Beneath the Burn (20 page)

A miasma of burning flesh emanated from him. It was pungent and smoky and everywhere. Jay couldn’t move, it was so cramped in there. No light. The walls were hot and growing hotter. “Turn it off. Please, Aunt El. Turn it off.”

Stop it. Not real
. He proved it by rooting himself into the wall at his back and staring at the swirly designs in the rug. He dug his bare foot into a splinter of glass. If the slivers pierced skin, he didn’t feel it. The dirt floor flickered in, the thin boards of the shed rattled. The room darkened.

Then he saw feet next to his. They were tiny and naked with black painted toenails, wiggling, bringing him back to the dining room in the New York suite. It was only a few moments before she spoke.

“Will you come with me to your room?” Her voice was so delicate, so sweet. “Just you and me?”

He loved the sound of those words, but her feet were in danger. “Don’t move.”

A pause. “Why not?”

“You’re standing in glass.”

She curled a toe.

“I said don’t move.” He raised his head and dove into the crystal-blue pools of her eyes.

“I guess you’ll have to carry me then.”

What a silly thing to suggest. He was barefoot, too. He knew she was trying to redirect his emotions, and damn, it worked.

She didn’t give him space as he rose to his feet. The top of her head came to his throat. The perfect height to tuck all that red under his chin.

He shimmied around her in an awkward dance of bending and standing. How would he do this? Scoop under her legs? Where would her hands go?

She put her arms up, waiting, and dropped them back to her belly. “How about a piggyback ride?”

A laugh escaped his chest. A laugh? What a strange sound in his voice. “Yeah, piggyback is totally rock-n-roll.” He turned his back. “Hands—”

“No hands. I remember.” She leapt, arms up and over his shoulders, legs squeezing around his hips, and laced her fingers together in front of him.

She weighed nothing. Not sure what he expected. He’d never carried a woman, let alone allowed someone to ride on his back. She was childlike in her bone structure, though the thighs beneath his hands and the curves of legs wrapped around his waist were deliciously mature.

She kept her fingers away from his body and tightened her clench around his hips. “You’ve never held anyone this close before.”

He was stiff, he knew, but was he that obvious? Maybe she’d gathered that from his no touching rule.

Her breath circled around his ear. “Your heart’s knocking against your chest.”

It sped up. “I might be nervous.” As in a thrashing maniacal ball of nerves.

“I think there’s a little of that happening on both sides right now.”

The misery-loves-company thing didn’t usually work for him, but he knew without a doubt his misery loved Charlee.

His friends stared at him with their mouths and eyes gaping as he left the dining room full of echoes and broken glass and strode to the bedroom in long urgent steps. He kicked the door closed behind them, and instead of releasing her, he pulled her legs tighter around him.

The hopelessness piled on his shoulders weighed so much more than she did. Now she’d seen him at his worst. “You thought I was made of steel. Now you know.”

There was a pause as if she were debating the answer. She was probably glaring at the back of his head.

She dropped her cheek on his shoulder. “No, it’s still in there. You just haven’t found it yet.”

His hands curled into the flesh belonging to the woman who strengthened him by merely opening her mouth. She was his ghost of dreams, his backbone, his everything.

He realized she was struggling to get down, and he released her immediately. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

She smoothed the borrowed shirt over her bare thighs and stepped back. “We have a lot to talk about.”

In a strolling circuit around the room, she traced the curvature of the King Louis furniture, fidgeted with the knick-knacks, and sniffed the bouquets of fresh flowers. How extraordinary it felt to have her there, in the same room, sharing the same air. He could watch her for hours, the graceful way she moved, the elegant arch of her throat, the flicker in her eyes when she looked at him.

She paused in front of the sheer ivory curtains. He could tell by the way she stared out at the gray-stone architecture of Fifth Avenue that her mind was in another place. Her words confirmed it.

“Three years ago, you walked into my tattoo shop. An hour after you left, my lover and dearest friend, Noah Winslow, was killed.” She turned to face him. “And I was kidnapped by his murderer.”

He reached out for the bed and sat, his pulse at full throttle. “Who took you?”

“I’ll get to that, but first you need to understand Nathan’s role in this.”

Noah Winslow had been the boyfriend. There was a worn card in his wallet with the contact info for Winslow Investigations…for Nathan Winslow. A brother? “He’s the fucker who told me you were murdered.”

She snapped up her chin, her eyes hard as aquamarine glass. “Insult him again and I’m out of here. Do you understand?”

He needed to know who abducted her and what the soon-to-be dead motherfucker did to her, so he focused on that instead of the man she so vehemently defended. He nodded.

“Good.” She took a deep breath. “Noah and Nathan were brothers, and I’m the reason Nathan lost him. The fact that he hasn’t killed me himself speaks volumes.”

“How—”

She held up a stiff finger, but it was her glare that shushed him.

“Nathan saved your life by lying about my death. The man who enslaved me put hits on anyone looking for me. Though there was no one. Friends or family, that is.” She paused as if to let that set in.

Yeah, he had definitely stopped looking for her.

“I think you’re beginning to see, but here’s the big one, Jay. Nathan sabotaged his mission, at a great financial cost to himself, and risked his life to carry me out of a prison where I was shackled, beaten, and raped by a man. The man I’ve been running from since I was eighteen. The man I’m still running from.”

27

Charlee watched as the gravity of her situation settled over Jay, contorting his face and tightening the muscles in his neck and arms. That was the moment she realized he’d fully perceived she was in danger.

