Page 56 of Salvaged Hearts

Max

Greyson Hart knows my name.

*fainting gif*

You taking good care of my girl, Mr. Hart?

Greyson

She’s not your girl anymore, Maximus.

Axel

You misspelled Maxipad, but okay.

Max

*middle finger emojis*

That’s where you’re wrong, Mr. Fancy Pants. She’ll always be our girl.

Finnegan

Welcome to the family, Grey. May the force be with you.

“Christ, do they ever shut up?”I asked when keeping up became impossible. By the time I read a message, a new one popped up. It was my fifth year running a billion-dollar division in our family conglomerate, and the Rhodes family text thread was overwhelming as fuck. Like some kind of radioactive artifact, I hocked the device onto the plush ivory leather of the seat across from us on our private jet.

Alessandra snorted in an entirely unladylike manner, kicking her bare feet up on the chair beside my discarded nuclear bomb. It was oddly adorable. Everything about this infuriating, brilliant woman was. She’d taken my control in a blink and crumbled it in her dainty little hands like the walls I’d built were constructed of sand and paste, not stone and mortar. The memory of her curves wrapped around me, her thigh slung over my groin, in nothing but a flimsy silk negligée, was permanently carved into my mind.

I was raised to be a gentleman. But there wasnothinggentlemanly about the way my palms buzzed or the primal images all of that smooth skin on display planted in my mind. She’d taken mercy on me after that first night, constantly climbing into bed in something that hung off her body, but I kept waking to my fingers settled on the strip of silky skin wherethose oversized hoodies rode up through the night. My perpetual morning wood a not-so-subtle salute to the goddess in my bed.

The goddess now grinning at me mischievously as she shook her head.

“Not unless their mouths are full, and even then, that’s debatable. You see why I never have my phone on me outside office hours.”

“They do this a lot?”

“All. The. Time.”

“And twelve weren’t enough, so you just…added Max?” I recalled, trying my best to grapple with her insane family line.

“He’s the easiest of the bunch, believe it or not.”

“His family terrible or something?” That was the only explanation I could think of that would entice parents to add another mouth to feed to the dozen they’d intentionally created.

“Nah, wonderful, actually,” she chuckled affectionately. “But he connected with El, Hads, and me in elementary school, and we just sorta…kept him, I guess. Jameson and El helped him come out to his family during his senior year in high school. His dad is Japanese, and his mom grew up a fundamentalist Christian. She’s not usually over the top, but it scared him to talk to them alone, you know? Only child, so it was kinda’ us against the world.”

“That was pretty solid of them.”

“Yeah. He’s definitely the suffer in silence type.”

“Still,” I blew out a quick breath. “How do you keep up?”

“I don’t,” she admitted with cartoon-wide eyes, wiggling to settle deeper into her seat, the Hart family crest peeking out from behind her hair. Hair I was desperate to touch again, to wrap around my fist and remember exactly how sweet she tasted.

We hadn’t talked about that kiss since the wedding. Hadn’t talked about the smaller signs of affection we exchanged over theweekend while her family was around. If it wasn’t for the fact that I’d created a game out of earning her blush or a delicious hitch of her breath, I would have thought I imagined it. The spark between us on that beach.

I hadn’t always been the monk the media knew me as. I’d had women. Not a ton. But I knew what it was to kiss a beautiful female, to feel them yield beneath my touch. To earn their submission.

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