Total pages in book: 117
Estimated words: 114492 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 572(@200wpm)___ 458(@250wpm)___ 382(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 114492 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 572(@200wpm)___ 458(@250wpm)___ 382(@300wpm)
“Could have been smoke and mirrors—you never know.” He pushes more wet hair off my face. “You just kicked Jen’s ass so fucking hard. Oh my God. You absolutely decimated that girl.”
“I should have warned you—I’ve got a bit of a temper.”
“You did warn me. I just didn’t realize you meant you were a trained fucking assassin. Jesus.”
“I shouldn’t have done that to her. She’s a bitch, but she didn’t deserve that. It’s just that I was just so effing—”
“Jealous,” he says, finishing my sentence for me. “Just so effing jealous.”
I exhale and nod. “Yeah.”
He holds my face in his hands. “Well, you’re in luck. Because I happen to be a sick fuck and I thoroughly enjoyed watching you go batshit crazy with jealousy over me.”
“You did?”
“Oh yeah,” he says. “It gave me a raging hard-on, you might have noticed.”
I grin. “Oh, you had a hard-on? Hmm. I didn’t notice.”
He laughs. “Or maybe I just had a raging hard-on from ogling your smokin’ hot body. Jesus, Kat. You’re fucking incredible.”
“You’re pretty incredible yourself,” I say.
There’s a long beat.
“You still sticking with your stupid jihad?” he asks. “Or are you ready to let me take you back to our hotel and make all your dreams come true?”
“Jihad,” I say, swallowing hard. Damn, it pains me to say that. I wish he could understand what I’m really saying to him. At this point, it’s not about his application anymore. I want him. And I won’t settle for getting anything less than of all of him now.
Josh looks genuinely disappointed. “It’s not fair, you know. You don’t have an application to give me in return.”
“If I did, I’d give it to you,” I say.
He mulls that over for a moment. “I thought you only get jealous with boyfriends.”
Something in the way he just said that makes my heart race. “It was the truth when I said it. I’m sorry. This has never happened to me before.”
He touches the cleft in my chin for a long moment and I close my eyes at his sensuous touch.
After a moment, he removes his finger and slowly licks the indentation in my chin with a languid flicker of his tongue.
My knees buckle and my clit zings. I stick out my tongue, yearning for his warm tongue to intertwine with mine, but he pulls back. I let out a shaky breath. Holy shitballs, that was sexy.
“You hungry?” he asks softly. “Suicide-bombing can really work up an appetite.”
I shift my weight. Blood is flooding into my crotch. “Yeah, I’m starving.”
He looks at his watch. “We’re supposed to meet up with our Ocean’s Eleven crew in just a few hours—no sense sleeping before then, right? Let’s go back to our hotel and grab some breakfast, maybe gamble a little—we can crash after we meet with everyone.”
“Yeah, sounds good. ‘Sleep when you’re dead,’ right?”
“‘Go big or go home,’” he says, smirking.
“YOLO.”
Josh touches the cleft in my chin again, his sapphire eyes sparkling at me. “That’s right, baby—you only live once. So don’t fuck it up.” He pauses, his eyes looking deeply into mine. “What am I gonna do with you, Kat?” he whispers. “Huh? You’re a goddamned runaway train.”
I shrug and wipe my eyes. “I know. I’m off the tracks.”
He exhales softly and slips his hand in mine. “Come on, Madame Terrorist. Let’s get you back to the hotel and get some food into you before you pass out—or, God forbid, injure some more innocent bystanders.”
Twenty-One
Josh
Kat’s drunk but beautiful head is resting on my shoulder as we sit in the back of the taxi, heading to our hotel. I grab her hand and look out the window at the pre-dawn zombies shuffling down The Strip. My eyelids are beginning to feel heavy. My head is beginning to pound. And yet I feel like I’m walking on air, sitting here next to Kat, holding her hand.
“Who’s Grace?” Kat suddenly asks.
“What?”
“The tattoo on your chest. You’ve got the dragon on you arm, so I can only assume the tattoo on your chest is the ever-regrettable ex-girlfriend-tattoo.”
“‘Grace’ isn’t a person,” I answer smoothly, like I always do. I don’t give a shit how “honest” I said I’d be with her—I don’t bare my soul about that particular tattoo to anyone, and certainly not to a woman I’m interested in. If Emma taught me anything, it’s that laying myself completely bare to a woman is a colossally bad idea. “It’s a reference to the phrase, ‘But for the grace of God go I,’” I continue. “It’s just a simple way of reminding myself to be humble and not take anything for granted—something I regularly need to be reminded of, it seems.”
She absorbs that for a moment. “No ex-girlfriend tattoo anywhere?”
“Nope.”
“You’ve got ex-girlfriends, though, right?”
“Sure.”
“Anything that lasted more than a month?”
I scoff. “My longest relationship lasted three years.”