Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 69352 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 347(@200wpm)___ 277(@250wpm)___ 231(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69352 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 347(@200wpm)___ 277(@250wpm)___ 231(@300wpm)
It almost made me feel self-conscious.
My own teeth weren’t straight.
I’d been in the process of getting braces when my sperm donor had decided to commit his final crime that would take his life.
When the dust had settled, the estate had been frozen solid, and no money had come in or gone out for a whole year while the vultures fought for their pieces of pie.
In the end, my braces had been one of those things that I’d placed to the wayside, meaning to come back for them later, yet not bothering when the world looked different after Copper went to prison.
Moving forward with her eyes on me, she reached up and pulled my pencil from behind my ear.
I laughed.
She watched me laugh and said, “Are you sure about this, Cutter?”
I grinned. “I don’t do stuff that I don’t want to do, beautiful.”
Mentally, I’m just a corner on a fitted sheet that keeps popping off.
—Milena’s secret thoughts
MILENA
We didn’t get married at a courthouse.
We didn’t get married in Vegas.
We didn’t get married in a church.
In fact, we didn’t get married at all.
What we did do was move in together later that night.
Into my place.
Neither one of us asked where he would sleep.
He’d walked into my house with a duffle—one that was stuffed so full that I’d had to question whether the zipper could handle the strain he’d put it under—and tossed it into my closet.
He’d then walked directly into my bathroom and stripped for a shower.
Which led me to now, watching him strip out of his sawdust-covered clothes.
Being covered in sawdust was not conducive with closing the bathroom door, apparently.
“Do you, uh, want me to get the door for you?” I asked.
“You got a hamper or something?” he asked. “I should’ve probably done this outside. I’m gonna get the bathroom floor covered in sawdust.”
I bit my lip and said, “I’ll, uh, get the vacuum once you get in there. That way you’re not getting water all over the floor after you get out.”
“Thanks,” he turned to me as the shirt was carefully pulled off of his body.
Now, here was the moment where I might’ve lost a few brain cells.
See, I’d seen the whole “man takes shirt off from the back of the collar thing” before.
My brothers weren’t shy with being half-naked in front of me.
They both took their shirts off like that.
Previous boyfriends, as well as my latest, had always taken the shirt off from the bottom, lifting the shirt up and over their head as they turned the shirt inside out.
But Cutter?
He carefully lifted the shirt from the back of his neck, hunched his shoulders, and pulled it free from his body.
All the while, in slow motion, making my mouth all but water.
“Hamper?” he asked when it was off and he was taking the shirt and rolling it into a ball.
I licked my lips and tried, but failed, to make my brain comprehend the question he’d just asked me.
It didn’t work, though.
Because…tattoos.
Lots of them.
As in, all over his body, from mid bicep to right under his collarbone, to just under his diaphragm.
I opened my mouth, intending to tell him about the hamper maybe, but instead said, “What the fuck?”
He laughed. “That’s what everyone says.”
“Well, maybe if you weren’t hiding all of that…” I said, gesturing to his upper torso. “Why don’t you have any visible tattoos?”
“Because I’m already a biker. Professionals need to look professional, in my honest opinion. I don’t need to be adding to the tics on the upper crust of Dallas as they see me pull up to a job site. They’re already wary when I get off a bike. If I get off covered in tattoos, too, they’ll pass on me and go to someone else. And, to be quite honest, I’m not too proud to admit that I could really use the money. I’ll gladly act like I’m respectable as long as they pay me what I’m asking for,” he expounded. “Hamper?”
I jumped and moved, opening a cabinet where the laundry chute was located.
When Shasha had this house built, the entire freakin’ place was custom built. Even the laundry chute in the bathroom.
“This fancy schmancy thingie is a vacuum. You put the clothes,” I reached for his shirt and he handed it to me, “right up against it, and it sucks them through this ducting system into the laundry room where it’ll spit it out into the hamper.”
His brows rose. “I feel like I just entered the Twilight Zone.”
“Wait until you see the safe room Shasha had built for me.” I rolled my eyes. “This place is like a fortress. With the high gates, the alarm system, and then the safe room, I could logically withstand a siege.”
His head tilted as he started unbuttoning his pants.
I turned slightly away to give him privacy, and he laughed.
“I’ll just tell you now that being in the military has completely cured me of my shyness,” he said as he took his pants off. “Plus, you saw me in this yesterday.”