He pulled his eyes open to find her looking down at him with an unusually serious expression on her clean-scrubbed face.
“Sure,” he yawned. “Uh, what do you want to know?” He delighted in these moments when she let her guard down, but he’d never dealt with one of them pre-coffee.
“How about these shoulder freckles?” Her fingers brushed his bare skin there, only to be replaced briefly by her teeth and then the soft press of her lips.Thatwoke him up. He shifted to face her, and she took the opportunity to prop her chin on her laced fingers, using his bicep as a pillow. “My mom was always paranoid I’d be one of those freckled redheads, so she slathered me in sunblock every time I got near the front door. To this day, I loathe the smell of her expensive SPF stuff.”
It was on the tip of his tongue to compliment her skin, which glowed in the bright July sunlight streaming through the windows. But that wasn’t what she was after this morning. She wanted truth, and he could give her that.
“Hours on the riding mower without a shirt as a kid. Pops didn’t worry much about sunblock.”
Another kiss to his shoulder, then she snaked her arm across his chest. “Okay, how about the scar?” She ran her palm over the crooked pink line cutting across his torso, and he shifted to let her small hand trace the length of it.
“Cattle hoof.”
She winced and looked at him expectantly, so he offered her the least gruesome version of the story. “Loading a heifer into the chute for insemination. She objected.”
Her brows arched upward on a smirk, alerting him that a dirty thought had floated through her mind, but she surprised him again by keeping the comment to herself. Instead, she held up her left hand and pointed to a scar that cut along the outside toward her wrist, so thin and pale that he’d never noticed it before.
“When I turned seventeen, Mom didn’t bother celebrating my birthday. Didn’t even mention it. So I got drunk that night. Not with friends or anything, just alone at home on vodka and Diet Coke. I passed out in the bathroom and woke up covered in blood from where I’d dropped the glass on the tile.”
“Jesus.” He ran his thumb along the long, silvery line, his heart aching for that long-ago lonely girl.
She laced the fingers of her once-injured hand through his.
“I cleaned it all up the next morning between bouts of puking and then took myself to urgent care for stitches. She didn’t even notice.” Her smile was sad as she looked at their joined hands. “I told anybody who asked that it was a kitchen accident, and I’ve been careful about how much I drink ever since. Not even Richard knows the real story.”
He was wrong. That lonely girl wasn’t gone; she’d just grown into an adult who hid her insecurities behind a wall. And he was the person she’d let inside.
“Thank you for telling me.” The words were insufficient for the gratitude he felt at her trust, but she smiled anyway, a little more brightly this time.
“Thanks for listening.” Then she dropped a kiss on his chest and asked, “Okay, how about the tattoo?”
She rubbed a thumb over the lion’s head on his left pec, and he swallowed a groan. No way was he getting out of this with his dignity intact.
“From high school. It’s part of a matched set.” His flare of hope that it was enough information to satisfy her was short-lived when she bared her teeth.
“Look, I think I’ve been a pretty good sport about things, but if Gina has a matching lion on her boob, I will have to kill her.”
Ah, there were those walls again. But he spotted the insecurity lurking under her words and quickly punctured it. “Not Gina. It’s a guy. Actually, it’s ten other guys.”
A beat, and then her pointy little finger jabbed at his armpit. “Explain.”
He rolled over and pressed his face into the mattress to avoid looking at her as he answered. It was almost enough to make him wish he’d kept his shirt on when she was around—almost. In actuality, he relished the hunger in her eyes when she looked at his bare chest, enough that he was willing to confess the truth.
“It was, ah, a senior varsity football team decision. We were the Liberty Valley Lions.”
“We?”
At her delighted tone, he pressed his face deeper into the mattress. So much for the intimate moment they’d just shared.
“Erik,” she said. “Maker of cakes. Guy who banged me senseless last night. Have you been holding out on me?Were you a high school football player?”She punctuated her last question by draping herself over his back and rolling around on top of him in a fit of laughter. As she was still naked, the squealing and writhing at his expense was an extra special form of torture.
“Yes,” he grumped.
She rolled off him to flop weakly on the mattress. “What position did you play?” she asked through her giggles.
Goddammit.“Tight end.”
His reluctant answer sent her into the throes of a silent laughing fit before she finally hooted, “That’s no secret! I already knewthat!” She reached down to slap his ass, bare under the sheet.
