“You’re shaking,” she murmured.
“I know.”
“Is that okay?”
He turned to look at her. “I don’t know what this is,” he admitted. “But I don’t want it to stop.”
Cradling his head against her chest, she continued stroking his hair, and he closed his eyes.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Scars
She slept the way she did everything else. Without pretense. One arm curled beneath the pillow, the other draped across her bare stomach, fingers still loosely parted as if reaching for something even in dreams. Her lips were swollen from his mouth, her lashes casting faint crescent shadows over her cheekbones, as the blankets pooled at her waist.
Jack couldn’t look away, enamored by every soft rise and fall of her breathing. He lay on his side, still fully dressed, watching her the way astronomers watch phenomena they know will never repeat.
The fire collapsed to a bed of embers. The fire’s glow would soon be lost against the intruding glow rising from the horizon anyway.
His cum still marked the inside of her thighs. The sight of it should have shamed him. Instead, something carnal and possessive stirred low in his chest, and he despised himself for how much he enjoyed seeing the evidence of his shame there.
It wasn’t enough that he pressed it deeper. Some animal part of him wished to make it permanent.
He was in catastrophic trouble.
This wasn’t infatuation or curiosity. This wasn’t the chemical reaction of adrenaline and proximity. This was something he couldn’t name. She rearranged the composition of him as a man, dismantled every wall he’d spent decades building.
She tasted like absolution and hope, two concepts that scared the hell out of him.
He didn’t understand the hold she had over him, only that he didn’t want to let go. He wanted time to unravel every mystery she held. Time to figure out why he felt so drawn to her.
He wanted to be whole for her.
The thought arrived without permission and lodged between his ribs like shrapnel. He wanted to be the man who could strip bare without shaking. The man who could hold her through the night and wake without screaming. The man who could bury himself inside her and not become a terrified boy pinned beneath the weight of a giant.
He just didn’t know how to become that man. Or if such a man existed beneath the scar tissue and calculated violence that comprised him.
Daisy’s breath shifted, a soft murmur escaping her lips as she turned her face deeper into the pillow. His chest constricted. She trusted him enough to sleep. After everything, after the storm, the tears, his confession, and the broken shards of passion he could offer, she somehow closed her eyes and slept.
He didn’t deserve that kind of trust. But God help him, he intended to earn it.
The sky beyond the windows was changing. He’d been watching it for the better part of an hour, tracking the slow hemorrhage of night as blackness thinned at the horizon, bleeding into a deep indigo, then a ribbon of violet that crept along the tree line like a whisper. The stars had dimmed as if someone were turning down a lamp in a distant room.
Dawn was coming.
Not gently, the way poets described it, but inevitably, the way executioners arrived.
He had an hour. Maybe less.
Jack rose from the bed in careful increments, distributing his weight to keep the mattress from shifting. Daisy didn’t stir.
He stood silently over her, taking in her unfathomable beauty. The dip of her hip. The impossibly delicate turn of her wrist. The way her hair spread across the pillow like spilled honey in the low amber light.
No part of him wanted to leave her, but he had responsibilities to see through. Straightening the room, he silently erased all evidence of their night. He couldn’t leave her up here alone and he’d be damned if he let her leave his bed in her current state.
He pulled out his phone, turned his back to the bed, and dialed.
The line rang twice before Vanessa picked up. “J?” Her voice was remarkably alert for a woman who’d been managing chaos since yesterday morning.
