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‘I’m sorry.’
‘For what?’
‘That you feel you have to hide them.’
And why couldn’t he show them to Maria? It wasn’t as if he would ever see her again after this night, not once he left this room. She’d found strength and pride in her own scars, but what would she find in his?
‘They’re not pretty,’ he warned.
‘I don’t care for pretty,’ she responded defiantly, not once taking her eyes from his. There was that strength again. The steel that he recognised encased in soft perfection.
Gritting his teeth, he turned and stalked back to her, lifting his shirt from his trousers as he did so. One by one he undid the shirt buttons and still she didn’t drop her gaze. The women he usually spent his time with either hungrily sought out the scars that had fuelled his reputation as a beast, or were barely interested in anything above his belt.
Having reached the last button, he took one last look at her before shrugging out of the white shirt and casting it aside, standing there before her unwavering gaze. Maria didn’t break the connection between their eyes, not immediately and he gave her credit for that. But finally he closed his eyes, unwilling and unable to see those beautiful features puckered with disgust.
He felt her close the distance between them, the heat from her body pressing against his skin. The undamaged skin, because his nerves had been dulled by the injured tissue and skin grafts that covered nearly half of his torso. He felt her circle him, could have sworn he felt the weight of her gaze sparking a thousand starbursts across his body, even the damaged parts. He sensed when she had come back to face him and braced himself as he opened his eyes. But where he had expected revulsion and horror, even the morbid fascination he occasionally experienced, instead he saw wonder and something like awe.
* * *
Maria was enthralled. Utterly and completely. I don’t like fire, that was what Matthieu had said. Yes, his torso had been badly disfigured from the scars that swept around his forearm and reached up to his neck, where she’d seen the silvery traces earlier in the evening. They covered almost half of his chest and, she had seen, wrapped around his flanks and up across his shoulder blades. The twists of tissue, strangely pale, nearly white against his tanned skin, and in some places shiny and criss-crossed from what she could only presume to be many, many skin grafts to help the full thickness burns she could see were from years ago.
The patterns she found on his chest were painfully beautiful to her and she couldn’t even imagine the kind of agony he must have experienced for these to heal, nor the time it must have taken. His skin had reformed over the powerful muscles of his arms, just as large as she’d imagined, and the scars rippled over the muscles in his abdomen, the powerful outline of a six pack that spoke to a brutal physical training regime. Because that was what screamed at her most as he stood there, shirtless, his lower limbs encased in low-slung blue superfine trousers. Strength and raw power. Power that was almost straining at some kind of self-imposed leash.
‘What do you see?’ he asked. Demanded almost.
And she said the words that had come to her mind. ‘Magnificence.’ Raw masculinity, but she couldn’t let herself say that last out loud. Because it spoke too much to her desire for him. It would have betrayed her.
She reached out a hand, but he caught it in the air between them. His large fingers wrapping easily, firmly but gently, around her slim wrist.
She threw her gaze to his, aware that her breath had hitched in her lungs. Aware that her skin was on fire as surely as his had once been. But hers was an invisible flame, one created by him and the need to feel his skin against the palm of her hand. Not from curiosity, but the desperation to make that connection. To feel that same incredible sensation she had experienced when they had kissed earlier. And then she realised to her shame how selfish that was. Just as he’d said earlier about passion. But it was more than that. She wanted to be with him, to soothe that ragged sense of...of...she couldn’t put a name to what she saw in his eyes.
She pressed past her hand, still clasped in his, and closed the distance between their bodies. He held himself still, but she could see what an effort that took and she was torn...torn between recognising the stress he put himself under and the need to offer consolation. Instinct won out and she pressed a gentle kiss to his chest, on his pectoral muscle that had the twist and turn of a scar that had shaped itself in such a way that made her think of a great white oak tree, gnarled but majestic.
She traced the trail her lips covered across his chest with her free hand, delighting in the hitch in his breathing as cruel as it was. Because she wanted him with her in this. As utterly devastated and destroyed by the attraction that flamed between them. Though she was innocent, she could recognise the desire in his eyes, recognise it because she felt it within herself.
Pressing another kiss in the centre of his chest, she felt oddly exposed, wanting his arms to wrap around her, hide her from the passion that was almost overwhelming her. He was so broad that she realised only lower around his waist would her arms meet were she to encircle him. But one hand was still captured by his, and the rapid rise and fall of Matthieu’s chest was the only outward sign that he was not made of stone.
No. This man would never have been made of stone...pure silver, she thought, only just tempered, still seething with heat from the furnace, still malleable, but just as dangerous. A quiver of desire racked her body and only then did Matthieu finally release her hand. She looked up into eyes that were boring down into hers.
‘Stop.’
‘Why?’
‘You don’t know what you’re doing. What you’re asking for,’ he stated, almost angrily.
‘I may be naïve—’
‘Maybe? You are an innocent, Maria. A true innocent.’
‘Does that mean I don’t know what I want?’
‘It means you don’t understand the implications of what you want.’
‘Would anyone?’ she asked.
‘This is something that you should do with someone capable of staying with you.
’
