Read His Every Desire (For His Pleasure, Book 7) for Free Online

quick second. “Go ahead and ask me a question right now. Ask me whatever you want and I’ll answer it.”
    “No you won’t.”
    “Scared?” he said.
    “Fine.” She turned and looked at him, her eyes narrowing as she considered the perfect question. Finally, she decided. “Why didn’t you want me to finish reading Blue Horizon?”
    He smiled slowly. “I figured you’d ask me about that.”
    “So you’re backing out, then?”
    “No, I’ll tell you.” He thought for a moment. “The thing is, Blue Horizon was successful beyond my wildest dreams. When I wrote that book, I did it because…” he stopped for a moment, as if not wanting to continue. “Well, I wrote it because someone very close to me needed me to write it. And then, when it was done, I sort of put it in a drawer and forgot about it. I didn’t particularly have the time to go about finding an agent and trying to get it published, and it never occurred to me that I could do that anyway.”
    Kallie watched him, her heart beating faster as she realized that Hunter was actually opening up to her, for the first time. He was telling her something that she suspected very few people, if anyone, knew about him.
    “So how did you end up getting it published?” she asked.
    “No, that’s two questions. I’m answering the one question only,” he told her.
    “Fair enough.” She smiled, liking the game for some reason. But then again, why did everything between them have to be a game?
    “I’ll just say that Blue Horizon somehow—as if by magic—found its way into the hands of an agent and then an editor, and I landed a very lucrative publishing deal.”
    “That’s amazing,” she said. “I mean, that’s like winning the lottery, isn’t it?”
    “Yes, but what nobody told me was the price tag for getting my dreams was steeper than I’d ever imagined.”
    She wanted to ask, but refrained. Instead, she simply nodded. “The book was a huge success, though.”
    “That it was,” he agreed. “Bigger than even my publisher had hoped for. We hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list for fifteen weeks in a row. We sold millions of copies, and then we sold the movie rights to DreamWorks. A couple of years later, the movie came out and grossed over three hundred million dollars worldwide.”
    “Oh my God,” she gasped.
    “I didn’t make three hundred million, personally. But my agent was able to get me a small percentage of the back end, and it worked out to be quite a chunk of change, on top of everything else.”
    “You still haven’t answered the original question,” she pointed out.
    “I’m getting there, Kallie. Have some patience.” He looked over at her and she got a thrill from the way his dark eyes met hers, before he went back to gazing at the road.
    “Okay, I’ll be quiet.”
    “Anyway,” he said, as the car hugged a particularly tight corner, and Hunter expertly maneuvered around it and then picked up speed into a straightaway. “Things were going absolutely wonderfully, except for one important thing.” He smiled, as if to himself. “I couldn’t seem to write the next book. The deal I’d signed was for two books, and Blue Horizon was so popular and the ending was so ambiguous that people were clamoring for the next one immediately. All anybody ever talked to me about or asked about was that next damn book. And I couldn’t write a word of it. Not a single word.”
    He glanced over at her again to gauge her reaction.
    “That’s obviously difficult for you,” she said.
    “Understatement of the year,” he laughed. “The pressure was immense and it only grew. Financially and socially and psychologically, my entire life is basically tied forever to that one book I wrote. And in the last two years, I’ve had to accept that I’m not going to write the next one. I gave my publisher back half a million dollars from the advance they’d given me.”
    Kallie gasped again. She couldn’t even imagine receiving