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“Thank you,” he muttered into her hair.
She smiled. “You’re most welcome.”
“Give me a moment…I’ll return the favor.”
“No. I don’t need you to do that. I…” She blushed. It had been so hot to watch him helplessly writhing beneath her touch. She wordlessly held up her right hand, and he lifted his head slightly to peer at the moisture on the tips of her middle and index finger.
“Aah, you rubbed one out?” It sounded as though speaking was a huge effort for him. He shocked her by grabbing hold of her hand and sucking the residual stickiness from her fingers. “You always taste delicious.”
“So do you,” she retorted faintly—still astonished by the earthy gesture.
She relaxed against him, and they lay like that for a long while.
“I finally got to fully inspect your tattoo,” she confessed complacently and he chuckled. The sound a comforting rumble in her ear.
“I wish I’d been different when we first started this, but —”
“It’s okay,” she interrupted. “I know.”
“You’re too fucking sweet.”
“I know that too.”
He chuckled, as she had meant him to. She traced the swirling tribal pattern of the tattoo on his chest. Happy that he was allowing her to do this now. In the past, he’d left before she got the chance to explore. Whenever she had attempted to touch during sex, he had distracted her with his hands and mouth.
The grayscale storm on his lower arm led to a gorgeous, perfectly rendered full moon above the roiling clouds, set in a black sky dotted with stars. The darkness of that night sky bled into tendrils of smoke that led to his neck. The dark grays and blacks also snaked over his shoulder and his chest, into a solid black tribal swirl that licked its way around his pec in thorny twists and turns. As a single—magnificently detailed piece—from wrist to chest, it was a thing of absolute beauty. She had never seen such an intricate tattoo before. She spotted something among the swirls on his chest—very fine print—and she lifted her head to get a closer look.
Dates. Three dates. She didn’t have to ask him what they were. She knew. And her heart bled for him.
He somehow sensed where her focus was and spoke without warning, “I was on short term leave. Headed stateside. My parents were on their way to pick me up from the airport. A semitruck driver lost control of his vehicle and…” He sighed, his chest lifting and falling beneath her head. “I waited at the airport for an hour. After receiving no answers to my calls, I took a cab home. We saw the commotion on the interstate, I figured maybe they were stuck in traffic because of the accident. It never once occurred to me that they were in the middle of that mess.”
“Ty…” Her voice tapered off. What was there to say?
“It was hard not to blame myself for their deaths. They wouldn’t have been on that road if not for me,” he murmured, his fingers combing through her curls. “Same with Dylan. He took a bullet for me. Died because of it. For so long I wished it had been me.”
“Oh, Ty.”
“His life had meaning. He had a wife, a baby, a family who loved him. I had nothing. Nobody. And the one person I did have, died saving my empty life.
“I can’t love you, Vicki. I can’t. That’s why I feel so selfish for wanting even this short time together, because I don’t want to hurt you. You don’t deserve it. You deserve someone who can love you with his entire heart. Without reservation, or fear, or baggage. But—despite know that—I’m selfishly not ready to let you go yet. I want this. I want it so fucking much because I’m going to need the memory of it after you’re gone.”
“Another memory of something you lost to put on your treasured wall of memories, you mean?” Vicki couldn’t quite keep the scathing censure out of her voice.
This man… She wanted to take him by the shoulders and shake him. Implore him to wake up and live his damned life. “Should I give you a keepsake to carefully store on a shelf somewhere? Maybe I’ll press one of your boutonnières and frame it? That would be a nice addition to your shrine, don’t you think?”
“Vicki—” He sounded wary.
She pushed herself up to glare at him, silencing him with her look. She couldn’t lie, it felt good. That was usually his go-to move.
“Ty, you’ve suffered terrible losses, through absolutely no fault of your own. But your current and future loneliness? That’s on you. Because you have so many people who want to be part of your life. People who want to care, if only you’d let them.”
“The point is, I can’t return those feelings,” he seethed, finally managing to get a word in.
