Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 107660 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 538(@200wpm)___ 431(@250wpm)___ 359(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 107660 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 538(@200wpm)___ 431(@250wpm)___ 359(@300wpm)
I studied her with narrowed eyes before confirming. “But I can tell you anything, correct?”
“Oh, yeah. I mean, some of the million possibilities my mind came up with, and I still said yes, ranged from needing help to hide a body, finding out you’re actually an alien, hoping that you’re being kidnapped to a world of sexy fairies, and you want me to come with you, to something as simple as you stubbed your toe.” She stopped and laughed like she had an inside secret with herself. “Or maybe you slept with Lucian.”
My stomach bottomed out, and my eyes shot wide. How the fuck had she guessed? Did I have ‘I’ve done sexual acts with Lucian Daire’ stamped on my back and not know about it? Or did…
Did she not know and laughed because she thought me being an alien was a bigger possibility than sleeping with Lucian—let alone agreeing to marry him? Shit. I struggled to school my features into a neutral expression, and before I could, she caught my original look, and her laugh evaporated. Now I wasn’t the only one with wide eyes and a dropped jaw.
“What the fuck, Aspen?” she asked slowly. “You slept with Mr. Dark and Douchy?”
Strangled noises escaped my throat before I managed a squeaky ramble. “Yes. But just once. Mostly we’ve done other things. But that’s not what I needed to tell you.”
Her face scrunched, and she shook her head. “What?” she screeched, blinking and looking around like something would pop out to help everything make sense. When it didn’t, she shook her head again. “Wait. What?”
I licked my trembling lips and swallowed. With a deep breath, I held her gaze and raised my left hand. Her gaze immediately locked on to the large, impossible to miss, sparkling diamond.
Besides her jaw dropping, she didn’t react. She stood so still I worried she went into shock and froze in place.
“Shiloh?” I asked with a squeak.
Finally, she at least blinked. I think she attempted to speak, but all that escaped were incomplete stutters before she managed a hoarse, “Who?”
As if she didn’t know. I pinched my lips and glared, refusing to say it out loud as if that would soften the reality.
The hope that it might be someone else slipped away, and she went back to her dropped jaw and frozen posture. This time with added incredulous blinks. She could blink all she wanted; the ring wouldn’t disappear.
I’d tried almost every time I glanced at it.
The silence dragged, tugging at my skin until I thought I would snap. Imagining her reprimand and calling me crazy and pointing out all the flaws in my plan and everything in between left me off balance and waiting for the ground to come up and smack me in the face. “Say something.”
Her mouth opened and closed, and I pleaded with wide eyes for her to put me out of my misery.
“I was really hoping for sexy fairies.”
The breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding whooshed from my lungs, pulling an incredulous laugh with it. The tension cracked apart, leading to more manic giggles until she joined in, laughing with me.
We struggled to catch our breaths and gasped half words like, crazy, how, what, insane, I can’t, oh my god—none of it making sense.
Soon, the laughter faded, and reality crept back in. I took a deep breath and fell back onto her couch, running my hands along the dark teal velvet fabric. “If it makes you feel any better, I wish it were sexy fairies, too.”
“Okay.” She sighed, plopping beside me and pulling one leg onto the cushion to face me. “First of all, what the fuck? Second of all, start from the beginning.”
I groaned, but did as she requested. I skimmed over some of the details, like him finding me in the middle of the panic attack, and that first time I went to ask him to spank me. Okay, I skimmed over a lot of that and summarized it as seeking an outlet for sexual exploration and us being compatible. I tried to skim over some of the experiences, but she claimed if she had to listen to the crazy, then I better reward her with the wild.
My shoulders worked their way back up my neck until, by the end, they almost touched my ears and the knot between my shoulder blades twisted so tight I worried I’d never relax again.
Any release from the laughing vanished, along with the hope that talking it out with Shiloh would help ease the doubt threatening to overflow.
“Okay,” Shiloh repeated with another sigh. “I’m still going with what the fuck, but less extreme.”
“I guess I’ll take that as a win,” I said with a forced smile.
She paused, and I held my breath, biting back words to defend my situation and attempt to cut into the objections I saw brewing in her thoughts. But I told her for a reason, and part of that was to hear more than my own voice.