She’d feel it. She was meant to.
People wanted things from him.
Protection. Violence. Solutions. Results.
Harper wanted none of those. She wanted him. And he had no training for that.
Her hand left his chest. Not far. Just to the first button on his shirt. She undid it without looking down, her eyes locked on his.
The second button. The third.
She already knew his body. She’d touched it when the fever had taken him somewhere beneath himself, where he’d heard her voice but been unable to answer it.
Now she was learning it as something else.
The shirt opened down his chest, and her fingers slipped inside, palms flat against his ribs, careful of the dressing on his chest. She slid it off his shoulders, and his shirt fell.
Her eyes dropped finally.
Stand still.
Her hands moved to his belt. She was waiting for something—permission, or just for him to be the one to say no. When he remained silent, she unbuckled it. The leather pulled free.
She got off the bed and pulled him to his feet.
She pushed her dress from her hips and stepped out of it.
Not far. Half a pace. Golden light from the stove painted her skin into something exquisite.
Her eyes darkened. He hadn’t braced for this. No one looked at him the way she did now.
Hunger. Desire. Reverence.
He understood hunger and desire had rules, but reverence undid him.
She walked around him. Her hand trailed across his stomach as she went, down the line of his hip, around to the small of his back.
Pav didn’t move.
Moving had become dangerous. His body had ideas. His hands had worse ones. Her fingers traced his spine the way his had traced hers. The same patience. The same attention. He stood in the center of her circuit and understood, with a clarity that did him no good, that he was the terrain now.
And she was reading him. Not for weakness. For him.
She stopped behind him, her hand between his shoulder blades, then sliding up to his shoulder. The puckered skin where the round had exited, years ago, in a country he didn’t name even in his own head.
He braced for the question that didn’t come. Her fingers skated across the raised edge of the scar the way she might trace a word on a page. Then she pressed her mouth to it.
He closed his eyes.
No one touched old damage like that. No one put their mouth to the place where violence had left him and made it something else. Something went through his chest with the force of a round.
She came back around to his front, taking in the bruising along his ribs from the shoulder reset—yellowing now to the color of old tea.
She skimmed his arms, his flank, the tattoo on the inside of his bicep. Two words in Cyrillic: a name and a date. Her touch passed over it and lingered for the half-second it took to register that this mark differed from the others—not violence done to him, but something he’d chosen.
Then she moved on.
He hadn’t breathed in a while. His hands were rigid at his sides. He hadn’t put them on her since she turned. If he started, he wasn’t entirely certain he’d remember how to stop.
