Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 76953 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76953 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
My heartbeat was fluttering.
My belly kept flipping over and over.
This felt like the bravest, most reckless thing I’d ever done. Yet so, so right.
Sucking in a steadying breath, I reached Perish’s door. Then I paused, telling myself that if the knob didn’t turn in my hand, I would turn around and go back to the basement; I would take it as a sign from the universe to move on.
But when my hand closed around it, it turned.
My heart skipped.
Then I moved inside, wincing as the door creaked, then carefully closed and locked it behind me.
One weird quirk about the clubhouse is that the bedrooms of the patched brothers had no windows.
I figured it was because the clubhouse had once been a repair garage. And when Uncle Reign’s father had started converting the place, he didn’t want to put in windows because the lack of them made the club safer.
So as I moved inside, the darkness was nearly complete.
The only light came from an alarm clock glowing from the nightstand.
Luckily, the basement had been dark too, so my eyes adjusted pretty easily, and I could see the massive form of Perish on the bed.
No blanket.
No shirt.
Just sinfully low-slung sleep pants.
Nerves sparked—little pricks on the skin. And my belly flip-flopped.
But I didn’t let myself retreat out of uncertainty.
I put one foot after another until I reached the foot of the bed.
Then, mustering up all my courage, I climbed up on the bed and crawled up over Perish’s body.
“Baby…”
Perish’s voice was a rough rumble.
It washed over me, making a shiver move down my spine.
I leaned downward, pressing a kiss to his hip, loving how his breath sucked suddenly in at the barely-there touch.
Wanting more of it, I moved across to kiss the other.
When I moved back to the center and ran my tongue up that delicious center line between his abdominal muscles, his body jolted as if he’d been shocked.
I kept moving upward, tracing each muscle, smiling at the way they twitched.
For a long moment, his hands stayed fisted at his sides, but as my tongue traced around one of his nipples, his hand slapped down on the back of my head, fingers curling in before relaxing.
Emboldened by his reaction—and the firm outline of his erection against my belly—I slid across his chest to tease some more before moving back to the center and up.
One of those delicious little growls escaped him as my lips kissed up the side of his neck.
His hand drifted down from my neck to my hip, then fell away.
“Gracie, we can’t—”
My heart seized, but I tamped down the urge to jump off the side of the bed, to take my bruised pride and hide in the basement, then insist someone drive me up to Hailstorm in the morning. Then, well, avoid Perish for the rest of my life.
I shifted up slightly to look down at his face, my hair falling like a curtain around us as we stared at each other for a moment.
“Are you rejecting me because you don’t want me?” I asked, stomach twisting at the vulnerability the words created. “Or because we’re not supposed to?”
“Baby,” he started, sounding pained. His hands lifted, both pushing my hair behind my ears, the touch impossibly gentle for such a big man. “I’m not rejecting you. Don’t think I’m even capable of that.”
I leaned my forehead against his, taking a deep breath. “No one has to know,” I told him.
“You don’t know how much I want that to be true.”
“It can be.”
“You’re a terrible liar.”
“Well,” I said, sitting back to smirk down at him, “I’m relatively sure no one is going to directly ask me if we had sex.”
“Fair,” he agreed. His hands seemed incapable of staying off me, moving to rest on my hips and tightening. “But…”
“Are you going to hurt me?”
“What? Fuck no.”
“Say mean things about me after we hook up?”
“Of course not.”
“That’s why the rules are in place,” I told him. Even though I had no idea if that was true. “If you’re not going to be a jerk afterward, and we are both acknowledging that this has to stay between us, and we are both consenting despite everything… why can’t we?”
“You’re making it hard to—” he started.
But he cut off when I readjusted my position until his cock was pressed against the juncture of my thighs.
“Not what I meant,” he said, shooting me a devilish little smirk.
“You can say no,” I said, rolling my hips.
“I really fucking can’t,” he said, breath going ragged.
His hands slipped from my hips to my ass, dragging me against him again and again. Until my head was thrown back and my little whimpers started to grow louder.
Perish sat up, one arm anchoring across my lower back, the other grabbing the back of my neck.
Then his lips were on mine.
Hard.
Hungry.
He caught my lower lip between his, sucking gently before adjusting the angle and devouring me.