The Billionaire's Princess - Ava Ryan Page 0,8

me going again.

What’s a guy to do?

I speed up, pumping my hips with an abandon that makes our flesh smack and threatens to throw out my back. I make guttural sounds that suggest some sort of zoo animal has possessed my body.

I lose myself in her, letting the rapture tackle me to the ground and pummel me into submission.

I shout her name as I come and come and come.

It takes a while for me to catch my breath and for the aftershocks to wind down, but that’s to be expected following an earthquake that’s broken the Richter scale. I reluctantly pull out and stretch out next to her. When it’s all said and done, we lie facing each other, more dressed than undressed, legs twined as we stroke each other’s faces and, for my part at least, wonder what the fuck just happened here.

I trace her eyebrows. Her nose with its sprinkling of freckles that I hadn’t noticed before. The tender cupid’s bow of her lip.

She runs her thumb over my cheek and jaw, a slight frown grooving down her forehead. Fun fact: she looks as satisfied yet vaguely bewildered as I feel.

I open my mouth, determined to get a few things straight from the get-go.

That she is surprising and unexpected.

That there is—or could be—something here between us.

That I hadn’t planned on anyone crash-landing into my life like this, but that plans change.

Above all?

That we both agree that we’re not done with each other.

Not by a long fucking shot.

But no words come.

Even so, she answers my searching gaze with a steady warmth that makes me wonder how I ever thought she was frosty. Then she tightens her hold on my face. Brings me in for a gentle nuzzle of a kiss.

“I know,” she says drowsily. “I know.”

I drift off with a lingering smile, my head full of plans for more sex during the night, a room service breakfast and leisurely shower in the morning and dinner tomorrow night, confident that she does know.

Which is why it’s such a horrific shock when I wake up to a cold bed and an empty suite.

I bolt upright, going from dead asleep to jarringly awake in half a millisecond.

“Carly?”

Nothing.

The sickening lurch in my gut tells me the truth. But, stupid MF’er that I am, I try again.

“Carly?”

More nothing. A more emphatic nothing.

I get up, visit the bathroom and do a quick lap around the suite, half hoping to find her passed out drunk behind one of the sofas or some such. At least then she’d be here, and I’d have some sort of explanation that doesn’t make me feel like shit.

No such luck.

The truth hits me slowly by degrees, probably because I’m desperate not to see or acknowledge it. But first, I run several increasingly wild scenarios through my mind, trying them on for size. Maybe she ran out for ice. Except that our suite has ice and she wouldn’t have needed to take her purse for an ice run. Maybe she meant to leave a note but couldn’t find a pen or paper. Maybe a sudden and dire problem with her eyesight prevented her from seeing the pen and paper on the nightstand next to the bed.

But she didn’t even bother to scrawl her phone number in lipstick on one of the mirrors.

She left. She’s gone. She’s not coming back. I’ll never see her again.

In that crushing moment, I’d almost rather believe that a crack team of foreign agents extracted her from the room while I was asleep and plan to hold her for ransom. Anything but the truth.

But the truth is that she walked out on me.

Walked. Out. On. Me.

Another woman has walked out on me with zero warning, and I’m the fool that’s surprised.

Haven’t I learned this lesson already? Didn’t my mother tattoo it onto the empty space where a heart should be when she walked out on her husband and three young sons to be with my dad’s richer best friend? And then again when she got herself killed in a car accident before we could reconcile? This is what women do. They lull you into a false sense of security and then they disappear from your life with no advance warning. They pretend to have a connection with you, then they rip the rug out from under your unsuspecting feet and leave you to try to figure out how to get up again.

I have temporarily and foolishly forgotten this one crucial fact about women.

I won’t forget again.

I seethe for