“Why?”
A shadow darkens her eyes, and she looks away momentarily. “I’m sorry,” she finally says.
I raise my eyebrows. “You’re sorry? You’re fucking sorry?”
She swallows, sits up at this change.
I shake my head, walk across the room to my dresser and drag on a pair of sweats before going into the closet to pull out one of my button-down shirts. I hand it to her.
“Put it on.”
She does and I return to the bathroom to get the first aid kit, then backtrack to her. She’s leaning against the headboard buttoning up the shirt.
“Leave it. I need to clean those cuts.”
She looks down, drops her arms. The shirt barely covers her nipples. I think how much I like how she looks in my clothes again. And I think about how she’s a woman now. No longer a girl.
But then I imagine her out on that cliff, steps away from plunging to her death and something inside my chest twists. I take a breath in.
“Why?” I ask again, sitting on the bed and taking her feet on my lap to clean the cuts with alcohol.
“I don’t know. Being back here, in this house, my grandmother, Noah. Lizzie’s room so close. It’s all just…it’s too much. I told you on the boat. I can’t do this. It’s too hard.”
I bandage the worst of the cuts as I process her words and only when I’m finished with both feet do I look at her again. “After all this time, I didn’t find you only to lose you again.”
“If it makes a difference, when I saw you up there, I didn’t want to do it anymore. I didn’t want to die.”
I study her and I don’t think she’s lying. I’m not sure she’s capable of lying. She’s somehow managed to hold on to her innocence. After everything, all those years, she’s still innocent.
That knowledge makes my chest ache. She lived with monsters for so long. Alone and no match for them for too fucking long.
But the thought of almost having lost her returns. It hardens me. “Good. Because if you try anything like that again and I will never forgive you. Do you understand me?”
Her neck and cheeks flush red, eyes growing wide and a little frightened.
Good. I want her scared of this at least. I raise my eyebrows and she finally nods.
“Lie down. Let me look at those.”
She obeys wordlessly and I open the shirt. My dick is hard again as I lay her out, taking in her perfectly round breasts, puckered nipples. I want to take one in my mouth. Suck it. Bite it. Make her come again. Take my time and hear her call out my name when she does.
It takes all I have to shift my gaze away, to clean the cuts on her stomach, chest and thighs. They’re not as bad as her feet, so when I’m finished, I set the first-aid kit aside and look at her.
Her eyes move from my face to my bare chest, lower. I wonder what she thinks when she sees the scars. The patch covering the place my eye used to be.
“I came,” she says when she meets my gaze again.
“I know.”
“No, I mean, I’ve never come. Before you.”
“What?”
Her cheeks go red again. “I’ve never had an orgasm.”
I guess I hadn’t thought of this. I remember what Petrov said but I’m sure he was lying, trying to get under my skin. But never before?
“Not even when you touch yourself?”
“I don’t.”
I am speechless.
“I didn’t want to. Not after—” she stops abruptly and her expression darkens, some of that anxiety creeping back into her face.
“Open your legs,” I tell her, wanting that softness back. Never wanting to see her anxious or afraid again. “Open them for me. I want to see you.”
Without shifting her gaze, she spreads them open.
I move between them, look at her. I lean toward her to kiss her, taking my time, tasting her. Her pupils are dilated when I draw back, so I bend to take a nipple into my mouth. It hardens instantly and I tease it, suck and nibble it before repeating on the other side. I’m hard as I straighten, spread her legs wider and look at the pretty pink lips of her sex.
Leaning down I smell her arousal. I close my mouth over her sex, licking the length of her, clit to ass and back. I do it two more times and when she lets out a moan, I close my mouth over her clit and suck hard. It’s moments before she’s bucking beneath me again, coming on my tongue. Her fingers are woven into my hair as she grinds herself against my face. I cup her ass cheeks, pull her open, lick her from clit to ass again, then start all over. Devouring her, my dick so fucking hard it hurts.