Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 95606 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 478(@200wpm)___ 382(@250wpm)___ 319(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95606 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 478(@200wpm)___ 382(@250wpm)___ 319(@300wpm)
But Chloe turned at the bar and gave him a look of conspiratorial mischief and winked. Then, slick as a cat burglar, she draped herself soundlessly over the bar, reached down, and landed on her feet again with a bottle in hand, sticking her tongue out and making the universal symbol for rock on. And his heart lodged permanently behind his jugular.
This was more than lust at first sight.
He didn’t have a name for the alternative yet.
But the night was young, right?
Chapter Two
Maybe I’m dreaming.
She’d taken a line drive tennis ball to the forehead and the paramedics were loading her onto a stretcher right now. She wasn’t really sitting in the lounge with the most casually intense man she’d ever met in her life. It was all an illusion.
But when she sat back down beside him and the cool, ultrasmooth leather kissed the backs of her thighs and he draped his arm along the back of the couch behind her, the warm shiver that snaked all the way down to her toes was very real.
Who was this man?
He’d made it known that he was interested in her, like really interested—and he did it without making her uncomfortable, which was not easy. At all. Especially considering his size. And his presence. His rough-edged charisma took up the entire room, let alone the couch. When she’d watched him stride confidently toward the valet earlier and stop to acknowledge his fan, he’d literally frozen Chloe in her tracks. Sig had accepted those compliments from the valet without any false humility, just an air of security. In himself, his abilities, who he was.
This man had grown into himself.
Had only the tiniest speck of self-doubt. She’d glimpsed it in his eyes when he looked around at the lavish lounge. When he’d registered the luxury of the leather as he sat down. That touch of humility had been so small she almost missed it, but there was something extremely attractive about it. The fact that this self-assured person seemed to find her equally compelling . . . it made her feel awake. And secure.
Excited.
Also, my goodness, he was a smoke show.
Something about the way he wore a T-shirt suggested he took it off multiple times a day. In his bedroom, in the locker room, prior to collapsing into sleep at midnight. Clothed was not his natural state. A shirt was a formality. He was six feet, some odd inches of athletically honed muscle, thick in some places, trim in others, and there was a hint of cockiness about him that tended to turn her off in other men, but not this one.
Perhaps because, unlike the men of her acquaintance, he’d earned it himself?
Without removing his attention from her, Sig took the bottle from her hands, unwound the wire from the neck, and popped the cork. Barely a sound escaped because he muffled it with his, wow, gigantic hands. Then, tossing a casual look toward the bar, he tipped the bottle to her lips, his golden brown gaze fastened to her mouth while she took the first sip. Two sips, three. She kept going because she enjoyed him quenching her thirst, the way he swallowed hard while looking at her throat.
Seriously, what in the Connecticut heck was happening here?
Her toes were curled in her sneakers, her thighs flexing involuntarily.
A pulse tick-tick-ticked at the base of her neck, in her wrists, in her chest—and it accelerated the longer they stared at each other.
Finally, he took the bottle from her lips and brought it to his own, gulping deeply and wincing at the taste.
“Not a fan?” Chloe asked, laughing.
“There’s no flavor,” he grunted. “It’s just a bunch of carbonation.”
“The bubbles are what make it a celebration.”
He reached forward, setting the bottle down on the low pink-quartz table in front of them, before leaning back into his manspread. “You let me know when you want more.”
Chloe dug the fingers of her right hand into the leather couch cushion, hoping to distract the rest of her body from the sudden onslaught of giddy heat. You let me know when you want more. She had no right liking that so much—the assumption that he would oversee her consumption of the drink. She didn’t need him to do that. But she . . . wanted him to?
Simply put, his honest brand of arrogance turned her on.
This was not the typical brand of trouble she looked for at the country club.
No, she specialized in . . . stolen liquor.
Playing harmless pranks.
Going topless in the spa.
Sig screamed Big Problem . . . and yet she continued to sit there, growing more and more fascinated as champagne bubbles zipped around her head and his heat surrounded her. “Do you like living in Boston? Is that where you grew up?”
“No, I’m from Minnesota. Just outside Minneapolis. Went to college in Michigan. But Boston has been home for six years. It’s . . . yeah, I guess I consider it my home now.”