Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 79781 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 399(@200wpm)___ 319(@250wpm)___ 266(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 79781 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 399(@200wpm)___ 319(@250wpm)___ 266(@300wpm)
The words spill out of me too quickly, and I’m more angry than I realized.
But I despise it.
I hate that I have to explain to a good person why he’s worth protecting, in a world where bad people never even stop for a moment to question themselves.
Tate is quiet for a moment.
It’s the first time I’ve seen that sad look in his eyes in person.
I caught it in some of the photos of him, and now it’s right there in front of me.
The sounds of crackling wood fill the air between us.
He reaches down to pick up a thin fallen tree branch from the ground, ripping off the leaves until it’s stripped bare. He leans over and puts the tip of it into the flames, letting it catch fire.
When he pulls it back it looks like a little torch, then he blows it out quickly, a trail of smoke curving around him into the air.
“Okay,” he finally tells me. “I believe you.”
“Was that so difficult?”
“Yes,” he admits, and even when he smiles at me, it’s still tinged with pain. “I’ve been the shadow in my family for my entire life. I don’t think I’ve ever contemplated if I’m a good person or not. I’m just a Landrey. Me play football. Me work out. Me no cause trouble… or if I do, there are bad consequences.”
“You act like you’re some meat-head, but you’re one of the smartest people I’ve talked to in a long time.”
“How do you know?”
I bite my lower lip, then slowly let it go. “Teacher’s pet.”
He sighs, giving me a hopeless look. “You watched me while I was in my classes? Of course you did.”
“Not all of them. But enough.”
“How the fuck did you do that? Hacking the school cameras?”
I give him a playful look. “Why do you think everything has to involve hacking? I took Econ last year. The professor loves me. I asked her if I could listen in, so I took a seat in the back row and just watched.”
“You were in that classroom with me?”
I nod. “Just one lecture, a couple of weeks ago. And you’re very, very good at being a teacher’s pet. Raising your hand, starting discussions, even helping the boy next to you who didn’t understand the lecture...”
He shrugs. “I like classes. So fucking what? That doesn’t prove I’m smart.”
I look him up and down.
“No, maybe not,” I murmur. “But using a translator on your phone does.”
Tate’s eyes snap up to look at me.
“Fuck,” he whispers.
“Adorable, how you tried to hide it.”
“You knew I was listening to what you and Maks said?”
“I would have said a lot more, if I didn’t notice you being a nosy mouse.”
He leans over and buries his face in his hands.
It’s too much.
I already felt deep satisfaction when I caught sight of the basic translator he was using, and making him squirm like this now is even better. He has no clue how irresistible it is when he’s embarrassed, and in reality I thought it was clever.
“Hey, you have access to bad shit, right?” Tate says in a muffled voice from under his hands. “Can I have some illegal fucking tranquilizers or something? I need to be knocked the fuck out for, oh, the next forty-eight hours or so.”
I reach out and run my palm along his back, up and down along his spine. “Relax. It’s okay that you want my cock. Very flattering, actually.”
“Remember when you only said five-word sentences?” he says, finally dropping his hands to turn and look at me. “Do that again, please. And quit talking about your cock, because I can’t take it. How do you know everything I think?”
“You make it obvious.”
I let the weight of my hand sink into the tense muscles of his back a little harder. He still looks like he wants to melt into the ground, but as I knead my fingers into the tight spots around his shoulder blades, he finally starts to relax again.
He glances over at me, looking down at my chest, then across the rest of my exposed skin.
“Feels good,” he eventually murmurs.
“You have knots all through your back. You should let me really work on you, sometime. You need to release the fascia all through here.” I run my fingers along his trapezius, up to the nape of his neck.
He hums. “Are you going to go to physical therapy school after college? You’d make a fucking killing being a massage therapist… holy shit, that feels so good—”
“No more school for me after college,” I tell him.
“No?”
“I will work inside my family.”
He exhales. “Oh. Right.”
It’s interesting how quickly he forgets who I really am. I’ll never tell him the finer details of what the Petrov family name truly carries, but I give him a few more things to chew on so that he doesn’t get sad again.