Page 11 of Beautiful Savage
Eight PM. She's been asleep forty-five minutes, breathing deep and even. I've been facing the wall in the desk chair, telling myself not to turn. The chair turns anyway.
For fifteen minutes I finally let myself look at her. Lamp light is gold across her sleeping face, gray shirt ridden up showing a strip of skin at her hip, one leg bent with her foot tucked behind the other ankle, mouth slightly open. She's exactly what nine years of paying for women has tried and failed to be. Soft curves. Dark hair spread across my pillow. The vulnerable arch of her neck that makes me want to put my mouth there and mark her as mine.
My cock throbs painfully against my jeans. I could cross eight feet, could slide my hand under that gray shirt, could make her body recognize mine even in sleep. The thought makes me sick. I know what it costs to be looked at without consent—I've been that monster on the street for nine years. The one mothers pull their children away from. The one that makes women cross to avoid.
If I take this from her while she sleeps, I become exactly what the world has already decided I am.
I close my eyes. Count thirty seconds. Open them and turn the chair back to the wall.
The body doesn't subside. I sit facing beige paint for two hours while my cock stays hard and my breathing shallow, while everything in me wants to turn around. The discipline holds because it has to hold. Because the alternative makes me the monster they discharged from the Army nine years ago.
Late. I unfold the bedroll against the back wall in standard configuration, remove only my boots, and lie down. Tonight's different: I turn my face fully to the wall, enforcing a new rule on myself. No looking, not even peripherally.
I listen to her breathe. Let the breath be the only permitted contact. Tomorrow I'll have to start asking about her father.Tomorrow I'll have to figure out if the old painter in my garden was working for Hallstein or just liked the flowers.
"Gunner."
Her voice, soft and sleep-thick from across the room. My entire body locks at once—spine, shoulders, hands fisting against the thin bedroll. My name in her mouth. My name when she's unconscious, unguarded, when whatever walls she's built in daylight have fallen away.
She shifts in the bed, sheets rustling. A small sigh escapes her lips, then her breathing deepens again. Just a dream. Just my name somewhere in whatever story her sleeping mind is telling.
I harden again. Instantly, painfully. My name in her sleep-soft voice is everything I'm not allowed to want.
I press my face harder against the wall and bite down on my knuckle until I taste copper, using the pain to keep from turning around, from crossing those eight feet, from answering her with the name for her that is already forming on my tongue.
The discipline holds. Barely. But it holds.
5 - Daphne
His hand brushes mine in the doorway and my body betrays me completely. Three days of careful distance destroyed by half a second of accidental contact.
The kitchen alcove is too narrow for two bodies to pass without touching. I'm rinsing my coffee cup when he moves toward the sink, and I step out as he steps in. The back of his hand catches the back of mine. His skin burns against my cold fingers, calluses rough against my knuckles, and heat shoots straight through my core, sudden and total.
We both freeze. He goes utterly still at the sink, his massive frame blocking out the morning light from the window. Neither of us acknowledges what just happened, but my pulse hammers so hard I'm sure he can hear it.
My body remembers touch exists, remembers wanting exists, and I hate him for waking that memory. Three days in this apartment, three days of him tending to my needs while refusing to look at my face, and this is the first time we've touched since he gripped my arm at my cottage threshold.
"Has my father been told something?" My voice comes out small, testing the boundaries of what I'm allowed to ask. The question has been burning in my throat since I arrived.
"Yes. You sent a text." He doesn't turn from the sink, refilling a water bottle with his back to me. His black t-shirt stretches across shoulders that could break me without effort. "Said you needed time away."
"Me? I didn't send a text."
"I sent it from your phone."
The violation of it sits bitter on my tongue. I shoot him an angry glare, but he never looks at me properly so I don't know if he saw.
But then he goes still again, like I've hit something true. The Saint Michael tattoo on his forearm flexes as his hand grips the bottle tighter under the running water, and I know he saw.
"Miss Macie's?" I ask, quieter now, pulling back from whatever edge I just touched.
"Family emergency." He turns off the faucet. "She arranged a replacement."
The thought escapes before I can stop it: "You did your homework. I'll give you that."
The words surprise me as much as him. My real voice, dry and observational, surfacing without permission. He freezes completely, water bottle half-raised. For three heartbeats, neither of us moves. The morning light catches on the knife in his boot, the gun at his hip, all that contained violence going perfectly still because I let my actual voice slip out.
Then he walks past me, careful not to brush against me again. The doorway that seemed too narrow a moment ago suddenly has enough space. He leaves without another word.
