Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 48709 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 244(@200wpm)___ 195(@250wpm)___ 162(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 48709 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 244(@200wpm)___ 195(@250wpm)___ 162(@300wpm)
I have to fight the urge to sprint across the room and tell her to never apologize to me, not her, not my Liliana.
My Liliana.
I want to grab her hand, turn her wrist over, lean down and kiss the tattoo softly.
What the fuck?
I almost howl at the ceiling as the thought hits me.
I never think stuff like that, tender things. I’ve had to harden myself over the years.
Minutes pass.
Max is making the men laugh, and everybody looks around now and then, scanning for Cartel members. There are a few here already, but Gabriel has decided to show up late, maybe as a power play.
If the fucker isn’t here in ten minutes, we’ll leave.
People have seen our faces. They can vouch for the fact we were here. We tried.
My gaze is drawn across the room to Liliana. I have to stop myself from sprinting across the large function hall when she appears.
It’s the way she moves, shifting her hips from side to side.
But there’s nothing artificial in the movement…it’s nothing like the way the other women walk, the wives, the girlfriends, and socialites, always trying to draw the eye.
My woman moves her hips because she’s wide, curvy, gorgeous, and can’t help herself. She does it naturally, not trying to capture me at all, not trying to play any games.
She walks toward a door at the side, looking like it leads out of the building.
Without thinking, I follow her. Max says something behind me. I hear a question in there, but then I’m gone.
If anybody except Max is curious, they know to keep their questions to themselves.
There’s a drum pounding in my mind, making it difficult to think about anything else. The memory of her ass is too vivid, the way the fabric hugged her full cheeks. I can almost feel them, how they’d shift as I squeezed them in my hand, how she’d shiver for me.
It’s her face too, that expression in her eyes, like there was so much she wanted to say but couldn’t.
I push open the door, spotting Liliana at the end of the hallway. She turns as though caught, her eyebrows shooting up.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
She tilts her head at me.
It’s like she’s saying, What, I’m supposed to take the word of a Bratva man, huh?
The suspicion blazes across her flushed and gorgeous cheeks.
The desire to run my hands through her luscious hair is almost overwhelming, thundering through me. I can’t stop thinking about what she’d look like naked, not just her curvy body or her perfect tits. But her face. How sassy she’d look, or shy, or ready, or….
My body burns with all the possibilities, my chest going tight. She makes my heart pound.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
I smirk. “You don’t have to keep apologizing. What are you looking at?”
She’s standing at the door to the kitchen as though she was just peering through the circular window.
“Nothing.” She shifts from foot to foot, suddenly shy. “I mean…the kitchen. I wasn’t breaking any rules.”
I almost sigh but stop myself at the last second so she doesn’t see the effect her words have on me.
It makes sense. She’s going to be scared of me. The Bratva-Cartel war derailed her life, and here I am, one-half of that problem.
But it still hurts.
It makes me want to draw her into my arms and hold her as tenderly as I can. I’ll stroke my hands through her hair and whisper that I’ll never let anything happen to her.
“You don’t have to be afraid of me, Liliana,” I say, walking slowly toward her.
She glances behind her as though debating running away, but then she turns and faces me fully. She tosses her head, summoning some sassiness, making the animal part of me wonder what she’d look like if she got sassy in bed.
“Who said I’m afraid?”
I smirk, stopping just short of her. From this view, I can get a look at her cleavage, but she’s hidden most of her breasts, which is good. Vital, in fact, because if any other man tried to look at her, to touch her….
I can’t even think about what I’d do, the pain I’d cause.
“I guess the constant apologizing threw me off,” I say.
She makes a tsk noise. I can tell most of this is a shield, a front she’s putting up, but it doesn’t change how vivacious and youthful she looks. Her flushed cheeks and pouty lips are just begging to be kissed.
“I just know it’s the right thing to do, apologizing to the Bratva boss. This isn’t my first party. I’m twenty, not nine. And I’d never want to disrespect you. Or for you to think the Cartel has, through me.”
My heart plummets. There it is, her fear laid bare. Repercussions for speaking out of turn.
That bastard. Making my woman scared.
“And I’m forty-one, not four. I’m glad we’ve got that out of the way.”