signing up for.
“I can handle Pruitt,” I forced out.
“Of course, you can, but that doesn’t mean you have to do it alone. Let me be strong enough to carry some of it,” he murmured. “Let me be there. For you. For Maddie. Let’s chase this fucker off, then you can get on with your life the way you so clearly need to do.”
“Why would you do that for me?” My head barely shook, trying to understand.
“Because there’s something special about you, Hailey Wagner. There’s always been.” Then he cracked a grin like he didn’t think either of us could endure the weight that sagged the room any longer. “That and I really like the sound of my name on your lips when you come.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry with the heat that flooded, pulsing between us.
In an instant, that tether of energy writhed and thrashed.
“We agreed last night that was a one-time thing.”
I forced myself to take a step back before I did something stupid and reached for him again. Got to my knees and undid his belt so I could…
I didn’t realize my attention had drifted to the enormous bulge in his jeans until he cleared his throat. I jerked, my eyes flashing back up to his.
A challenge pulled across his ridiculously handsome face. “Is that the way you want it?”
Gathering all my resolve, I said, “We’re just friends, Cody. That’s all we can be. It will only complicate things.”
I repeated his defense from last night.
“And maybe I’ve come to realize I’ll welcome any complication if it means getting close to you.”
That arrogance resurfaced, the man nothing but a taunt, and he reached down to the hem of his tee and peeled it up and over his head like he’d done it a thousand times in front of me before.
My mouth dropped open, and I swore, the world canted to the side.
Annihilated by the sight.
I was pretty sure it was the result he was going for since he let one of those smirks free, the kind that did a little slaying of its own.
I couldn’t form a coherent thought or word, stupefied as I stared at him through the moonlight that flooded through the window.
There’d been no question that he was made of muscle and brawn. A fortress of strength. A mast of power.
But I nearly crumbled at the sight of him like this.
Skin bare and glowing, like the sun breaking on a dreary, gloomy day. A golden, coarse stone, ruggedly chiseled and shaped. A sculpture of tenacity.
Shoulders obliterating view, wide and hulking, that power reverberating beneath the flesh stretched tight across his packed, quivering chest.
It rippled down his abdomen, his stomach engraved in sharply cinched divots and lines, his hip bones jutting out from above the waist of his jeans.
Where I was soft, he was hard, forged of slate.
Designs covered his left arm and scrolled up over his shoulder to his pec, bright colors that gleamed in the night.
But what caught my attention was where the mosaic lines opened to a clock that sat right in the middle of his chest.
Prominent and emphasized like it’d become the focal point of who he was.
An emblem that was drawn to appear rustic like the man, rusted metal or bronzed iron, the teeth heavy and gnarled as it ticked through time.
Though the hands of the clock were bent, jagged where they forever rested at eight-seventeen.