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“I can see you thinking,” he said, his voice still coming from a considerable distance behind her. “What are you worried about?”
She turned to face him and found him leaning against the doorframe, his arms crossed over his chest and his eyes still on her.
“I’m not worried.”
“Liar.”
“I’m a little worried,” she admitted. “I don’t do this often and I may not actually be as confident as I just seemed.”
“If you’re not sure?—”
She waved a hand to silence him. “It’s not that.”
“All right.” He pushed off the door frame, towering over her even from across the room. “Let’s start with this.”
She was rooted to the spot as he crossed the floor until she had to tip her head back to look at him. Her breath shuddered out of her when he cupped her cheek in his palm and caressed her lips with his thumb. The gentle simplicity of the touch rekindled the desire that had gone dormant beneath her nerves and brought it roaring back to life.
Her lips parted in expectation but instead of kissing her as she expected he skimmed the skin of her throat with his fingers and traced the curve of her cheekbone with the tip of his nose.
“Ethan …”
She wasn’t sure what she wanted to say and whatever it might have been was lost to the baffled pleasure of his fingers in her hair, tangling in the silken strands to tug her head back and open her throat to the exploration of his mouth.
If he’d intended to begin with something less intimate than kissing, she feared he’d made a significant miscalculation. The softness of this and the focus in his gaze was every bit as devastating as the onslaught of his kiss would have been. Her knees trembled and for a moment she wondered if she was going to embarrass herself by falling at his feet.
There was a self-satisfied smile on his face when he steadied her and pulled her against him. It seemed he had enough confidence for both of them, but she wasn’t going to let him leave this room thinking she was incompetent or fragile.
His smirk turned to amused surprise when she gripped the hem of his shirt and lifted it until he raised his arms and allowed her to pull it over his head. It was a stretch for her—even on her tiptoes she suspected he’d humored her and bent down so she could manage it—but the full view of his broad chest drove that little irritation from her mind.
She’d seen art—statues and paintings that were hundreds of years old, still revered for their quality and loved for their beauty. She’d stood at the tops of mountains and at the shores of seemingly endless seas while she marveled at the world’s wonders.
Nothing had awed her quite as much as Ethan’s bare chest.
The muscles in his stomach jumped when she touched them, and she smiled up at him. Knowing she wasn’t the only one affected by whatever this was between them made her heart beat a little faster. It was like taking a curve on the motorcycle—wild and thrilling and empowering in a way she couldn’t explain.
He watched her with a hooded gaze as she explored his body, making no comment as she followed the lines of his tattoos, skirting carefully around the gauze still protecting his wound, and discovered the puckered skin of his scars. The longest of them, thin and wicked as it curved around his side, was several inches long.
She tapped it with a finger and watched his calm expression briefly flicker with something unreadable. “What happened here?”
He licked his lips and sucked the bottom one between his teeth as she waited for an answer. “Run in with someone who didn’t like me.”
“Are you telling me you’ve been shot more than once?”
“Stabbed that time.” He said it with such a lack of emotion that it took her several long seconds to realize he wasn’t joking. “It was a long time ago.”
“How long?”
“I was still a teenager.”
Her heart ached at that and despite his intimidating size and somewhat sinister appearance she had no trouble imagining him as a scared, hurting young man. Her parents had asked a lot from her, especially her mother, but she’d never feared for her life, never worried for her safety. It was a miracle he had come through all of that as happy and whole as he seemed to be.
“Was it bad?” It was a foolish question—he’d been stabbed—but he seemed to know what she meant.
“Frightening more than anything. There was a lot of blood, but it wasn’t life threatening.”
“You’ve made a habit of that, haven’t you?”
“It looks that way.” He was smiling again, the shadows of past pain gone from his eyes. “It was better the second time around. All I had to patch me up the first time was Dylan and a cranky nurse that must have been at least sixty.”
