Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 75337 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 377(@200wpm)___ 301(@250wpm)___ 251(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75337 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 377(@200wpm)___ 301(@250wpm)___ 251(@300wpm)
Her silky hair was loose around her shoulders, lending her face even more softness than usual.
How she didn’t look at herself and see someone gorgeous staring back at her was beyond me.
I mean, maybe if she was trying to compare herself with someone like those famous-for-no-reason celebrities who were more plastic than flesh, creating an unattainable, almost inhuman sort of beauty, she might not be able to see how naturally pretty she was.
And, sure, a lot of men liked hot however they could get it. But I was old-fashioned. I liked the natural ways a woman was pretty. Scars and stretch marks and some jiggle.
It wasn’t long, though, before I wasn’t thinking about how pretty she was, or how much I wanted to bend her over the counter and fuck her from behind.
Because we got to talking.
And I got to see some shit that I got a feeling she didn’t share with a lot of people. Not even her baby sister that she’d raised like her own kid.
The struggle.
She showed me the struggle.
In her words, in her eyes, in the tension in her body as she spoke of it.
She’d been struggling uphill for a long fucking time, with no end in sight.
And from the way she talked about it, I was pretty sure she had no one to talk to, no one to lean on, no one to even share the burden with.
She had her sister, but it was clear she was trying to make the woman’s life easier. Whitney would think that sharing her money woes with Wren would make her sister feel guilty.
Money had only been a minor concern earlier in my life. When I was a kid and had no say in the matter. But as soon as I was old enough to figure out that even a kid could hustle for some extra cash, I always made sure I had more than enough.
I was always the kid with the nicest shoes, with the best clothes, with as much money as I wanted to go to movies or bowling or whatever the fuck else was going on at the time.
Then, when I was old enough to start working for the Family? Shit. The money poured in.
When I took my time without opening my mouth to the feds, yeah, the Family repaid me by making sure I always had more than enough money on the books.
When I got out, I busted my ass to make myself valuable, which meant I got paid really well.
I didn’t have to worry about money.
So, no, I couldn’t quite relate to her struggle. But I could empathize with it. I could read the strain of it all over her face.
Maybe that was why I’d reached for her, why I’d found myself stroking her face—something I wasn’t sure I’d ever done before.
Because I got to see through to the heart and soul of her. Which, I’ll admit, I’d never really tried to do with a woman before.
When it came to the opposite sex, I was down for a good time. Be that a night, a weekend, or a casual on-again-off-again thing.
Never more than that.
Likely because I never spent much time talking to any of them. We were busy doing other things.
But most of what I’d done with Whitney so far was talking.
Save for that little incident in the bathroom that I had to force right out of my head because I didn’t need my cock getting hard when we were standing so close.
Whitney’s eyes fluttered closed for a brief second as her head leaned to the side, giving me more access to run my fingers up and down the soft skin of her jaw.
My hand, operating with a mind of its fucking own, shifted down a bit, then back, sinking into the hair at the nape of her neck, curling into it, about to tug her head up so her soft lips were more available to me.
It was the damned vibrating of my phone on her countertop that snapped me out of my thoughts, that made me jerk suddenly away.
The spell of the moment broken, we both stiffened, created distance.
“I, ah, so were you just here to steal my food?” she asked, voice sounding huskier than usual, and it was like a stab of desire through my system.
“No.”
“Then why?” she asked, busying herself with running water over my plate, acting like the task required all of her focus.
“Your stitches,” I told her, using the excuse I’d come up with for seeing her again.
“My stitches?” she asked, turning around with scrunched brows.
“They need to come out,” I reminded her.
“Oh, right. Yeah. I was about to make an appointment with my doctor for that.”
“A doctor who would have questions you can’t answer,” I said, reaching into my back pocket for the small medical kit I’d stashed there. “Ten minutes,” I said, then turned to head down the short hall and into the bathroom, setting the kit on the sink counter.