Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 94181 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 471(@200wpm)___ 377(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94181 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 471(@200wpm)___ 377(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
“Okay,” I said.
He looked at me for a long moment. His brown eyes held mine with a steadiness that felt different from the commanding gaze he used on set. I watched his jaw work, the muscles tightening and releasing as if he were chewing on the words before letting them out.
“I’ve been doing this for eleven years,” he said. “Training girls. Working with the Institute and Selecta. I’ve maintained control through all of it. Every scene. Every girl. Every situation. Control is what I am. It’s the foundation of everything I do.”
He paused. His hand had moved from my temple to my jaw, his thumb resting against the hinge. I could feel a faint tremor in his fingers. Master Paul’s fingers were trembling against my face.
“Something is happening with you that I don’t have control over,” he said. “And I need you to know that. Because you deserve honesty, and because…” He exhaled. The breath seemed to cost him something. “Because I’m falling for you, Anne. Not for the trainee. For you. The girl who asked me to turn her disobedience into a scene because she wanted to understand herself. The person who looked up at me with her hands shaking and offered me something real.”
I felt the ripples of his words spreading outward through my ribcage, then reaching into my face, heating my cheeks and bringing tears to my eyes. For a moment I couldn’t breathe. I could only lie there in his enormous bed in his cedar-scented robe and feel the full, transformative weight of what this man had just said to me.
He watched me with an expression that combined the vulnerability I’d glimpsed a moment ago with something fiercer—a bracing, as if he’d prepared himself for the possibility that I would pull away.
“Sir,” I started, and then stopped, because the name felt wrong for this moment. Too formal. Too bound by the roles we occupied in the studio. “Master… Paul,” I said instead, and his name in my mouth without the title tasted different—intimate and strange and terrifyingly real. “Master, I… I think I’m already…”
My voice cracked. The tears came—not the tears of humiliation or confusion that had become so familiar, but something simpler. The tears of a twenty-year-old girl who had walked into a corporation a few weeks ago looking for a paycheck and had found something she didn’t have a name for.
“I think I’m already in love with you,” I whispered.
The words left me and hung in the amber light of his apartment, and I felt simultaneously terrified and weightless, as if confessing this had removed some essential ballast and now I might float away. My hands found each other in my lap, that familiar desperate grip, and I looked at him through blurred vision and waited for whatever came next.
What came next was his mouth on mine.
He kissed me, softly and slowly. His lips moved against mine with a tenderness that seemed to contradict everything I knew about his hands, and one of those hands cradled the back of my head, fingers threading through my tangled blonde hair, holding me as if I were something that might break.
I tasted salt—my tears, I realized—and I kissed him back with everything I had, which wasn’t much. I was a twenty-year-old girl who’d never been kissed like this, who’d only been kissed by Kevin in the back of his car and by Paul the suitor on camera, and neither of those things had prepared me for the experience of being kissed by a hyper-dominant alpha male who’d just told me he was falling for me.
When we separated, his forehead rested against mine. Our breath mingled. His thumb stroked the nape of my neck.
“This complicates things,” he said, and the ghost of a smile touched his lips.
“It does?” I asked.
“Yes. But I don’t care,” he said, and kissed me again.
The second kiss lasted longer. Deeper. His tongue found mine and the tenderness began to shade into something warmer, something with more weight. I felt my body responding the way it always responded to him—the heat building between my legs, the nipples tightening against the soft fabric of the robe, the slow, liquid loosening of every muscle south of my navel. My hips shifted on the mattress, pressing toward him, that involuntary tilt that my body performed in his presence like a compass needle finding north.
And then—I don’t know how to explain what happened next except to say that it rose up from somewhere deep inside me, from the same place that had produced five orgasms in the dark and the courage to ask for the confession scene and the word bitch sobbed into the sheets while he fucked me. A need so specific and so consuming that it bypassed thought entirely and arrived at my lips as words before I’d consciously formed them.