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“Will you remain here?”
Carter’s voice was muffled so I couldn’t hear his reply, and Cole didn’t respond.
Feeling guilty about spying, I snuck back to the room. I had just gotten under the covers when Carter came in. He stopped, shook his head, and closed the door behind him.
“What?” I asked.
“Did you get the answer you wanted?”
“What are you talking about?”
A faint smirk teased at the corners of his mouth, but he sighed and tossed a file onto the bed. With one motion, he pulled his shirt over his head, and my mouth dropped. His face had remained relatively clean after the sparring sessions, but not his chest. Carter had avoided showering with me or undressing in my presence all week, I now realized. His chest was full of cuts and bruises. There were welts over his ribs, too.
“Oh my god.” Scooting toward him to the edge of the bed, I stopped right before touching one of the cuts. “Carter.”
He looked down, surveying his chest. “They’re mostly superficial wounds.” He bent and pressed a kiss to the top of my head. “No need to worry about me.”
As he went into the bathroom, I followed him. He turned on the shower, and I perched on the counter.
“Is that why you’ve not undressed around me this week?” I asked over the water. He’d slid into bed late at night, after an hour in the gym with Cole and showering. He kept the lights off so as not to wake me, and he was gone when I woke. When he returned to shower and change, I was working in the office. My eyes roamed over his body, and I ached for him, but not in the usual way. Some of those cuts looked nasty.
He stepped inside, but left the door open and angled his head so he could still see me. His eyes found mine. “It wasn’t on purpose.”
I tucked my hands under my legs. “Did you get them checked out, to make sure you haven’t broken anything? None of those cuts are infected, right?” I eyed one in particular. A red circle had formed around it.
“I’m fine.” His eyes slid down my body, lingering where my shirt fell low, revealing some cleavage. “I’m definitely okay enough for you to join me.”
I smiled, but stayed where I was. “Maybe later.” With him on the bed, me on top, I knew he wouldn’t be hurting…too much.
His eyes darkened, but he ducked underneath the water, wetting his hair. I waited until he finished showering, and when he was done, I waited some more while he dried himself before going back into the bedroom. As he went to the closet, I spied the folder he’d thrown onto the bed earlier. I picked it up and asked, “What’s this—” as I began to flip through it. My words died as I saw the first picture.
It was my baby picture.
“What is this?”
Carter finished pulling on a shirt and sweats. Both clung to his form in a way that would’ve distracted me thirty seconds earlier. He said, so gently, “The men told me about that man.”
I heard the shout again in my head. “Miss Nathans!”
“Oh.” I was six months old in the picture. I recognized it because AJ had given me a similar one. Only the backdrop was different. This picture had a tree and flowers in the background instead of a plain white wall. But it was me. Same dark eyes. I had light blond hair then. Some of it curled upward, like it was standing on top of my head, and my cheeks were plump and red.
I’d been happy in that picture. Tracing the image, I murmured, “AJ and I never really talked about our parents. He didn’t like to, so I never asked. The few times I did, he got really upset.”
Carter sat beside me and he took the picture, examining it for himself. “He never talked to me about them either.”
“Really?”
He nodded, handing the picture back. My breath caught at the look in his eye. It wasn’t…he rarely looked at me like that, but it was regret and sadness.
“That picture’s not of you, Emma,” he said.
I frowned. “What?”
He turned it over and showed me the back. Someone had written 1988.
“What?” I was born in 1986. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Emma, listen to me...”
