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“No, you don’t get it.” She took a deep breath and leaned back. “You get death. You get loss.” She reached around to her back and rubbed her scar. “But you don’t get this.”
“No, I don’t, but I get you.”
Maybe too much.
He should hold her until she fell back to sleep. She needed to be sharp in the morning. The quicker she neutralized the threat, the quicker he could get back to his lonely, chaotic normal that didn’t include her. He sighed and touched her cheek, too late for all the talk in his head. He was in deep with the most beautiful, driven, tortured woman he’d ever met, and he couldn’t let her walk away.
At least not tonight.
He followed her gaze to her gun on the arm of the sofa. “You can’t shoot a nightmare.” Did she always sleep with a weapon at the ready? The idea of her going to bed in fear sickened him. At least tonight, she wouldn’t be alone. “Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it?”
“I can’t right now.” She wiped her eyes with one hand and massaged her back with the other. “I’m a mess.”
“A beautiful mess.” He lightly pressed his lips to hers. “Are you in pain?”
She snorted. “That’s a loaded question.”
“I meant your back.” He nudged her off his lap and set her on the bed. “Remembered pain can sometimes be more intense than the actual trauma.”
“Does it ever go away?”
“Yes, with time and patience. And help. Are you in therapy?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.” If she wouldn’t talk to him, at least she talked to someone. “Now, let me help you.”
“You’re not a therapist.”
He gripped the hem of her FBI T-shirt and slowly raised it to just below her breasts. “That’s not the kind of therapy I have in mind.”
She stilled his hands. “You need sleep, not to take care of me.”
The hitch of her cherry-laced breath said he did. “You’re right. I don’t. But I’m going to make you feel better.”
Hell, he needed to make himself feel better. The nightmare had rattled him too.
He nudged her onto her belly and spread his palm on the small of her back next to her scar. He wasn’t taking any chances of her bolting. Not after her earlier talk about going home to Denver.
Brushing her silky hair to the side, he pressed a hard kiss to the middle of her shoulder blades and growled against her skin. “If we ignore how fucking good we are together, Malgor wins.”
She shuddered beneath him. “He can’t win.”
“He won’t. You’re too tough to let him.” Gripping her hips, he held her tight and trailed open-mouthed kisses down her back until he reached her scar. The puckered skin against his tongue felt rough and wrong, but her breathy moans and the wriggle of her body beneath his hands felt soft and right.
“Best therapy ever, Dr. Ford.” A languid sigh whispered from her lips. “You should join the FBI so we could do this once a week. Better yet, once a day. Oh wait, you’re too old.”
He slapped her ass with his open palm. Yelping, she spun her head to face him. “You spanked me?”
“I did, and you liked it. Now be a good little agent and turn around so I can prove I’m not too old to be the best therapy you’ve ever had.”
“Yes, Doctor Ford.”
He chuckled as he worked her T-shirt over her head and slowly explored every inch of her back, marveling at the soft skin covering the dips and planes of hard muscles. He’d do anything to erase her scar and take away her memories. But even if he were a plastic surgeon with a magic wand, her pain would never fully abate. In less than a heartbeat, that cold fact turned his vow to heal into a promise to murder. “If I ever come face to face with Malgor, I’ll kill him for doing this to you.”
She stiffened. “He’s not your monster; he’s mine.”
In a move he hadn’t used since the police academy, he flipped Rosalie onto her back, straddled her thighs, and pinned both wrists above her head with one hand. Instead of battling the primal urge overtaking his brain, he embraced it. “You’re in my bed, which makes himourmonster.”
