جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 7

Iris's POV "You there yet?""Yeah." The key worked on the first try, and I stood in the doorway for a second, with my suitcase in one hand, phone pressed to my ear in the other. "God, Chloe. It's so quiet."I looked around, the Blackridge Mansion was exactly as I remembered it, marble floors, high ceilings, the kind of house that screamed wealth."Well no one is home," Chloe laughed through the phone. "So stop thinking and go find the pool.""Chloe I...""Iris." She said, cutting me off. "You've been a ghost for months. I know you're stressed out by your stepmom, and Tristan, I can see it in your face. So get in the pool, get in the water and remember what it feels like to actually be in your body."I pressed my lips together. "Your dad gets back in the morning, right?""Yeah, he won't land until eight." She paused. "I'll be back by tomorrow too, so the house is yours. Now stop stalling.""I don't have a swimsuit." I said."You have underwear, don't you?" She asked."Chloe...""Goodn

Iris's POV "...and what most students fail to understand," Professor Blackwell said, clicking to her next slide. "is that the scent bond does not wait for your permission. By the time you consciously register what's happening, your body has already been responding for..."I stopped hearing her.My brain simply checked out mid-sentnce and handed me back to the dream. His hands on my skin. The way his fingers had found me soaking and the groan that had torn out of his chest.I shifted in my seat.I imagined him here. Not as the man he actually was, controlled, composed, the kind of alpha other men stepped back for without being asked, but as the man from the dream. The one who would lay me down on the desk, his hands rough as he pushed my skirt up, his fingers finding the damp heat between my legs. I imagined the way he would groan when he felt how wet it was, like this morning, like every morning, the way his c*ck would twitch against my thigh as he told me exactly what he was going t

Iris's POV I ordered a whiskey sour.The bar was three blocks from campus that Chloe and I had been coming since we turned eighteen, I was steady enough to sit down without gripping the stool.I took a sip of my drink, the alcohol burning a path down my throat. I didn't cry, I was past crying about Tristan. The words came flooding through my mind.Corpse. Dead when I touch her.I set the glass down and looked at it and thought about the thirty seconds in his bedroom that had undone eight months of nothing. Thirty seconds of thinking about Rafael, his large hands, and my pussy tightened at the mere thought of him. I thought about the way I wanted him in ways I had never wanted anyone.I signaled for a third drink.I wasn't broken. I'd been telling myself that because it was easier than admitting that the reason Tristan had never once reached anything real in me was because something else had already taken up all the space, it had been taking up space since I was sixteen, waking up flu

Iris's POV"Dad? Iris?"Her footsteps crossed the marble entrance hall, getting closer."Fuck," Rafael said under his breath, and he was already pulling himself out of the pool, water streaming off him, reaching for the towel on the lounger.I scrambled after him, grabbing the pool steps, hauling myself out. I grabbed my soaked shorts from the concrete, yanked them up my legs with hands that were shaking so badly I nearly fell over. My tank top was beside the lounger. I snatched it, pulled it over my head, the wet fabric plastering itself to my skin immediately.No bra. No underwear. Soaking wet from the pool and flushed from everything that wasn't the pool.Rafael had already wrapped the towel around his waist. He ran one hand through his wet hair, exhaled once through his nose, and his shoulders dropped into that easy, composed posture like he'd just flipped a switch. The composure came back so fast it was almost frightening, like watching a door close on a fire.I couldn't keep my