She had to stop him. “Scars aren’t beautiful.”
“Yours are.”
But she was shaking her head before he’d finished speaking. “No, they’re not. Believe me. I know beauty.” She created it, destroyed it, every single day at the studio.
“Yeah? Well, I know
you
.” His jaw set, a decidedly mulish expression overtaking his features as he clamped his hands at her waist, the pads of his thumbs stroking along opposite ends of her scars. “And those gashes on your belly are the most beautiful fuckin’ things I’ve ever seen.” His fingers tightened. “Now take me in, baby.”
Another one-two emotional punch from her man, leaving her dizzy and desirous and desperate to have him inside her. She shifted, reaching between them to wrap trembling fingers around the solid length of him before guiding him to her entrance.
They froze when his head, the first inch of him, slid into her. He shuddered. His grip turned bruising. Planting her palms on the hard plane of his chest, she forced herself down on him with a gasp, a moan, a sigh. “Holy…”
The heat generated by their bodies, in the absence of air-conditioning, settled over them like a blanket, but it wasn’t time to curl up, pull the covers over their heads, and call it a night. No, it was time to move, and Declan was already pumping shallowly beneath her in encouragement.
Sweat beaded at her temples as she rolled her hips. Not quite forward and back, but in a languid, subtly sweeping curve. As though she was dancing, but with him inside her. And damn, it felt good. Good to move, good to dance, good to fuck. He was big enough to stretch her, filling her empty spaces with a delicious insistence that sent shivers sprinting down her spine.
Trusting the big, warm hands at her hips to keep her steady, she lifted her arms to tangle in her hair, tipping her head back and closing her eyes on a sigh. She wouldn’t put on her pointe shoes for him, nor would she don any sequined pasties, but she could give him this dance. He’d earned it, again and again, day after day as he showed her how much he cared. To deny that he did would cheapen this act, and Fiona couldn’t do that, not to him. Not to them.
“Fiona. Fi.” His grip suddenly halted her, holding himself deep inside while she writhed, needing the movement, needing the friction.
“Why’d you stop me?”
“Because...because I need to
take
you. I need it, baby.”
And because she heard the echo of begging in his rumbling lilt, hoarse and desperate, she climbed off him with a whimper, bending down to capture his lips with hers as he rolled them, reversing their positions. The heat of his mouth, his tongue, kept the fire within her stoked high, and she moaned when she felt the head of his cock tease along her wet slit.
“Finally.” He shuddered. “God, finally I’ve got you.” And he slid into her, a slow, smooth glide that filled her up in the best possible way.
But even as she moaned in welcome, her mind couldn’t comprehend his words.
Finally
. Yes, she felt that
finally
, too, but— “I don’t understand, Declan. I just…I don’t understand.”
“What, love?”
Love
… “Why me?”
“Fiona.” He cupped her cheeks, palms warm, eyes hot. “Why
not
you?” His kiss was surprisingly gentle, the press of his lips almost soothing even as his body moved over hers, into hers, ratcheting up the piercing tension building low in her belly. His tongue swept into her mouth, playfulness quickly transforming into possession.
She welcomed it. Her legs wrapped around his hips, heels digging into the backs of his thighs as her spine arched. Every inch of her torso found every inch of his, the ridges of her scars pressed to the flat plane of his stomach, and euphoria twisted high in her chest as three years of denied intimacy faded to distant memory. With every thrust, he cracked the protective shell surrounding her fears, until she was gasping his name, fingernails raking across his sweat-slicked shoulders.
He groaned. “Fuckin’ hell, Fi.” Planting his elbows on either side of her, he levered his body over hers, the piston of his hips moving faster, harder. Teeth entered the fray, nipping at her lips, her jaw, her throat as the mood changed yet again, and desperation clogged her senses.
Gripping his damp hair, she dragged his mouth to hers, stole the deep, wet kisses she needed as her thighs tightened around him. “More. More, Dec.”
