Table of Contents
Title Page
FOR 100 NIGHTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Other books by Lara Adrian
About the Author
COPYRIGHT
FOR 100 NIGHTS
A 100 Series Novel
Book 2
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR
LARA ADRIAN
© 2017 Lara Adrian, LLC
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (v1)
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Coming Spring 2017
FOR 100 REASONS
100 Series ~ Book 3
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FOR 100 NIGHTS
Passion knows no bounds . . .
Avery Ross is living a dream. After struggling all of her life to make ends meet, a chance meeting with a powerful, darkly handsome man has catapulted her into a dazzling new world of penthouse luxury, elegant parties, and a wild, consuming passion with her billionaire lover, Dominic Baine. Nothing is out of his reach in business or in pleasure, yet the only woman he wants is her. Nick sweeps her to sensual heights she has never dared explore, commanding her body the same way he commands her heart. Yet Avery knows the fantasy she’s living cannot last.
With dark secrets and a dangerous enemy haunting her past, Avery must find a way to trust Nick with the truth before it destroys everything they share. But Nick is harboring secrets of his own as well. And when they come to light, Avery will be forced to decide if the love she feels for Nick is strong enough to endure a betrayal she may never be able to forgive.
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“There are twists that I want to say that I expect from a Lara Adrian book, and I say that because with any Adrian book you read, you know there's going to be a complex storyline. Adrian simply does billionaires better.”
—Under the Covers (on FOR 100 DAYS)
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For 100 Nights is the second novel in a passionate new contemporary romance trilogy from New York Times and #1 international bestselling author Lara Adrian.
Available now: For 100 Days
Coming soon: For 100 Reasons
Chapter 1
Sunrise glistens on the meandering curves of the East River, the golden light of the August morning gilding the elegant hotels, mansions, and other prime real estate that surrounds verdant Central Park ninety-three stories below me. Lifting my head from my pillow, I sweep my bed-tossed tangle of blond hair away from my eyes, awed and breathless as I watch daybreak gently play over the city from my privileged vantage point far above it all.
I’ve been waking up to this view—in this bed on top of the world—for the past two weeks, yet I swear each morning is more spectacular than the last.
So are the nights.
As tempting as it may be to slip out from the silky sheets and savor the splendor of New York City’s waking skyline, my body is languid and flushed, my limbs too weak to move. All of my senses are still thrumming from an incredible predawn orgasm that’s only beginning to ebb.
I sigh in pleasure, and the firm, muscled arm that’s wrapped around me from behind flexes to pull me closer. Warm lips and a beard-roughened face nuzzles my nape with a kiss that sends wet heat licking through me, straight to my core.
The view from the penthouse of the tallest building in Manhattan is a jaw-dropper to be sure, but it’s the man holding my naked body against his who never fails to leave me amazed and breathless.
Dominic Baine.
He’s still inside me, his cock still erect even after the climax that had him shouting my name like a curse only moments ago. His hips move against my ass and I arch into his lazy thrust on a moan I don’t even attempt to bite back.
“So greedy, Ms. Ross. Such a sweet, demanding pussy you have.” He withdraws slowly as he speaks, each retreating inch a torment, a threat of loss that makes my walls clench around him in protest. I feel the vibration of his amused chuckle against my spine, his mouth teasing the sensitive skin behind my ear. “I’ve made you come twice since you woke up and you’re ready for me to fuck you all over again.”
Not a question. No pretense of propriety, despite the urbane polish of his deep voice or the fact that he’s one of the most respected, successful—wealthiest—men in the country.
We’re long past all of that now.
“Tell me, Avery,” he demands quietly, yet firmly, against the shell of my ear.
“I want you to fuck me, Nick. Right now. Again. I don’t ever want you to stop fucking me.”
“Good girl.” He rewards me with a tweak of my nipple as he pushes inside me all the way to the hilt.
I suck in my breath at the enormity of him, of how primal our need for each other is. It’s burned white-hot for nearly four months now, since the moment we first met—a chance encounter in this very building, then another, more provocative exchange at Dominion, the art gallery Nick owns on Fifth Avenue.
The same gallery where several of my paintings had hung unsold for more than a year before they were culled at Nick’s direction to make way for more promising artists.
I hadn’t realized Nick was Dominion’s owner that first night I ended up in his bed. As angered as I’d been to learn who he was a few days later, it hadn’t kept me from wanting him, or from falling headlong into the kind of carnal, consuming—infinitely intense—relationship I’d never had with any man before him.
Nothing had.
But then, to be fair, there were things Nick hadn’t known about me either. I’d been playing what I thought was a harmless game—pretending I was someone I wasn’t, letting him think I was someone better, someone without my ugly past and the onerous baggage that came with it.
