Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 76065 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 380(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 254(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76065 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 380(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 254(@300wpm)
Maybe I could do some cheap sprucing up around the apartment. I wasn’t exactly a craft chick. But poverty could make you pick up all sorts of new talents when you set your mind to it.
You could learn to do anything on YouTube these days.
Or I could actually get to know more about Brooklyn, my new home.
I’d moved because it was as far from the Bronx as I could get while still having somewhat reasonable rent prices. But I hadn’t really known shit about the area. To be real, I still didn’t. I knew the route to work and home, then to the laundromat, pet store, and market.
That was about it.
I didn’t have the money to be going any other places, but I could at least learn where things were for the day when things loosened up a bit.
I was getting there. Another few months and I would even be having some of my paycheck left at the end of the month.
So long as Evander didn’t go out spreading his seed and bringing a baby mama and kittens over to mooch off of me too.
“You hear that, buddy?” I asked as I slipped the soft pizza onto one of those cheap melamine plates I’d picked up for like fifty cents on summer clearance. “No babies. Actually, can you make babies?” I asked, never having really looked at his whole… situation. Actually, I didn’t know for a fact if he was a dude or not.
I just assumed. Given all the dramatics.
Anyone who said women were the more emotional of the sexes had clearly never met a sick man, or one who’d encountered even the mildest inconvenience.
Evander shot me a bored look as he started to groom himself.
“Well, it’s been a good talk,” I said, putting his bowl in the sink, squirting some dish soap into it, then filling it up to soak before grabbing my plate, a knife, and a fork—since this was not the kind of pizza you could pick up—and making my way to the couch. “But I’m gonna re-watch that show about the alien abduction again before I crash. I’d appreciate you not waking me up at the ass-crack of dawn on my first day off.”
To that, Evander flicked his tail and shot me a look that said he didn’t give a single fuck what I wanted before going back to his grooming.
I’d just finished shoveling the last bit of pizza into my mouth when a memory flashed across my mind.
“Go home, Kick. It’s late.”
God, the way his voice had said my name in that deep, raspy little voice of his.
It was shiver-inducing.
I didn’t even think he actually knew my name.
Or, if he did, he knew my government name—Kathleen—from my employment paperwork, not the name I actually went by.
But there he was.
Just a few feet away from me.
Smelling like cigars and woodsmoke—dark, sexy, mysterious. It was the kind of scent I wanted to smell trapped in my hair, all over my clothes when I peeled them off. On my bare skin after he’d run his face…
Nope.
No.
I was not going to be having sexy little fantasies about my boss. My, admittedly, absolutely ridiculously hot boss.
He was the literal definition of ‘tall, dark, and handsome’ with his almost black hair, his dark eyes, his impressive height, and those strong arms I’d maybe eye-banged once or twice when I caught him doing something that made the muscles twitch and twist in a way that had no right to be as sexy as it was.
Fine.
It was probably more like a dozen times.
Still.
I wasn’t going to fantasize about him. Even if I was dying to know how my name would sound coming from that mouth while he was deep inside of me, his body taut, his fingers digging into my flesh as he came.
I mean, I totally fantasized. A lot. While asleep. But there was no controlling that.
I wasn’t going to play into it when I was awake.
No matter how my spine shivered at the way he’d said my name.
I had no qualms about having some good, fun, casual sex with some random hot guy who said my name like a sexy little secret only the two of you shared.
But when that hot guy was your boss?
Qualms.
There were a lot of qualms.
“Damnit,” I added to my inner monologue.
Maybe this week away from him would be just what I needed to get my mind back on straight about him.
Maybe I also needed to invest some of that last hundred bucks in tips I’d gotten into a new, strong, battery-powered boyfriend. With rechargeable batteries. Since, with the way things were going, I’d be killing batteries left and right. And I didn’t have the funds for that.
I didn’t even spend much time with Rico. But the man was still ever-present on my mind for some reason. Especially in those quiet moments in bed just before sleep. When all the other noise fell away and all that was left was that rare moment I saw my boss come out from the back office where he spent most of his time when he was around to go and grab a drink or a premade sandwich out of the case. Or when I overheard him speaking to the manager, always wondering how it would sound if he said my name.