Total pages in book: 174
Estimated words: 172061 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 860(@200wpm)___ 688(@250wpm)___ 574(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 172061 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 860(@200wpm)___ 688(@250wpm)___ 574(@300wpm)
A dark phantom that cast its shadow across the walls. Pure malice and intimidation while he still somehow managed to emit a softness underneath.
His footsteps were long and slow as he approached, and those hazel eyes raked over me as he sat down on the edge of the bed facing me.
A tiny groan left me at the warmth of the cloth as he set it on my belly.
“How wrong is it that I want to be stuffing this cum into your cunt rather than wiping it away? How wrong is it that I want to mark you with everything that I am?”
Shock rasped out of me at his crude words.
Okay, there wasn’t a whole lot of softness when it came to him.
That was clear enough.
But I felt the undercut. That brittle tenderness that he didn’t know what to do with.
Shower me with it, apparently, because then he murmured, “Don’t want to hurt you, Daisy. Terrified of it,” as he resituated my underwear and pulled down my shirt.
I pushed up to sitting, drawing one knee up. I angled myself so I was a little farther behind him, my chest pressed to his shoulder. My fingers brushed through the silky locks of his hair. Playing with the barely-there curl at the edge of his ear where his hair had gotten longer in the amount of time since we had been here.
“That didn’t feel like pain to me,” I whispered.
He grunted in return. “That’s what I want. To make you feel good. Treat you like a queen the way you deserve. But I’m afraid the only thing I’m going to do is drag my bad into your good.”
I scoffed. “Yet I’m the one who came to you because my psycho ex wants me dead? Concocted an entire plot to get you to marry me so you’d adopt my kids? Talk about baggage.”
My fingers slipped down to brush along his cheek, my palm settling on the stubble of his jaw.
Cupping him gently so maybe he could feel a little of what I felt when he looked at me.
Cared for.
Shielded and shrouded.
Desolation took over his features. “You witnessed what happened tonight.”
Fear rebounded. Tumbling through my insides and hauling me back into the nightmare. My guts sick with the idea of what could have happened. Sick with the thought of losing him.
“You protected us. That’s what I witnessed.” Dread twisted through my being. “Do you…do you think they’re related to Ethan?”
He gave a harsh shake of his head. “They were specifically sending a message to me.”
Confusion bound. “Who were they?”
His thick throat bobbed. “Not sure. They just implied that I should have known I wouldn’t get away with what I did.” He stalled before he pressed on, “Keep telling you I’m not exactly a good guy, Daisy.”
Maybe it was the first time I really believed it.
The first time I really believed that he might be involved in the sordid.
After today? After meeting his family? After what happened on our way home?
A tremble rocked through me.
“What exactly does that mean?”
He turned away like he was going to shut me down. Ignore the subject. Close himself off the way he’d done since I got here.
The gruff man so different from the boy I once knew.
But he was still the same person.
The same soul and light.
I recognized it as clearly as I recognized the flame that burned in me whenever he came near.
“Tell me what’s going on, Cash. Tell me who you really are.”
Regret billowed out of him. “I can’t let you go to that place, Daisy.”
Disbelief shot from my mouth. “Too late, because I’m already there. I’m already right here.”
I slid my hand around to his opposite cheek and drew his face in my direction.
Forcing him to look at me.
To see me.
To understand he was exactly what I’d been missing, the same as I would proclaim that I was what he was missing.
“You want to know who I am, Daisy? You really want to know who I am?” He clutched his left hand in a fist. The tattoo on the back with the stacked Ss and the dagger running through flexed and seemed to sharpen. That eye seeing too much, his secrets peeking through the flames that licked up his wrist and forearm from the torch.
All while I felt completely left in the dark.
“Yes.” I basically implored it.
Cash shot to his feet and crossed the room. He roughed both hands over the top of his head. Agony poured from his being.
A riptide that threatened to knock him from his feet.
“I’m a monster, Daisy. Keep trying to explain that to you, but you refuse to see it.” A war went down inside him, every intrinsic part at odds, and he looked to the floor before he returned his attention to me and ground out, “After I left West Virginia…”
My chest clutched in old misery as the horrors of that night stole the oxygen from the room.