“Where?”
“Everywhere.”
His mouth curved into a victorious smile.
“I like your dreams.”
He straightened and pulled his shirt over his head, tossing it into the chair atop the discarded lobster.
His hair stuck up in all directions, but she wasn’t looking at that. Her eyes were locked on his chest. On his scars.
He wasn’t shy, not by nature. His body was solid and hard-packed with muscle from years of training and flying and…yeah…fucking. Still, when her eyes traced the roadmap of old wounds across his skin, he felt exposed in a way that had nothing to do with nakedness.
“You’re gorgeous,” she breathed, her hands landing lightly on his chest, making his stomach muscles contract.
Her fingers were cool, erotic as she traced the lines of his pecs, brushed his ribs, stroked his abs like she was memorizing him.
He’d been called hot plenty of times. Sexy was the adjective he was most used to hearing out of a lover’s mouth. But gorgeous? Never.
He was too big and battle-scarred to be gorgeous.
She wasn’t blowing smoke up his ass, though. Sabrina looked at him and saw beauty. And that was more sensual than any dirty talk he’d ever heard.
“What happened here?” She pressed a finger to a round mark on his flank.
“Spent six months in a foster home with a woman who smoked,” he admitted, although it was hard to think with her hands on him. “She made use of the old-fashioned cigarette lighter in her sedan.”
Sadness flickered in her gaze, but she didn’t offer hollow sympathy. He appreciated that more than he could say.
She moved on to the long scar slicing up his side. “And this?”
“I’d just turned sixteen,” he admitted. “By that point, I was an old hand at the game of foster care roulette. I could size up a new house within two minutes of walkin’ through the front door with my trash bag full of worldly possessions slung over my shoulder.”
Even now, all these years later, he could still remember the tang in the air from the prayer candles, the prurient gleam in the man’s eyes when he’d let his gaze roam over Hew’s form.
“Folks who were willin’ to take on a teenager were usually either religious nuts or perverts who wanted to shove their hands down my pants,” he went on, his tone devoid of emotion because he’d worked through that trauma and could now view it with the disgust and derision it deserved. “That particular place was both. So I turned and ran. Caught myself on their barbed wire fence and nearly spilled my guts into their yard.”
Her hand stilled. “Jesus, Hew.”
“Mmm.” He nodded. “My social worker was more pissed that I ruined a perfectly good placement than anything else. Didn’t even take me in for stitches. Just patched me up with butterfly bandages.”
He glanced down at the mess of poorly healed skin and shrugged. “Ain’t pretty, but it did the job.”
Her chin trembled. Her eyes shimmered.
It wasn’t exactly pillow talk. But maybe talking about his scars, his old hurts, helped her to forget about hers for a minute. Maybe showing her how he’d survived what happened to him helped her believe she could fully recover, too.
She touched the clean white scar beneath his right pec but didn’t ask the question.
He answered anyway. “Stab wound. Africa. 2019. Dropped in to extract my team. Got overrun by rebels. It was messy as hell.”
Her gaze moved to the ragged line cutting through the meaty part of his right shoulder.
“Colombia. Firefight. Dodged when I should’ve ducked.”
“Hew.” There was a catch in her throat. “I?—”
“Shh.” He cupped her face in his hands, careful of her injured cheek. “It’s okay. Bodies heal. So do heads and hearts.”
