Chapters (66)
- Cover
- Dedication
- Keep Reading
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Forty
- Forty-One
- Forty-Two
- Forty-Three
- Forty-Four
- Forty-Five
- Forty-Six
- Forty-Seven
- Forty-Eight
- Forty-Nine
- Fifty
- Fifty-One
- Fifty-Two
- Fifty-Three
- Fifty-Four
- Fifty-Five
- Fifty-Six
- Fifty-Seven
- Fifty-Eight
- Fifty-Nine
- Sneak Peek
- Find Me
- Books by Mary Catherine Gebhard
- Acknowledgments
I groaned his name.
“Fuck…” He dragged the fabric of my nightgown, exposing my shoulder, never leaving my mouth. “I’m going to make you scream that.”
He was still calling me Snitch, and a weird, twisted, dark part of me liked it. It was humiliating and savage and cruel, and combined with his attention it made my stomach ache in ways I didn’t know possible.
He bit my lip, and I tasted copper.
I hissed and he pulled back, watching me, waiting. I touched my lip, wet where he’d bitten.
“More.”
His eyes darkened, a strangled sound in his throat. When he dragged me back to him this time the fervor was doubled. Frenzied. Fire.
But my throat filled with cotton.
“I’m not going to sleep with you when you love someone else,” I gasped through kisses on my neck. “While you’re practically with someone else. I won’t be that person.”
Don’t make me that person.
He raked his fingers down my thighs, leaving a bruising trail, and with his ragged exhale, he stopped kissing me.
He lifted himself onto his elbows. “That’s going to be a problem for me, Snitch.”
Our eyes locked. Pulsating.
“You’re starting to take up too much space inside me. I don’t think there’s any other way to get you out.”
When he kissed me again, it was slow, gentle, languorous. My heart bled from the tenderness and the words I’d always wanted to hear, yet fate had given me a catch-22. His confession was wrapped inside barbed wire. Maybe he was starting to feel what I felt…but to him it was a tumor that needed to be ripped out.
Brutal kisses and gentle words, or gentle kisses and brutal words—I was learning there was no other way with Grayson. He never gave you both.
“I don’t want this to end,” I said against his lips. “I don’t want to go back. I don’t want you to forget me.”
Use me to forget me. Why did they always do that? Why did I always let them?
Grayson froze and pulled back, lips red and swollen from kissing me. Eyes stone and impenetrable.
“Forgetting you would be…” He trailed off for so long, that same distant stony look in his eyes. I wished I could drag it back, the bleeding part of me.
“It would be impossible,” he said at last, locking eyes with me, tone harder than diamond.
My heart cracked in uncertainty. Words I wanted to hear, but he looked so, so unhappy.
Then below us, the door slammed against the wall.
“Grayson!” his mother called.
Twenty-Five
GRAY
My mother waited for me in my foyer, always dressed like she was about to host some luncheon for the queen, even at three in the morning.
“It’s the middle of the fucking night,” I whispered.