Trapped with My Best Friend’s Dad by Flora Ferrari
Chapter Nineteen
Rayla
Roman looms over me, a giant mass of muscle and possible pleasure as he stares down at me. His eyes alert. His body is a behemoth, barely contained within the blue shirt he wore for dinner.
We stand at my bedroom door, in the darkened hallway. Tanker sits at Roman’s feet.
“I guess I should say goodnight,” he murmurs huskily.
I nod, bit my lip, and then let it go quickly.
He chuckles. “It drives me even crazier when you do that, angel. When you bite it and then let it go. It makes me realize how close you are to the edge too. But we’ve got our deal…”
“No more sex stuff.” I nod, trying to make the words seem firm, confident, trying to make it seem like I’m not constantly on the edge of letting go. “And we need to stick to it, at least until…”
I don’t need to finish the sentence, but we both know where it leads, who it leads to.
He glances down the hallway, his jaw going tight, as though he doesn’t like the idea of leaving me for the night. “Why do you want to be an actress, Rayla?”
“I don’t really know how to answer that.”
He turns to me, that intoxicating smirk on his face like he’s silently begging me to lean forward and press my lips against his. “Care to elaborate?”
“It’s just that I’ve always wanted to be an actor. It’s like what you talk about in Jack’s Promise. There are certain grooves people can’t help but fall into, and these can be bad grooves, evil grooves, or they can be good, positive. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve wanted to dress up, to be other people. And later, when I became a teenager, I started to think…”
“What, Rayla?” he growls, voice deep as he steps forward. “Tell me.”
I whimper as our bodies brush. They don’t crash together, just press close like they did before. But right now, with our no sex stuff rule hanging between us, the barest touch feels like a universe of sensation.
“I didn’t want to be myself. I didn’t want to live trapped in me. So I pretended to be other people, and I practiced doing their voices and moving like this and that, so maybe I could truly believe I was them. And sometimes I’d get this feeling, almost magical like I was somebody else entirely. Does that make me crazy?”
He shakes his head but does that just-Roman thing where his eyes never leave me. “No, it makes you exactly like me. That’s how I feel when I’m immersed in a story.”
I should stop, I should really freaking stop, but I can’t…
I reach up and grip onto his shirt, digging my fingernails in so I can feel his muscles against my fingertips. He makes a shivering growling noise as though the mere force of my touch is setting things alight inside of him.
“Your heart is beating like crazy,” I whisper, as it thunders against my palm.
“It’s you,” he snarls. “It’s like I’m constantly fighting to stay strong, to remember who I’m supposed to be, what sort of man I’m supposed to be. But you, Rayla, you make me want to be a monster.”
“A monster?” I whimper, tightening my hold on him, feeling his need surge through him, making him seem bigger, the tension pressing against his skin like a beast trying to escape.
“Yes. A monster who doesn’t care about the future, about how wrong this could be. A monster who only cares about what it feels like now.”
He leans even closer, letting me feel his breath whispering across my skin, and I look down at Tanker, curled up at his feet. The little dog is our only escape, our only way out of this, stopping us from crossing the line.
“Tanker,” Roman says. “You want to get to bed, boy? Hmm, bed?”
Part of me prays for Tanker to ignore him, to sit down and look up at him as if to say, What the heck are you talking about?
But another part of me silently screams for the little dog to get the hint and give us our space.
There’s a moment when it could go either way, but then Tanker yawns and turns away, padding down the hallway. I watch him go with a disbelieving smile on my face, and that’s proof right there… the smile tells me what I really wanted to happen, not what I pretended to hope would happen.
Privacy, just me and him.
It’s like Tanker wants us to be together.
The future be damned, consequences be damned.
He leans down. “I fucking need you. I can’t play these games anymore.”
I gasp as his lips collide with mine.
