Total pages in book: 218
Estimated words: 209489 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1047(@200wpm)___ 838(@250wpm)___ 698(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 209489 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1047(@200wpm)___ 838(@250wpm)___ 698(@300wpm)
I hadn’t expected him to get home so soon.
But I didn’t think it was such a bad thing either.
I listened, not totally surprised when a big shadow appeared at my door. I only had one of the bedside lamps on.
“What are you doing?” Alex asked, stepping into the room.
Oh.
His suit was pulled down to his waist, leaving most of that incredible upper body bare to my poor unprepared eyes.
I blinked and made myself focus on his face. “Oh, you know, I’ve just been sitting here for the last thirty minutes, wondering what in the hell all that stuff we talked about really meant.”
He raised one arm to palm the back of his neck, giving me an even better view of those hard pecs. “You know exactly what I meant. You always do.”
“Do I?” I asked him slowly.
He nodded back at the same pace. “Do you need me to tell you again?”
This motherfucker was serious. But so was I. I nodded.
That’s when I finally noticed that Alex’s beautiful cape was on the floor behind him. The sight of it almost felt sacrilegious. He should at least carry it and not drag it around.
Alex took another step into the room, then another and another until his shins bumped into my knees, and a half naked Alex in a skintight suit loomed over me, and he was nudging my jaw with his index finger. “Why’s your heart beating so fast?”
I lifted a shoulder and met his eyes. “Because I’m scared.”
His head jerked back a little, and the smile that came over his face… it tipped the edges of his mouth into the sweetest expression I had ever seen. He even let out a little huff, and in a move I wouldn’t have expected, he leaned forward, slipped his arms under me, and scooped me up. In the next second, I was on his thighs, on his lap, and he had a forearm bracing the middle of my back, and Alex was looking down at me with the most unbelievably affectionate look on his face. “We talked about this already. You’ve got nothing to be scared of when you’re with me,” he said, sounding absolutely serious.
It was too natural by then to lean against his side and let my head fall with a clunk against that spot between his neck and shoulder. “You say it like it’s supposed to be easy,” I told him. “You were gone for a long time. What did you have to think about for a month? Whether you liked me or not?” Did I have to sound so irritated?
“I thought we already covered that I like you.”
I frowned. “You sure haven’t acted like it sometimes.”
“I didn’t know what I expected you to be like, but it wasn’t like this. Alana’s husband doesn’t curse, Agatha is great, but she’s serious, and I’m pretty sure Achilles’s wife shits rainbows. Could you imagine me being happy with someone like that? You were ready to stab people to defend me. You like talking shit to me.” The son of a bitch smiled. “I thought you were okay when you didn’t run and leave me behind when they took us. Then you kind of won me over when you tried to protect me in that cell. And you’ve kept on winning me over since,” he said quietly. “I needed some time to think about what was best for both of us. That’s why I was gone.”
I frowned even more.
“I did,” he insisted. “I’ve been told my whole life what to do, how much I could say, how I should behave. Who I should be and so have you. Neither one of us always did what we were supposed to do, but for the most part, we did, didn’t we?”
Where the hell was he going with this?
“My brothers and sister both went looking for their mates the second my grandmother told them to. My mother and father barely knew each other when they got married. None of them asked questions, they didn’t argue; they went and found their partners, and have been happy since. You mumbled something before about wanting to have a choice, and I get it, Gracie. Better than you’ll ever understand. But unlike you, I was never lonely,” he explained calmly.
I closed my eyes.
“Until I was. Until I was on another continent and wondering what you were up to. Until I was in bed, by myself, and I didn’t like it,” he told me.
The urge to faint was right there in my heart but I held on to listen to him.
“I missed your three thousand questions and the way you hold my hand. I missed my little monster. Missed her a lot,” Alex admitted with a huff, like he couldn’t believe it but it didn’t bother him after all. “I was never going to leave you, but I needed to be sure, Gracie, of what we were going to be to each other. And once I was, I made myself think about you. How fair would it be for me, for my family, to take that kind of decision away from you?” he asked.