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)
“Salvatore… I can’t…” she whimpered even as her body was proving otherwise.
“You can. You are,” I added as she started to come, this time taking me with her.
I swear I damn near fucking blacked out at the intensity.
“That just keeps fucking getting better,” I said a while later after I’d crashed down on the mattress beside her.
Whitney made some sort of noise that I took as agreement to that.
“Come here,” I said, reaching for her and pulling her closer as she slowly but surely recovered from the back-to-back orgasms. “You good?” I asked when she finally snuggled in a little closer.
“Actually,” she said, turning her head up to rest her chin on my chest and look at me. “I’m kind of starving,” she admitted. “I was thinking of making some spaghetti to go with those meatballs.”
She was a fucking mafia wife in the making.
And, somehow, after a life of being happily single, I was totally fucking okay with that.
“I could go for spaghetti.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Whitney
I’d never lived with a man, not really.
Sure, there had been times when I’d crashed at their house, or theirs at mine, for a few days in a row before heading home to do laundry. And, inevitably, life stuff would get in the way, so it would be another couple of weeks before we’d spend back-to-back nights together.
Eventually, we’d grow sick of each other, and things would fizzle out before it got anywhere close to serious.
So being in Salvatore’s apartment was the closest thing I’d ever gotten to living with a man. And after the first three or four days, it stopped feeling strange.
Especially after we’d gone back to my place to pack some bags of essentials.
And, for me, essentials included things like a frying pan—because he didn’t have one—, a coffee cup because it felt wasteful to use disposable all the time, and books for both my upcoming lesson plans and just for pleasure.
“What’s this one about?” Salvatore asked, knifing forward toward the coffee table, snatching one off the top of the stack, and flipping it open before I could stop him.
And I would have stopped him.
Because despite its unassuming floral cover with a somewhat generic title, there was no way he could have known from the outside that it was, apparently, one of the smuttiest books ever written.
I crossed my fingers that he’d just flipped to a page of dialogue or descriptions, but that hope got squashed when he let out a bit of an awkward cough before looking up at me and declaring, “You like some filthy stuff, baby.”
“I haven’t read it yet,” I reminded him. “But I’ve heard good things.”
“There’s a thing or two on this page alone I think we should explore,” he decided, shooting me a heated look.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I demanded, feeling desire bloom through my core as I finished tying my sneaker laces.
“Why not?” he asked.
“I have to go to work,” I reminded him.
“No, you don’t.”
“If I don’t show up, there’s no one to serve the tables.”
“Yeah, what’s with that?” Salvatore asked. “Why is there only one server on the night shift?”
“In short, because Tommy is cheap as hell. When I started, there was another server on at night. But the cooks and busboys kept spreading rumors about her, ah, taking breaks to… get down and dirty with customers in the bathroom or in the alley. Eventually, one of the other women caught her in the act and forced Tommy to fire her. I guess he just figured that if I could handle it for a few nights after she was fired, then I could just… keep handling it.”
“You were fucking slammed last night,” he recalled.
“Yeah, that was insane,” I agreed. I felt like I’d been running all my shift. Even Salvatore had hopped up to help here and there—clearing tables and wiping down the surfaces so new guests could sit down, or fetching some condiments or drink refills. “But I made great tips, so I can’t complain too much.”
“You shouldn’t have to work so hard.”
“It’s not so bad. I mean, yeah, it is going to get a lot harder when school starts, but I will manage.”
“When school starts,” Salvatore repeated, face going a little dark. “Seven to almost three. Then you have to go into work at five or six until two or three in the morning.”
“Yeah, it’s a lot,” I agreed. “But I don’t work every night at the diner.”
“I’m never going to see you,” Salvatore said, mostly to himself.
“Hey,” I said, feeling my heart squeeze in my chest at the hint of disappointment and sadness in his voice. “We will find some time,” I assured him, reaching over to pull the book out of his hands, and placing it down on the table, then climbing up to straddle him.
We hadn’t exactly talked about what was clearly a budding relationship. We were both more than old enough to actually sit down and have a grown-up conversation about what was going on. I imagined we would do that eventually. It just never felt like the right time to have that talk. And I was enjoying what was going on with us too much to force that discussion.