She didn’t regret telling him truth, but worry slid through her and knotted in her stomach. Would he reject her? Would he compare her to the piano girls? Or would he go ballistic again? “What I tell you cannot be repeated. You could endanger my life, and yours.”

He jumped to his feet. Given his sudden tenseness, she’d anticipated his rage. What she hadn’t prepared for was him moving toward her in three ground-covering strides and enfolding her in a crushing embrace. “Oh God, Charlee. You’ve lived that nightmare since you were eighteen?”

His arms pinned hers at her sides, and his face pressed into her neck. A warm, low crackling fire kindled in her core and spread through her body. Roy had never held her that way, which meant he hadn’t stolen her capacity to trust hugs, and return them.

“Since I was sixteen. Nine years ago.” She held her breath, the explanation sticking in her throat. She steeled her spine against the images of memory. Nathan told her rape victims blamed themselves, but she wasn’t a victim. “He imprisoned me for two years.” A smile twitched her lips as she recalled her proudest moment. “I escaped on my own that first time.”

When he raised his head, she wanted to wrap her arms around him and squeeze him as tightly as he squeezed her. Since she couldn’t do that, she held firmly to his eyes. Their brown depths were murky, but the emotions swimming in the deepest parts begged for answers, for help, and for things she didn’t want to address.

He saved her from the painful questioning. “Are you okay?” His breath pushed against her lips. “Can I hold you like this?”

Life was jaded like that, throwing them together when he couldn’t tolerate affection and she was desperate for it. “Yes. I really like it.”

He dropped his forehead to hers. “Thank God, because—” A shuddering inhale. “This is going to sound really forward, Charlee, but I want to kiss you. I’ve dreamed of it for three years. I’ve enacted it in my head so many times.” He straightened. “Jesus, I sound creepy.”

Creepy? Maybe a little. It was a harmless creepy. His hard body pressed against the length of hers. Not a forceful weight. Instead, it propped her up, supported her. “A fantasy, huh? I can’t compete with that.”

He removed his hands from her back, cupped her neck, and slowly tilted her head back. “Let me show you.”

The first kiss touched the hairline at her temple, and the muscles in her face relaxed. The next brushed her eyelid. She smiled, remembering the way his had twitched under her fingers the night before.

A kiss landed on the corner of her smile. More trailed along her cheek to the spot below her ear, and he lingered there with nipping lips.

She laughed and buried her ear in the crook of her shoulder.

“Tickles?”

“You’re a tease. I thought you were going to kiss me?”

He stared at her mouth, his own parted with increased breath. His chest rose and fell, moving against hers. When his tongue wet the top corner of his lip, she felt it on her skin from her lips to her toes.

“Jay—”

He swooped in and took her mouth. It began with a sip, then nibbles, a little at a time. Soon he was sucking every inch of her lips, sending the beat of her heart spluttering through her veins.

She fell into a trance, yet she could mark every perfect second of his mouth opening hers, and the precise moment their tongues touched.

Oh, to run her fingers through his hair, or over his ribs and around to the rise of his backside. As it were, her hands were useless weights hanging on her thighs. She didn’t want to move them, afraid she’d startle him and ruin the moment.

He seemed to sense her distraction and joined their fingers without breaking the kiss.

She pulled on their hands to bring them around to her back, but he tugged them the opposite direction, over his hips, and settled them with the backs of his hands over his ass. The position brought their hips together, and she felt the strength of his arousal at her belly.

“Is this too much?” he breathed against her lips.

She arched into him and chased his tongue, entangling it with hers. She moved to his bottom lip, drawing it in, tasting it, and slowly let it go. “Not enough.”

Beneath the solid rock of his chest and arms, she felt him shaking. With restraint? Anticipation? She rose on tiptoes to deepen her strokes, leaning into him, bolstered by the musculature of his body.

They began to gasp for air, and the roll of their tongues slowed. The intensity faded into lazy doting licks and the wet slide of swollen lips. When their breathing returned to normal, she dropped her heels to the floor and searched his eyes. “How did reality stand up?”

“Incomparable.” His eyes glimmered. “The fantasy was an opening act. You just flattened me with a show-stealing encore. I’m ruined for all other performances.”

Her pulse fluttered in that girly draw-hearts-around-his-name kind of way. Was she an idiot? She needed to pull up before she drowned. “I was hoping for a more explicit answer.”

His dark eyebrows crept together, and he tugged her closer by her hands held at his back. “I was one thrust against your cunt away from busting a nut. That explicit enough for you?”

The lewdness of his words stiffened her spine. She asked for it, deliberately forced the sentiment from the moment. Emotional distance was safer for them both. So why did she feel so sick?

“Shit. I’m sorry, Charlee. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Don’t be. It’s better that way.”

He dropped her hands and stepped back. The absence of his body was as discomfiting as his expression. “You don’t get it, do you?” The brackets around his mouth deepened with his scowl.

She could feel his disappointment because it was hers, too, and the air was thick with it. “I came here to talk, not…this—” She gestured between them. “You’re forgetting the last time I attempted a relationship, my boyfriend was murdered.”

He touched her shoulders and guided her backward until her legs hit a chair. With a nudge of his hands, he sat her in it. Then he dropped on his knees between her feet and pulled at the hem of her shirt at her hips until it covered her thighs. That last gesture made her want to yank out her heart and hand it to him. She was an idiot.