Total pages in book: 140
Estimated words: 137144 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 686(@200wpm)___ 549(@250wpm)___ 457(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 137144 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 686(@200wpm)___ 549(@250wpm)___ 457(@300wpm)
Yeah, it was dirty, but at this point, she was covered in stuff anyway, so it didn’t matter. Then he pushed himself between her thighs, spreading her legs wide.
“Too much?” he murmured.
“I don’t . . . I’m not sure,” she said. “I’ve never done anything like this before. I’ve never really done much of anything.” She glanced away and swallowed heavily. “I mean, I’ve had sex, but it wasn’t . . . I didn’t . . .”
A surge of rage filled him as she hesitated over her words, and he grabbed hold of her chin, tilting her head back so he could stare down into her face.
“Was it Rick? Did he force you?”
Why hadn’t that occurred to him before now? If he’d forced her, he was a dead man.
Why the fuck hadn’t he taken her from him earlier? Had he left her in an abusive relationship? He felt bad enough about leaving her with her mother.
But this might be enough to rip away his control and send him spiraling.
“No! Ew, no, it wasn’t Rick. I hated him touching me. And, honestly, he didn’t seem that interested in me. No, I had boyfriends before Rick. A couple of them. Nothing really lasted that long. They were men that Mother approved of. The relationships were nothing to write home about. Certainly nothing that you see or read about in romance movies or books. But maybe that doesn’t really exist.”
“Oh, it exists, baby,” he said to her. “You just hadn’t found the right man. Before now.”
“That could be true, because the way I feel when you touch me is nothing like when they did.”
“And how is that?” he murmured as he moved his hands. One went up her back toward her head to hold it still. With the other, he grasped hold of her hip.
Her cheeks went bright red. Was she embarrassed? That was super cute.
“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me how it feels when I touch you.”
“I don’t think I can.”
“Sure you can. Tell me. If you want me to make you feel that way again, I need to know how it felt in the first place.”
He loved the way her lower lip dropped. It was wet and slightly swollen from where she’d been biting it.
Oh, they couldn’t have that, could they? He didn’t want her hurting herself. Cupping the side of her face, he ran his thumb over her lower lip. “Don’t bite this again,” he warned.
“What? Why not?”
“Because it hurts you and that’s unacceptable.”
“You’re very overprotective, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, I am. Of you. I’m overprotective, overly possessive, and definitely demanding.”
“Oh, yeah, I’ve seen that,” she said.
“I tried to keep myself under a tight rein in order not to scare you, Mo bhreáthracht. But now that you’ve told me you like me that way, that you need me that way, well, all bets are off.”
“It didn’t take you long to return to your caveman instincts,” she said dryly.
He just grinned. “Oh, it was hard work to keep my hands off you, to stop myself from giving orders. I was basically hiding from you in the end.”
“Hiding from me? What? Why?”
“So I wouldn’t be tempted to throw you on the bed and have my way with you. So I wouldn’t command you to sit there and eat more of your breakfast or dinner, or, better yet, feed it to you myself. Which is what I’m going to be doing from now on if you’re not eating.”
She groaned. “You know what? Maybe we could reverse things a little bit. You know how you said we could meet somewhere in the middle?”
“This is somewhere in the middle,” he said.
“Oh my God, you can be worse?” she asked.
He threw back his head and laughed. “You know that I can. Now, tell me how it makes your body feel when I touch you, kiss you, boss you around.”
“Those are not at all the same things,” she told him.
“I think you like when I take control, because you know everything I do is to protect you.”
“The last thing I want is for you to think I look at you and see my mother. I know you’re not like her at all.”
“That means the world to me, hearing you say that, baby. But if I do take things too far, you can slow them down. We can use the traffic light system.”
“The traffic light system?” she asked. “What does that mean?”
“It means that if I need to check in with you, then you can use a color. Or if you need to tell me something and you can’t get it out, you can just say the color. So, I might say to you, what color are you at right now? Green is you’re all good. Go ahead. Yellow would mean proceed with caution. Red is let’s stop everything. Do you get what I’m saying? Or if we were doing something and you started to feel uncomfortable, you might say yellow, and we’ll slow down and talk. You might be really uncomfortable, in pain, can’t go on, you yell out red and I stop.”