Her mouth turns down. “That’s mean.”
Yeah. When we joked about it years ago, Nevaeh was in the past. Saying it now…I feel like an asshole. ”I’m sorry. That was a dick thing to say.”
Her brown eyes flick up to meet mine. “It’s okay. If I got a tattoo animal of you, it’d be an enormous ass.”
“Fair enough.” I picture all the glimpses I’ve had of her naked. I haven’t seen all of her, but I don’t think she’s got any ink. “How come you don’t have any tattoos?”
“I was gonna. When I turned eighteen, I was gonna have Creech put your name on my left tit. The number, not the letters. That kind of fell through, for obvious reasons, and it occurred to me that maybe I’m not a lifetime commitment kind of girl.”
“Seriously?” My dick’s almost at full mast now, imagining my name on her pale skin.
“Seriously. You can ask Creech. Good thing I didn’t, though. I’d have had to tell every person who saw my titties that I’m really into malt liquor.”
I snort. Funny girl. She reaches out and traces the outlines of my other tats: the Steel Bones skull and hammers, the Army eagle perched on a sniper’s crosshairs, the POW-MIA profile set against an American flag, the engine block on my bicep.
My abs clench. It’s getting hard to sit still and let her explore, especially since she’s biting her lower lip in concentration, oblivious to me.
“What are these for?” She strokes the scales, the nickel, the handcuffs, the wrench, and the Roman numerals XL.
“That’s the crew. Heavy.” I tap the scales. “Nickel. Charge. Scrap. And me.”
Nevaeh trails her fingers over my shoulder to my collarbone, and my cock throbs. “You gonna get more?”
“Maybe. Creech finished the full sleeve a few months ago. I like having it finished.”
Her fingers reach the outline of my burns. There goes the hard on. I shift.
She startles and jerks her hand away. “Oh, shit. I’m sorry. Does that hurt?”
“No. It’s fine. You can touch me.”
She peers into my eyes and resumes her exploring, testing to see if I’m telling the truth. I am. The pain is in the bones where the pins are holding me together.
She finds the scar from one of the surgeries and traces it down my forearm. “You broke your arm?”
“Yeah. Broke my clavicle and shattered my proximal humeral bone and my elbow. There’s some nerve damage. I’ve got a decent range of motion, though.”
“How did it happen?”
“Helicopter.”
“I know that. What happened?” She’s got my forearm and my bicep, and she’s bending it and straightening it like the doctor, her forehead furrowed. I let her.
“There was a hard landing.”
“Did it land on your arm?” She huffs. “What happened?”
She wants the details? All right. Fine.
“The tail rotor control linkage broke. We went into a tailspin, and we crashed into a paved lot. I reached out to brace myself, but with the spinning—” I stop because my mouth is suddenly bone dry. Her eyes are glued to mine. She nods for me to go on, so I clear my throat. “I ended up landing on my own arm and crushing it against the metal seats. The seats are welded to the frame. They don’t give.”
She’s holding my hand now, fingers interlaced. Her palm is clammy. “How did you get burned?”
“I crawled out. There was lot of bent metal, but no smoke. I was alone in the far back. I circled around to help, and it burst into flame. So I tried to get the men out, and I got the co-pilot, but then my jacket caught on fire, and by the time we put that out, there was… We had to retreat.”
Her hand tightens on mine like a vise.
“He died? The pilot died?”
“Yeah. Him and another passenger. But two of us survived. That’s not common in that kind of accident.”
“What do you mean?” Her eyes are turning to shiny pools.
“In a crash like that, usually there are no survivors.”
And then she bursts out in tears, slamming her free hand against my chest. I grab her wrist. “You could have died!”
Her tits are heaving. There’s snot. I don’t know what to do. Nevaeh doesn’t cry. “It was almost four years ago.”
“You could have died, and I would have never seen you again, and that would have been the end!”
“I didn’t. I’m fine.” If you disregard the scars and the chronic pain. And I’m only accurate to six or seven hundred meters now.
She wipes her snot with the sleeve of my white button down, but the tears keep coming. “You were hurt! And I didn’t even know until Lou happened to mention it!”
“Nevaeh. Calm down.”
For some reason, that makes her cry harder. Her breaths are coming all jagged. Should I whack her on the back? Before I can decide what to do, she gags and bolts to the bathroom, kneels in front of the toilet, and pukes.
At that moment, Wash walks in with two plates piled with burgers, baked beans, and devilled eggs. He’s got a six-pack tucked under his arm.
“Thought I should bring dinner for two, boss.” His grin falls when he hears Nevaeh wretch. “She okay?”
“She’s fine.”
Nevaeh flushes the toilet.
“Uh. Sure, boss. You need anything else?”
“Close the door after yourself.”
I set the plates on my desk—she rearranged all my shit—and I take her a beer. She’s brushing her teeth. I press the cold bottle to the back of her neck. She yelps, but then she relaxes into me.
I wind an arm around her waist. I don’t question the impulse. She needs to be close to me.
I need her close to me.
“You feel better?”
She sniffles and taps the toothbrush against the edge of the sink. “I feel horrible.”
“You look pretty.” I gaze at her in the mirror. Her hair’s wild, her skin’s pasty white, and her brown eyes are eating up half her face. She squirms, her thick ass brushing my thighs. My hard-on comes raging back.
“Don’t tease me,” she says. “I’m emotional.”
“I’m not teasing. I love it when you look like a mess.”
She snorts. “Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. You look freshly fucked. I love that.”
I unscrew the beer and offer it to her. She shakes her head. I take a swig.
She wriggles in my arms. “Let’s go eat.”
“We had a deal. I showed you my scars. Now you answer a question.”
Her jaw clenches, and her eyes darken. She knows what I’m going to ask. She stops squirming and meets my eye in the mirror.
“Okay,” she says softly. “We had a deal.”
Her eyes are pleading with me not to ask. My cock wants me to leave it alone. It would be so much easier to drop it. Feed her and fuck her and figure out what to do with her later. I don’t need to listen to her lie to my face again.
But maybe I’m a fucking optimist. Maybe if she cares whether I live or die, she’ll tell the truth.
“How many men did you cheat on me with?”
She drops her head. “None,” she says into the sink. “I didn’t cheat. I messed around where I knew people would talk. What you got pictures of? That’s all I did.”