“It doesn’t matter. Surprise me.”
“Surprise you?” Her pretty face scrunched up, incredulous. “It’s permanent, you know.”
“So, come up with something I won’t regret for the next hundred years.”
The ghost of a smile played along the curve of her mouth. Damn, she had a fantastic mouth. Mathias’s groin tightened as he watched her chew her lip in contemplation. “Anything I want? Anywhere I decide to put it?”
Her choice of words only made his desire flare even hotter. “Anything. Anywhere. I’m in your hands completely.”
He held her sky blue eyes, knowing full well that there were secrets in their pale depths. Dark secrets that he was still determined to uncover.
“Can I trust you, Nova?”
She stared at him for a long moment. “I guess you’ll have to wait to find out. Take off your shirt.”
CHAPTER 4
Had she lost her bloody mind?
She must have, because that was the only explanation for how she’d found herself perched on her stool a couple of hours later, putting the finishing touches on a freehand tattoo she’d inked onto Mathias Rowan’s back.
His powerfully muscled, utterly distracting back.
Nova hadn’t wanted to notice how firm and strong he felt under her gloved fingertips. She hadn’t wanted to acknowledge the warmth of his naked skin, or the beauty of his Breed dermaglyphs--elaborate skin markings that made all of her work pale by comparison.
She could have gone with a smaller design, placed somewhere less intimate, less time-consuming. God knew, she would have, if she’d been thinking clearly at all.
But talking with him had put an image in her head that wouldn’t let go. When he took off his shirt and she saw the twin flourishes of glyphs on his shoulder blades, she knew she’d found the perfect placement.
And she had to admit, she took more than a little satisfaction in the thought of inking the tattoo on the persistent male’s spine, instead of somewhere with fewer nerve endings just under the skin.
Given how long the work had taken, she was also thankful that she hadn’t spent the whole time under his intense, unsettling gaze. Lying face-down, comfortably relaxed on the reclined work chair, made him almost seem like any other client.
Not that she’d ever had one of the Breed under her iron.
And not that any of the human clientele coming in and out of Ozzy’s over the years had ever made her so keenly aware of herself as a woman the way Mathias Rowan did.
Dangerous thinking.
She had learned a long time ago how monstrous his kind could be. Even the ones you trusted the most.
Especially them, because they held the power to hurt you the deepest. To violate everything you believed in, everything you were.
To destroy you.
“Anything wrong, Nova?” Mathias’s deep voice drew her out of the dark spiral of her thoughts. “You didn’t fall asleep at the wheel back there, did you?”
“No. Just wrapping up.”
She tried to sound casual, cool. But her throat was dry and her hands were trembling.
She didn’t like to trek back to her past. It was something she deliberately avoided, wounds that had scarred over but still had the power to shred her apart if she stopped to recall them.
Just the thought of what she had endured put a knot of cold terror in her belly. Bile burned in the back of her throat, her ears filled with the sounds of a young girl’s screams.
Her screams.
“I’m almost finished,” she murmured, willing the tremor out of her fingers as she placed the tattoo machine over Mathias’s skin again. She completed the last of the coloring, subtle shadow and shading to bring realism to the piece.