With a soft kiss to her lower belly, he moved on. Not because he wanted to, but because time demanded it.
He washed her feet one at a time, his thumb pressing into her arch until she gasped and steadied herself with a hand on the wall.
“Your feet look a little better. Do they still hurt?”
“Not as much.” She moaned as he rubbed between her toes.
When he stood, the water sluiced the soap from both of them. Steam cocooned the shower in translucent white, softening the stone, blurring the glass, reducing the world to only him and her.
She reached for the soap and looked up at him, her eyes cautious more than expectant. Jack swallowed tightly as she lathered her hands.
She waited for him to decide.
Water streamed down her body. Her hair was slicked back from her face, darkened to the color of wet sand, and without it framing her features, her eyes looked enormous. Green as glass. Green as the sea when light passes through a wave.
Slowly, he pulled her hand closer and pressed it flat to his chest. For a moment, he forgot how to breathe. Then she moved, keeping her touch featherlight, almost hesitant, as she traced the planes of his chest, the ridges of his abdomen, and the hollow divots of imperfect skin.
She didn’t linger on the scars or avoid them. She treated them as what they were. Part of him.
Slowly, he remembered how to breathe, hard and deep, but breath wouldn’t reach the base of his lungs.
“Now, your back?” she asked tentatively.
He silently turned.
A quick inhale, held too long, released too carefully. He knew what she was seeing.
The chancellor’s canvas—his twisted, gnarled masterpiece.
When her delicate, soapy hands pressed flat between his shoulder blades, Jack flinched. Every muscle locked as his palms slammed against the wet stone wall.
She stilled, attuned to his every response. “I can stop?—”
“No.” He gritted his teeth. “I can handle it.”
Daisy slowly moved her hand between his shoulder blades, and his breath punched out in a staccato burst that ricocheted off the wall.
She didn’t retreat. Didn’t apologize. She simply waited, holding her hands still until the tremor subsided and his breathing steadied. Then she continued.
Slow, patient strokes down his spine, over the ridged landscape of old violence, across the small of his back, the only patch where the skin was smooth and untouched.
Her fingers lingered like a traveler finding a clearing in a scorched forest. So gentle. So tentative and respectful, every touch drenched in clear intent not to disrupt. The sensation was so overwhelming, so impossibly tender and excruciating, that his control fractured down the center.
Slowly, she glided her hand back up his spine, the pressure shifting—firmer, possessive. Something detonated.
He spun and caught her wrist, pinning her arms to the wall like a sacrifice nailed to a cross before he knew what he was doing. The soap fell to the floor as her lips parted on a startled gasp.
Her chest heaved. Water cascaded between her wet breasts, pooling in the hollow of her collarbones, streaming over her hard nipples, before spilling down her stomach.
Those haunting green eyes looked up at him without a flicker of fear as the tension in her body went soft beneath his grip. Not limp, but passive enough that her silent surrender dissolved every rigid line of resistance, turning pliant in his hands. Willing with devastating trust.
Her chin lifted, even as her pulse visibly hammered in the hollow of her throat.
She understood his response without judgment. Without criticism. Without fear.
His hands slid from her wrist to her hands. His gaze shifted to the wet gauze on her wrist. “Did I hurt you?”
“No, and you wouldn’t,” she said with more certainty than he deserved. “I won’t hurt you either, Jack.”
