The skin-on-skin connection shot through him like a bolt of lightning.
Her eyelids flipped open as if she might have felt the power of it too.
For one instant—an instant that seemed to last an eternity—their gazes locked and held. She murmured something in her raspy, sleep-thickened voice but Asher was beyond hearing it. Ripped from his spot on the edge of the bed with her, he was hurtled into another place and time, his mind snagged on a painful memory.
Hermemory.
Steeped in the sights and sounds and emotions of the moment, he was living it all through her senses. Through one of the rawest experiences of her young life. And she was sobbing. Choking on little girl tears as she sat in the middle of a squalid one-room apartment clutching a stuffed pink teddy bear to her chest.
“Mama, please, don’t go! Why can’t you stay home with me tonight?”
An elegant young Japanese woman dressed in a red silk dress and high, thin-heeled sandals came out of the open bathroom and squatted low until they were eye to eye. She was beautiful, her delicate oval face framed in a long curtain of shiny black hair. Smoky dark brown eyes dominated her features, and tonight her lips were slicked with scarlet color so glossy it looked like glass.
“Now, Narumi, didn’t you promise Mommy no tears tonight?” She smiled, but it didn’t reach her gaze. “You know how hard I work. Doesn’t Mommy deserve to go out and have some fun with other grownups once in a while?”
A sigh and a hesitant nod. “I guess so. But I don’t like your new friend. He hurt your face last time.”
The pretty smile faltered. One slender hand came up to the ghost of a bruise that lingered beneath her left eye, not quite erased by the makeup that covered it. Mommy wore a new ring on her finger since it happened. The deep red gemstone glittered as she dabbed tenderly at her cheek.
“Don’t you worry about Mommy, okay? I’m a big girl, I know what I’m doing. I can take care of myself, all right? And so can you, pumpkin. Now, be good for me and get dressed for bed. I promise I’ll be home before you wake up in the morning.”
“No, you won’t.” A soft recrimination, uttered on a raw, aching throat.
A sigh was her only response. She leaned in and her red lips felt cool and sticky against her daughter’s brow. Then she stood up and smoothed out her dress, pausing to take one last look in the mirror before she glided to the chipped and aged door.
“I love you, sweetheart.”
She scurried out, the sound of her high heels clicking on the apartment building’s steel stairwell as her terrified little daughter moved to the window and peered through tattered drapes at the large black limousine that idled below, praying that the bad man inside wouldn’t hurt her mommy again.
Asher’s hissed curse punctuated the silence of the bedroom. The adult version of that sobbing, frightened child had since drifted back into her slumber. He was glad for that now, relieved to be freed from her gaze as he drew his hand away from her face and stood up.
His heart was hammering as painfully as hers had been. Sorrow and anger clogged his throat, along with the fear and loneliness this child had apparently lived with on regular basis.
It was almost too much for him to bear. How she’d managed to cope with the force of those powerful emotions at her tender age he had no idea.
He stepped away from the bed, watching her sleep. He would come back to wake her and give her the pain meds and water. Right now, he needed air.
He needed space to breathe for a few minutes, at least until the overwhelming blast of Zoe’s emotions—or, rather, Narumi’s—had a chance to subside.
CHAPTER 4
Naomi woke to someone at her bedside repeatedly washing her outstretched hand with a warm, wet cloth.
One that tickled and smelled strongly of Alpo.
Peeling one eyelid open, she waited for the banging in her skull to kick up again like it had been doing all night, but there was no pounding ache. No muffled cotton-head feeling or dizzying wave of nausea. That was a relief. The worst of the storm that had been raging in her cranium after the blows she’d suffered from Slater’s goons had finally passed.
Her vision was clear now. And it was suddenly filled with the panting mush-mouth and inquisitive big brown eyes of a giant yellow hound nosing into her face from the side of the bed.
“Well, hello there.” She frowned, swallowing on a dry mouth. “Who are you, the hospital comfort animal?”
The thick tail started thumping enthusiastically in response, a soft whine building as the beast attempted to get closer to her, practically crawling up on the bed.
“That’s Sam,” a deep voice answered, disembodied thanks to the massive dog blocking her view of anything else in the room.
But she knew that low growl. She’d been hearing it in her dreams most of the night, nagging her to open her eyes at least half a dozen times, bossing her like a drill sergeant when all she’d wanted to do was sleep for days.
Asher. She remembered his unusual name. Against her will, she remembered his ruggedly handsome face, too, the chiseled cheeks and strong jaw that made her pulse speed a little faster in her veins.
