Chapter 17
Sera
Five minutes ago, he’d told me to leave.
That fact existed somewhere in my brain, filed alongside everything else that no longer mattered, because Travis Hale’s mouth was on mine and his hands were in my hair and the wall behind me was the only reason I was still standing.
This was not the gym kiss. That one had been brief, accidental, a circuit that tripped and reset.
This kiss was a choice. I could feel it in the way his thumb traced the hinge of my jaw, the way his body pressed into mine with an intent that left nothing ambiguous.
My brain was screaming. He’d said this isn’t working. He’d wrapped rejection in protection and handed it to me like a gift I was supposed to be grateful for. And now his hand was on the back of my neck, and his teeth grazed the spot below my ear and every thought I’d ever had about analytical consistency left my body on a sound I didn’t recognize as mine.
I pulled back. Just far enough to see his face. His eyes were open, and there was nothing behind them that looked like performance. He looked wrecked. He looked honest.
“You can’t tell me to leave and then do this.”
“I know.” His voice was rough. “I’m sorry. I can’t stop.”
I could have been the reasonable one. The careful one. The woman who didn’t take things that might not belong to her.
But I’d been that woman for four years. She was exhausted. I grabbed the front of his vest and pulled him back to me.
The tactical vest he was still wearing, rigid plates and buckles, the hard bulk of equipment designed to stop bullets standing between my hands and his skin. I started working the buckles and Travis went rigid, a sharp breath whistling through his teeth that he tried to swallow. The left shoulder. My stitches.
I shifted my hands lower and found the side-release buckles at his waist. One opened with a click. The second stuck. He shrugged the right strap off, tried the left, and his jaw locked. I caught it and eased it off for him.
He was still filthy from the mission. Dirt along his jaw, sweat-dampened collar, the smell of exertion still clinging to him. An outdoor smell on a man who was supposed to never go outside.
“You need a shower.”
He let out a huff of breath, half-laugh. “That’s romantic.”
“You have dirt on your face, and you’re still wearing a knife on your ankle.”
He looked down at the ankle holder like he’d forgotten about it. Then back at me, and something crossed his expression that was almost a smile but landed closer to surrender.
Neither of us suggested he go alone.
His bathroom was functional, like everything he’d built. Wide shower, glass partition, a single toothbrush on the counter. Medical supplies organized on a shelf above the toilet, close enough to reach one-handed.
I understood the reason for that arrangement in a way that made my chest ache.
It was confirmed when Travis pulled his shirt over his head.
The night I’d stitched his shoulder, I’d kept my focus narrowed to the wound and the needle and the work. Now I looked at his body in full light, with nowhere to turn away.
Every scar I’d only glimpsed in pieces over the past few weeks was visible now, all at once. The knife scar along his ribs was the one my eyes went to first, white and puckered at one end where the skin hadn’t come together cleanly because nobody had helped him close it.
The raised line on his forearm where he’d done his own stitches over the bathroom sink at three in the morning. Smaller marks across his shoulders that I hadn’t seen before, the accumulated evidence of impacts and falls, each one a night he’d come home and told no one.
My stitches in his shoulder from a few nights ago were holding. Clean. Even. Slightly more even than the ones he’d done for himself.
I put my hand flat against his chest, and he went still. I traced the knife scar with my fingertip, following the raised tissue from the bottom of his ribs toward his hip, and something fierce rose in my throat.
Not pity. Anger. At every one of these marks. At every night he’d sewn himself together alone because he’d decided he didn’t deserve help.
He caught my hand. Pressed it flat against the scar, held it there.
