Stay with Me (Wait for You, #3)

My eyes narrowed with irritation. “Yeah, that’s not what I’m talking about, jackass.”

Totally unfazed, he moved his thumb in a slow circle over the inside of my elbow. That tiny, almost unconscious touch sent a shock wave of sensation through my system. One second I was ready to knee him in the nuts and the next I was thinking of other more pleasant things involving said nuts.

“What are you doing?” I asked again, my pulse racing and even pounding.

His chest expanded, brushing mine, and my toes curled in response. “Doing something better than sleeping.”

That really wasn’t an answer.

Jax dipped his head and the tip of his nose grazed my right cheek. “I like you.”

My heart stopped flouncing and did a twirl on one toe. “What?”

“I like you,” he repeated, voicing dropping to a whisper that glided over my skin.

“You don’t know me,” I pointed out for what felt like the hundredth time in the short time I had known him.

“What I know of you I like.”

Perfect answer. It really was. I swallowed hard. “But—”

“Don’t overthink it, honey. Life’s too short for that shit,” he said, his lips grazing my skin. Every muscle tightened in the most delicious way, and his thumb, it was still swirling, still dragging out an array of sensations. “I like you. That’s all.”

“But you can’t.” The words sort of popped out of me.

His lips stilled against my cheek and then he lifted his head. Our gazes collided, and I wanted to look away, but couldn’t. “I can.”

Then Jax lowered himself, and all the air in the world was sucked out of that room. His weight . . . I’d never felt anything like it before. He was heavy, but it was good, and his hips were cradled between my legs, and . . .

Holy mother lode, there was no mistaking what I felt pressed against me.

“Get it?” he asked in a voice that probably caught a hundred panties on fire.

I didn’t get it.

Jax liked me and he’d known me only a handful of days. That made no sense. If I looked like Avery or Teresa, I could get it. They were gorgeous in their own unique, practically fucking flawless ways. They had members of the Hot Guy Brigade, rightfully so. And I was Calla—Calla whose makeup, my Dermablend, most likely had sloughed off my face, leaving the scar a hell of a lot more visible. It wasn’t like I was Miss Shiny and Wonderful Personality, either. Hell, for all Jax knew, a piece of rock could be smarter than me.

So I didn’t get it and I told him.

“I like you, Calla. Yeah, I’ve only known you a couple of days. But you’ve made me laugh,” he said, his gaze never leaving mine. “I can also tell you’re nice and sweet when you wanna be. I think you’re cute as hell and you make me hard.”

Whoa. Did he seriously just say that?

“You’ve made me hard a couple of times in the last seventy-some-odd hours and I gotta say that’s not a bad thing,” he went on. “I want to fuck you, and all I need to want to do that with you is to like you. It’s really not that hard to get from point A to point C on that, honey.”

Double whoa.

He’d laid it out to me, right to the point and taking no prisoners, and I found something refreshingly . . . hot about that, which probably meant something was wrong with me. Or it was just lack of experience when it came to guys saying they wanted to get bow-chick-a-bow-wow with me.

Either way? Daaaaammmn.

Taking my dumbstruck silence as acceptance, he dipped his head again, and I didn’t freak out this time. He wanted me, and I honestly didn’t know what that felt like until . . . until now, and I was awed by the blossoming heat rippling through me. I forgot about the fact that most of my makeup had to have wiped off during the night. My eyes drifted shut and my toes did the curling thing once more. He was going to kiss me, and I wasn’t going to stop him. Maybe this time there’d be tongue. I was really interested in exploring that.

Jax didn’t kiss me.

Not my lips at least. His mouth veered off to the left at the last second, skating over my lips to my left cheek. He kissed the scar.

He fucking kissed the scar.

Emotion—violent and energetic—warred inside me. A mixture of a thousand screwed-up thoughts and feelings. Beauty. Fear. Panic. Lust. Ice. Heat. Revulsion. Confusion. I felt it all and it was too much.

I slammed my hands into his chest. “Get off.”

He froze. “What?”

“Please.”

Jax got off. It had to be something in my voice, because he rolled right off me, and I rolled right off the bed, coming to my feet. I backed up until I hit the corner of the dresser, sending a burst of pain across my hip.

He sat up and moved over the bed, both hands on the mattress. “Calla, baby, are you scared of me?”

“No. Yes. I mean, no. I’m not scared of you.” I squeezed my eyes shut briefly. “It’s not like that.”

“It’s like what then?”

We would never fuck.

There. I couldn’t say it out loud, but there it was. I would never get naked with him. I would never get that close.

God, that shouldn’t be as disappointing as it was, but this with Jax—being in bed, tangled together and wanting each other—was normal. And I wouldn’t get any kind of normal, not with a guy like Jax. Not when he might’ve gotten over my jacked-up scar on my face, but hadn’t seen or felt the rest of me.

This wasn’t about having a low self-esteem, being inexperienced or weak or being too nervous to get naked because I needed to drop twenty pounds. My body was wrecked. There was nothing attractive about it.

Drawing in several deep breaths, I forced the sting out of my eyes and the back of my throat. “This is what I’m about. Okay? So this isn’t going to happen.”

His dark brows rose.

Damn, he gave good brows.

I was distracted again. “I mean, you’re really hot. Don’t get me wrong. And I’m sure you know that, because there is no way you don’t know that.”

The corners of his lips started to tip up.

God, I needed to shut up. “And I’m flattered that you . . . um, that you like me, but that . . . it can’t happen. Okay? There’s no way. I’m not your type of girl.”

“How do you know my type of girl?” he asked, sounding genuinely curious.

I almost rolled my eyes. “I know. Trust me. And that’s okay. You’re nice and I appreciate everything you’ve done for me and are doing, but this . . . this isn’t going to happen. All right? You got that?”

He stared at me a moment, seeming to want to push the issue, but then he nodded slowly.

“Got it,” Jax said.

And then he grinned.

I didn’t think he got it at all.