Scar me.
“You see me, Shea?” The gruff question threw me, and he lifted his chin in a challenge I wanted to meet. I knew what he was offering. One last chance to back out. A warning that came with his fierce beauty because we both knew he had the power to lay me to waste.
But where there’s beauty, there’s also pain.
And I wanted to share in his, because I felt it every time he looked at me. I wanted to immerse myself in it, in him. To be set adrift in all he kept hidden, to slip under, to see and feel and experience what he shored up tight inside.
Slowly, I lifted my own chin. But not in challenge. In surrender. “Show me.”
He watched me closely as he pulled a strip of six condoms out of his front pocket.
Correction.
Five.
One was missing.
Jealousy curled through me like a sickness, and I attempted to swallow around it, knowing this wasn’t going to end well. My heart was never going to make it.
But in this moment, I didn’t care.
Because I was falling.
Falling.
Falling.
Falling.
He tossed them onto the center of my rumpled bed. “Glove box,” he said as if he felt the need to explain.
Awareness swelled, perception that belonged only to us, lifting in an arc, barbs of energy prickling at my fevered skin.
Never releasing me from the grip of his gaze, he reached for the collar of his tee and tugged it over his head. Almost defiantly, he stood up straight and stared back at me.
That insane, confusing attraction I’d somehow managed to keep under semi-control, hidden inside, burst—a rapid slide pushing heat through my veins. Gathering fast.
My mouth went dry and I shifted on unsteady feet.
He knelt down and unlaced his boots, rose and toed them off, ticked through the buttons on his fly. Shoving his jeans down his legs, he shrugged out of them, kicked the pile of clothing aside.
Oh. God.
He stood there in nothing but a pair of tight, tight boxer briefs, his thick erection straining against the fabric, pushing at the elastic band in a play to break free.
Just like the first time he lifted his face to me, I was again confronted with more beauty than I could fathom. Again imperfect. And again, I was sure that was part of the problem, because my heart lurched in a bid to meet with his, and my stomach clenched with a flood of desire that sailed straight through me.
My eyes soaked him in.
Dragging across wide, wide shoulders. Tracing his collarbone, and exploring the coarse, rigid muscle that defined his chest. I sucked in a broken breath when I let my eyes wander down to take in how those wide shoulders and chest tapered into the flat planes of his abdomen. Hipbones jutted out from his narrow waist, a deep cut of muscles on his lower stomach that disappeared beneath the waistband of his underwear.
The strength of him was overbearing. Foreboding.
And I was sure I’d never seen a more brutally beautiful man.
But just like his face, scars were etched into his skin, lanced across his chest, one slashed in a long gash across his side. Some deep. Others shallow.
All significant.
Both of his arms were completely covered in ink—colors and swirls and more beauty that spoke of…pain. Bleeding crosses, indecipherable words, and hidden innuendo. One arm depicted a darkened sky, the night infinite. Eternal.
My attention was drawn to the mermaid on his left upper arm. Her face was fierce and evil and somehow angelic. She sat on a rock next to a raging sea swishing her tail. A pocket watch was held gingerly in the scoop of her hands. The watch appeared to be disintegrating, slipping through her fingers, like sands of an hourglass falling through the cracks.