Total pages in book: 171
Estimated words: 164705 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 824(@200wpm)___ 659(@250wpm)___ 549(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 164705 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 824(@200wpm)___ 659(@250wpm)___ 549(@300wpm)
“I’m going to ask you some questions now, okay?” I put a hand on his shoulder.
His breath caught in his throat, and I felt a jolt, too. Of something foreign and weird. Of an unfamiliarity that churned my stomach.
“Okay.”
“Do I have a criminal history?”
He choked on his wine. “Only for being criminally hot.”
“Be serious.”
“You don’t have a criminal history.” Pause. “Not that I am aware of.”
“Do I have any tattoos?” I knew the answer to that question purely because I’d noticed the ink on my hipbone when I’d changed earlier.
Our eyes met, and his ran wild with something I couldn’t read. Desire, and anger, and alarm, and something else. Something darker. Much darker than I knew he was capable of. This was Ollie. My happy-go-lucky soulmate. What happened to him? To us?
My nostrils flared. “You should know the answer to that one, Oliver. Do I have any tattoos, and if so, what are they of?”
The silence hung in the air like a guillotine.
He tipped his chin up, drawling slowly, “You have one tattoo. Hipbone. Fight like a girl. Lobster font. You like it when I trace the letters with my fingertips, one at a time, while I eat you out. You like when I kiss it when I wake you up in the morning and lick you head to toe. You inked it the day you turned eighteen and realized your relationship with your parents was officially over. It was a reminder you don’t need them. That you have yourself.”
The seed shriveled up in my belly, dying a quick death. This was Oliver von Bismarck. My Oliver. Right, and authentic, and true. The boy who gave me blue roses and went to sleep every night with his phone ringer on the loudest setting, just in case I called for help. I was being weird. Silly. Ungrateful. Guilt sent a load of heat up to my cheeks. How could I even doubt him?
“I’m sorry.” I rounded the table and threw my arms over his shoulders, drawing him close. “I’m sorry for ever doubting you.”
He clasped my waist, burying his nose in my hair. “I’m the one who should be sorry for not keeping you safe.” A tremble passed through his body. “I’ll go make you Aglio e Olio.”
“I’ll come watch you and try not to rip your clothes off as you do.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Oliver
She’d become a vegetarian. News to me.
My soul nearly left my body when she asked me about her tattoos. I still remembered the one she’d inked on herself the last summer we were together, just as she turned eighteen. And I didn’t lie. Not technically, anyway. I did eat her out and traced those letters as they healed. I did kiss it better when it hurt.
The rest of the dinner was blissfully uneventful. Briar was funny, observant, and although she couldn’t remember her addresses, friends, or job for the last fifteen years, she had no trouble at all discussing fucking Nietzsche in depth. She had just remembered she was a philosophy major in college.
“I think this is what I meant by fight like a girl.” She twirled spaghetti onto her fork with a spoon and slurped it like a kid, grinning at me. “Women are pioneers. Nietzsche was a bitter man with more health issues than Vogue. Polite society largely shunned him for not believing in God, and he was as broke as your average college fuckboy. A chauvinist, just like the rest of his peers. Still, women nurtured him. Smart women. Feminists. His sister, mother, aunt, Lou Salome.”
“Lou who?”
“The woman he proposed to three times. A brilliant author and intellectual. She rejected all three proposals.”
“Why did she do that?”
“She wanted to marry her equal. You see, despite the general views of her time, Lou Salome knew her worth. She figured out just how little he thought of her, and she deemed him less than she deserved. It wasn’t arrogance, or greed, or snobbery. It was pure fact.”
“And that fact is?”
She snatched up the candle and blew it out. “A man’s shadow is designed to hide a woman’s light. It seeks to contain what it cannot control.”
Her brain turned me on.
I wanted to fuck her mouth, knowing all the smart things that came out of it.
By the time we made it back to the master bedroom, I hadn’t stopped thinking of what I wanted to do to her. Clearly, I hadn’t found my morals between her dip in the pond and now.
She waltzed into the bathroom to brush her teeth while I changed into pajamas in the closet, peeking at her wardrobe. It was so basic I almost wept.
Briar possessed a style that could only be described as uniquely hers. She didn’t dress like every inch of Earth served as her runway, drowning in the nouveau riche clothes Dallas and Frankie blew six figures on every month. Nor did she dress like Fae, a fashion victim in desperate need of an eye transplant.