Total pages in book: 173
Estimated words: 169266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 846(@200wpm)___ 677(@250wpm)___ 564(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 169266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 846(@200wpm)___ 677(@250wpm)___ 564(@300wpm)
“Someone could see—” I start.
“Empty floor. So far.” He’s already shoving my knickers aside. “And I don’t care if they do.”
His fingers slide between my thighs, rough and searching.
“You’re soaked.” He sounds almost angry about it.
“It’s the adrenaline,” I say, doing all I can to stay focused on the wildness in his eyes and not on the drop beneath me.
“Sure it is.” He presses harder, and my head falls back against the glass. “You’re always lying.”
“And you’re always—” I lose the sentence when his fingers curl. “Fuck.”
“That’s the idea.”
Then spins me around so my chest and side of my face is pressed against the glass and he’s holding me from behind. I can see the crack getting larger, snaking out along the pane, and the empty conference room beyond that.
I hear something shift in his suit, the sound of a zip, and then he’s pushing his cock inside me, no gentleness here, just one hard thrust that pins me between his body and the window and punches the air out of my lungs.
I cry out, with want, with fear, with everything. He bites my neck in response, and reaches around, yanking down my tank top, my breasts spilling out. He pinches one nipple hard and then I’m squeezed against the window again.
God help me, the only thing really holding me up is his cock.
His hips move in sharp, punishing strokes, and I take it—take him—because this is the only language we have left. The only honest thing between us. He’s full of rage and I’m furious and we’re both so fucking broken that this is the best we can do.
“Look down,” he growls against my ear.
I do, past my toes, down to the street far below. The cars are toys. The people are specks. We’re suspended against nothing, held up by his power alone, and he’s so deep inside me I can’t tell where I end and he begins.
“This is what you do to me.” His voice is ruthless, his teeth nipping at my neck. “You make me insane. You make me dangerous. I dropped you off a building because I don’t believe a fucking word you say anymore, and I still—” He thrusts harder, and I moan, the crack in the glass getting longer. “I still couldn’t let you fall.”
“So don’t pretend this is love.”
“I’m not.” His teeth graze my shoulder. “This is something worse.”
Whatever it is, he fucks me like he’s trying to excise something, like if he can just get deep enough, he can carve out whatever poison I’ve put in him. And I let him—impaled against the cracking glass, meeting every brutal thrust because I’m trying to do the same thing.
Burn it out. Fuck it out. Get free of this thing that won’t let either of us go, that has ensnared us like two hunters caught in the same damn trap.
“I could have let you fall,” he pants. “I should have.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.” His chin drops on my shoulder, eyes squeezed shut like it all hurts. “I never fucking can.”
I come first—sudden and vicious, coming so hard I see stars, and feel him follow a moment later. He buries himself deep and groans against my neck, and for a few seconds we’re just two people destroying each other in the night air.
When it’s over, neither of us moves. We hover.
His breath is ragged against my neck. The glass is cracked and cold against my breasts and he’s still inside me and I have no idea what any of this means.
He pulls out slowly, and I feel the loss like something being torn away.
Neither of us speaks.
He carries me back to the roof silently, two ghosts who just tried to break each other and failed, and carefully sets me down on solid concrete.
I fix my knickers. Put my boobs back into my singlet.
I do my best not to look at him because I’m not sure if it will ruin me or not.
“Mia—” he starts.
“Save it,” I tell him. “There’s nothing else we can really say to each other right now.”
So we stand there in the dark, breathing, bleeding from wounds neither of us can see.
Nothing fixed. Nothing forgiven.
Just alive, somehow.
For now.
CHAPTER 36
MIA
Vanguard takes me back down the elevator and to his penthouse and sits me down on the couch, wrapping a large, plush blanket around me. The air in here is blissfully warm but I’m not sure when I’ll stop feeling the cold from outside, the way it’s settled into the marrow of my bones. Then he steps back, putting distance between us.
It kinda feels like I had a near death experience. No, bugger that, it feels like I did die and somehow he brought me back to life and now I’m inside his penthouse and it’s like learning to be a human all over again.
He nearly killed me.