The Long Road Home (These Valley Days #1) Read Online Bethany Kris

Categories Genre: Action, Contemporary, Erotic, Romance, Suspense Tags Authors: Series: These Valley Days Series by Bethany Kris
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Total pages in book: 116
Estimated words: 112249 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
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His friend whose name was on the apartment lease wouldn’t be home until the next night, so he offered the couch, if she could stand to sleep with a partner. The liquor, and maybe the man making the offer, had been able to make it hard on Gracen to say no.

Their sweat-slicked skin peeled apart while she breathed in the unmoving air inside the apartment, and cold air rushed inside their warm cocoon when she sat up on the couch at the sound of her alarm ringing somewhere in front of Gracen. The open concept of the layout meant she sat up to face a small flatscreen sitting on a handmade wooden TV stand, and the island where she’d sat her hoodie and phone the night before. Her sudden movement earned her a grunt from the warm, hard body moving at her back.

Gracen blinked a couple more times.

Maybe she hadn’t been all the way awake until then because her vision cleared to say the curtains behind the couch weren’t thick enough to keep the morning light out entirely. The tiny apartment wasn’t as dark as she first thought it was.

“Crap,” she mumbled.

“Hey, hey,” came the sleepy call grumbled against her lower back.

She could feel every scratch of his unshaven jaw moving against the dimples he’d praised and kissed as he’d stripped her clothes one piece at a time.

It was hard to stay in the present when her mind would much rather drift back to the night before when she’d dared to take a few hours to step outside of the very confining box she called her life. Gracen couldn’t mentally afford to be one hundred percent, one hundred percent of the time, but the way she chose to express and release that frustration didn’t have to be fodder for opinion and gossip by the rest of the people in her life.

It would be kind of tough to hide a night like she just had when she was already so late to wake up on a workday with morning appointments that her phone was beeping with the alarm meant to be a notification for her daily birth control pill—that she took at ten. It wasn’t the same chime-like tune that should have woken her up quite a while ago like it did every other morning.

Long after the Haus should have opened.

Had she accidentally silenced her phone the night before?

It was a possibility. The only push notification her phone allowed in sleep mode was her damn birth control because that was a no-excuse task on the daily. For obvious reasons, even if she wasn’t having regular sex.

Last night proved why consistency mattered. Their second condom split after Malachi had finished. The couch hadn’t been used to simply sleep after the two snuggled in under the blanket and their quiet conversation around her bouts of giggles turned into a kiss with sinful intentions. One, and then another. Before Gracen knew it, she was guiding Malachi’s hands between her thighs under the heavy quilt to work her into an orgasm that she could still hear him begging her for in the darkness. His forgotten pile of clothes had been closer—with that fateful rubber.

Fuck.

“Are you going to give me another, angel? Come on, I want it.”

Gracen tried to blink away Malachi’s words. Now wasn’t the time, and she needed to focus on what should be important and where she should be.

She could smell him all around her.

Because he was still there. It aided the memory fighting to keep her happy and sleepy, wrapped in warmth and the smell of sex with Malachi on a couch, in an apartment that did not belong to her. This was not where she should wake up on a Monday morning.

More than Gracen could handle.

“Where you goin’?” he sleepily asked while his fingertips glided along Gracen’s bare thigh still covered with the quilt.

God.

She wanted him to keep touching her. To do what he had last night. Again and again. Desperately because maybe then she wouldn’t have to consider showing up to work late, apologizing to clients who showed up to find their stylist MIA, never mind the questions she would have to answer from Delaney and Margot.

Had Delaney been worried?

Called a million times?

Probably.

Shit.

How had Gracen silenced her phone? She couldn’t figure it out, but sitting there with gooseflesh prickled skin while her greatest temptation touched her wasn’t going to get Gracen any closer to fixing what was already fucked up.

“I’m late for work,” was all Gracen managed to stammer.

She studiously ignored the man who eyed her from the couch with one arm slung haphazardly across his face while she raced around the dimly lit room to find all her things. Or rather, what really mattered.

Sure enough, her phone was on silent mode. Correcting the setting after she’d pulled on her yoga shorts and hoodie—fuck the sports bra she couldn’t spot upon an easy survey of the kitchen and living quarters; she didn’t have time to check the bathroom and garage—her phone immediately lit up with every missed call, text, and calendar notification she’d managed to miss over the last several hours.



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