More he gave, changing the angle of his hips and causing the most wonderful tension to build with each stroke. That tension coiled until she couldn’t take it any longer and, crying out, tore her lips from his, spine arching as her legs clutched him to her. Ecstasy suffused her, stealing her breath, stopping her heart, and she could do nothing but shake and hold him. Hold him, and refuse to let go.
Muffling his moans against the side of her neck, he shuddered atop her, hands sliding beneath her body to hold her closer. She clung to him, riding the dissipating waves of her own orgasm as he came, pleasure-shivers chasing along her nerve endings. Her eyes closed as she inhaled their mingled scents, reveled in the sticky feel of his chest meshing with hers. Complicated sex stripped down to basics, and God, it had been exactly,
exactly
, what she’d needed.
He rolled off her with a sigh, stripping off the condom and tossing it…somewhere. It didn’t matter. As they lay side by side, scrambling to catch their breaths, Declan muttered, “That was like screwin’ in a sauna.”
The air-conditioning roared to life, power returning.
She laughed while the sweat cooled on her skin, until he chuckled and pounced. Her laughter turned to delighted shrieks as he dragged her body under his to make her sweat all over again for the next hour.
ELEVEN
She woke up to the foreign sensation of male fingertips tracing her scars. Slowly, gently, finding all the jagged edges and imperfections in her knitted flesh.
Fighting not to tense under his touch, Fiona opened her eyes to find him lying on his belly, head half on her pillow, half on his, and his gaze trained on the steady movements of his fingers. Her voice was strained when she murmured, “Morning.”
“Mornin’.”
Soft light filtered through the blinds covering her bedroom window. The comforter lay twisted at the foot of the bed, but the turquoise top sheet covered Declan to the waist, her to the juncture of her thighs. That she flashed him her privates worried her much less than the visual she was providing with her belly.
Her voice was scratchy, with nerves and with sleep, when she mumbled, “You’re the first person to touch me there.” No one but the doctors, and then no one but Fiona herself.
A kiss to her navel. “Tell me about Vegas.”
“Can you…stop touching me, while I talk?” It was just too much sensation, too much numbness cracking open at one time for her to handle. Every time he touched her, her walls threatened to collapse, and she couldn’t tell the story if she was buried in rubble.
A shift of limbs, a roll of bodies, and then she was tucked into his side as he lay on his back, her leg over his thighs, her arm over his ribs. Her head on his shoulder, because, she realized, he wouldn’t force her to look at him while she spoke.
Her heart thudded in her chest, so violently it was almost painful. Those walls didn’t stand a chance.
She exhaled, her breath skating over his collarbone. “I dropped out of college one semester before graduation—” another story entirely “—and ended up in Vegas. My first day in town, I went to an open audition at the House of Tease, this brand-new burlesque club. Later that night, I found out I got a callback.”
Declan’s hand began to stroke along her back, encouraging her to cuddle closer.
She did. “I hadn’t even been there forty-eight hours, and I’d found a job, dancing, that paid more money than I’d ever thought to make with my first gig out of school.” In that amount of time, she had also acquired roommates and a shared bedroom in a crumbling apartment complex, but that was irrelevant now. “I worked at the House of Tease for two years. I was good at it—burlesque.”
“I have no doubt.” The rumble of his voice vibrated against her cheek.
“But I…made a lot of bad choices. A lot of drinking backstage, a lot of partying until five in the morning. I wasn’t taking care of myself, because I…I
didn’t
care about myself.” Another consequence of leaving college too soon. Of letting someone who didn’t matter change her own opinion of herself.
Familiar anger clawed at her throat. Her nails were digging into his side, but he didn’t complain, simply continuing to pet a steady path up and down her spine, and she forced herself to relax, to breathe. “It was an accident, really an accident. I’d been drinking in the dressing room with two of the girls, and we decided we didn’t want to troll the house floor that night, so we snuck out the back, through one of the service doors that led to an empty loading dock. There was a group of men, drunk men, already there.”
He tensed beneath her.
“It’s not what you think.” It was sort of what he thought. “When they saw us, they got rowdy and in our face, heckling us. One of them grabbed me. I pushed him, and he fell into one of the other guys. They started fighting and throwing punches, and I got caught in the middle. One of them had a broken beer bottle. He missed the man he was aiming for and gutted me instead.”
