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I tried to keep it clean, tried to be methodical with it, but she didn’t make it easy on me. Every time I touched her, her skin pebbled with goosebumps and she shivered. Not an artificial one, but a genuine little quiver, as if my touch were as powerful as an electric shock.
Whenever she responded like that, it made me glance at her, and when our gazes collided, it was like the fucking world stopped.
By the time I was done cleaning the wound and bandaging it, she was trembling like a goddamn leaf and I was as hard as nails.
I blew out a breath as I rasped, "I’m not alone in feeling this way, am I?"
I could see that I wasn’t, but I needed verbal confirmation that this was weird as hell.
Slowly, she licked her lips, and I swore to God I could feel the tip of that little muscle around the glans of my cock.
"No, you’re not. You know that though. You know it’s been like this since that first day," she whispered. "Even when I was scared of you, you drew me to you like you were a magnet. I thought it was me fangirling but that was why it hurt so much when you disappeared."
"I didn’t disappear," I corrected. "I saved you from me."
She sat up, pressed her hand to my thigh. "You’d never hurt me."
"There are different kinds of hurts in this life, Savannah. You know that as well as I do."
Her brow furrowed, but then, slowly, as if it were a storm cloud marring a crystal clear day, it abated. "I’ve been in danger all my life, Aidan. Relatively speaking. My dad saw to that just by being who he is. You think that’s the first intruder I’ve had to deal with? My sister was kidnapped, for God’s sake. Camden routinely deals with insane stalkers." She pursed her lips. "Nothing in this life is safe. You should know that by now."
"My world is a lot more dangerous. Kidnappers don’t take you because they’re obsessed with your father and want whichever piece of him they can get.
"They take you because they want your spilled blood to mean something. Vengeance, a warning, a threat."
"You can’t save me from myself, Aidan," she rasped. "And I told you yesterday, I’m done with you blowing hot and cold. You take me or you don’t, but you make a decision fast or I’ll find some other motherfucker to claim me and make me his."
A snarl was torn from me, the visceral reaction to her words firing me up much as it did earlier.
"You need to stop making that threat."
To my growl, she purred, "Why? When you react so beautifully."
Even though I knew if I didn’t nip this in the bud, stop it from becoming a common occurrence between us where she thought she could have me by the balls just because she threatened me with another man taking ownership of her, I couldn’t stop myself from looming over her.
The second I did, of course, pain howled through me. I’d been suffering all day and all night, but it was only now that I felt it like a blunt knife tearing through tendons and shredding muscles in its path.
I knew she saw because her expression twisted, morphing with concern as I turned around, flopping back against the mattress as the agony of my knee colliding with the bed ricocheted inside me.
As I struggled to get the pain under control, to stop that feeling of drowning, she was there, her hand on my chest, tucked against my side like she was experiencing it too. I thanked God she wasn’t, but sweet fuck, it felt good to have her there. To take my mind off what I was going through.
"Is it always this bad?" she asked after a while, once my breathing had calmed down.
"You mean after I kick the bed with my fucked up knee?" My voice was so deep and so hoarse it sounded like it was being scraped over rough gravel.
"Yeah," she said softly, but there was a small bump in the middle, making it two syllables as she laughed at my phrasing.
It amazed me that I didn’t mind.
The heat of her hand against my stomach was fierce, much like the woman herself.
"It’s always bad," I admitted gruffly, then, I admitted what I never had to my brothers. Not even Conor when I’d showed up at his door and puked all over him. "I-It got me hooked on Oxy, Savannah."
She stiffened, then whispered, "Oh, Aidan, I’m so sorry. I thought you looked thinner. I thought it was from the pain.
"No one knows what really happened, trust me I researched as much as I could after the shooting, but everyone knows you’ve been limping ever since. Have you only just detoxed?"
There was no accusation in her voice, no pity either, just sympathy. It swaddled me, comforted me, let me relax and eased up the tension inside me which, miracle of miracles, diminished the pain a little.
