Total pages in book: 63
Estimated words: 59395 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 297(@200wpm)___ 238(@250wpm)___ 198(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 59395 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 297(@200wpm)___ 238(@250wpm)___ 198(@300wpm)
But that memory lingers with me, and in her touch just now, it’s ignited. She is standing close enough that I can smell the jasmine sweet perfume she wears tonight as she had that night, and I’m hot and hard, the zipper to my expensive blue suit stretched and ready to break. No doubt a product of the fantasy in my head right now, involving her naked and in my arms while my cock is buried inside her. She’d beg me for more. I’d give it to her, too.
She must read my reaction, the primal need to drag her away and fuck her kind of feeling, because she whispers, “Tyler?”
“Yes, Bella?”
“You okay?” she asks.
I have no idea why she believes I would be anything but fine and then some. It’s in this moment that I think that maybe, just maybe, I should just fuck this woman out of my system and me out of hers. I don’t want a friendship that involves sympathy and an assumption that I am weak when I am not. “I’m just fine. Are you?”
She wets her lips nervously, her delicate little pink tongue stroking over skin when it really should be my tongue all over her body. She gives a short laugh. “I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You tell me,” I urge softly, baiting her when I should be reassuring her.
It’s a game I’m playing with her, one I cannot resist despite good reason. Because it’s a dangerous game. For her, not me.
Chapter Seven
Tyler
The exchange between myself and Bella lingers in the air...
Her: You okay?
Me: I’m just fine. Are you?
There’s a flicker of something in Bella’s eyes that I cannot name with that rebuttal question I’ve handed her one moment and dashed away the next with what appears to be sheer determination. My gut feeling is that whatever she wants to say to me has been set aside. As if proving my assumption, she dismisses the question and in a typical Bella move, does exactly what I did to her. She turns the topic back to me. “This isn’t about me tonight. It’s about you,” she declares. “It’s a big deal to take over the family empire. But I want you to know that everyone here tonight, and everyone I’ve communicated with since your father’s death, seems relieved to have you officially steering the ship’s wheel.”
“Even Dash?” I ask because I believe that is who she is talking about, reassuring me that I’m right with her brother, who was more than a little put off by me only months before. I’d not only pulled him from an underground fight, but I’d also used Bella and the woman he’s now marrying to help me with the process. He’d been embarrassed, but he’d kept his film deal, and his woman.
“Dash knows you were there for him.”
“He didn’t at the time.”
“No,” she confirms, “but that was then, and this is now. He’s reached out to you for a reason. He’s officially over his anger. Just as you’re officially the captain of this ship.”
The reference to my position being “official” punches me in the gut, but I manage not to flinch despite the voice of concern nagging at my mind, telling me my father hated me. He will never make my takeover easy, no matter how inevitable it is. I skip this reality check with Bella. It’s Thursday night. My concerns will no longer be concerns at all come Monday morning. “And I’m not polarizing?” I challenge, interested in how she dodges this bullet, not how I dodge my own.
“I’d label you as demanding and arrogant,” she replies with no hesitation in her answer. “You can also be sharp and intolerant.”
I narrow my eyes on her. “You know no one else talks to me like that, right?”
“You asked, and if I’m the only person you believe will really answer, then the staff must not know that you value honesty and directness. You really should fix that.”
“Should I now?”
“Yes, you should.”
“And how do you know I value honestly and directness?”
“Because that’s how you operate, no matter how uncomfortable honesty and directness might make everyone around you.”
My lips curve. “Are you talking about the night you came to my apartment?”
Her cheeks turn pink and there is a bristle to the air. That something in her eyes is back but, in a blink, she erases her emotions. “Or perhaps the time you told me that being a woman could be an advantage or disadvantage and I had to choose which. In that situation, you said I was being a scared little girl when I let a Hollywood studio walk on me. I wasn’t offended. You were not gentle, but gentle is not what I needed.”
She has no idea how much I want to prove those words right.
She continues with, “You can be a bastard when you so choose to be, Tyler. But you are not a bastard. Those are two different things. Just as one can be bad, but not be a bad person.”