And there were the scars.
He closed his eyes briefly. Then focused on the healed wounds.
She had been stabbed repeatedly by a right-handed assailant, the wrinkled and knobby pattern located under her left collarbone. He was well familiar with those kinds of injuries and he knew she had to have been penetrated by a blade at least ten times, because there were satellite punctures around the main impact zone.
Her hand lifted, and as she ran her fingertips over the uneven texture, he had a feeling she did that a lot.
“I can’t fix it, you know,” she said in an absent way. “I mean, plastic surgery won’t really make it go away.”
“Why would you?” When she recoiled, as if he’d shocked her, he shook his head. “The scars are not ugly. They don’t detract from how beautiful you are. And what happened is always on your mind anyway. Besides, you probably needed surgery afterward. A couple of times. You’re done with operations, aren’t you.”
She nodded, as if in a daze. “I can’t make it go away just by… you know, trying to get rid of this.”
“We can’t run from our pasts. We shouldn’t even try.”
There was a long silence, and he worried that he’d said the wrong thing. Maybe he needed to—
“Thank you,” she said softly.
Now it was his time to be surprised. “For what?”
“You’re so… accepting.”
I love you, he thought to himself.
“But you’ve been in war, haven’t you,” she said. “This is… what you’ve seen before.”
“It’s true. It’s a part of life. I don’t want you to have gone through what you did. I hate it. I fucking hate it—and if that asshole weren’t under the ground already, I would hunt him down and bring him back to you in pieces. I would ahvenge you and your dead to honor you and your parents. I would see that it was done in the proper way, in the painful way. I would have him suffer under my bare hands and breathe in the smell of his blood and the stink of his cowardly fear.”
He had to stop himself before he got too far into all that. And then he bowed to her from his sitting position on her blue couch.
“Verily, it would be my honor to ahvenge you and your bloodline.”
When he looked back up, she had put both her hands over her mouth and her eyes were shining.
He couldn’t tell whether he had offended her or scared her or—
Erika came forward, came to him. And as she dropped her hands, she whispered, “No one’s ever said that to me before.”
“Is that… good? Or—”
She settled on top of his lap, one knee on each side of him. As her eyes roamed around his face, she ran her fingers through his hair.
“It’s hard to talk about my past,” she murmured. “Because people are interested for reasons of their own and they get emotional for reasons of their own. I lived through it. I don’t want to help others manage my tragedy.”
He ran his hands up her arms to her shoulders. “Makes sense.”
“You’ve been through war,” she repeated. “You’re different.”
Balz focused on her breasts. “May I touch you?”
“Yes.”
Just as she had during the night, she took his hand and moved it onto her tender flesh. And as the weight of her breast filled his palm, he moved his thumb back and forth over her nipple. In response, her hips rolled against his, her back arching, her chest rising up.
Slipping his hands around her waist, his mouth brushed over her sternum, her heart. Then he kissed her scars, gently, reverently.
“You’re so beautiful to me,” he said.
He glanced up. Her eyes were luminous as they watched him—and the fact that she was so open, so vulnerable… told him she believed him. She knew what he was telling her was true.
Balz took his lips farther down onto her breast. It was hard for him not to think of all her pain, but she was right. He wasn’t going to ruin this moment with her with his own emotional response to what she had had to endure.
Instead, he was going to show her how desirable she was. How absolutely perfect. How sexy and alive she was.
He worshipped her, sucking at her, stroking her, nipping and licking. And she felt exactly how he wanted her to. She was liquid on top of him, fluid in her hunger, aroused in her anticipation of what he was going to give her—and then her hand was in between their bodies, encircling his erection, standing him straight up.
Erika positioned him, holding him in place, and then her core took over the job, encapsulating him with a tight, hot hold that he knew he was never, ever going to get enough of: They could spend an eternity together, and still, entering her was going to be a revelation.