Total pages in book: 143
Estimated words: 132834 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 664(@200wpm)___ 531(@250wpm)___ 443(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 132834 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 664(@200wpm)___ 531(@250wpm)___ 443(@300wpm)
She’d done the right thing. The Mom thing. I’d never really appreciated that aspect of being a parent. The hard parts. I didn’t have much in the way of good examples. Not since my mother died.
This Halloween plan wasn’t just for Nicky. Savannah loved her son, and I heard how hard it had been for her to tell him he couldn’t go. Not that this was for her. Neither were those cookies I’d brought home. I could badger Daisy for the recipe and make them myself, but I wasn’t going to.
Why would I? It’s not like I could barter cookies for sex.
Could I? Not likely, and I wasn’t interested in sex with Savannah, anyway.
God, I was a liar.
I was very interested in sex with Savannah; I just wasn’t doing anything about it.
I wanted to. I’d kissed her on an impulse—the way I did most things that didn’t have to do with cooking. She was gorgeous. Always had been, even before she hit puberty and grew all those lush curves I wanted to get my hands on.
Even when she was a little kid, she’d been beautiful. Her wild, sunset curls paired with those cool gray eyes. Fire and ice. And she’d had a mouth on her as a kid. Not enough to cause trouble, but enough to let everyone know she wasn’t to be messed with.
Savannah was smart and passionate. And in the dark, the flush on her cheeks when she’d tasted her stolen dessert had been magnetic. I hadn’t tried to stop myself. I’d grabbed her and kissed her, and fuck, it had been worth it. Feeling her come, the sweet, sharp gasps in my ear, her body writhing against mine. That had not been what I expected. Not at all.
I’d come within a breath of fucking her right there on the island. I did not need my conscience to tell me that was a bad idea. Not because she could have me kicked out of Heartstone Manor. Because this was Savannah. She was not the kind of woman who fucked her employer’s brother, whom she was also supervising in our shared workplace.
With a spurt of shame, I remembered what I’d said about her all those years ago in the cafeteria. It’s the fucking Sahara in that cunt. God, I’d been a dickhead. What a shitty thing to say about a girl who’d never done a fucking thing to me. I just couldn’t stand the idea of an asshole like Murphy touching her. Thinking about her. So, I’d made sure no one gave her a second look.
All these years later, I still felt bad about it. There was no way I was going to treat her like she was just a convenient body this time around. I owed her better than that. Anyway, my gut said she wasn’t the kind of woman who fucked around, not at work, not at all. Which had me wondering how long it had been for her.
No, no, don’t go down that path. Do not think about it.
Because I had a sneaking suspicion that I was the first man to give her an orgasm since her husband had died. And I did not need that thought in my head.
Come on, my evil side whispered in my ear. You can’t let a woman like that go unsatisfied.
Shut up, I ordered myself. My evil side had been whispering things like that in my ear since the moment she left my arms and disappeared down the dark hall to her little apartment, the sound of her orgasm fresh in my ear.
The issue wasn’t sex. The two of us would be brilliant at sex. No question about that. But, bottom line, I was almost positive Savannah was not a casual kind of woman. There wasn’t a thing in her life she approached casually. I couldn’t make myself believe the exception would be sex with me.
I had it on good authority that I was the crappiest of partners. I tried it once, the whole girlfriend/love thing. In my midtwenties, once I’d settled into a good job at a high-end restaurant in France. I was close to happy for once, learning, making friends, with enough in the bank to pay my rent. After the way the prior few years had gone, that was close to heaven.
Marie had been a sous chef at the restaurant across the street. One night, over a few bottles of wine, I fell in love. She was gorgeous, with dark hair she wore in punky spikes and huge blue eyes with the longest lashes. Her saucy French accent made me crazy with lust. Overflowing with talent and the temper to go with it, she entranced me. We spent eight blissful months cooking and fucking and drinking. I could have stayed with her forever. Then she dumped me.
I’d been as heartbroken and devastated as a self-centered twenty-seven-year-old could be. She said I was selfish. That my job and my ambitions always came first. She hadn’t understood when I went after and got the job she’d been working toward. Hey, this was a meritocracy, right? Let the best chef win and all that. It had never occurred to me that she’d be pissed. She loved me, didn’t she?