Oh, who was she kidding?Yes, hell yes.
But she shouldn’t. She wasn’t hanging around Blackwood, after all. She’d be leaving once the tattoos were gone, and the last thing she needed was something to keep her here.
Uma breathed in, remembering Ivan’s smell, reveling in the recollection. That first slow moment, faces barely touching, getting to know him with her nose before letting her mouth or teeth or tongue get involved. The moment had been distilled to nothing but those senses. She’d never been so turned on in her life.
They were so different, though. He was a man made to inhabit his body; everything in his life centered around his hands, his arms, his muscles, all working together. He was carnality itself, and Uma was—
She was a mess. And so, so tired of inhabiting this useless shell of a body. It had let her down when she’d needed it the most, left her vulnerable, pinned to the floor. Weak. Nothing but a pitiful,weakwoman.
We can do whatever you want.The memory made Uma shudder. God, how could someone who’d seemed like such a brute be that way? Would he really let her do whatever she wanted to him? Without trying to force anything on her?
No. No, she was leaving.
But then again, he was a man. And menwantedtemporary, right? Lots of them did, so maybe—
Uma’s eyes drifted closed as she remembered how carried away she’d been. She regretted not paying more attention to the feel of him under her mouth and hands.
Oh, why hadn’t she touched more of him? What were his arms like? Those firm biceps, or the long slope of thigh she’d ogled as he worked. His face. Her breath caught at that. She wanted to touch his lips, to test their springy plushness with her hands.
She pressed her thumb to her mouth, wondering how much harder his would be under her fingers. Her imagination skittered on, over the stubble sprouting along his jaw. She wanted it rough, abrasive like sandpaper.
An image intruded: Joey’s smooth, perfectly shaved chin. It was a cold shower to Uma’s budding libido. She gritted her teeth at the memory of him pinning her shoulder with that chin while his hands held her arms and his deceptively heavy legs covered hers. Every part of him had incapacitated every single inch ofherthat night. She’d been helpless. Utterly.
No. This wasn’t what Uma wanted to think about. She wanted to thrill at images of Ivan, thick and strong and raw. And yet so gentle. The antidote to everything Joey.
Joey. Would he ever leave her alone? As surely as he was out there somewhere, looking for her, he was with Uma, every second of every day, dogging her footsteps. Haunting her life.
Fucking Joey.Regret fisted her innards, making her queasy as she thought of him. Maybe she needed to let them come, those images. Maybe she needed to let him back into her brain to exorcise him completely from her life.
Thinking about him took courage. Almost as much as it would take to finally work up the balls to look herself in the mirror, at the obscene evidence he’d left all over her body.
Okay, if this is what it takes.Uma opened her eyes, needing to be wide awake to face the memories.
* * *
Uma was a goner the first time she met him. It had been a wedding, some cousin of Joey’s marrying her longtime fiancé. Uma’d been there as the photographer. Considering her free-love upbringing, Uma had been a pretty inexperienced twenty-four-year-old—a couple of boyfriends under her belt, and a single, stupid one-night stand in college. Nothing that could have prepared her for Joey’s laser-sharp attention.
He’d been lovely to look at: tall and wiry, almost slender, with piercing blue eyes that drew a girl in fast. Too fast. He’d had the same appeal Frank Sinatra must have had in his heyday: easy to look at, smooth voice, and pure sex oozing from every pore. Panty-dropping eyes to go with his silver tongue. A deadly combination.
Uma would never forget the moment she’d first laid eyes—or rather, lens—on Joey. She’d taken the photo, knowing it was a good one, and then realized, with a strange jolt of awareness, that its subject had been looking directly at her. He’d gazed right through the camera and literally set his sights on her. Out of all the perfect, well-dressed women there, how strange that he’d noticed the invisible one—the woman behind the scenes.
Uma had never considered herself particularly attractive, but that evening, Joey had made her beautiful. He’d convinced her to dance, to kiss. She’d never done anything so unprofessional in her career, but he’d been pretty darn convincing. So convincing, in fact, that she’d had sex with him later that night.
That first night had set the rhythm for their entire relationship. Everything moved so quickly between them. Uma always wondered if he knew he didn’t have much time before everything changed. Before he messed things up.
Within two months, she’d moved into his place, gone on the pill. By the end of the year, most of her friends had given up on her. Oddly, Mom remained the one person Joey hadn’t minded sharing her with. Uma never understood how he knew from the get-go that he’d found an ally in her mother. He’d always had the strongest, oddest instincts when it came to how best to hurt her.
At the same time, Joey had taken such good care of Uma, given her everything he’d thought she wanted. He’d tried so hard to get her to stop working, telling her that this was also part of spoiling her rotten. It was the only point on which she’d staunchly refused to give in. Not working, she knew, would never make her happy.
Eventually, in a roundabout way, he’d ended up winning, even on that front.
After more than a year of refusing to admit that there might be trouble in paradise, Joey had cheated on her. It was a strange move from someone so seemingly obsessed. Why on earth would he cheat after making her the center of his world?
That’s when she’d realized what he’d really done. He hadn’t, in fact, made Uma the center of his world, but had rather made himself the center of hers.
She’d found out about his cheating when the woman called their home. She’d spilled the story, every detail so clearlyJoeythat they had to be real. Uma’s hurt and embarrassment were terrible, but after suffering through Joey’s apologetic self-flagellation, it finally sank in that she didn’t care that much. A dangerous thought to have about someone so obsessed.
From there, things steadily grew worse until the day she left him. He started by accusing her of cheating, convinced she’d done it to get back at him. In all the time they’d been together, the only thing Uma had ever hidden from Joey was the money she’d put away to purchase her own car. A consummate liar himself, he had a sixth sense for when people tried to pull one over on him. Accusations led to yelling, then pushing, and eventually, a slap across the face, leaving an angry red welt in its wake. At the time, that slap had been the worst thing anyone had ever done to her.
