AllFreeNovel
Share Us
In one sudden swoop of wings, Remus flies across the kitchen so he’s standing in front of me, crowding my space. He slams a hand against the wall above my head, and I gasp as he looks down at me.
“You’ve found out my secret, little consort. I’m not a good man. In fact, I’m a very, very bad one. I don’t care about morality or right and wrong.”
He bends his head down over me, eyes piercing mine. As much as I want to squeeze my eyes shut against the magnetism of his pull, I don’t. God help me; I stare right back even as my body begins to tremble from his nearness.
“But maybe you don’t want a good man,” he whispers, voice low. “Good men are boring. And I’m beginning to suspect that underneath that sweet, good-girl exterior is a woman who wants more than the safe and boring things a normal life has to give her.”
He leans down even more so his thick lips brush my temple at my hairline. “Life with me won’t be safe. Or expected. I want to do things to your body that will have you shuddering and gasping my name. I want you trembling and aching and begging me for more even though you’re already spent.”
A quiver wracks through my body at his filthy words and the images they’re conjuring in my mind.
He leans down more, slightly to the side now so that his whisper is right against my earlobe. “I want to grab the luscious flesh of your ass in both of my hands and drag you up and down my cock until you forget your own name because you’ve been crying out mine for so many hours straight.”
I gasp, and it comes out something like a squeak.
Hot air and the brush of his lips against my ear have me quivering and drenching my panties, my eyelids fluttering as he continues to speak low. “Then and only then will I permit you to give in to your pleasure, clenching and bursting apart while acknowledging me as your one true god.”
Chapter Seven
LAUREN
And that’s how he leaves me. He doesn’t push like some men might, leaving me to question everything I ever thought I knew.
What the hell was my life a week ago? Yesterday?
Is this really me?
Because as wild and as insane as it may be, it’s yesterday that feels like the dream world. This feels real. Like my life was waiting to begin, and earlier today, in that plaza by that fountain, it finally did.
And not because I met some man.
But because when something shocking and unusual finally happened to shake up my boring, dead-end, tragic fucking life, I didn’t run with everyone else to safety.
I jumped off the edge of the cliff when there was every chance jagged rocks or sharks waited below.
I’m not the girl who leaps. I’m never, ever the girl who leaps.
When I met Michael, I was a shy girl who was one year away from graduating with my Library Sciences degree when a few girlfriends dragged me out to a bar for my twenty-first birthday. I’d commuted to college all three years and had never been much of a partier anyway, so it was one of the few times I’d ever drunk alcohol.
When my bestie started flirting with a group of guys—who turned out to be Michael’s friends taking him out for finally getting his start-up off the ground—I never thought the cute guy with the good haircut and bright smile would ever look my way. Not when I was out with who I considered to be my much more attractive friends.
I didn’t really leap that night. The alcohol loosened me up enough to giggle at his jokes and lean in flirtily when he sat down beside me and started telling me all about his new company. I thought it was luck that I got laid on my birthday by such a good-looking guy. Even if most of that experience was comprised of him pumping inside me twice, then crawling up the bed to jerk himself off all over my face.
When he contacted me the next week to ask if I wanted a summer internship at his company, I was only excited about the experience. I didn’t see it for the narcissist-seeks-bait ploy that it was.
God, I was such a sucker.
He saw how weak I was. Then he got free labor for the summer and free ass to go with it.
Was he cheating on me the entire time? That question has tormented me when I let it. Michael liked what was comfortable. He’d recently moved out of his mother’s house, too. And I cooked, cleaned, and did his laundry because he was just so stressed out with the start-up.
But I had a boyfriend! We lived together, and he loved me; I was a vital part of his business. He told me so all the time. At first, anyway. I was still paid a pittance wage, and he’d never officially gotten around to changing my title to Operations Director because he was “so busy.” But that was the way of genius. He was about to start another money-raising round with investors and was so stressed out. I needed to help him de-stress and keep the team more focused on the next product release than ever before.
I slam my hand against the mattress I’m lying on with the lights off. Ugh! I’m supposed to be living in the moment, not letting that bastard take up another ounce of my brain space. I hate that I still think about him. I hate that he still has the ability to affect me. I never wanted to be this woman pining over a guy, especially now I know what a rotten person he is.
I idolized him for so long. I believed in him and all the bullshit he peddled. And then to realize that the nagging in the back of your mind that maybe something was off was right all along? The things you questioned him about but he always had an answer for. His way of turning questions back on you to make you feel like you’d done something shameful by even asking him in the first place. . .
It crushed your faith in. . . kinda everything.
