Many others were nicked and scored in a pattern of clear violence that he had lived.
His muscles bulged and flexed beneath them. Tension binding every inch of his cruelly beautiful body as I stood there and stared.
My mouth dry and my head spinning.
A shot of air escaped Cash’s nose like a bull that was about to charge.
I peeked up at his face that was just as hard as the rest of him, before I forced myself to turn my attention to the wound on his side. There was a large scrape and a deeper opening in the middle.
“It looks like you maybe got impaled by a stick.” I leaned down to inspect it. “I don’t think there’s anything stuck in it, though.”
He grunted in response, as if he couldn’t speak.
I turned away and rinsed the washcloth again. I shifted back to him, trying to hold myself together beneath the intensity he emitted.
Sure that all it would take was a brush of his hand and I would completely fall apart.
Who was I kidding? I was already shattering.
Peeled apart by the cruel fervency of his gaze.
He winced when I dabbed the cloth on the wound.
I bit down on my bottom lip. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” he hissed. “I’ve had far worse.”
I knew from looking at him it was true.
“I hate that for you,” I whispered into the dense air that filled the room. “Hate that you’ve been hurt.”
I peeked up at him, hoping he’d open up and give me an explanation. Invite me into the depravities that he’d suffered and the ones he’d surely dealt. Show me who he’d become.
“I barely feel it anymore.” His expression struck me, and I looked up to meet the burn in his gaze. “I’m only numb, Daisy. Empty.”
Except I knew he was feeling then. Knew it with the way his muscles rippled and goosebumps lifted on his flesh as I gently brushed my fingertips over his skin.
He inhaled a strained breath before he rasped, “Except for you. The only thing I felt were the remnants of you.”
Surprise bolted through me at his admission, and my stomach coiled and pulsed with need. A thrum of desire that had been compounded and exacerbated by the years of separation.
Years of imagining him.
Years of fantasizing about him.
Years of picturing his face when I should have been picturing my husband’s.
For a long time, I felt guilty over it, until I came to realize the way Ethan had manipulated me into our entire relationship. Used my insecurities against me.
I began to slowly ease around him, fingertips tracing and memorizing the designs he was written in.
The horrors and the shame.
Demons and horned creatures that prowled the barren plane that he’d marked on his abdomen and side.
The desolation so clear.
My chest squeezed in pain as I gently ran my fingertips over his side where the scene continued, inching around him as if I could memorize every ghost that had left a scar.
