Total pages in book: 224
Estimated words: 215705 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1079(@200wpm)___ 863(@250wpm)___ 719(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 215705 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1079(@200wpm)___ 863(@250wpm)___ 719(@300wpm)
I inhale and try to process what just happened. He didn’t know but he wasn’t sorry. He isn’t sorry. I repeat those words in my head about three times and my emotions land on anger. I charge after him, reaching the edge of a wide living room with cream-colored furnishings, Reid’s jacket and tie lying on the couch that faces a wall of curtains, of which one flaps in the wind, indicating an open door. I kick off my heels and follow him, exiting to a wooden porch overseeing the inky-black ocean waves crashing in the distance. Reid stands with his back to me, his hands on a wide wooden railing, the muscles of his broad shoulders bunched beneath his shirt.
I close the space between us and I dip beneath his arm and step between him and the railing. “You aren’t sorry?” I challenge.
“No,” he says. “I’m not sorry.”
“You say I’m going to hate you.”
“You will,” he says. “Maybe it’s already starting.”
“Maybe you’re trying to push me there. Maybe that avoids the relationship side of this. Maybe you want to make it happen. Is that it? You want me to get on to the hate so you can just fuck me? So you can backtrack all the rest of the talk and—”
His fingers tangle in my hair. “I don’t want you to hate me,” he bites out. “I dread the day you hate me, woman, but I can’t change who I am or what I’ve done. It’s already done.”
“I’m not asking you to change who you are.”
“Because you don’t know who I am, and I keep telling myself to walk away before you do.”
“Then I’m right,” I say. “You just want to push me to hate. You want a reason to walk back—”
“I don’t want to walk back anything,” he says, his fingers tightening in my hair, “and this isn’t just fucking.” His mouth closes down on mine, his tongue licking into my mouth, devouring me, consuming me. “How do I taste now?”
“Angry.”
“I am angry,” he says. “And I’m not hiding from that.”
“Why are you angry?”
“Because the hate will come and I can’t stop it. Because no part of me is not right here with you, Carrie. What about you?”
“I’m here,” I whisper, but I don’t say more. I can’t. He’s already kissing me again, as if he’s testing that claim of “I’m here” on my tongue, on his lips, turning me to press me against the wooden railing, his hand sliding around my hip to cup my backside. “You’re never all here with me,” he says. “You always hold back and that’s not good enough anymore. If this has to end, you’re mine until it does. You’re mine now.”
I don’t push back against that claim of ownership. I welcome it in a way I didn’t believe I was capable of welcoming such words. His mouth closes down on mine, the taste of him demanding and possessive, but there is also regret and the certainty of “the end” that I don’t want to exist. I want to drive that piece of his emotions away. I need to drive it away and I’m not sure I have ever been as aroused in my life. “This time is hard and fast, baby,” Reid says, his lips finding my ear, his hand caressing my breast over my silk blouse. “I need to be inside you.”
“Yes,” I whisper, and already he’s turning me to face the pole, forcing me to catch my weight with my hands, and already he’s unzipping my skirt and dragging it down my hips, right along with my panties, not ripping them away this time. I don’t even care that I’m outside, on a beachfront, naked from the waist down but for my thigh highs. I just want Reid and when his arm wraps my waist and he lifts me, kicking away the material, I turn easily in his arms, eager to feel him next to me. Eager for his mouth on mine again. Hungry for more, so much more, and I’m not sure it will ever be enough.
Nothing is ever enough with this man and yet I fear the day that it’s too much, and that has me tugging at his shirt, trying to drive away anything but the here and now.
Chapter forty-one
Carrie
Iwant Reid inside me and that’s exactly where this is headed, hard and fast fucking, but some part of me pushes back, not on being owned by this man, but at the idea that I don’t own him. That’s the control issue. That’s what I’ve been trying to avoid with Reid, but it’s not about power. It’s about him letting me in, him letting down that stone wall, and while sex isn’t the way either of us owns each other, it feels like a good starting place. It was our starting place.