Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 98561 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 493(@200wpm)___ 394(@250wpm)___ 329(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 98561 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 493(@200wpm)___ 394(@250wpm)___ 329(@300wpm)
I stared at him. He was the complete opposite of me. I slavishly followed the rules; he took pride in ignoring them. I’d always wanted to help others; he only helped himself.
Or at least, that’s what he was determined to make everyone believe.
“And then you joined the Marines,” I said quietly.
He glanced down at the Marine Corps tattoo on his arm, the one that was almost obscured by the thorny plant surrounding it. Then he looked away and shrugged, as if it was no big deal. But the atmosphere changed: I’d ventured into something forbidden and suddenly, he was closed and silent. Our easy banter was gone and I wasn’t ready for how much that hurt.
Checking his wound only took a few moments. There was no sign of infection and it was healing up nicely. I cleaned it and put on a fresh dressing and then, technically, we were done: I could call for the guard to take him back to his cell. But I couldn’t leave things like that.
“You’ve got a lot of scars,” I said, trying to extend an olive branch.
He looked down at himself and I saw a hint of his usual smirk, but he didn’t speak.
I touched an unusual, triangular scar on his neck. “What happened here?”
His lips slowly twisted into one of those wonderful grins and a huge rush of warmth lit up my core. He was back. “That’s from when I got caught by some Russian mobsters in Chicago. I’d been offloading some emeralds on their turf and they thought they deserved a cut. They tied me to a chair and did the whole heat up a knife on the stove thing. But we worked out a deal.” He traced the scar thoughtfully with his fingertip. “Eventually.”
“What about this?” I nodded at a small scar, almost hidden by his hairline near his left ear, but he just frowned, not sure where I was looking. “Here,” I clarified, and without thinking, I touched it. Something like an electric shock ran up my arm and I swallowed.
“That’s from when an arms dealer in Kazakhstan broke a bottle over my head.”
“Looks like you got it sewn up,” I mumbled thoughtfully. “The stitches are a little, um…”
“Crooked?” He grinned. “I did it myself, in the mirror.”
I blinked. “In that case, you did a very good job.” He stitched himself up? It brought home what a lonely life it must be, being a thief.
He twisted around and slid off the gurney, then turned his back to me and used his cuffed hands to push his jumpsuit and boxers down over his ass. High on the outer side of his left thigh I saw—
“Teeth marks?” I asked.
He nodded. “Breaking into a museum in Italy. I roped down from a skylight and…well, things went wrong. The alarms go off, the guards run in, and the guy on the roof who’s meant to be pulling me up gets the ropes tangled. Then this big beast of a dog bounds up and sinks his teeth into my leg. I’m swinging back and forth, hollerin’ to be pulled up, and I swear the dog thought it was a game.”
I noticed something else: a roughly circular wound right in the center of one perfect ass cheek. It looked almost like a puncture wound. “What’s this?” I touched it. God, they were so firm. I went a little heady.
“Oh…” His lips twitched into a smile I hadn’t seen before: a darkly secret one, as if he was remembering something intimate. That smile hit me like a shot of eighty-proof rum, sending heat flashing to my face and rippling down through my body. I wanted to know. And I felt a tiny, irrational stab of jealousy.
“That,” he told me, “is from the wife of a French smuggler. She didn’t tell me she was married.” He looked thoughtful. “Their relationship was…complicated.”
“What did she do to you?!”
He turned to face me, his jumpsuit still pushed down to his upper thighs. I glimpsed the washboard ridges of his abs, then the deep diagonal line of his Adonis belt that led my eyes down further. Curling dark hair and—
I tore my eyes away and looked up into his face, my mind full of what I’d just seen. Thick. So thick. And OMG long.
He gazed back at me, proud and teasing, enjoying my embarrassment. Then he finally hitched his jumpsuit up to his waist. “I was fucking her, on a four-poster bed. And she was cursing away in French and scratching at my back and she had her legs up in the air, kicked out wide.” He was still staring right into my eyes, his own eyes like molten sapphires. “And then she came—pretty loudly, as I recall—and she dug her heels hard into my ass.”
I swallowed and tried to keep my voice level. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”