I’d been acting like I belonged in Nick’s world when in reality I was a failed artist and struggling bartender living a temporary fairy tale existence as a house-sitter in his building.
For the first hundred days we were together, I let Nick believe all of my lies.
Even the worst ones.
When everything finally crashed down around me, I thought for sure he would be gone. Instead, he came after me. He found me. He forgave me.
And then he named his price for letting me back in.
One hundred nights.
For each day I deceived him, he demanded a night in return. He wanted all of me. In his bed. On his terms. At his total mercy.
I can’t imagine a more exquisite punishment.
He drives into me again, another long, hard thrust that wrings a broken cry from my throat. My body is spent, my sex swollen and sore from the fury of Nick’s passion last night and again this morning. But I crave this ache. I crave this man with a depth of need that probably should terrify me. Instead it only makes me hunger for more.
Half in pleasure, half i
n pain, I tilt my body to take all of him as his next thrust goes even deeper—to the razor’s edge of what I think I can bear. I want everything he’ll give me, the pleasure and the pain. The raw possession.
The complete dominance that demands nothing less than my full surrender.
He grinds out a tight curse and I groan when I feel him withdraw too far, too fast for my liking. He shifts behind me, the flat of his palm coming down on my ass in a sharp smack. “On your hands and knees, baby.”
As I hurry to comply, I register that he’s disposing of the spent condom from our last bout of the morning and rolling on a fresh one. He returns a moment later, the heat of his body radiating over my bare backside, which is on full display for him in the thin light of morning.
“God, you’re beautiful,” he murmurs, skimming his hands up the outsides of my parted thighs, then onto the rounded curve of my ass.
Facing the floor-to-ceiling window, I watch the faint ghosts of our reflection in the glass as he looms behind me naked on his knees, his strong hands roaming all over my body. I arch and shudder as his fingers leave no inch of me untouched. The warm coil of need that held me a moment ago now twists tighter, hotter, aching with anticipation of the pleasure still to come.
“All of this belongs to me,” he says, while his fingers skate back down to splay atop my bare cheeks, then squeeze, opening me wider to him. Then he releases my ass only so he can slide one palm along the length of my bowed spine while the other one delves into the drenched and pulsing cleft of my sex. “All of you, Avery. Mine.”
“Yes.” The word rushes out of me, both an admission and a plea.
I am his, even if I’m not quite certain what his possession will mean for me in the end. Although I’m falling in love with him—and I’ve confessed as much to him—we’ve made no promises to each other beyond these hundred nights.
Right now, all I need is the next moment. I need to feel him inside me.
“Nick, please.” My voice is little more than a whimper, my breath panting and shallow.
He leans over me, pushing my shoulders down onto the mattress so that my backside is angled high. Lust floods me, animalistic and urgent. He is naturally dominant, and, in spite of my history, nothing turns me on faster or harder than submitting to Nick’s carnal control.
He reaches down to caress my face with the back of his hand—the one that’s riddled with angry scars, horrific wounds he’s dismissed as the result of a foolish brawl when he was eighteen. They are the only flaws on his otherwise perfect body.
At times in these past few months we’ve been together, I’ve wondered if there are other scars he doesn’t allow me to see. I know there must be, because the broken parts of me recognize the fractures in him, even if he hasn’t permitted me close enough to touch them yet.
When his thumb brushes my lips, I stroke my tongue against it, then draw him into my mouth the way I want to—need to—draw him into my body.
His groan sounds ragged as I suck him deep. His pelvis bucks against my ass, his erection wedged between the slickness of my cleft.
“Ah, fuck,” he snarls, rubbing the pad of his thumb against the cushion of my tongue as he guides his cock to my entrance. “Hang on, baby.”
The low command is a warning. I feel his ferocity building even before he pushes inside me on a sharp roar. There is no gentleness in him as he pulls his hand away from my mouth and gathers my loose hair in his grasp. He winds the blond tresses tautly around his fist, until I feel the sting all over my scalp.
I am instantly lost to the violence of his passion—and my own.
He powers into me like a tempest, furious and unrelenting. His words rasp low and dark above me, praise and profanity, my name uttered like a prayer as he takes me over body, heart and soul.
Braced on my hands, with my head pulled back and my shoulders pinned to the mattress, I stare through pleasured tears at the carnality of our lovemaking reflected with fading clarity in the window glass and the warming colors of the summer morning now bursting to life on the other side.
My chest aches with emotion as my orgasm swiftly builds. This is when I feel most alive—held fast against this man, naked and surrendered to him completely. Feeling the full measure of his power and fury, yet knowing there is nowhere safer that I can be.
The sensations overwhelm me. The beauty and the pain and the pleasure.
I want to hold all of it close. I want to memorize every moment.
I want to paint everything I’m feeling, even though it’s been weeks since I’ve worked on anything new.
