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“I did your sternum?” I asked as I kept my hand hovering just over the torn collar.
“You’ve done a lot of them,” she said as she tugged the material so it fell off her shoulder.
Before it could fall all the way, she caught the shirt against her breasts. Watching me. Seeming to wait for my reaction. But I had already forgotten what we were doing. All I knew was I needed to stop this.
Stop us.
As much as I wanted Scarlet, I couldn’t let myself have her when I didn’t know how—orif—I’d betrayed her.
And yet, I just sat there. Blood pounding and roaring with need as I stared into those dark, hypnotic eyes. And then the material of her shirt fell. Pooling around her waist as her hands covered her breasts.
When she spoke, her voice was barely above a whisper. “It’s even weirder to feel like this is the first time I’m undressing in front of you.”
“It is, Scarlet.” I lifted my hand to trail the tips of my fingers up her arm and across her shoulder. “To me, it is.”
Heat bloomed in her cheeks as her gaze searched mine. After a few moments, she cleared her throat and hurried to ask, “So, do you remember my tattoo?”
“Can I look?”
The corners of her mouth twitched before a small smile broke free. “I’ve already taken my shirt off, Mr. Grayson. Do you ask all your clients if you can look at the place where you’re about to tattoo them?”
“I’m not tattooing you,” I informed her. “And I don’t need my memories to know you’ve never been a client.”
Her eyebrows scrunched together in a way that was all adorable confusion. “I just told you that you’ve done most of—”
“You’ve never been a client, Scar.”
In an instant, her confusion was replaced with need and that unmistakable, unending love. “Right,” she breathed. “You can look.”
My heart felt like it was going to tear out of my chest as I let my stare drift over her face and down the elegant slope of her neck. Lingering on the flawless skin of her chest and swell of her breasts, barely hidden beneath her hands, until I was trailing the design I’d been drawing.
Black lines and dots decorated her brown skin and surrounded a small quarter-moon and flower in an elegant pattern.
“I drew this,” I muttered as I studied each part of the tattoo.
“That’s right.”
I met her elated stare before dropping mine to the tattoo again, head slanting as I explained, “This past week. In some of the sketchbooks you just grabbed for me—a few times.”
Excitement and hope practically burst from her when she asked, “Really?”
“Scarlet, I—” I dropped my hand and shook my head as I reached for the sketchbook. “There’s something else. Something I’ve been drawing repeatedly. But it...it isn’t from a real memory. Well, with everything else you’ve figured out, it could be,” I hurried to add when I felt the force of her excitement being stripped away. “I don’t know anymore.”
“Tell me,” she pleaded softly as she sat back on my thighs and shrugged into her shirt.
And I hated it.
Not just that she was covering herself, but the way she was doing it. Pressing the collar of her shirt close to her chest. Looking like she suddenly felt vulnerable when she’d been a breathtaking and contradicting display of strength and shy innocence just seconds before.
“There’s this—” I cleared my throat and tried to orient my thoughts. “In what Ithoughthad happened when I first woke, there was this symbol Harper used to draw all the time. I found a ring of it and gave it to her for Christmas, which I’m guessing never happened.”
“Not that I know of,” Scarlet whispered as she looked at where I was thumbing through the pages of the sketchbook.
Not that I needed to go looking for it. I’d drawn it on almost every page so far, unable to stop thinking about it.
Opening to one of the pages, I made sure the symbol was on there and then turned the sketchbook around to show Scarlet. “Does this mean anything to you or us?”
Scarlet looked from the symbol on the page to me a few times before she bent. Pressing her head to my chest as a breath rushed from her lungs that was at once amused and grateful and relieved.
