“Come on,” I said, voice quiet. “Bedroom.”
27. Derek
By the time we reached my bedroom, my head was spinning.
Théo called himself broken like it was a verdict. A permanent condition. But sitting there, watching him bare the worst parts of himself with that defiant tilt to his chin, I didn’t see broken. I saw someone who’d been shattered and had put himself back together—maybe not perfectly, maybe with cracks still showing—but standing. Still fighting.
That wasn’t broken. That was survival.
I didn’t want to save him. I wanted to be someone he could lean on. I’d seen what lived under the armor—fierce loyalty, a tenderness he tried to hide like it was a weakness.
After Mackenzie, I’d honestly thought that part of me was done. I’d closed the door, let the ice grow over, told myself it was safer that way. But Théo… Théo made me want to thaw. Like his namesake—a snowdrop pushing up through frozen ground, blooming in spite of everything.
Just inside the doorway, he spun and fisted my shirt, yanking me forward. His mouth found mine and I inhaled that clean, winter bright scent of him. It sent a shiver down my spine.
Would it be easier for him to heal without me complicating things? Probably. Would stepping back be the noble choice? Almost certainly.
But even though Théo liked to call me Saint Sully, I was only human. Selfish. Greedy for something I hadn’t let myself want in a long time.
So I let him tug my shirt over my head. My fingers went to his pants—fumbling, eager, no finesse. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just knew I wanted him. Wanted to learn him. Wanted to touch him until he forgot he’d ever thought he was something to be endured.
He was something to be savored. And I was going to spend all night proving it.
He shoved his pants down and kicked them aside, then tugged at mine with impatient hands. We fell onto the bed in a tangle of limbs, bare skin sliding against bare skin. He was warm against me, softer than I expected, and I ran my palms down his sides just to feel him shudder.
“Derek—” His voice was breathless, wrecked.
“I don’t—” I pulled back slightly, trying to catch my breath. “I don’t really know what I’m doing.”
“You’re doing fine.” He pulled me back down, arching up so our bodies pressed together. “Just touch me. However you want.”
However I wanted.
I kissed his jaw. The curve of his neck. The hollow of his throat where his pulse jumped against my lips. I licked a stripe across his collarbone and he made a sound that went straight to my cock. I wanted to catalogue every noise I could pull from him, memorize every spot that made him gasp.
I kissed down his chest, pausing to tease one nipple with teeth and tongue, then moved to the other. His back arched off the bed and his fingers tangled in my hair.
“Fuck,” he breathed. “Derek,fuck.”
I kept going. Down the flat plane of his stomach. Along the ridge of his hip. And then I found them—the scars. Thin silver lines, some faded, some newer, scattered across the inside of his thighs like a map of everything he’d survived.
He went still beneath me.
I didn’t hesitate. I pressed my lips to the first one, soft and deliberate. Then the next. And the next. I kissed each one like a promise, like a vow, like I could pour enough tenderness into the gesture to drown out whatever voice in his head told him they made him undesirable.
His hand found the back of my head, fingers threading through my hair, and he let out a shaky breath that sounded almost like relief.
I kept going. Mouthing at him through the fabric of his briefs, feeling his hips buck up involuntarily. His fingers tightened in my hair—not pushing, just holding on.
I looked up at him, meeting those dark eyes. “Tell me if I do something wrong.”
“I don’t think you’re capable of doing anything wrong, Saint Sully.”
I hooked my fingers in the waistband of his briefs and pulled them down slowly, revealing him inch by inch. His cock sprang free, flushed and hard, curving toward his stomach. He was leaking at the tip already and something primal in me wanted to lick it clean.
So I did.
Théo’s whole body jerked.“Fuck!”
