I had to take a few fortifying breaths before I could get out of the cab into the dark night and walk to his door, but Hero kept close, brushing against my thigh with every step and I took comfort from the fact that he would protect me until his dying breath.
I reached the door without incident, which given my life lately, seemed like a minor miracle.
When Danner opened the door, he was smiling, and I loved that. He wasn’t a man who smiled often, but he did a lot of it around me and always had. I loved that I gave him lightness to combat his somber spirit, that he weighted my wild impulses just enough to give me cause to think before I acted. We were such opposites, but so beautiful paired.
I hated when the smile dropped from his face and crashed to the floor between us. Before I could lie and tell him I was fine, I was wrapped up tenderly in his arms and he was lifting me and my big bag easily over the threshold into the house. I could hear the sounds of Hero following as Danner locked the door behind us, armed an alarm and then walked with me into a little living room off the kitchen. He sat us down with me straddling his lap, my bag forgotten beside us. Hero jumped up on the couch next to him and let out a contented groan.
I held my breath as Danner gently unwound my arms from around his neck and then tipped my chin down with his thumb so he could look into my eyes.
He had a way of looking at me that seared me to my very soul. It was as if he could read every thought I’d ever had, every feeling I’d never been able to correctly express in the blue of my irises, as if he would happily drown in the blacks of my eyes. He looked at me as if his world began and ended in my gaze.
I swallowed thickly as that look hit the well of emotion at the heart of me and tears sprung forth. “Lion.”
“Rosie,” he breathed, the thumb at my chin gliding up the angle of my jaw over the shell of my ear and then the hair over my temple with the rest of his fingers. “My Rosie, what happened?”
My body needed to cry. I could feel the lava-like burn of it behind my eyes, the pressure of it in my nose, tightening my throat and clenching my gut.
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.
My throat was closed, my nose was stinging, and I was crying.
Danner heard me hiccough but gave me the dignity of sobbing into the shower spray until he was done with my hair. He turned me around, pushed me gently farther under the water and commenced rubbing me down with a natural sponge and body wash that smelled like him. I watched through the stream of water as he sympathetically dabbed at the cuts on my neck and worked away the crusted blood peeling on my chest then I closed my eyes to better feel it as he worked the sponge in firm circles over my breasts, slowly swirling from the outer edges to the hardened peaks. I gasped as his hand slid down my stomach and he crouched before me, lifting one of my feet to his shoulder so that he had unrestricted access to me. I could feel his fingertips at the edge of the sudsy cloth, moving up my calves, behind the tender skin of my knee to my inner thigh. I panted into the steam as he carefully swept over the outside of my bare pussy, across my suddenly aching clit and down the other side.