Page 19 of Beneath the Beauty (Beauty 2)
“Don’t hide from me,” she whispered.
But he didn’t even know what she meant. He was looking at her, head on. She could see the worst parts of him, in the ugliness of his face and the degenerate use of her body. He showed her every dirty, unkind desire and God help her, she never told him no.
He realized she was murmuring something. Not a wordless sex-chant, but something more. “Let me see, let me see,” she moaned, and he shuddered beneath. He writhed, and it must have looked like pain. A tear slipped from the corner of his eye. A fucking tear—how had that happened? He didn’t know, but it hovered there on the brink, and he was unable or unwilling to reach up and wipe it away. She wanted to see? He would show her what a coward he was, and even then he wouldn’t let her go. Mine.
The teardrop slipped from his eye, falling over skin that should have died. But it wasn’t dead, it was wholly, painfully alive. It burned all day and all night as if the explosion had never stopped. The moisture of a single tear wasn’t nearly enough to put the fire out, but she rested her face against him, right there. Her soft skin was a balm anywhere, but there, on his burns, it was a goddamned miracle.
He’d stopped moving, he realized dimly, but she hadn’t. She set her hands on his shoulders and moved over him in sweet, rhythmic sex. Her face was pressed against his, right where he was most disgusting, right where he was most vulnerable. He didn’t know why she’d want to see that, but it twisted something inside him. It made him desperate.
Desperate, he grasped her shoulders and pulled her down. Too hard. She winced.
Shit. “Sorry,” he muttered.
“No, that’s what I… Show me.”
He shook his head, refusing even while he held on tightly and did it again. She gasped at the impact, the breathy sound spurring him on. He thrust inside her faster and harder, the room filling with the slaps of her skin against his, of her moans and her cries. He was cruel and relentless but instead of turning him away, her sex clenched around him. It squeezed him tight as she threw back her head. Beautiful, so beautiful.
He shut his eyes tightly and placed hot, open-mouthed kisses at her neck while his body shuddered its release. He groaned against her skin, breathing her in while he ground her body down against his cock. Helplessly, his hand clenched in her hair. Her soft pussy tightened around his cock, her hips rocking gently, wringing a final spurt of come from his cock.
Her contended sigh was hot against his neck.
CHAPTER SIX
Consciousness came back to Erin, carrying an almost acute sense of loss. The chill of something found and then lost. Still groggy, she stretched slightly, feeling along the thin cotton sheets of her bed. They were cool to the touch—and empty.
With a start, she opened her eyes, looking around for Blake. After their passionate bout of sex in the living room, they’d made their way into her bedroom for round two before falling asleep entangled in each other’s arms. It was the first night he’d spent over at her place, the first time he’d been here at all, and though his house was certainly nicer, it felt lovely to have him here. Like the first burst of bright spring, blinding hope on well-worn terrain.
He wasn’t in the bedroom or the bathroom. She slipped out of the bed, clothed only in the lingering musk from their lovemaking. A puddle of white turned out to be his undershirt. As she picked it up, something flat and square flipped open.
Little pieces of white floated down to the floor. His wallet. And she’d just spilled something. Bending, she started to gather the slips of paper when she realized what they were.
She opened one. The key to your future lies in the past.
Another. All your hard work will soon pay off.
Do not let ambitions destroy small successes.
Someone you care about seeks reconciliation.
There were more.
The fortune cookies. She swallowed past the lump in her throat. He’d saved the messages inside them, each and every one from their nights together. She was mildly impressed that some of them had come true, but far more moved that he’d kept these little folded pieces of paper, little notes of nothingness marking their time together.
Clutching the fortunes in her hand, she pulled the undershirt over her head. It went down to mid-thigh, so she padded out into the dark living room.
Blake stood at the sliding glass windows looking out, his silhouette both intimidating and forlorn. In that moment, she saw the warrior he usually kept carefully banked. His shoulders were broad and carved with muscles, angling down along thick arms crossed in front of him. His back was lean, sloping into loose-slung jeans he’d put on. His feet were bare, but she didn’t discount his fierceness for one second like this. His deceptive casualness, his quiet intensity—he looked calm but ready to fight. Not murderous but capable of killing. She shivered.
The truth was that his time in the military wasn’t a reality she understood. Throwing yourself into danger. Fighting for your life. It was theoretical to her. She felt in awe of his service to his country but unknowing of the harsh realities—or aftereffects.
Why didn’t he sleep? She’d asked him that night in his study, but he’d never answered. She sensed the answer lay here, in the turmoil that rippled through the air unseen. He didn’t sleep because he couldn’t. He couldn’t rest because his heart was still at war.
In some ways, it was a far greater barrier to their happiness than her mistrust of men, than Melinda, his lover-come-lately. The pain inside him was an invisible enemy that invaded when they were most vulnerable, breathing desperation into their intimacy and inevitability into their sex. There were places inside him that she couldn’t reach, not with her words or her body. And if she could? She was a little afraid of what she would find.
He turned suddenly, though unsurprised. She got the impression he’d known she was there, probably heard her wake up, his senses finely honed, primed for a battle left behind.
“Are you okay?” she asked softly.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” he said, although it wasn’t really an answer, she realized.
