Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
In exchange, I tell him about Colorado. I tell him about my mother and how she’s only texted me once since I got here. I tell him about my stepfather Frank and how much I dislike him. I tell him how much I miss my father. I tell him about Ryan, just enough that he knows I’m recently divorced. I tell him I miss having a dog—I had one with Ryan—Princess Buttercup—but she died a few years ago from kidney disease and I haven’t had the heart to adopt another since. I tell him I haven’t laughed properly in a year and I think I’m laughing again, here, today.
As we talk, the light goes amber, then bruised, then dim. The candles do more of the work. He gets up at some point and lights more of them around the room, moving from sconce to sconce with a long taper. The fire is built up. The room is warmer than my cottage has ever been.
I look around, trying to see if there are any actual lights. There is electricity in this place, isn’t there?
He comes back but he doesn’t sit down, just stares at me for a long second until I squirm a little in my seat.
“Iris,” he announces, as if he’s about to announce something serious. “I would like to take you upstairs.”
I don’t pretend not to know what he means.
“All right,” I say in a small voice, that apprehension coming back.
He leads me out of the room, across the front hall, and up a stone spiral staircase I’ve not been on before, the steps worn in the middle from centuries of feet. At the top of the stairs is a long corridor with doors on either side. He leads me to the one at the very end and opens it.
It reveals a massive bedroom with a very high ceiling. The bed is a four-poster of dark wood, hung with heavy curtains in the same deep red as the velvet blanket downstairs. There is a fire in the small fireplace, already going. There are candles lit, as if they were waiting for us, and a long window with the bay outside it, the late dusk just visible through the leaded glass.
He closes the door behind us then turns me toward him. He cups my face in both hands and I’ve never felt so dainty and small.
“Foxglove?”
I swallow hard. “Uh huh,” I squeak.
“Tell me what you want.”
He’s going to make me spell it out? “I told you yesterday,” I say.
“Tell me again.”
So he is going to make me spell it out.
I take in a deep breath. “I want you.”
“Aye.”
“All of you,” I add.
More than just getting finger-banged in a forest.
He tilts his head, as if thinking something through.
“You’ll have what I can give you tonight.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I will have my hands on you and my mouth on you in a bed for the first time, foxglove. It means I will make you come for me until you can’t anymore. It means I will not yet take all of you, because I am keeping that for a day that hasn’t come yet.”
My brows go up. “Why not?”
“Because there are still things you don’t know about me.”
Things? Oh, just things? How about mostly everything?
“Okay, so tell me them now.”
“No,” he responds, somewhat firmly. “Not now. Tonight you are mine in the ways I can have you. The rest is for tomorrow.”
I should push him and make him tell me. I shouldn’t let him put my body in his bed without telling me what he’s been waiting to tell me.
But I don’t push him, because I am a horny fool, and because the idea of his hands and mouth all over me reduces me to those two bumbling brain cells again.
I let him kiss me instead.
The kiss is long and slow and undoing. He has me in his bedroom, with the bed behind me, and he’s going to take his time. He undresses me piece by piece—the camisole, my bra, the pants, my underwear. He kisses along my skin where it becomes bare, then folds each thing as he takes it off me, setting them down on a side table. Eventually, I’m totally buck naked and he’s still fully dressed. Just like last night, before I got in the water. But unlike last night, while I do feel on the spot, I don’t mind him looking so much.
And he looks. He takes his time and my skin erupts in gooseflesh where his heated gaze has been.
“You are unfairly lovely,” he murmurs, his eyes flicking over me.
I make a whimpering noise, my cheeks and chest flushing.
“You need to take your clothes off,” I manage to say.
“In a minute.”
“Now. You’ve seen me naked like this twice now and I’ve not seen you.”
“Oh, but you have seen me naked,” he jokes with a small curve to his lips. “With binoculars of all things.”