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“I trust you more now than when we started.”
“That’s…something, I guess. Is this why you didn’t eat?”
She nodded. Not that she could see if he was watching her. The pain had tied such a knot in her stomach, it’d made her nauseous for the last two days.
“I’ll try to be quick.”
Water dripped down onto her leg, and then, one after another, Rafe plucked the slivers of glass from her skin.
He’d warn her before each time he had to cut into her flesh to expose enough of the shards to clamp the tips.
She kept her face turned away from him, tears silently streaming down her cheeks at the pain.
But she held steady, only allowing the slightest flinch when a shard twisted brutally in her skin.
He said he would be quick, but it took at least forty-five minutes before he heaved a sigh out and wiped the wet cloth across her thigh multiple times. “I think I got them all.”
Relief. Finally.
She exhaled the breath that had been festering deep in her chest the entire time and turned her face toward him, pushing up on her elbow and sliding her right hand under her cheek to prop it up. “Truly?”
He nodded as he dropped the washcloth into the bowl of red-tinged water. “Does it feel better?”
“It is fine. It just hurts.”
His jaw twitched as he spied the wetness on her cheeks. “Is there anything else that would help it?”
“Your hand…it was cool on my skin.”
Had she really just said that?
Her eyes shifted from him, staring at the fire as she wiped away the tears on her cheeks, humiliated by her own words, but also at a loss for being anything but vulnerable in that moment.
An awkward pause sat heavy in the room for a long moment, and then his hand settled on the back of her thigh, the cool touch of it an instant balm.
“Like this?”
She nodded involuntarily and her eyes dipped, her stare transfixed by him. By his eyes that were no longer cold, but alive, studying her. Learning her.
His stare not moving from her face, he moved his hand up and down her thigh, covering it, the skin losing all pain where he touched. Sorcery in his fingertips.
Breathe.
She forgot to do so when he looked at her like that, his dark brown eyes devouring her.
Before she understood exactly what she was doing, she twisted, pushing herself higher up from the bed on her right side, and leaned up to him, drawn to him by some invisible force. Without thought, she set her lips to his.
She held them there, dusting his lips, not kissing him, just breathing him in.
He didn’t pull away. Didn’t yank his hand from her thigh. But he didn’t kiss her. Even though she was there, waiting for it. Wanting it.
It hit her incredibly hard in that instant, how all she wanted was to be touched.Touched.An aching need that always sat deep in her soul and only needed one thing to soothe it. Touch.
It was that raw, nagging need that sent the bubble of the most humiliating word from her mouth.
“Please.” A breathless plea against his lips and he froze.
One heartbeat. Two.
