She made a little noise, and for one second, I could have taken it back. But I didn't. I watched her turn her back on me and slam the door in my face.

Chapter Fifteen

Liliana

Stop crying. Why are you surprised? He's cruel. He's evil. You already knew that, so why does it bother you so much?

Berating myself wasn't helping me sleep, and neither was the crack of early morning light that was working its way up the far wall of my bedroom. Maybe I dozed a little in between bouts of recrimination, but I didn't sleep.

When my stomach growled, I finally gave up on forcing myself to sleep and just lay there. My head felt like it was stuffed with cotton balls and my eyes were puffy and swollen.

And my cheeks were scratched from Jax’s stubble and my lips still tingled from his kiss.

I could leave. Go back home, put an entire continent between him and me once more. It was an enticing thought.

Dammit, no. I'm not running away again. I have as much right to be here as he does, and he's not going to get to me.

Fierce.

I closed my eyes, feeling marginally more composed.

I swore I never fell asleep. But I must have. Because when I opened my eyes, Jaxson was sitting at the edge of the bed, my laptop opened in his knees. "Mornin' Bit," he said.

I sat bolt upright, yanking the covers up to my chest. "What the fuck, stalker! What are you doing here?"

He stretched like a cat in a sunbeam and shot me a lazy grin. "Waiting for you to wake up." He gestured to the laptop. "You took forever and I got bored."

My heart started hammering in terror before my lips could form the question. I gaped at him, watching his eyes dart back and forth across the screen, an amused, and frankly triumphant smile twisting his lips. "Are you seriously reading my book?" I demanded, trying to mask my horror with belligerence. "Oh my god, Invasion of privacy much?" I reached over, trying to snatch the laptop away while simultaneously clutching the blanket to my chest.

He deftly swung the laptop just out of my reach and kept on reading. "You publish these books for everyone else to read, why can't I? Besides," he tapped the screen, "I see a few things in here that might constitute an invasion of my privacy, Bit."

I blushed. He was reading the sex scene. "What are you talking about?" Though I well knew.

He licked his lips. "Well that move sure sounds awfully familiar." He swiveled and looked me full in the face and twisted the laptop so I could see. "Right here? We did that, right?"

I couldn't look at him. I couldn't look at the screen. Mortification was hitting me from every possible angle. "I guess we did, yeah. Why, you don't remember?"

He pulled the laptop back. "No. I do." His eyes went far away for a moment. Then his lip quirked slightly. "Though I don't remember it going exactly like this. 'The center of her pleasure?' Why not just call it what it is?"

"That's… more or less what it is." I bunched the blanket in my fists and contemplated pulling it over my head. "You can't be too clinical."

He rolled his eyes and kept reading. "So many euphemisms." He paused and burst out laughing. “ ’Nethers’?! Really?"

The corner of my mouth twitched involuntarily. "Yeah?"

"That's a terrible word!" he laughed.

"It's evocative!" I tried to protest, but suddenly I was laughing too.

“ ‘Nethers.’ For fuck's sake. The real words for it are so much nicer."

"The real words?"

"Yeah, you know." He shifted a little, tucking his leg under him. His warm thigh pressed against my leg. I could feel his heat even through the blanket. "Clit," he said, rolling the word through his mouth like he was tasting each letter. "Cunt."

My mouth went dry and I swallowed, suddenly at a loss for words.

He stared at me for a moment too long. No way was he going to make me admit how sexy those words sounded when he said them. It was like he was calling right to them and mine were answering with a clutch of need.

A slow smile spread across his face. "Yeah, you think those words are better too, don't you, Lily?"

"They're too… dirty."

"Nothing's too dirty."

"Maybe not to you…"

"You either, Bit." His eyes darted down the page. "Oh my God, 'shaft'? Really? That's what you're calling it?" His hand went to his groin and I realized I was watching way too closely and quickly glanced away. "How about 'cock'? That's a much better word. Better yet, make it a pierced cock, since I remember how you liked that so much."

I ignored his jibe. "I doubt there were many pierced cocks in 19th century England, Jaxson. I was trying for a bit of historical verisimilitude."

"Yeah? Well whatever that means, I think it's too bad. Your Geraldine character seems like she would enjoy a piercing sliding against her G-spot. It would help her reach the… er… 'pinnacle of her pleasure,' faster than this lame-ass Tristan guy gets her."

I suddenly realized something. "Jax, you're like, at the end of the book. It's almost ninety thousand words. Did you even sleep?"

For the first time since I woke up, that cocky little smile slid off of his face. "Nah. Not really."

His beautiful face looked pinched too tight and the bags under his eyes were an angry looking shade of purple. My irritation melted away and I reached for him without meaning to. "Why?"

"I wanted to catch you before you woke up. So we could maybe talk about last night. Before you woke up and stormed off."

Did I say my irritation left? Never mind, it came flooding back in an instant. "Stormed off?" I repeated.

"Yeah, storming off without talking to me. It's kind of your thing," he shot back."

I flopped back down on my pillow. I couldn't believe how quickly he veered from being sweet and sexy to the most annoying person on the planet. "Oh, fuck off," I cried, pinching the bridge of my nose.

I felt him shift, lean forward. "We can, you know. All these things you wrote down…" His voice went lower. "Mmm… such vivid details, Bit. If I had known you were paying such close attention, I would have stepped up my game."

I clapped my hands over my ears. "Shut up!"

He leaned over me. I looked up at him, hovering over my bed. My breath was coming too quickly, my heart beating too rapidly. Realizing I was biting my lip, I licked them instead and his eyes went right to them. "It's given me a few ideas, frankly. How about it? Wanna do some research with me?"

His offer hung there, for one, two, three heartbeats before I finally came to my senses. I reached up and pushed him away. "Oh my God, get the fuck out of my room."

He stood up. "You never even heard why I was here."

"I don't care, get out." I flopped over to my side and waited until I heard the door close before I finally exhaled.

Chapter Sixteen

Jax

I stared at Lily's bedroom door, wondering how the fuck I had just gotten it shut on me again. I stayed up all night and into the late morning, wanting to apologize to her the minute she woke up, and yet somehow, I fucked that up as well.

Dammit, this wasn't happening again. I raised my fist to bang on the door, ready to batter it down if I had to, when my cell phone rang. I grabbed it out of my pocket, ready to hurl it down the hallway when I saw Bev's name. My heart, already in my stomach, splashed right down to my toes.