Page 107 of Keep Me Safe
“Sure you do,” I said, skating my lips over the soft skin of her neck, drawing the tiniest sigh from her, proving my point.
“I need to ask a favor.” She twisted out of my embrace.
“What is it?” Her cup of coffee rested on the railing, and I took a sip. It was so sweet it bordered on undrinkable, but I was too lazy to go back inside and make my own.
“Take out my stitches.”
I paused. “Isn’t it a little soon?”
“I don’t care.” Her voice was filled with fire. “He put them in me. I want them gone.”
I set her cup back down, my gaze not leaving hers. I couldn’t do anything about the scar, but I was happy to help her remove this final piece of Juric.
She must have laid it out while I was in the shower.
On the coffee table rested needlepoint scissors, tweezers, and liquid bandage. I hadn’t noticed the scent of rubbing alcohol that hung in the kitchen from where she’d sterilized the tools when I’d walked through looking for her.
She shed her shirt and lay down on the couch, facing me, waiting as I washed my hands at the wet bar nearby.
“Do you know how?” she asked.
“Yes.”
Jason had played American football in high school, gotten a laceration once, and had been too lazy to go back to the doctor for removal.
She inhaled sharply when I placed a hand on her waist to hold her steady. “Your hands are freezing!”
“Hold still,” I whispered.
It was easy enough to slide the scissors under and to the side of the knots and snip them open, one by one. I returned with the tweezers and tugged from the knots until the thread was free. Then it was done. I tossed the last physical thing Juric had done to her into the garbage.
I opened the bottle of liquid bandage and brushed it over the cut, inadvertently making her jump, then blew softly on it to speed the drying process. When my breath rolled over her skin, it sexually charged the air. She flicked her gaze to me, her blue eyes beautiful and clear, and I had to maintain an ironclad grip on my self-control.
“Don’t put your shirt back on until that’s dry. Shouldn’t be but an hour or two.”
She flashed a knowing smile. “Thank you.”
“Anytime.” When I tried to stand, her hand shot out and grabbed mine.
“For everything. I don’t know how I would have... without you.”
That was nice, but the voice in the back of my mind grumbled. I was still waiting to hear something from her, something I felt confident was true, but I needed to hear her say it out loud. To admit it to herself.
A few minutes later, she sat up and disappointingly slipped on her shirt. “Do you have a plan for the day?”
I’d had some this morning, but she’d woken before me and was in the shower when I rolled over and discovered her gone. So much for staying in bed all day. “I got us here. That was the extent of my planning. We could watch something.”
I picked up the remote and turned the television on, only to have CNN come on screen. With my dumb luck, it was an update on the brewery bombing and the American hostage who had been taken. I shut it off before she could ask me to, and I searched for something else to distract.
“There’s a deck of cards. We could play a game. Strip poker?”
She acted unfazed, but I could see she was trying very hard not to think about that night on the lawn, or what followed. “We’ve already seen each other naked.”
“You’re saying you don’t want to see that again?”
Thankfully, her smile reappeared. “I don’t need to beat you at cards for that. Something tells me all I have to do is ask.”
She was so very right.
