Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
"Mia." A warning.
"Don't stop."
"This isn't—"
"Don't. Stop."
His mouth found the curve of her neck. Not a kiss. A surrender. His lips dragged up the column of her throat, slow and open and ruinous, and she couldn't think, could only feel the heat of his mouth and the grip of his hands and his body trembling against hers, actually trembling, like the control was costing him everything he had.
She gripped the front of his shirt. Her knees were gone. The kitchen counter was pressing into her back and she didn't remember moving but none of it mattered because his mouth was on her cheek now, tracing the line of it, and his chest was heaving, and she was making sounds she'd never made before, soft, broken things that she would've been embarrassed about if she'd had any brain cells left to spare.
His hand slid up her side. His thumb grazed the curve of her through the sundress, and the world went white.
"Oh—" She gasped. Her head fell back. Her hands flew to his shoulders, gripping hard enough to leave marks, and the tremor that ran through her entire body was visible.
He froze.
She felt it. The second of hesitation, the war playing out in the rigid set of his shoulders. He was going to pull back. He was going to stop, just as he'd stopped last night, just as he always stopped.
"Please." Her voice cracked. "Alexei, please—"
His hand closed over her.
The sound that came out of her wasn't a word. It was something raw and undone and desperate, and his teeth clenched at the sound of it, and his eyes when she met them were black.
"Tell me to stop." His voice was gravel. "Tell me to stop and I will."
"No."
His thumb moved. A slow, ruinous circle through the cotton, and she bit her lip so hard she tasted copper, and her hips pressed forward into his without her permission, and the groan that tore from his chest was the most honest sound she'd ever heard from him.
"I didn't—" He pressed his forehead against hers. His voice was wrecked. "I didn't plan this."
"I know."
"This changes everything."
"I know."
His other hand found the hem of her dress. His fingers grazed the bare skin of her thigh, and every nerve in her body caught fire.
"You're shaking," he murmured.
"So are you."
His teeth met. His fingers traced higher, slow, torturous, up the outside of her thigh, over her hip, along the curve of her waist beneath the dress. And everywhere he touched, her skin erupted, and the sounds she was making had become continuous now, small and urgent and begging.
His mouth was at her ear. "If you want me to stop—"
"I swear, Alexei, if you stop—"
His hand slid between her thighs.
Her whole body arched. A cry tore from her throat, sharp and startled, and her nails dug into his shoulders and her eyes squeezed shut and the world narrowed to nothing but the pressure of his hand and the heat of his body against hers and the ragged sound of him in her ear.
"Open your eyes." His voice was barely recognizable. "Mia. Open your eyes."
She did.
His face was inches from hers. His composure was in ruins. Eyes burning, a flush spreading across his cheekbones that she'd never seen before. He was wrecked. He was a man who had spent twenty-two years controlling everything in his world and had just lost control of the only thing that mattered.
"I've got you." His voice was barely a whisper.
And his fingers moved.
She broke.
It wasn't gentle. It wasn't gradual. It was a shattering, fast and blinding and so intense that her vision went dark and her body bowed against his and the sound she made was his name, just his name, over and over, and his arm was around her waist holding her up because her legs had stopped working entirely.
He held her through it. Both arms wrapped around her. His face buried in her hair. His chest heaving against hers, his body rigid with a tension that had nothing to do with control and everything to do with what he'd just done and what it meant and the fact that there was no wall in the world high enough to undo it.
When she came back to herself, she was pressed against his chest with her face in his shirt and his heartbeat hammering against her cheek. Her fingers were still curled in the fabric of his suit. Her legs were still trembling.
"Alexei," she murmured.
He didn't answer.
She pulled back. Just enough to see his face.
He was undone.
Not in the direction she'd feared. Not disgusted, not regretful. Devastated in the manner of a man who'd just proved something to himself that he'd been denying for years, and the proof was standing in his arms with her hair wrecked and her skin flushed and his name still on her lips.