But I was Harleigh Rose Garro and I’d made a pact with myself a long time ago, the day I say my mum on the brink of death for the last time, that I was not the kind of woman that cried.
I was strong.
I was thorn-studded roses, smoking gunmetal and the cool heat of weed being sucked down your throat.
I was my own woman before anyone else’s and I could hold my own against anyone. The mean girls in high school, Cricket, The Nightstalkers MC, Reaper and Wrath, even my own mother.
God, but I both loved and hated that I couldn’t hold my own against Danner. That my body and soul could outvote my mind and give in to the tears, because a huge part of me knew that there was no hiding from Danner. Not when he held my thorny heart in his hands. Not when he’d had it inked onto his chest.
A sob ballooned in my throat and I choked on the effort to keep it down.
Danner’s hand moved soothingly over my back then, his eyes on me asking the question silently so that I could answer that way, it moved down to the hem of the tee and slowly, gently pulled it up over my head. He tossed it to the floor, his eyes to my wounded throat instead of my breasts inside a sheer, black and leather bra.
“What happened to my girl?” he asked again, his thumb trailing whisper soft over the cuts then pressing over my thudding pulse point as if to reassure himself I was alive and safe. “Tell me so I can kill them.”
He would kill them. I could see it written across his face, his features twisted with heathen savagery and it occurred to me that this wasn’t the first time Danner had offered to do bad for me.
In fact, it wasn’t even the hundredth.
He’d been going bad for me for a very long time.
It shouldn’t have been romantic, his corruption and my culpability, but it was.
There was enough power in that realization for me to give up control and allow myself to be vulnerable with him, so I told him.
About the cold edge of the blade biting then slicing smoothly through the skin at my throat. How hard the hand squeezed the left side of my neck, so hard capillaries had burst and I was already bruising, purple finger marks beneath the blood. About how the chemical response my body initiated in response to the crippling fear, how my breath lacked oxygen so I had to breath hard and fast but carefully so I didn’t press my trachea into the blade. My muscles flooded with so much adrenaline they burned with acid and my heart stuttered, failing and starting again and again, each time more painful than the last.
How I kept thinking about dying in that car after everything I’d already been through, without saying goodbye to my family and friends, without ever really being with him.
At that last, he stood up swiftly, caging me carefully in his arms before he stalked down the hallway into a darkened bedroom through to a bathroom. He opened the glass shower door, cranked on the water, and then set me on the sink basin.
Carefully, reverently, he took off my clothes. My jeans were peeled off, his guitar roughened fingers tips trailing the fabric in a way that tickled then burned, next bra, unclasped with a flick of his fingers, and last, my panties torn with a snap so quick it was painless.
I gaped at him as he tossed the lacy fabric to the side and lifted me again.
“You know,” I told his shoulder. “I can walk.”
“Hush,” he said as he placed me under the hot spray and closed the door behind us.
I watched in fascination as the water soaked through his black tee and jeans, plastering them to his body in a way that was somehow hotter than him being fully nude.
“Why are you dressed?” I asked as he reached for the shampoo, lathered some between his hands and then turned me into the spray so he could massage my hair into suds.
“Don’t want you to feel uncomfortable,” he muttered distractedly, obviously focused on giving me the most relaxing head massage in the history of the world.
Those words cut through the thicket of vines and thorns around my heart in one swift motion, leaving me tender and exposed. I stood there naked in the spray, a beautiful, good man washing me because I needed platonic affection and care, not undressing because I’d recently been attacked both sexually and physically a number of times and he was sensitive to that.
I felt honoured, blessed even to have a man so good tend to me as if I deserved it.
“Not possible,” I whispered because when I tried to speak, I found that was all I could manage.