Total pages in book: 114
Estimated words: 114820 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 574(@200wpm)___ 459(@250wpm)___ 383(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 114820 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 574(@200wpm)___ 459(@250wpm)___ 383(@300wpm)
He reached out, ran the backs of his fingers down her soft cheek, then he turned, threw his legs over the side of the bed and knifed out.
“Right, it’s important you listen,” he said into the phone as he walked to stand at the window. “I’m not yours to jerk around anymore, Jennifer.”
Another gasp.
“We divorced. We’re done. You made that plain by fucking another man in our bed. I didn’t want you after you took some other guy’s cock, and you didn’t fight it.”
“You didn’t fight it either,” she fired back.
“Is that what I was supposed to do?” he asked. “Beg you to come back to me when it was you fucking somebody who was not me?”
“We had a marriage, Rus, we had children.”
“Yeah, we did, so why did you fuck another guy?”
“Well, my husband wasn’t home to fuck so…”
“So? So you fucked another guy? So you, you, Jenn, put an end to our marriage by betraying it, and somehow it was on me to save it for you and our kids?”
There was silence from her end.
Yeah.
Fuck yeah.
“Do you hear yourself?” he pressed his advantage. “Do you know how fucked up that is? Christ, I loved you, Jenn. But that died instantly when you looked over his shoulder at me standing in the door to my own damned bedroom watching my wife get fucked. We’re divorced three years, I woke up with a woman next to me, you knew it, and threw a fit. What if I did to you what you did to me?”
“Rus, maybe—”
“Answer me.”
“What’s gotten into you?”
“I told you. Some sense. I felt so much guilt for not being everything you needed me to be, it escaped me that you weren’t what I needed either. You were demanding. You were unappeasable. And in the end, unforgivably cruel. I didn’t make you happy, and you didn’t make me happy, and we’re over. So why the fuck do you keep calling me?”
“I’m trying to protect our daughter.”
“No, you’re trying to lead me around by my dick. Take this in, Jenn, when you took his, you lost hold on mine, and you can’t have it back. Yeah?”
“You can stop being crude now, Rus.”
“You can stop calling me, Jennifer. The kids. That’s all we talk about. Are you listening?”
“Fuck you, Zachariah.”
Christ, she knew he hated that name.
“Right,” he bit off then ended the call.
He turned to Lucinda who was staring at him not with fear, or revulsion, but like she was proud of him.
So yeah, there was something happening between them.
Trial by fucking fire.
“A twenty-three-year-old girl came in yesterday and explained how she’d been gang raped by a guy she had a crush on when she was fifteen, and he invited his friends to the party. They didn’t do it once but came back repeatedly. She’s so fucked up by it, she might be in a position where the only way she can get pleasure from sex is to be raped. To test this theory, she set up a stranger danger scenario to get raped again. But it didn’t go down how she expected. She wasn’t raped. She was raped. She paid someone to rape her.”
“Rus,” she said quietly, her eyes melting, her beautiful face full of sympathy.
“That’s my job. That’s my life. That’s the shit I have to deal with. And that’s not the worst of it, Lucinda.”
“I know that.”
“Okay. You’re smart. You’re getting this. You know I mean to freak you. It sucks I gotta jump ahead when I haven’t even kissed you, but you’re into me. I’m way into you. And you need to know what you’re getting into with me.”
“We can remedy part of that now, honey, if you kissed me,” she invited.
And damn, sitting on her hip and propped up on her hand in his bed, she was inviting.
“No way, baby,” he whispered. “It’s not about morning breath. I’ve wanted to fuck you since I met you. Now you, in my bed, so damned beautiful, it wouldn’t stop at a kiss, and I got shit I gotta do.”
“Okay,” she murmured, the invitation still in her eyes.
He used her words of last night.
“Stop it.” And added, “Be good.”
She bit her lip.
Jesus.
She let him off the hook. “I cared about Brittanie a lot. You have to find who hurt her. I know what you do, Rus.”
“Okay,” he muttered.
“And I know this won’t help, but that was an outrageously serious turn on, listening to you make mincemeat of your ex.”
“It helps, but it doesn’t help. And that isn’t being good.”
“She deserved it.”
“You’re way into me too.”
“Yes,” she said simply. “I am.”
Well then.
Fuck it.
He went to her, pulled her to him, twisted to his back on the bed, and held her on top of him as he kissed her.
He didn’t experience morning breath.
She tasted musky and forbidden and fucking delicious.
And she might be queen of her domain, but she submitted totally when kissed.