Aware of the time this has already taken, I hurry to rinse out the shampoo and repeat the process with the conditioner. She’s still turned with her back toward me when I pick up the loofah and squirt some bodywash on it. I avoid the label, not wanting to see another ridiculous name likePlease Fuck Me Nowor something equally ridiculous and forbidden.
Although I’d love nothing more than to touch her in all the right places, I refrain from doing so. This might be one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I wash each arm and her neck, only brushing the loofah over the exposed skin on her chest before I move on to her stomach. Then I bend down to wash each leg, trying to ignore that my face is right in front of her pussy.
Images from the club and how wet she was pop into my mind, and I indulge in the knowledge that her wetness was all for me. She was as desperate for me as I was for her.
But all of that changed the second her uncle announced my engagement to her cousin. That was a little inconvenient.
It still is, since she hides her attraction to me as much as possible, which could be said speaks for her character. While that might be the case, it just pisses me off. I haven’t gotten laid since I got back to the city with my team, and it’s been too long. Actually, I hadn’t been with anyone for a while before then either. Somehow, being away for two years and constantly on the move made the whole cliché of having a different woman in every city get pretty boring after a while.
It’s just my luck that the first woman who gets my dick excited in so long is the beautiful girl standing in front of me now, and I had to meet her on her wedding day of all days.
I move the loofah higher up her inner thigh, and her left hand grasps my shoulder, her grip so tight her fingernails threaten to break my skin.
Yes, baby, leave your marks on me.
Due to her underwear, I skip her pussy completely and go straight to the other thigh, and Gemma lets out a frustrated huff. I press my teeth into my lower lip, trying to distract myself from this walking temptation.
My gaze flicks to her stomach and the scar she has, and I have to remind myself to be gentle with her despite the edgy, twitchy feeling that’s coursing through me at the sight. It awakens every single carnal urge inside me, even the ones I’ve worked hard to push into the darkest corners of my mind. My muscles and veins strain against my skin, and I know I need to let out some of this energy later, before it eats me alive.
“Do you know who did this to you?”
She realizes I’m talking about her scar and immediately tries to cover it with her hands, which makes sense for someone like her, who was taught to look as flawless as possible. It’s not the worst scar I’ve seen, but it’s not pretty either. It’s more like a half-assed butcher job that bears a close resemblance to a boomerang right above her belly button. That is if the boomerang had fang-like edges and was about seven inches long.
She shakes her head, still trying to get her hands fully over it.
It takes me several times to swallow the rage down enough to ask, “Does your dad know who did it?”
She stops holding her hands over the scar, and instead, tries to get away from me. But I keep my hands on the backs of her thighs. Firm and unyielding, without hurting her.
Her left hand slaps on her outer thigh when she drops it. “What’s it to you?”
The bite in her voice surprises me. Especially since she tried to pull away.
My gaze finds hers as I get up, and the pure rage in her eyes seems to connect with mine, allowing me to breathe normally again.
What’s it to me, she asked?
What’s it to her after all this time? How is it possible that an incident that happened years ago can still get her this worked up?
I doubt she’d be honest with me though. That’s not the way things are between us.
But I do want to know about her dad’s involvement in all of this, so I repeat my question. “Does he know who did it?”
There’s a visible tightness to her jaw and neck that’s impressive for someone who’s supposed to be calm and obedient. Is she only like this with me, or did no one else ever notice her fiery spirit?
This woman has been challenging me from the moment we met, not acting anything like the woman I heard about marrying an old family foe, the one she was molded into by her father.
I want to figure her out, strip off every one of her layers to see what’s hiding deep on the inside.
At last, she flicks her gaze at the ceiling like she’s had enough of our staring match, and says, “I don’t know if he knows, okay? He’s never mentioned anything to me, but it’s not like he’s usually forthcoming with any information. The police and my family wrote the incident off as a home invasion gone wrong, that the person breaking in probably wanted to get their hands on my dad’s business files or something, and that I was lucky I got away at all.”
What she’s not saying is that her mother wasn’t so lucky. After Ash saw the scar, I did some digging and read about the break-in. It said that the then fifteen-year-old girl was safe but that her mother died at the scene of the crime and the killer was never found.
Thoughts of losing my own mother when I was a teenager slice through my chest. While it was cancer that took her away from us, and not murder like in Gemma’s case, our situations couldn’t have been more different regarding what happened once we lost our moms. Whereas I had a dad who took good care of us, Gemma was left with nothing but an asshole of a father, who treated and still treats her like she’s nothing more than a commodity.
“I’ll find out if the person responsible paid for what they did. If they did not, it seems like there’s a debt that still needs to be paid.”
“Why?” She tilts her head to the side and studies me, as if she can read the answer on my face.