Page 63 of Her Rival

Without a word, I rolled her on top of me. She squealed and clung to me, trying not to slide. My hands dropped to her ass. I locked her against me with one arm under her and stood up from the bed.

"Jett?" she asked softly.

I didn't answer.

I didn't say a word, which I knew was unlike me. I'd spent my whole life saying every word I had access to, and now, in this room, on this night, I'd run out of them. I walked her down the hall to the bathroom. She held on to me like a tired kid. I set her down on the bathroom counter.

She drew in a breath.

"Jett, I."

"Quiet."

She curled her lips over her teeth. Her legs dangled off the edge of the counter. The bathroom lights were on dim from the hall. Her hair was a wreck. Her makeup was a wreck. There were finger-shaped marks I'd left on the soft skin of her hips. She looked like a woman who'd been put through something and lived through it, and she looked beautiful to me in a way I couldn't have explained to a stranger if my life depended on it.

I reached into the shower and turned the water on.

I scooped her into my arms again the way I'd scooped her off the bed, and walked us into the shower. The kind of shower I'd bought with too much money the year I bought the house, two heads and a stone bench. I set her under one of the heads. I let the hot water do its thing on her hair.

She tried to talk again.

"Jett, I."

"I said quiet, Hartley."

She swallowed and nodded.

I let her stand there a long minute. Let the water rinse her. I picked up the shampoo, the kind I bought from a barber I'd been going to for six years, lathered it in my hands, and worked it through her hair the way I'd watched my sister work shampoo through her hair when we were kids and our mother had broken down again and couldn't get out of bed, and Mary Beth had taken to washing my hair instead of leaving it to the woman who could no longer remember to do it. The motion was old. It came back from somewhere in my body that didn't require thinking.

Dani peeked at me sometimes. I caught her doing it. I didn't say anything. I let her watch.

I backed her under the water and tilted her head back and rinsed the shampoo out the way you'd rinse it out of a skittish animal's coat. Gently. One hand cupped against her hairline to keep the soap out of her eyes.

She started crying again, quietly, with her face turned up to the spray.

I didn't say anything about it.

I lathered the bar of soap and washed her. Her shoulders. Her arms. Her breasts. I lifted them carefully and washed underneath, where the sweat from the bed had gathered. I knelt in the shower and washed her legs, the fronts and the backs. I washed her scars. I washed each one with the same attention I'd washed everything else. No faster. No slower. No different from the rest of her. I felt her cry harder when I did, and I didn't look up at her, because I knew her tears in that moment weren't for me to look at.

I washed the mess of me out of her, gently, with a washcloth and the same soap, the way a person washes something delicate that's been damaged.

I stood back up. Rinsed her again.

I did not flinch through any of it.

I spent a quarter of the time washing myself.

"Didn't realize the chirper of the team could be so quiet," she said with a soft snicker as the water beat down on us.

That earned a chuckle out of me. The first one all night. It came out small.

She didn't ask if she could wash me down. I figured she'd worked out by now that if I wanted her to, I'd have told her to. She seemed to like that about me. The lack of guesswork. The not-asking-her-to-perform-care-for-me. It was, I was learning, possibly the thing I'd been carrying my whole life that this woman needed me to keep carrying.

I turned the water off. Stepped out and grabbed two towels. Wrapped one around her and one around myself.

"Apology accepted, by the way," I said as I handed her the towel.

She caught it. Wrapped it around herself before she stepped out onto the mat. "Good to know the sex was that good."