Total pages in book: 87
Estimated words: 84635 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 423(@200wpm)___ 339(@250wpm)___ 282(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84635 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 423(@200wpm)___ 339(@250wpm)___ 282(@300wpm)
“What is it with you and breaking glass?” I asked.
“I will break everything you own until you annul this fucking marriage.”
“Enough,” I said.
“You don’t get to tell me when it’s enough, I—” She choked off her words when I picked her up and dropped her back on the bed. I followed her down, pinning her flat, holding her wrists above her head with one hand and covering her mouth with the other.
“Now is the time for you to shut your pretty fucking mouth and open your fucking ears. If you continue to fight me, then I will give your mouth something to work on.” She sank her teeth into the flesh of my hand, and I pulled back with a curse. I half expected to see blood.
“Shove your cock in my mouth, and I’ll bite it off.”
I pulled her off the bed, turned her around, and in seconds, I had her bent over my knee as I ripped her pants off.
My hand slammed down on her ass, and she screamed a stream of obscenities that would make a sailor blush. I spanked her again. She could swear and curse all she wanted; her body told a different story.
Her skin pinked for me. After the third spank, her muscles unclenched, and her hips rose ever so slightly to meet my palm.
“Are you ready to listen?” I asked after the tenth slap, when she finally stopped yelling and only whimpered.
She said nothing.
“I’m going to take care of you. I’m going to soothe your skin, then I’ll give you what you need, but you need to listen first.” I kept her bent over my thigh as I reached for the aloe lotion next to the bed and worked it into her hot skin.
“If I don’t?” She squirmed in my grip, and I smacked her ass again in warning.
“Then you’ll be over my knee until you can’t sit for a week, and instead of satisfying your cunt, I’m going to fuck your ass until you behave.” Her thighs clenched then her weight shifted.
She stopped fighting.
“Are you going to listen?”
“Fine,” she huffed as she slid off my lap and wrapped a corner of the blanket over her hips.
“I’ve told you that Jameson is alive and I helped him fake his death, but I haven’t told you the entire story.”
“Shocker.”
She opened her mouth to say more but I laid my finger over her lips and raised my voice to drown out whatever curse she was about to fling at me. “Pierce changed the rules of the game when he brought Madison into play. The thing is…I’ve never been a fan of losing.”
CHAPTER 54
MADISON
Pierce Worthington could ruin a woman in a hundred ways.
I was only just learning that tenderness was one of them.
Afterward, he held me against his chest…and talked.
Outside, Ravenscroft settled into evening. The deep groan of old timbers. The occasional knock of a shutter somewhere in a distant wing, the wind coming off the cliffs in long, cold pulls. The estate had a different feel after dark. Less stately. More strangely alive, as if it were watching us.
As I listened, it was odd to realize he didn't have anyone else to say these things to. I couldn’t quite grasp why he chose me to confide in.
"Did you and Jameson ever get along?" I asked, tracing the buttons on his shirt.
"When we were boys. Before either of us understood what the name Worthington meant." He was quiet for a moment. "There's a tree line at the back of the east garden. We used to race to see who could reach it first. He'd cheat every time. And I’d let him…I’d let him win. Every time.”
"What changed?"
"Our father started keeping score."
He said it the way someone mentioned the weather, but his jaw tightened, and his thumb stilled against my shoulder.
I didn't push. He'd given me more in that one sentence than I suspected he'd given anyone in years.
It wasn't until Tompkins came up to tell us dinner was served that I'd even realized how late it had gotten.
Pierce had dinner brought up to the Blue Room. A smaller table had been set up near the window.
Tall tapers in silver holders threw unsteady amber light across white damask, the cloth falling to the floor in heavy folds, its embroidered edge catching the glow.
At the center sat a small bouquet of dark roses, their petals just beginning to curl at the edges, releasing that particular thick sweetness of flowers past their peak. Not rotten, not quite, but edging toward it.
The Worthington china was ivory with a thin border of black. Mourning colors. I wondered if that was deliberate.
The silverware was heavy in my hand. The handles were engraved with the same mark worn into the china, smooth in the grip where a hundred years of Worthington hands had held them. How many of those dinners had involved plotting someone's downfall? Probably most of them.