Page 59 of Her Rival

"Shit," I hissed, scrambling to cover myself.

I wasn't sure what I grabbed. A sheet. A blanket. I couldn't have told you the texture of it. All I could do was twist around and stare at his face, hauling the fabric over myself as I turned. He was on his bed. Perched on his knees. His hands still hovering where they'd been about to take my hips. His eyes still fixed on the place my body had just been.

His whole body had gone still.

"Jett?" I asked softly.

"Lay down."

I swallowed hard. "Jett, we don't⁠—"

His eyes snapped to mine. "Lay down on your stomach, or get dressed and get out."

"Jett," I whispered.

He planted his palms on the bed and prowled toward me, slow, lifting his head as he came. The fury in his eyes coupled with the way the lean muscle moved under his skin made him look like something that hunted. Those green eyes hooked into mine and didn't waver, didn't let me look away.

But the anger in his eyes wasn't for me.

I understood that after the first second of looking, with a clarity that surprised me. The anger wasn't for me. It was for the thing I hadn't yet given him a name for, and which he hadn't yet had to name, because the scars themselves had named it for him, and his body had taken the information in faster than the rest of him had.

I lay back down, sprawled under him, his hard cock dragging hot along the inside of my thigh.

"Jett?" I whispered.

"Turn over, Dani," he said.

There was less demand in his voice now. Not a command. More like a plea. No. Never. Not from someone like him. I swallowed and searched his eyes. They'd gone kinder. Still insistent. Part of me didn't want to. Part of me understood he'd already seen them.

My scars.

I cleared my throat and slowly turned back over, feeling him follow my movement until he had me caged against the bed on my stomach.

I felt him looking at the scars along the backs of my thighs and my lower back.

And then I felt his lips.

They pressed to my lower back, then traced one of the raised scars, slow. His legs worked between mine, one knee pressing into the crook of mine until he had my leg hiked out to the side. I shivered, bared to the cool room. His warm, wet mouth kept moving along the streaked expanse of my marked skin, kiss after kiss, unhurried, like there was nowhere in the world he had to be and nothing he would rather do.

"Jett," I whispered, tears in my eyes, a different kind now.

He didn't answer.

He kissed each scar until every one of them had been touched by his mouth. He took his time with it, the way he'd taken his time with the rest of me, except there was nothing of the game left in it now, no edge, no denial, no teeth. Just his lips, and the flat of his tongue, and the kind of patience that undid me worse than any of the heat had. I buried my face in the sheet bunched under me and dried my eyes against it while he laid his mouth over the ropes of old skin that no one had ever once acknowledged out loud, that I'd spent half my life arranging clothing and lovers and lighting to keep hidden, and he kissed them like they were the most honest thing about me. Like the car. Made, not bought.

No one had ever touched my scars before.

Not the men I'd let touch the rest of me. Not the doctor I'd seen at twenty-three. Not the woman who cut my hair for eight years. Not me, in the dark, in the shower, in any mirror.

And he touched them so kindly that it broke something open in me I'd thought was welded shut for good.

Then his hands roamed up my back. Up my spine. Up the length of my arms, until one hand gathered both my wrists and pinned them above my head with just the one. His other hand came down on my hip. He settled his weight onto me, his chest to my back, and the pressure of him held me together. Kept me from shivering apart. Like he was keeping my soul inside my own body by sheer mass.

The pressure was so good, so total, so much like being held down and held safe at the same time, that I lost myself in it.

Until I felt him notch the blunt head of his cock against me.

"That's it," he said low, his mouth at the back of my neck, as my body finally went loose and willing for him. "Let me in. Take what you want from me. You know this is what you've always wanted. Even when you didn't know my name was the name you wanted to say. You knew."