Total pages in book: 164
Estimated words: 156728 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 784(@200wpm)___ 627(@250wpm)___ 522(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 156728 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 784(@200wpm)___ 627(@250wpm)___ 522(@300wpm)
He scowled, unable to catch his breath. “You’re not listening, Daisy. Beneath the velvet curtains and champagne, I’m a predator. I’ve built empires by stealing power from giants. I’m ruthless. Damaged. You can’t fix me.”
“Jack, I don’t want to fix you. I want to love you.” Her voice pitched as tears streamed down her cheeks. “Don’t you see?”
“No. I can’t possibly see how someone like you could love someone like me.”
She caught his hand and flattened it to her chest. Her pulse beat rapidly against his palm. “Do you feel that?”
He nodded.
“That’s my heart. If you break it, Jack, you would also be killing something pure and beautiful inside of me. And that would haunt me more than any other agony. I’d have to live with it forever, knowing you were here, alone, when you could have just as easily been with me.” Her grip tightened. “Is that what you want?”
He swallowed, trying to beat back the riotous current she woke inside of him, but it was too strong. “I just want you to be happy.”
“Then make me happy, Jack. I want you.”
The words struck him with the force of something physical, settling deep inside his chest where they rearranged the order of everything he believed himself to be.
“You want…me?” He searched her face for doubt, for the faintest tremor of uncertainty, and found none.
“Yes!”
He didn’t wait. Didn’t give her the chance to take back her words. His lips crushed to hers, sealing her confession with unrestrained acceptance.
“I want you, too.” He kissed her again. “So much, it pains me.” His hand slid behind her neck, fingers threading into her hair, and he pulled her into him with a hunger that no longer needed permission to exist.
Not the way he kissed her at The Preserve, weighted with apology and grief. He kissed her the way a man kisses a woman when language has exhausted itself, and the only vocabulary left is touch.
She made a sound against his mouth, something between a gasp and a sigh, and her fingers curled into the lapel of his robe. The thin silk parted under her grip, exposing the hollow of his throat where his pulse hammered so violently she could feel it against her knuckles.
Jack stood without breaking the kiss, drawing her up with him. Her purse clattered to the stone. The letter drifted under the table. Neither of them looked down.
He gathered her against his chest in a single motion that stole the breath from both of them. Her legs hooked around his waist, tight and secure. Her arms looped around his neck as her lips found the underside of his jaw, pressing warmth into his skin.
“Take me to bed, Jack.”
He carried her through the glass doors, into the cool interior. Sunlight filtered through stained glass, gold, and sapphire.
Her breath teased his throat as his bare feet moved soundlessly over marble, through the vestibule with its Art Deco sconces and geometric inlay, past the corridor where Myrtle’s herbs perfumed the air from the kitchen.
The staircase curved upward, and Jack took it without slowing, his arms tightening around her as the landing opened into the second-floor corridor. She weighed nothing and everything. She was the lightest burden he would ever carry and the heaviest truth he would ever hold.
His bedroom door was already open. Pale morning light filled the room through tall windows dressed in ivory linen, the curtains stirring in a cross breeze that smelled of cut grass and the distant salt of the sea. The bed was wide and simply made, cream sheets pulled taut over a dark walnut frame with clean geometric lines. No canopy. No crimson draping. Nothing that resembled a cage.
He set her down at the foot of the bed, and the loss of her warmth against his chest registered like a wound. She stood before him in bare feet, having kicked off her shoes somewhere between the garden and the stairs, and the sight of her stripped the remaining air from his lungs.
Faded jeans worn soft at the knees. A white t-shirt that clung to the modest curve of her breasts. No armor. No pretense. Just Daisy, standing in his bedroom with her heart racing visibly in the hollow of her throat.
He gave her a split second to change her mind before closing the distance. She pulled the tie of his robe. Silk whispered and slid down his arms, pooling at his feet in a dark puddle.
The morning air kissed his bare torso, finding every scar, every ridge, every damaged inch of him, and, for once, he didn’t feel the need to hide. Her gaze moved over him, unhurried, tracing the terrain from his heaving shoulders to the bulge of his black swim trunks. When her gaze returned to his, the fierce desire he saw in her eyes made his stomach flip and clench.