But, God, Vaughn made it hard not to react with her entire shipwrecked soul. His eyebrows went up, breath hitching once before coming out in a huge rush, fluttering the edges of the picture, in which Marcy was dressed like a pumpkin for Halloween. He shook his head, like maybe until that moment, he hadn’t really believed they’d created a tiny human being together.
Vaughn let the picture fall to his thigh, the opposite hand coming up to drag down his open mouth. “Ah, doll. She looks just like you.” He tried to clear his throat, but it was obvious from his voice he hadn’t succeeded. His boots scuffed on the black pavement as he paced away and returned. “Christ, River. We had a baby?”
His words sent her back to the day she’d gone into labor, the way she’d gotten through the ordeal by imagining him there, substantial and reassuring. Real. “Yes.” She had to look away from the gravity in his eyes before it sucked her in. “We made a baby.” In her periphery, River saw Vaughn lift the photograph again. She knew every detail he took in. Knew that while Marcy took after her, she’d inherited Vaughn’s devilish smile. “You can hang on to that. I have to go back—”
Vaughn entered her personal space without warning, bringing River’s back up against the car, dropping her pulse into a tumultuous downbeat. His bottomless brown eyes ran over her face, intense, so intense. Which she might have been able to resist, if it weren’t for the vulnerability lurking in their depths. “What was it like?” His attention drifted down to the space between them, that regard burning her alive. “Did you…have an easy time, Riv?”
His tortured tone pinned her to the car, rendered her feet incapable of carrying her away. “She was a C-section.” A need to ease the pressure in her throat had River trying for levity. “I have an ugly scar now. I’m not your flawless class president anymore.”
Vaughn crowded closer. So close she could feel his breath pelting her lips. Had his hand just grazed her hip? “Let me see it.”
River’s head was too busy spinning to make sense of his request. He’s touching me. He’s touching me. “See what?”
She almost moaned when his knuckle traced down her belly. “Show me the scar.” They met eyes when his hand slowly flattened on her stomach, his thumb applying just a bare amount of pressure, but it might as well have been a full body rub the way her senses went crazy, and crazier still when his upper lip grazed hers. “It’s too late for me to be there for you. It’s so fucking late, doll. But I need to see what you went through. I need to pretend for just a second that I was a part of it.”
If for no other reason than to insert an object between Vaughn and her heart, River wedged a hand in at the top of her jumpsuit zipper. With a deep breath, she dragged it down, down, exposing her blue cotton T-shirt, a Giants logo at the center. Vaughn eased back just enough to reach out, his fingers shaking as he gripped the T-shirt’s hem. He lifted the material and tugged her jeans’ waistband down to reveal the thin red scar running low and horizontal on her abdomen.
His pained sound dotted the air between them.
“It doesn’t hurt,” she felt compelled to say, but it didn’t seem like he heard her because one second he towered over her, and the next, he’d fallen to his knees. “What…”
His mouth landed on top of her belly button, filling the indentation with warm breath. Lips, so familiar and so new at the same time, moved lower—too low—kissing along the scar with painstaking tenderness, left to right. River’s legs dipped, her back sliding a few inches down the car door. Had she moaned out loud? Yes…she had. When was the last time someone had touched her? Really touched her, skin to skin? Vaughn, ages ago, inside a stale motel room while a cheap clock radio played static-laced Snow Patrol.
She tipped her head forward and found Vaughn watching her intently, with undeniable heat—and something closer to an apology—as his mouth moved higher. His hands, too. They skated up her rib cage to fist beneath her breasts. “Vaughn, stop. You have to stop.”
“I’m sorry.” He laid his lips against her scar one final time and stood, those devastating hands still beneath her shirt. “I’m sorry for the pain that went into that scar. I’m sorry you did it alone.”
Don’t come any closer. She needed to say it, but the heat, the physical contact, was decadent after being cold and bereft so long. “I wasn’t alone,” she whispered. “I had Jasmine…my family—”
“You needed me, though.” Their foreheads met, and one muscular arm slipped between the small of her back and the car. “You needed me, and I was long gone. I’ll never make that up to you.” He tugged her up into his big body then pressed her against the car, so securely the vehicle swayed. “Can I comfort you now, Riv? For just a minute?”
Her gaze found his waiting mouth, so sculpted and masculine, a white scar at the right corner, courtesy of a bar fight. “If you think this will comfort me, you’re wrong,” she breathed, watching as his expression darkened, grew more like she remembered it. Restless. Hungry for her. Always hungry.