It felt like coming back to earth after floating far above it; it wasn’t a thing that happened in a moment.
When she did Kat was smiling.
He watched as with fluid grace she rolled on her side, then he took her hand to kiss her open palm before he drew her warm, pliant body to him.
Relaxed... As it seeped through his body it took him a whileto recognise the feeling. He did not associate sexual release with being relaxed; lowering your guard to that degree, opening yourself that much, required trust.
Then it hit him like a wall, the knowledge that scared him more than anything else could—in the few days he had known her she had burrowed her way through all the barriers he’d thrown up into his soul, his heart. If he loved her this much now, how much deeper, stronger would it grow if he let it?
How much harder it would be when it ended, when he let her down; there was a terrible inevitability to it. No one had ever been there for him and he had never been there for anyone else; a genetic flaw or something he’d never learnt, it remained a fact.
It was in his genes. Who would pass on a heritage like that? It would stop with him.
He closed his eyes and lay there, feeling her hands on his body, exploring. She was a giver and he was a taker, but he didn’t have the will or the strength to stop her. He wanted the moment to last.
She watched Zach. He appeared to be sleeping, his breath even and steady, his chest rising and falling. The rest of him... Her glance slid lower and she blushed, remembering the pleasure his body had given her. The rest of him was perfect. The only flaw, if it could be counted as such, was the long surgical scar she had seen.
Zach tensed and kept his eyes closed as he felt her fingers move down the scar on his chest; he’d known it was coming. In a moment she’d find the more messy, less surgically precise scars on his ribs, which the knife, luckily for him, had just glanced off, not penetrated. It was the one underneath that had thrust upwards, severing some major vessels, that had caused all the damage.
The only people who knew the truth of the scars were Alekis and Selene, plus the surgical team who had saved his life, the real heroes. He was indulgent of a little morbid curiosity from his bed partners. He even had a few ridiculous lies he wheeled out on occasion to amuse himself, safe in the knowledge they really didn’t care about his pain or his trauma or the fact his uncle had knocked seven bells out of him—these were all pluses.
This was different. Kat’s curiosity would not be morbid. Her empathy had quite a different quality and would include sympathy and pity, two things he had a strong allergic reaction to.
He opened his eyes and turned his head and, despite everything, experienced a shock-level surge of possessiveness as his eyes slid over her lovely face and beautiful body.
She smiled.
You made a mistake that was human and, if not, forgivable as such, but at least you could have a free pass; you repeated it and there were no free passes because you were a fool.
He was not a fool.
He’d made a mistake and he was not about to repeat it. This was going nowhere, because he didn’t do tomorrow and she very definitely did. The kindest thing in the long run—and she might appreciate it one day, when she had her family and her brood of children—was a clean cut. Not that there would be anything clean about it if Alekis found out.
She had edged a little closer, planning to put her head on his chest, pushing her long leg against his hair-roughened thigh, enjoying the contrast in their bodies. They were two very different halves that had made a total perfect whole. At the last moment something in his face, or rather the lack of it, made her pause.
‘Is something wrong?’ Fear of losing this happiness made her tense.
‘I didn’t protect you.’ The only time in his life.
It took a moment for his words and the self-contempt in his voice to make sense.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I was there, too,’ she reminded him quietly. ‘It was my responsibility, too.’
He closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘You would say that.’ Because she was good...too good for him, but the truth was she had given and he had taken.
She reached out again and touched the scar, pale against the deep gold of his skin. ‘What happened?’ she asked, her tender heart aching as she thought of the pain those marks represented.
He took her hand off his chest, dropped it as if it were something contagious and sat up. ‘One of those “wrong place wrong time” things.’
She blinked and felt the trace of unease already stirring in her belly take serious hold. ‘Is that all I get...?’ She smiled to lighten her words and added half jokingly, ‘You really could do with some lessons in sharing.’
He looked at her again; the coldness in his eyes made her stomach quiver in apprehension. She reached for her dress as the self-consciousness she had shrugged off returned. Pulling herself onto her knees, she slipped it over her head but didn’t attempt the zip.
He didn’t offer so she knelt back down again.
‘We are not sharing, Katina. Yes, we had sex, but it was not the beginning of some special sharing, caring relationship. But if you want to know, the scars are why I am who I am. I was in the wrong place but so was Alekis.’