Total pages in book: 167
Estimated words: 157162 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 786(@200wpm)___ 629(@250wpm)___ 524(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 157162 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 786(@200wpm)___ 629(@250wpm)___ 524(@300wpm)
“What can I say?” I shrugged. “I’m okay with my woman being successful. Powerful. Now get the fuck off my property.”
He watched me for a long beat, smiling and putting his hands in his pockets before he turned and leisurely walked away.
I knew that the lock I clicked on my front door wouldn’t keep him out if he planned on coming in. But my father had given me a lot of things, had taught me a lot of things, and one of those was how to take measure of a man, if that’s what you could call Jasper Hayes.
I figured he wouldn’t go straight to violence, to using brute strength. And I dismissed my earlier suspicion of him being involved in the shooting. No, that was too simple for that kind of man. This was a man who waited, who toyed with his prey. He had it in his head that he could coax Calliope into his web, back to his side then taunt me with that.
Yet I knew her better than him, despite their history. He only knew her darkness. I knew her in the sunshine.
My breathing was back to normal by the time I walked into my bathroom, eyes skimming down Calliope’s bare back, exposed in a silk nightgown that dipped almost to the small of her back.
I knew it was silkier than any fabric I’d bought. She had expensive, luxurious things, and I fucking loved her in them. Not as much as in my tee but a close second.
She was dabbing cream on her face. Another thing I loved, all sorts of fancy glass bottles cluttering every available surface in my bathroom. Her making herself at home. Because this was her home. I was her home.
“That was a long trash trip.” Calliope met my eyes in the mirror.
Despite the events of the night, what she’d revealed—broken pieces of herself she’d been expertly hiding—she looked relaxed. Her hair tumbled down her back, her face free of makeup, exposing the freckles that were becoming more pronounced with the warmer weather and the time she spent outside. In the sunshine.
I’d vowed to myself to never lie to her, to never deceive her, and I kept my promises. “Was some kind of scavenger, trying to weasel in. Had to take care of it.”
It wasn’t a lie.
She shook her head, dipping her fingers into a glass tub of some kind of cream before slathering it on her arms. The floral scent filled up the small space.
“Better you than me,” she muttered.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Much better me than you.”
An hour later, she was sleeping in my arms. Though she seemed so much bigger in stature—something I’d never say to her face, lest she misunderstand it—when the sun was shining and she was wearing heels, being Calliope Derrick, it was only in the darkness where I realized how petite she was.
How delicate.
Her bone structure, her nose, her wrist bones. I traced the skin that was red from Jasper’s fucking hands being on it. She was never soft for him. She’d never curled against his chest, hair splayed over his shoulder as she mewed faintly in her sleep. Because if she had, he would never have even dreamed of marking that milky skin, of harming her.
My brain wouldn’t shut down.
The Russian Mob…
I ground my teeth together, thinking of how Calliope had said it. The way she said everything else. In a cool, even, self-assured tone. That tone had made my cock twitch on the dock when I first saw her, waving papers in my face, in those high heels, that hair, the fucking suit. Yeah, the power she carried around turned me the fuck on.
But what happened earlier wasn’t that. I knew her well enough now to recognize that she was clutching on to that veneer of power with her fucking fingernails. Maybe someone else might not have caught the catch in her breath, the way sweat beaded on her upper lip. The tightness to her shoulders.
Listening to her, I’d battled to control my own reactions. Because I knew any small response would have had her shrinking back, putting up her defenses, shrouding the truth.
And fuck, part of me might’ve wanted that. The cowardly part of me might’ve been tempted to let her do that. To sanitize whatever might’ve come next because I wasn’t brave enough to hear what the goddamn Russian Mob did to my woman.
I’d had to remind myself that she’d been brave enough to survive it, that she was brave enough to tell me all of that while standing in her power like she had on the dock. Like she had each time she walked into the room since I’d known her.
So I’d weathered it.
I listened to her tell me that she was beaten half to death. That she was raped.
That she hadn’t called the police, no ambulance, that she stitched herself up in her bathroom, with broken fingers. I’d resisted the urge to snatch her hand into mine, to inspect the slight crookedness of her middle finger that I’d noticed but never in a million years had thought would have such a sinister history.