“It’s yours. Stay.” He batted his eyes. “Please?”
How could she say no to him? Why would she want to? For once in her life, she could wake up surrounded by luxury without being held as a prisoner.
She looked at the man perched before her. “Well?”
23
Charlee shimmied out of her jeans, slid the Bodyguard 380 under the pillow, and fell back into a cloud of luxurious bedding. “This is the life.”
Nathan said something to the guard in the hallway and closed the door. “We have a bodyguard.” He scratched his head, his voice flattened with disbelief. “He’s going to stand out there all night.”
She pulled the blankets up to her chin. “Maybe we can sleep with both of our eyes closed tonight?”
He perched on the other side of the bed and tugged off his pants. Then he clicked off the light and lay on his side to face her. “Crane still hasn’t found any connection between these guys and Roy, so yeah, we’re sleeping well tonight.”
She smiled, and it was bitter sweet. “The one night you could sleep alone, yet here I am. You’re stuck with me as usual.”
They’d shared a bed for three years, too concerned about the other’s safety not to. The worst part of that had been the way Nathan just accepted his celibacy in this life with her, making her his responsibility and giving up everything for her and his revenge.
He shoved her shoulder. “I’m not stuck with you and have never felt that way. Besides, how else will I trap Roy? You’re my bait.”
It was her turn to shove him. “Ass.”
He might’ve been driven by revenge, but three years of simply trying to exist without being caught left him frustrated and without a plan to bring down Roy. Moreover, if anything happened to her, he would see it as failing his brother. Again. In truth, if Nathan wanted to use her for his own end, he would’ve been justified in doing so. She was the reason Noah was dead after all.
A burn torched her throat, and she swallowed through it. “I might be doing a couple tattoos tomorrow, so I’ll need to get my supplies from the apartment, okay?”
“A couple? Laz and…”
“Jay.” Hopefully. There was so much hope in that name.
“Be careful with him, Charlee. The last thing you need is another obsessive man.”
She tensed. There was a lingering fear in her that she might somehow attract compulsive men. If she could entice a monster like Roy, it might happen again with another man. Jay wasn’t a monster. He wasn’t Roy. “He’s different.”
“Yeah, he’s a whole other breed of messed up.” He kissed her brow. “Sleep well, sweetheart.”
That he could count on.
24
Jay woke up shaking. Charlee had invaded his dreams again, but this time was different.
The blue-eyed beauty had been haloed in flames of red. Her fiery hair swept over her tiny shoulders and cascaded in curtains around her. He clutched the bedding. She was so fucking beautiful.
He closed his eyes, tried to push himself back into the dream. He found her and she saw him, saw into him. He could hear the happy tune of her humming. Her tattoo gun was buzzing against his back. She touched his shoulder with her fingertips, with her sweet lips. She actually touched him, and it was the best sensation he’d ever experienced. He turned his face to capture her mouth.
Gone. She was fucking gone.
Fuck. He punched the pillow. Fucking let her go.
He rolled out of bed and nausea fisted in his gut. He plodded through the room in a hangover daze on uncoordinated, hundred-pound feet. At least there was a bright start. He didn’t have to chase any clingy strangers from his bed.
In the bathroom, he shed his shirt and shorts and turned his back to the mirror. Why did he torment himself everyday by staring at something that would never come to fruition?
He looked over his shoulder and saw the finished illustration the way she might’ve seen it. He saw the blaze, the heat, the passion in the detail. She didn’t cover the scars. She added more, the edges burning and twisting away from the flames. It was the steel etched beneath the melted skin that fortified him. He wanted to be that iron man underneath. She’d seen something in him he hadn’t been able to see himself.
Before Charlee, he couldn’t look at his scars without hurtling back to the weather-worn shed with no light, no food, and no toys or human contact. The sooty insides of the cast-iron cooker and the rumble it made when it fired up still made him ball his fists so hard his nails left indents in his skin. And the woman with the empty eyes who kept him in the shed and forced him in the oven…