Total pages in book: 48
Estimated words: 46132 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 231(@200wpm)___ 185(@250wpm)___ 154(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 46132 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 231(@200wpm)___ 185(@250wpm)___ 154(@300wpm)
But then my over-taut mind begins to warp the darkness into impossible shapes.
I see Damian standing at an altar, wearing a suit the same color as his hair, his eyes lighting up in delight as the music welcomes me down the aisle, his smirk shifting into a true smile.
Get a freaking grip, I tell myself. You only just met the guy.
But it doesn’t feel that way.
Chapter Five
Damian
This is a first for me—having a throbbing hard on as I drive away from a job.
I try to take deep, slow breaths to calm myself down, but her natural scent is too close and all-consuming.
The way she sits is making me sneak looks at those thighs, my mind swimming with thoughts of grabbing them and massaging them, bending her over and tearing a hole in her tights and revealing her wet hot …
Get it together, I roar in my mind. You only just met the woman.
But it doesn’t feel like that, not one bit.
It’s not just my body rioting at the reality of her, either.
“I don’t have folks,” she said, and I felt a twinging in my chest that’s difficult to identify. I can only name it as an enhanced version of what Sparky makes me feel … human, perhaps.
Yeah, maybe this woman makes me feel human.
In the lights of the car, I see ridiculous vignettes, like this gorgeous dark-haired woman all sweaty and deliriously happy from childbirth, our offspring cradled to her ample breast and a wide smile on her heaven-sent face.
We did it, I imagine her saying. We really did it, Damian.
I try to tell myself to let her go, to drop her off at the nearest police station, but then my mind catapults into a future where another man tries to lay claim to her, and murderous fire surges through me.
I can never let that happens.
She fucking belongs to me.
“Where are you from?” I ask.
“Why do you ask?” she sasses.
Her eyes are dry now, but her cheeks still glisten with the memory of tears.
“Just making conversation,” I snarl. “No need to bite my damn head off.”
Maybe if I put up a wall of steeliness between us I won’t give in to this overwhelming hunger. That’d put the mother of all spanners into my plans, derailing the whole thing.
Get Sparky—head to the West Coast and start my life on the property there.
Meeting a woman with heavenly curves and hellish hot sassiness was not part of the damn plan.
“You’d think you’d show more gratitude after I saved your life,” I go on, unable to stop myself, my chest getting tight and my fists clenching tighter.
“Fair enough,” she says a moment later. “Thank you, Damian. I really am grateful. Do you think they’ve found his body yet?”
I glance at her briefly, taking in the luscious green of her eyes, wide and frantic as though she’s still living in a world of shock … maybe only now starting to climb out of it.
“What?” she murmurs. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
I turn back to the road. “Like what?”
She laughs, a low sweet sound, a sound I could listen to for a hundred years. “Like I’m some specimen on a freaking lab table and you’re examining me.”
No, Dakota, I want to say. You’re not a specimen. You’re a goddamn treat. And I don’t want you on a lab table, but I reckon it’ll do when you’re naked and the curvaceous beauty of your bare flesh is waiting for me to indulge in.
Grabbing those hips, sliding my hands up to the big fleshy globes of those breasts, sliding my hand down her belly and then her mound and feeling the slick wetness there …
Fuck, it’d be perfect.
“It’s just civilians don’t normally take stuff like this so lightly,” I say after a pause.
“I … I’ve seen people die before.”
“Oh,” I mutter.
“My parents,” she goes on in a rush. “When I was a kid somebody broke in and they killed them right in front of me and I saw the whole thing. And I guess then I sort of tried to harden myself. Maybe that’s why I always found it hard to make friends and … And anyway, I’m sorry. I’m oversharing. I’m just so tired. I hardly know what I’m saying. I’m sorry, Damian—”
“You have nothing to be sorry about,” I snarl fiercely. “Not with me, not ever.”
Stop, this is too damn much.
I let out a growling sigh and stare hard at the empty country road, telling myself that I won’t look at her again until I’m telling her she has to leave. I’ve got plans with Sparky, plans of solitude and isolation and forgetting about the rest of the world.
Just quiet. Just nothing.
I almost laugh at the thought.
To think that I could abandon her now is madness.
“I’m sorry about your parents,” I murmur. “I lost mine, too. When I was young.”