Read Online Shatter (Club Grit Trilogy) by Brooke Jaxsen - Free Book Online Page A

distracting woman I’ve ever met, and most of the people here, I wouldn’t describe as women, but as girls. I’d describe the males as boys, not men, because they’re all immature. Maybe I’m from a different time, but I think people should be mature by the time they’re old enough to have the money to flash their credit cards and charge thousand dollar bottles of liquor. Obviously, that doesn’t stop me from exploiting their weakness, the need to impress others and spend as much money as Daddy can afford, but if I didn’t, somebody else would. But you? You’re someone that nobody could really control, Kim,” he said, brushing a loose lock of hair out of my face. I turned away, knowing I was blushing, even through my makeup, but I didn’t care. I knew I couldn’t will away the telltale shading of light red, but he pressed his knuckles underneath my chin and pushed my face forward and up so that I was forced to look into his Siberian blue eyes. He kept my wrists down with one of his hands, and with the other, he traced the lines of my body, from the angular curve of my jaw to my décolletage, as if he was painting a line across my collarbones, using only his fingertips as a brush. The painting continued down, along my dress, but not under it, as he lightly pressed my waist and the small of my back, but didn’t go grabbing for my tits and ass the way that someone else might. He was a man who appreciated details, and while breasts and ass was a dime (or, in Beverly Hills, twenty thousand dollars and the number of a great surgeon) a dozen, he was a connoisseur of not just alcohol and fashion, but of beauty in general. He understood that design was universal, and that a curve that was gorgeous on a bottle of absinthe could be as appreciated as that of a fine woman in a damn fine dress.
    I wanted his hands on my body, but really on my body, not just on my clothes, not just gently handling me like I was an expensive glass vase at Sotheby’s. I didn’t want to be held like something that had provenance, like a work by an up-and-coming artist. What I wanted was more basic and primal, the sort of thing that a frat boy can do with ease yet a man with multiple master’s degrees and a Wikipedia page seemed somehow unable to bring himself to do. He was on me, he was beholding me, he was objectifying me, and I loved every moment of it, but I didn’t want to be an object of art, but an object of his affection: something he not only admired, but that he could use. “Kim, you’re not just a woman, you’re a force of nature. You’re able to hold your own in conversation without talking about trite topics. You understand what I try to say better than even I do, and you’re an enigma wrapped in a black bodycon dress, and I wouldn’t change that for the world,” he said, pressing his lips onto my forehead gently, before he pulled up and removed his hands from my wrists.
    I could have gotten away without a struggle. I could have just left the room. I didn’t have to put my hand by his cheek, feel the stubble that was dense and rich and soft and sharp at the same time, and press further up, pressing some imaginary lock of hair out of his hair, cut short, and pulling his head to mine, digging my hands into his hair and feeling how his hair felt like a luxurious mink coat. I didn’t need for us to press foreheads, then noses, before we bent into a kiss. I could have just left.
    But I didn’t, because I knew that he was the only man that I really wanted. I knew if I walked out the curtains, what we had could be irrevocably lost. I wasn’t stupid: this wasn’t The Great Gatsby, he wasn’t going to wait and watch a green light from across a bay, and I wasn’t going to be oblivious as to his true feelings about me. There was no Tom keeping me from Jay, so this wasn’t some American classic, this was a pulpy romance at best, the likes of which you get at a supermarket as an impulse purchase, the way I was letting myself loose