Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 88656 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 443(@200wpm)___ 355(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88656 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 443(@200wpm)___ 355(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
Kage turned on the shower. “Call the front desk while I wash up, will you? Have them send someone up to clean the floor. You can shower after me, and then we’ll head out to dinner. Maybe we’ll find some trouble to get into, like a club.”
Getting into trouble with Kage sounded a little too dangerous, but I didn’t say so. Maybe I needed a little dose of dangerous. Or a little dose of Kage.
I pushed aside my increasingly inappropriate thoughts and called the front desk. Within minutes a man and a woman showed up and made quick work of tidying the kitchen. They vacuumed the glass and used some sort of magical solution to get the stain out of the carpet. I asked if I could borrow some of the stain remover for our clothes, and they looked at me like I’d asked for free money. “Never mind,” I mumbled, and they hurried from the room.
Kage came out of the bathroom followed by a plume of steam. He was naked except for a white towel around his waist, and I tried not to notice his iliac furrows disappearing into the low-slung fabric, or the dark blush of his nipples.
“Did they get the kitchen clean?” he asked, pausing in front of the wide mirror over the vanity. He leaned in toward his reflection, checking his face, studying some imagined flaw there. From the back, his towel hugged his ass intimately, displaying those unreal dips in the sides of his muscled ass cheeks. I had never seen anyone in such amazing shape. He was truly a work of art, a walking statue of David.
And apparently oblivious to my inner turmoil. He looked like the last hour had never happened.
“Yeah, the kitchen’s spotless, Kage. Unlike me.” I pushed past him, needing to get into the shower, more concerned with washing away the confusion and dread rather than the wine. I reasoned that I was probably just exhausted from the trip. Freshening up ought to do the trick, set things back to the way they were before we walked into this place. It appeared to have worked for Kage.
The shower didn’t help me much, though. Physically, I was restored, but I was more emotionally wrecked than when I’d gone in. For one thing, I couldn’t stop thinking about jerking off. Several times, my hand had wandered down below and gotten my cock nice and slippery with hotel soap, only to fall away when I thought of the man in the next room. I just couldn’t do it with him out there. Not today. Not after what had happened.
But what exactly had happened, anyway? I was leaning toward the conclusion that I’d made an ass of myself, and Kage was too nice to call me out on it.
I’d only touched him, and just barely at that. Just a simple graze of skin.
Yeah, while looking up at him with that lovestruck expression, Jamie. You fucking moron.
“Your mom called while you were in the shower,” Kage told me when I finally emerged. I looked in the mirror and ran my fingers through my hair, noticing how long it was getting. How it was curling around my ears.
“Did you talk to her?”
“Yeah, I answered it. I wouldn’t have, but I figured since it was her, maybe it was okay.”
“I don’t mind you answering my phone, Kage. What did she say?”
“She said she loves you, Happy Birthday, and that she’s supposed to report for surgery at seven Monday week. What the hell is Monday week?”
“It means not next week, but the Monday after. Don’t ask. It’s something my grandmother always said.”
“Jamie, why didn’t you tell me your mom had breast cancer?”
“Because it’s got nothing to do with my job. Why would I bother you with my personal sob stories?”
He gave me a reproachful look. “Because I care. Because I could talk to you about it. And because I’m going to take you down there to be with her for her surgery.”
I whirled on him. “You can’t do that. It’s… please don’t make me be a burden on you. This job means a lot to me, and I don’t want to make you regret hiring me.”
“Shut up,” he said. “Don’t say things like that. You make me seem like a tyrant or something. I thought we were—”
He didn’t finish his sentence.
“What else did my mom say?” I asked, mainly to break the silence.
“I told her we would be flying down for it. She’s fussing about it just like you are. She thinks it’s a wasted trip, because she’s going to be fine. But I told her that it didn’t matter how minor the surgery was, because I wanted to bring you. A boy should be there for his mother. End of story.”
That made me smile. “And what did she say to that?”