“Sam?”
“I did this,” he said again hoarsely, eyes glued to where his hands framed the small dark spots. “These bruises came from me. From my hands.”
She covered his hands with hers. “It’s okay. I bruise easily, don’t worry about it. “
He was breathing heavily, face tight with some strong emotion. He raised his eyes to hers and she winced at the pain in them.
“Is that why you ran?” he asked hoarsely. “Because I hurt you? Because you were afraid I would hurt you some more?”
Nicole opened her mouth to answer, appalled that he could even think such a thing. She’d run because she was a coward and couldn’t face her feelings for him.
“No, God no, Sam. I?—”
But he drowned her out, his voice strong and adamant. “Because I don’t do that. Could never do that. I don’t hurt women.” His jaw muscles bunched, he opened his mouth, then clamped it tight, throat working. It was as if he wanted to say more, but nothing else besides that stark statement would come out.
Nicole started to sayOf course you don’t hurt women, but stopped when she looked closer at him. He looked like a truck had run over him. As if something had scraped him raw.
In Nicole’s world, of course men didn’t hurt women. That went without saying. The man she knew best, her father, had been the most gentle, loving and affectionate of fathers and husbands. She couldn’t even begin to imagine her father raising a hand in anger to her or to her mother. Or to any woman or child for that matter. It was simply unthinkable.
But that wasn’t where Sam had grown up. Sam had grown up in the feral underbelly of the world—a place of brutality and cruelty, where men regularly beat up women and children, simply because they could. And because no one stood up for them. At some point in Sam’s childhood, something strong in him must have risen up, rebelled against the cruelty and the violence around him, led him to make his stand and forged him into the man he was.
I don’t hurt women.
The words had clearly come from the deepest bedrock of his being.
Looking up at him, at that strong face, now trying to mask how deep his feelings were, something big, something important shifted inside her.
Sam Reston. At first she thought he was a lowlife, a thug, the kind of man a woman instinctively avoided. Then he turned out to be the sexiest man alive. Last night had been, hands down, the most incredible sexual experience of her life, a potent combination of heat and laughter and pure hormonal overload.
She’d been wildly attracted to that Sam Reston, the man who had taught her more about sex in one night than in all her twenty-eight years taken together. Attractive and attracted, sex on a stick. That Sam Reston had turned her on so powerfully he’d turned her inside out.
But this Sam Reston—the man who protested hoarsely that he didn’t hurt women, as if the very blood in his veins would stop if he did…Well, that man was more than an incredibly hot date.
The feelings he aroused in her were like a complete realignment of her being, right down to the molecular level.
The French had a name for it—les atomes crochus. Where the very atoms that made up your being hooked up with another person’s, so that you were one, permanently, irrevocably.
The night of amazing sex had somehow sparked off the process, and Sam’s horror at the idea he could have hurt her set it ablaze. The violence in her office had been a defining moment, watching Sam come to her rescue, unflinching even with a gun in his face.
He’d defended her with his life.
His hands were stroking her hips, right over the bruises. Gently, so gently, as if he could somehow wipe the bruises away. He watched his hands, face tight and grim, etched in regret at what he’d done.
There was nothing wrong with what he’d done last night. She’d been with him every step of the way.
He’d given her so much. Wooed her, seduced her, protected her, defended her. It struck her that she had the power to give something back to him, something he desperately needed.
His pride. His knowledge of himself as a man who didn’t hurt women.
“That wasn’t why I ran, Sam,” she said softly, holding his beard-roughened chin in her hand, forcing his head up so she could meet his eyes. His gaze kept going in horror to the small bruises on her hips.
She took a deep breath, looked at him solemnly, shoulders back, standing ramrod straight.
He stared at her, unblinking, jaws clenched.
He was hurting. It was so clear, now that she had eyes to see. This big, strong, tough, magnificent man was hurting.
She couldn’t stand another second of it.