“Oh, God . . . Nick.” My grasp on lucid thought slips away as my climax chases up on me. Eyes closed, I bite down on my lip as Nick’s merciless tempo pushes me right over the edge. The scream that rips from my throat is jagged, uncontrolled.
Nick’s guttural shout a moment later is no less primal. With the fingers of one hand digging into my hip, the other still wound tightly in my hair, he rams deep, a hard shudder raking him as he comes.
Although I’m spent and trembling from my release, he continues to rock inside me, losing little of his hardness, despite the ferocity of his own orgasm. He moves slowly, patiently, gentling me now. Tender kisses light on my shoulder, then along my spine. He lets go of my hair, carefully unwinding it, then combing his fingers through the loosened strands.
As turbulent as our sex often is, his aftercare is impossibly sweet.
Gathering me to him, he takes us both down onto our sides on the mattress. His arms encircle me, strong and warm, a shelter I’d like to remain in all day if I could. Forever, if I’m being honest.
It takes some time before we’re both breathing normally again and relaxed. Nick reaches up to stroke the side of my sweat-sheened face. When he speaks, his deep voice is thick like velvet, a caress I feel as palpably as his touch. “Better now?”
“Perfect.”
It’s not a word I’m accustomed to using, especially when it comes to my life. But these past few months—the two weeks I’ve been living with Nick in particular—have come pretty damn close. I never thought it could be like this with someone. I never imagined that I would ever feel this connected to anyone, this whole.
I’ve never felt this terrified either.
Because as deeply as I’ve fallen, I know that the bottom could drop out of this bliss at any moment.
It nearly did two weeks ago.
Nick and I came through some of my worst secrets together, but there is more he doesn’t know. Things I don’t dare tell him. A truth I intend to take to my grave.
He kisses my nape, drawing me out of the past that continues to haunt me.
“Now that I’ve satisfied one of your appetites, how about breakfast?”
My mouth waters at the thought. “Mm, sounds great.” As gifted as he is in bed and at business, Nick’s culinary talents are nothing short of spectacular.
Giving my shoulder a light nip, he carefully withdraws from my sex. “Join me in the shower. I’ll get the water started.”
I moan as he rolls away from me, leaving cool air where his delicious heat had been. Pivoting around, I watch him move to the edge of the bed and dispose of the condom. The sight of his muscled back and broad shoulders makes my mouth water too. How did I end up with this amazing man? It’s a question I’ve asked myself numerous times since fate put me in his orbit.
Dominic Baine, a man who can have anything—and anyone—he desires, yet the only person he seems to want is me.
When he glances back to look at me, I am struck now, as always, by how handsome he is. An arresting mix of sharp angles and hard lines, his face is softened only by the lush line of his mouth. A mouth that knows every inch of my body and how to pleasure it. Under the ebony slashes of his brows and bed-tousled crown of dark hair, Nick’s cerulean gaze makes my pulse kick with banked, but still smoldering, arousal.
One of those inky brows arches wryly. “If I didn’t have a meeting I can’t miss this morning, that look might get you fucked
again right now, Ms. Ross. Whether you’re ready or not.”
I laugh, but my core throbs, knowing he means it.
He stands up, facing me with a hard-on I can’t help but admire. “Shower and breakfast,” he growls. “If I don’t decide to skip the cooking and spread you out on the table before I leave.”
“Promises, promises,” I tease, sliding to the edge of the bed where he waits. Taking his cock in my hands, I flick my tongue against the tip. Before he can grab hold of me, I hop to my feet and dance out of his reach. “Shower and breakfast, Mr. Baine. I’ll put the coffee on and join you.”
His acknowledgment is little more than a snarl. “Make it quick.”
I pad out of the spacious bedroom naked, feeling at home in the immense, luxurious penthouse that overlooks all of Manhattan from various angles. Passing the windows in the living room, which frame the iconic skyline of the city and the view I glimpsed the night Nick first kissed me here, I head for the kitchen with a smile lingering on my lips.
As I go to the coffee maker, I notice my cell phone peeking out of my small evening bag on the black granite counter where I left both last night after Nick and I returned from dinner and a play.
The text message light is blinking.
“Shit.” I had silenced the phone in the theater and forgot to turn it back on.
I swipe the lock screen and tap the message icon. All the blood drains from my face when I see the phone number on the unread text. I’ve seen this Pennsylvania number before. It’s been seared into my mind from the last time I saw it appear on my phone.
My finger trembles as I open the message and absorb the fresh threat I’ve just received.
U avoiding me?
Told u 2 wks ago we need 2 talk.
Im not going away Avery. Not this time.
Be in touch. Thats a promise.
My breath is racing, my heart banging so hard it might burst out of my chest.