Page 75 of Root

She’s there, a drawer in the side table open and papers in her hands.

Jess looks guilty as fuck.

She’s clearly snooping.

“What the hell are you doing?” I ask.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Jess

“Snooping?” Rush picks up a book and flips through it.

The book’s some heavy thing, on the shelf near the door, but his gaze, it’s on me.

He waits, snaps it shut, and slides it away. “Jessie?”

For a moment I can’t speak. Or think.

It doesn’t help he’s even hotter with his hair still shower damp. It doesn’t help he’s fucked me and I want more.

And it certainly doesn’t help my equilibrium’s a total mess because of how he did what he did.

My hand starts to shake and those fucking tears prick and burn against my eyes again.

It’s enough to hate him, it really is.

Hate him for how he licked and kissed me so intimately. He did that to my asshole, too.

I’ve had boring sex. Good sex. Bad sex.

I’ve dominated the hell out of a guy and made him go to absolute town on me and not given him anything in return except that thrill of having a girl top him. Hell, I enjoyed the fuck out of Rush tying me up.

But when he touched me, licked and kissed me, cleaned me with his tongue, I… It shattered something inside and I felt open, so exposed. I was his in every way. Just for that moment.

I’m not sure what to do about it.

Maybe more than me not knowing how to react to his questions right now.

There are a million and one excuses, there always are and I should have had one at the ready. But he…

He throws me sideways.

I look at the crap in my hands. Notes about books, one of them’s a shopping list that looks like girly writing—Rose?

I try to breathe.

“Curious,” I say, finally settling on something general.

“You’re curious so you think it’s okay to just go through people’s things?” he asks. “About Nikolai? Rose? The mansion?”

“Curious about you.”

The moment I say that, I realize I mean it.

But the look he gives me is one of tired disbelief. Then, it melts into nothing, the shallow charm of Rush the fuck boy, the charm with seemingly nothing behind it because that’s what most of the girls he meets expect.

And I’m hit with a strange feeling that zig zags in my stomach.

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