Tripping headfirst right into this dangerous, mysterious man.
“Royce.” This time I was begging.
Praying he wouldn’t stamp out this little part of me that he had sparked to life.
Reluctantly, he lifted his gaze. Hammering me with all that intensity.
Potent and wicked, though it was the flickers of grief shimmering in those onyx eyes that threatened to annihilate.
Totally wipe me out.
He kept me pinned with that unwavering stare as he eased the fabric of my nightgown up a fraction, his thumb just caressing over the scar that had been left to devastate. One I wished he wouldn’t have noticed. One I was doing my best to ignore.
“I don’t deserve to be touching you,” he murmured, voice a rough abrasion in the night.
“Aren’t I the one who gets to make that choice?”
For a beat, his eyes slammed closed, and then he was on his feet, stealing my breath as he swept me off mine, gathering me into his arms. He carried me across his room and into the attached bathroom. Setting me on the counter, he grabbed a washcloth and wet it under the water.
Softly, carefully, he ran it over my lips, like he was trying to erase the mark of him from my body.
Not a chance of that.
One of those big hands came up to tenderly cup one side of my face, thumb sweeping along the hollow of my eye, the action completely at odds with the weight of his words.
“I want to protect you, Emily. I want to take every fucking bad thing that has ever happened to you and delete it. Purge it from your body and rip it from your spirit. I want to stand in the way of every goddamn thing that might hurt you in the future. Including myself.”
“Is that what you see when you look at me? Someone who needs to be protected? Saved?”
“I see someone who’s holding onto so much pain.”
A huff of remorse and defiance left me. “I don’t want anyone to pity me. That’s not what I’m lookin’ for.”
“Doesn’t everyone need someone to fight for them? To stand up for what’s right? To take care of them?” It looked as if he was the one in pain when he said it. As if maybe he was desperate for someone to come alongside him.
His expression shifted through a million different emotions.
I fought to keep up.
To understand.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he murmured, so tight and hard that I wanted to reach out and ask who it was that had hurt him.
To hold him the same way he wanted to hold me.
“That’s good because I don’t think I’ve ever felt so safe as when I’m with you,” I whispered, sure I’d never known a greater truth.
I felt as if I might crumble and break apart and, when he picked me back up, I might be whole.
Which was insane.
I hadn’t known him for more than a handful of days, and the man was written in errors. Abrasive and curt and asking me to do the one thing that I was having the most difficult time forcing myself to do.
But there was something in his eyes that I believed.
Something about him that made me want to dig for more.
Seek and discover.
“That’s because you’re reckless.” His response was a caress.
A lash.
I let my fingertips fumble across his jaw. “I’m not a fool. You think I don’t know you’re hiding something underneath all that brash exterior, too? Maybe that’s what’s calling out for me. Maybe you need me the way I need you. Don’t pretend like you don’t feel this.”
A smirk tweaked at one corner of his mouth. “You are asking for it, aren’t you?”
“I think I made that plenty clear.”
Affection flitted across his features as he stared at me through the vapors of dull, muted light, gone before I could be sure that it was real. “You should go. We have to be up in a few hours.”
Wow.
So that was how it was gonna be.
That hollow space that screamed of abandonment flared in the middle of me, but I locked it down and tried to make sense of what he was really saying.
I raked my nails across his chest, right over the black hawk he had tattooed there, the wings spread and trying to take flight. But one of its feet was shackled, locked by a manacle that dragged him down and kept him from soaring, chained him to faces and snapshots of memories I didn’t understand, a morbid story written in mystery across his ripped, packed abdomen.
“Is that what you want, Royce? For me to leave?”
He laughed out a disbelieving sound. “You really love to test me, don’t you, Precious?”
“Isn’t that what life is . . . one big test?” It almost came out a tease.
He scruffed a hand over his face. “Pretty sure I’m about to fail this one. Strike that. Clearly, I already did.”