“Oh, my God. Fiona.” His other arm came around her, hugging her to him.
Her walls trembled, and fell. “I had nearly bled to death by the time I got to the hospital. Had to stay there for almost a month.” Her voice was muffled against his chest. “Lots of surgeries, lots of time spent repairing internal damage.” Though, thankfully, the makeshift weapon hadn’t perforated her stomach or intestines, so it was merely a matter of…tucking everything back in.
Nausea roiled at the memory, before she tamped it down.
“I’d gone off my parents’ insurance and didn’t have any of my own. No emergency contact info or next of kin or whatever.” It had been days before she could think clearly enough through the drugs to realize her phone hadn’t made it to the hospital with her and then have a nurse dial her parents when her hazy memory coughed up their phone number. “Mom and Dad didn’t get there until a week later, because they didn’t know what had happened.”
She may have been estranged from her parents at the time, basically having gone off the proverbial reservation when she ran away from school and became little more than a stripper, but she’d never doubted they would come for her, if she were in trouble.
Trouble she had been in, there at the hospital. The long hours between that phone call and their arrival had been the loneliest of her life. It had made her decision to leave Vegas behind and go home to L.A. with them beyond easy. “When I was well enough to travel, I came home for good.”
“And left dancing behind.”
She tried to shrug, couldn’t beneath the weight of his arms. “For a while, dancing was tied to Vegas and pain in my mind, so I went in a totally different direction by choosing makeup artistry. But I’ve come to terms with all of it.” Most days, at least.
The bedroom was quiet as she listened to the steady rhythm of his heart. Her eyes slid shut, and the last of the tension left her. She’d told him, Declan, which made it less of a dirty secret. Didn’t mean she was eager to shout this story—or the story about Alexei—from the rooftops, because she was still ashamed of herself, for so many reasons: her immature response to a setback in college, the unspoken decision to cut her parents out of her life when they were worried sick, the vices in which she’d indulged in an effort to avoid any sort of accountability for the choices she was making in her day-to-day life.
His hold on her loosened a fraction. “I hope you didn’t think I would want you less, if I saw your scars.”
“I wouldn’t blame you if you did.” She had a hard enough time looking at her body herself some days. “We work in an industry dependent on physical perfection. Scars are about as far from perfect as you can get.”
“You remember when I said you wouldn’t be you to me without your glasses? Same goes for your scars, darlin’.” His hand curved over the crown of her head, a tender touch that placed her ear over his heartbeat, her cheek nestled against the soft hairs curling across his chest. “You know I like how you look.”
“I like how
you
look.” She stroked a hand down his torso, the tips of her fingers finding the muscled grooves bisecting his chest, tracing over the lean, hard ridges on his stomach. “You make me want to take a bite.” Too honest, the words were too honest, but they felt right on her tongue.
Just like he did when she dipped her head to sink her teeth into one bunched oblique, followed with a sweep of her tongue. He twitched beneath her hand. “Yup. Totally biteable.”
He chuckled, the fingers tangled in her hair clenching, gentle pressure that urged her to move lower. “You can bite somethin’ else if you like. I don’t mind.”
“So generous,” she teased. The head of his cock nudged at her cheek, trapped under the sheet as she nuzzled his navel, planting soft kisses along the goody trail of black hair disappearing behind Egyptian cotton. He flinched, then jerked again when her hair brushed over his belly. “Are you ticklish, Declan Murphy?”
He pushed her away with a grunt when she attempted to use her fiendishly wiggling fingers on him, narrowing his gaze on her in accusation. “Absolutely not. Man of steel here. No ticklish spots anywhere on my person.” When she dissolved into silent giggles at his stern glare, he dropped his voice into a lower register and adopted an American accent, declaring, “I am a fortress, woman.”
“A fortress, huh? Yet you’re not all crazy ripped.” She liked that about him, loved the lines of him, shoulders hard and broad, body firm and lean. And biteable.