“Oh,” I said and slowly turned my back so she could take off her clothes. I was starting to feel a little better physically. There were carbs in me, and I was a bit rehydrated. I tried not to listen to her movements too much or think about how that round ass was now bare and sliding into the water. I wondered how tight she would be as little as she was.
I really needed to stop thinking like that. I was instantly rock hard and pretty sure jerking off in the raft wasn’t going to go over well. I wondered if I could get in the water under the pretence of taking a dump and jerk off instead. I shifted a little and tried to think about something – anything – but the naked woman behind me.
“I’m done,” she finally announced. I kept myself from adding anything colorful to her remark, like how she would only be done when she was screaming my name. I turned back to her and was met with a better view of the bruise on her cheek which killed my erection pretty quickly.
I remembered wanting to belt Jillian a couple of times towards the end, but I had never done it. I’d never hit anyone who wasn’t really asking for it. Well, at least I hadn’t before now.
Shit.
I shifted and moved a little closer to her, my eyes trained on the bluish mark on her cheek. My left hand reached out to her, and she flinched. My hand froze in midair, and I looked at her eyes for a moment before reaching out again. My fingers touched under her jaw line, and my thumb gently brushed over the mark. It was worse than I had originally thought since the angle hadn’t been right when I saw it before. Now I could see it quite clearly.
“Why did I hit you?” I asked. “I don’t remember.”
“I kept touching you,” Raine said with a shrug. “You told me not to touch you anymore.”
“I remember saying that,” I confirmed. “Why did you keep doing it?”
“Well…it may sound a little weird,” she said.
I arched an eyebrow at her, willing her to go on with it.
“I used to work at an animal shelter,” she started. “It was before Dad died – while I was in high school. There was one summer when a bunch of pit bulls were brought in. They had been trained to fight, and they weren’t used to being around people. I helped one of the trainers try to get them acclimated so they could get adopted.”
She looked at me through her lashes and then looked back to her hands. My thumb traced over the mark again.
“Acclimated?”
“Yes,” she nodded. “They weren’t used to any kind of affection or anything, so they would either bark at you or cringe when you tried to touc
h them. You kind of…remind me of them.”
“I remind you of a dog?” My fingertips slid under the ridge of her jaw line.
“Not exactly,” she shook her head a little but not so much that I had to remove my fingers from her face. “You just…don’t seem to know how to deal with people. When you said you were a fighter, it just made me think of the dogs.”
I narrowed my eyes, trying to decide how I felt about being compared to a dog.
“So what does all this have to do with touching me?”
“Part of the rehabilitation for the dogs was to handle them a lot,” Raine explained. “At first they would growl and snap. I got bit more than once. Eventually, you hoped they would get used to it and end up…well, liking it.”
Her voice lowered along with her eyes.
“You were kind of the same way,” she said. “So I thought if you got acclimated to me touching you, you wouldn’t be afraid of me, and I could help you.”
“Afraid of you?” I scoffed. My fingers trailed over to her neck underneath her ear while my thumb still traced over the blue mark. Her skin was amazingly soft, and my eyes dropped down over her bathing suit-clad body for a moment. Her shoulders trembled, and I looked back up to her eyes. “I don’t think that was it. I think you were just pissing me off.”
“We’ll just have to agree to disagree, then,” Raine retorted.
A small laugh escaped my lips as I listened to her words and processed them.
“Did it work?” I asked. “Did you find homes for the dogs?”
“For some of them,” she said, her eyes darting away from me.
“What about the rest?”
“We had to put some of them down,” Raine said quietly.