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“Adam drops her at school on Thursday mornings,” she said. “You can stay if you want, but if you want to leave, I understand.”
He pulled her back against him. “I don’t.”
She sighed and traced the ink under her fingers. “What is this?”
The tattoo spanned his entire chest, continuing up and over his shoulders. It was clearly detailed, but it was too dark in the room for her to make out the image.
“It’s hard to explain,” he said.
“Well, now I have to see it,” she said, sitting up, the sheet falling from her body. “Unless…”
He cocked an eyebrow. “Unless?”
“Unless you don’t want me to look at it, which is fine,” she said. “I’m being nosy. It’s a bad habit of mine.”
“Curiosity is never a bad habit,” he said, reaching for the lamp on the bedside table.
A soft glow washed over the room and Ruby was glad she’d chosen low-light bulbs for the bedroom. She felt like she and Roman were floating through space, like nothing else existed outside of the bedroom.
She didn’t want to break the spell.
She turned her body to get a better look at the ink, ran her fingers over the image as she scanned it for an overview.
The first thing she saw was the gladiator at the center, the metal helmet sharp and detailed. A pair of piercing eyes, beautifully and finely drawn, stared from behind the helmet, facial hair visible in the gap at the chin.
“It’s you,” she said. Already she would know those eyes anywhere.
He didn’t say anything, and when she looked more closely, she saw that there was a building behind the gladiator.
“This isn’t the coliseum,” she said, taking in the structure, which looked to be a big house, the main building flanked by two additional wings.
“No.”
“What is it?”
“My father’s house,” he said. “In Brighton Beach.”
She looked at his face, felt the pieces fall into place. “You’re Russian.”
Brighton Beach was sometimes called Little Russia for its concentration of Russian immigrants.
“I was born here,” he said. “But my parents are Russian, and I went to boarding school in Russia.”
She looked at the image on his chest, trying to piece it together. “Are you and your father… at odds?”
“You might say that.” Something wary had crept into his voice, and she knew she was treading on sensitive ground.
Now that she’d oriented herself to the image inked onto his chest, she realized there was something else there, patches of skin that were different from the rest, raised instead of smooth.
She ran her fingers over them. “You’ve been hurt.”
She knew a scar when she felt it.
“Yes.” There was a world of pain hidden behind the single curt word, and she suddenly felt like a lead weight was sitting on her chest.
It was followed by something familiar, something primitive: the desire to protect, to shelter.
It didn’t make sense. Roman was a giant, well over two hundred pounds of sheer muscle, but she had the strangest urge to keep him safe.
