In Bed With the Billionaire by Jackie Ashenden

Author:Jackie Ashenden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

CHAPTER TWELVE

Jericho opened his eyes just as dawn was stretching itself over the city. And it wasn’t the earliness of the hour that surprised him as he turned to check the clock on the nightstand. It was the fact that he’d even been to sleep at all.

He didn’t sleep much these days and wouldn’t have thought he had now, but there was nothing else to account for the blank passage of time in between holding Temple’s warm body close and opening his eyes just now.

She was still asleep, twined around him like ivy, breathing deep and slow, and he lay there for a couple of minutes just watching her.

He very deliberately didn’t think of what had occurred between them downstairs the day before. All the things he’d said to her, the secrets he’d revealed about himself, because even though he hadn’t said anything aloud, she’d been able to read him like a fucking open book.

No, he couldn’t think of that. So he thought about what had happened after that instead. Of fucking her up against that window, watching the sun fall across her naked body, turning her hair into a bonfire of brilliant red and gold. The freckles on her milky skin had been like gold dust and the look in her eyes molten.

She hadn’t held back this time. She’d given him everything. He’d seen the aching vulnerability of her beneath that dangerous edge, the little girl who’d never stopped being scared. Because why else did she protect herself so fiercely? Both physically and emotionally?

Her father had sold his oldest child for drugs. Jesus. What kind of childhood had she had?

You know what kind.

Yeah, he did. The kind he saw evidence of every day, in the lives of the girls who got trapped in his network. In the lives of the drug dealers and users he came into contact with all the time. His world …

A world she should never have been a part of, and yet by an accident of birth or a cruel twist of fate or just fucking life, she was.

No wonder she was protecting herself.

She had her head on his chest, strands of red hair falling over her face so he pushed them back, hooking the silken red curls behind her ear.

Her relationship with her sister was obviously important to her, or at least had been, and it made him wonder what exactly Thalia had done for her little sister. Maybe like he had with Violet, Thalia had protected Temple. Maybe she’d kept her safe. And when she’d disappeared …

Cold moved inside him, though what a fucking hypocrite he was to worry about this one small woman, to hope nothing bad had happened to her and yet, knowing what he knew, to realize that something bad probably had. Because something had to have set her on the path toward finding her sister. Toward vengeance.

She’s not the only one. What about all the others?

So many other women who’d had it worse than Temple. So many trapped in the trafficking web who still did.

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