Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 93751 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 469(@200wpm)___ 375(@250wpm)___ 313(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 93751 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 469(@200wpm)___ 375(@250wpm)___ 313(@300wpm)
She glanced up at Mason as she reached for her coffee. His hands wrapped around his mug, he was watching her with an amused expression. “You going to lick the plate clean?”
Abashed, Hannah realized she’d just inhaled every single bit of the huge portion. She laughed self-consciously. “What can I say? It was that good.”
As he continued to regard her, his eyelids hooded, his mouth quirking into a sexy half smile. “I might actually enjoy that,” he said in a slow, teasing voice. “Watching you lick the plate clean. Of course, you’d need to be on your knees, hands behind your back.”
Heat rushed again into Hannah’s face, her hand fluttering to her mouth. Was he flirting with her? Or was he challenging her? Was she up to that challenge?
“Oh, um…” she stammered, the details of last night’s scene once more front and center in her mind’s eye, which only made her blush more. She reached for her mug to hide her face. Her hand, she was alarmed to observe, was trembling.
For crying out loud. What was her problem? She was acting like a teenager. Did she actually have a crush on this entitled, tattooed chef? Maybe this whole Enclave idea was more than she was ready to handle at this point. She’d been a recluse for the better part of a year. Talk about going from zero to a hundred.
“Relax,” he said, grinning. “I know you were just along for the ride last night.” He cocked a brow. “That said, your performance was quite impressive, even if you did fail to ask for permission.” He brought his fingers to his nose and made a show of inhaling with exaggerated pleasure, a smirk on his face.
Hannah pushed back abruptly from the table. The bastard was making fun of her. She was nothing more than a joke to him. She blinked back hot tears of embarrassment, drawing on her fury instead.
“I’m glad I was such a source of amusement for you,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
Getting to her feet, she dropped her napkin on her embarrassingly clean plate. He started to speak, but she cut him off.
“Thanks for the breakfast. See you around.”
Chapter 10
Hannah blew a tendril of hair out of her eyes, her arms up to the elbows in sudsy water. She was still ruminating on the events of the night before and that morning as she washed dishes. She’d arrived home feeling edgy, excited, irritated, angry, confused and aroused in equal measure.
In a word, she was a mess.
Unfortunately, no housekeeping fairies had arrived during her overnight absence, so she decided to put her angst to work on some serious deep cleaning. Two hours later, the bathrooms were scrubbed and sparkling, the sheets changed, the rugs vacuumed, the furniture dusted, the floors mopped. She’d saved the dishes for last, after which she planned to treat herself to her favorite comfort food—a grilled cheese sandwich on sourdough accompanied by a cup of her homemade tomato soup.
She recognized with the passage of a little time that she’d probably overreacted to Mason’s glib remarks. At least her timing had been good when she’d made her dramatic exit from his kitchen. Just as she’d pushed her way through the swinging doors, Hans had appeared, her coat in his hands, politely asking if she was ready to depart. Other than a bit of polite small talk, the young man had been mostly silent on the drive down, which had suited her at the time, as she was still riled up by what had occurred.
Calmer now, she tried to put things into perspective—to see them from Mason’s point of view. He’d been invited to participate in what was surely to his mind an extremely tame scene with a woman he regarded as something of an interloper. He’d made that much clear.
“You were just along for the ride.”
No doubt, he was so used to the highly trained slave girls at The Enclave that he’d thought nothing of flogging her to a frenzy and then making her come, just because he could. When it was done, so was he—on to the next scene, the real scene he’d been waiting for. She was the one who had made too much of it all, reliving the events in exhaustive detail as she lay in the unfamiliar bed the night before, that camera in the corner blinking at her.
Now, as she set the dishes in the rack to dry, she fervently wished she’d handled things differently this morning in his kitchen. When Mason had quipped about putting her on her knees to lick the plate clean, she should have come up with a clever, sassy retort, instead of blushing beet red and stammering like an idiot. If only real life was like writing, and you could highlight and delete the sections that just didn’t work.