Page 9 of Stalked By Raiden

“I tried. That’s the fourth attempt.”

“It’s good.” He carries it to a machine on the counter and feeds it through, and something inside it warms and whirs. “Sizing it down. Then I'll pull a stencil.”

He holds the transfer up a minute later. The lavender again, reversed, in dark purple.

“Is this right?” he asks.

I nod. “Yes.”

Our gazes connect, and everything soon quickly disappears. All except the intensity of his sharp gaze and how deeply I’m affected. He breaks the connection first.

“Shoulder blade?”

I nod, unable to speak, and reach for the hem of my shirt with trembling fingers. Raiden turns, giving me his back, and I nearly whimper at the courtesy. I strip quickly, folding my arms across my chest in my bra, feeling exposed and vulnerable and desperately aroused.

“Ready,” I manage, my voice barely above a whisper.

He turns, and his gaze drops to my bare shoulders and crossed arms. Something flares in those sharp eyes—hunger, dark and unmistakable. “On the chair,” he commands. “Face away from me.”

My core clenches in response to his demanding tone. Grateful, I settle onto the leather, cool against my heated skin.

“Strap down.”

I slide it off my shoulder, and there’s nothing to do with my hands afterward except hold the cups against myself and stare at the wall.

I hear him tear something open. Then a razor moves across my shoulder blade in short, unhurried strokes, and I have never in my life been so aware of a piece of my own skin. There’s no hair there worth removing. He does it anyway…and takes his time about it.

“Standard,” he says, like he heard me thinking.

Coldness covers the area next. An alcohol wipe, and I gasp before I can stop myself. He doesn’t say anything at all. Then something slick and cool spread in a thin layer across the same patch, his gloved fingers working it out to the edges.

“Don’t move.”

The stencil presses down. He holds it there with the flat of his hand, longer than seems necessary, his palm warm through the paper and his other hand resting against my ribs to keep me still. When he peels it away, it’s slow, from one corner, and I feel every millimeter of it lift.

He angles a hand mirror over my shoulder. The lavender sits there in purple, exactly where I’d imagined it.

“Happy?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now we wait.” He rolls his stool back a foot. “Twenty minutes, minimum. It needs to be bone dry before I start.”

“Twenty minutes?”

“Twenty minutes.” A pause. “You can’t lean back. You can’t put your shirt on. You can’t touch it. And I can’t touch you because anything I do to that stencil, I do to your tattoo.”

I sit there in my bra with my back to him and my hands full of my own chest. I understand exactly what he’s told me, but he’s just three feet away. He’s going to look at me for twenty minutes, and neither of us is allowed to do a single thing about it.

The silence stretches. I hear him inhale. Once, deliberately, in a way that isn’t quite steady.

“Raiden—”

“Don’t.” His voice has dropped into gravel. “Not until it’s dry.”

It is the longest twenty minutes of my life.

When it finally ends, I hear gloves snap. Then his fingers brush my shoulder. A whisper of touch, and my breath stills.