“You’ve always said that. Even when I was a gangly teenager.”
He pinched her nipple lightly, relishing her harshly indrawn breath. “It was true then. It’s even truer now.” He peppered her breasts with light kisses designed to torment and moved down her body, licking along the edge of her panties. “The first time I realized you weren’t a kid anymore was that summer when you were thirteen.”
“The pool party at Quinn’s.” The words came out breathy, making him grin.
“The very one. You wore that blue bikini, and I felt like a dirty old man because my cock wouldn’t calm the fuck down.”
Hope laughed. “You were sixteen. A stiff wind made it impossible for your cock to calm down.”
He liked this, revisiting the good memories. Daniel worked her panties down her hips, stopping when they hit the tops of her thighs and she tensed. To distract her, he kept talking. “I knew John would kick my ass, so I stayed the hell away from you.”
“And ended up making out with Christie Jenkins, if I remember correctly.”
Now it was his turn to laugh. “Yeah, well, you had a point about my being sixteen.” He kissed the sensitive skin below her belly button. “You want to know something?”
“Sure.”
“That day had nothing on when I saw you at my birthday party seven weeks ago.” He licked her hip bone until she squirmed. “All I wanted was to haul your ass out to my truck and bury my cock inside you.”
“Didn’t even make it to your truck.”
He inched her panties down farther, kissing the point where thigh met hip. “Nope. And my cock hasn’t calmed down since, either.”
Her laugh cut off when he finished pulling her panties off, leaving her naked. He feathered his fingers across the top of the scar, forcing himself to really look at it for the first time since she’d walked back into his life. When his car rolled, the passenger door had caved in, impaling her leg with pieces of metal. It caused the scar to be jagged, an ever-present reminder of the trauma she’d gone through.
More importantly, the trauma she’d survived.
“Danny—”
“Do you trust me?”
She propped herself on her elbows, looking down her body at him. “You don’t have to be at peace with my scars to have sex with me.”
No, he didn’t. But he’d been fucking up when it came to this injury since she walked back into his life, and he was done. Hope had hurt herself to spare him a situation where she thought he might be uncomfortable, and the thought of her doing it again… Over his fucking dead body.
But if he pushed too hard, she’d get up and walk to the bedroom she’d claimed as hers and shut the door on him and his attempt to truly start new with her.
So he met her gaze. “When I said you’re beautiful, I meant every inch of you. That includes this.” He stroked her thigh, down over the scar to her knee. There was nothing of her original skin there, some of it having been grafted from elsewhere during the surgery. “You’re beautiful here, too.”
“Danny—” His name was choked from her lips.
He stopped. “Am I hurting you?”
“No.”
He still didn’t take his hand away. “Do you want me to stop?”
It took her longer to respond this time. Hope shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
In the week she’d been back in town, he’d never heard her sound so unsure—not even when she was waving a box of pregnancy tests in his face. He kissed her thigh. “You don’t have to hide this from me, darling. Not anymore.” It hurt seeing it, but at the same time…it was part of her, and had been part of her for almost as long as she’d had an uninjured leg. If he couldn’t accept this, he had no business pushing her to stay.
When he looked at it like that, it was really no contest. “What do you do when it’s bothering you?”
“Daniel.”
He stopped and met her gaze. “What do you need from me?”
“We can have this conversation later. Right now, I want your mouth and hands on me and your cock buried deep inside me.”
There was no arguing with that. He didn’t want to. Hearing the words—the plea—out of her lips was enough to have him once again battling for control. You promised her you’d make love to her. Falling on her like a starving man isn’t going to cut it. He moved up to settle between her thighs. “Find something to hang on to, darling.”Chapter ThirteenHope couldn’t breathe. She wasn’t sure if it was the fact that she was in bed with Daniel, feeling more naked than she ever had, or the fact that he was going to make love to her, or if her hormones had finally decided to revolt and just finish her off entirely.