Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 73240 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73240 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
“Fuck this,” he ground out around the lump in his throat. “I’m leaving.”
Forsythe went stone-still. “Where do you think you are going?”
“Out. Nobody needs me here anyway, right?” Ash glared at Forsythe. Everything inside him ached with an awful and pulling tension that felt like it would snap and unravel him into nothing but a pathetic pile of threads. He turned away, yanking at the door. “So is it your fucking business where I go?”
No man as large as Forsythe should move as quickly as he did. One moment Ash was pulling at the door—and the next Forsythe had rounded the desk. His gloved hand covered Ash’s, stilling it on the handle, pushing the door firmly closed.
And holding it there, as Forsythe braced his hand against the door over Ash’s head, pinning the door in its frame and trapping Ash between a wall of slate and a wall of man so overpowering and intimidating that his shadow turned the glassy light of the sun-filled room into darkness.
“It is entirely my business,” Forsythe bit off, pinning Ash with a fierce look. “How do you think I knew the entirety of your history and dilemma without being told?” The gaze that raked over Ash was harsh, scoring. “You are constantly tarnishing your family’s reputation in the papers. You have been notorious since you returned from boarding school and appeared in the public eye—even more since your father’s sudden illness. What do you think it would do for your family’s standing if you were to be seen carousing about with your…gyrating paramours with your father in his current state and his business affairs unattended?”
“I don’t care!” Ash shot back, breathing in great, hoarse, heaving gasps that he wouldn’t let turn into sobs. This fucking asshole—this asshole crowding him, acting like Ash was supposed to obey him like some fucking child, talking to him like this when he just…he just…
He hadn’t even had time to hurt before he was thrown into this.
He hadn’t even had time to cope with the world falling down around his ears before everyone was waiting for him to put it back together, and judging if he placed so much as one stone out of place in the million stones it took to made an empire.
Gulping back another harsh breath, he glared at Forsythe. “Is it so fucking wrong of me to want a distraction?”
Forsythe’s eyes narrowed. He studied Ash in measuring silence, before inclining his head, then straightening, his hand falling away from the door. He slipped his fingers under the hem of one glove and peeled it off precisely, revealing a long, angular hand with crude knuckles and a certain brutish grace and finesse to it.
“Very well,” he said—then caught the fingertip of the second glove in his teeth, his stern, firm-lipped mouth moving against the white fabric as he tugged the glove away from his other hand.
Confusion roiled in Ash’s gut. His gaze darted from Forsythe’s eyes to his mouth, those hands, then back again. “…what?”
“Since male attention is the distraction you desire,” Forsythe replied calmly, “I shall oblige.”
Neatly, meticulously, he tucked his gloves into his suit coat pocket.
Then captured Ash’s face in the heated coarseness of palms worn work-rough and capable, tilted his head up, and leaned down to claim his mouth in the hard and undeniable command of those cruel and unsmiling lips.
Where Forsythe’s words were ice, his mouth was fire, burning and wild—and Ash went hot in a trembling flush from his fingertips to the twisting breathless depths of his stomach, burning in a liquid wash as if he’d plunged into a sea of molten flame. That searing ocean stole the air from his lungs and swallowed him deep, in over his head before he’d even known he was drowning.
Forsythe took command of his lips the same way he’d taken command of Ash’s life, and while Ash gasped and floundered and clutched at Forsythe’s arms, at the hard-hewn strength concealed beneath the lie of the smoothly tailored suit…Forsythe showed him with languid, domineering control exactly what he meant to oblige with every soft, taunting graze of his teeth and every flick of a tongue that licked and teased at Ash’s throbbing, sensitized mouth.
For a breath, he couldn’t stop himself from going boneless, from arching against Forsythe. His usual distractions were boys his own age—college boys with football bodies and rich clothing and easy, shit-eating grins. He’d never been kissed before by a man who knew what he was doing with such certainty that he made Ash feel small and vulnerable and new, suddenly not so sure of himself at all, trembling and overwhelmed and completely swept up in the sheer magnetic force of Forsythe’s absolute control.
God, he tasted like liquor and sharp steel edges, tasted weathered and wild all at once, and the size and heat of his body, the feeling of muscle tested and worn by time, were turning Ash’s blood heavy and hot and dark. Every time he tried to steal a breath around that deep, dominating kiss it drew every part of his body up tight until he felt the smallest inhalation pulling at the base of his achingly hard cock.