Chapter 26 Scars #2
He helped her down from the vanity, her bare feet meeting the heated stone floor, as their fingers laced. She didn’t press against him, didn’t reach for his body. She simply stood close and waited, following his lead.
He led her into the shower, testing the temperature before guiding them both under the spray. The water against his scars drew a sharp breath from his lungs.
She tipped her face upward, eyes closing, letting the cascade flatten her hair against her skull and run in rivulets down her breasts, her stomach, the soft thatch of curls between her thighs.
He reached for the soap, working a lather between his palms, and stepped behind her. The scent of minerals in the water disappeared as gentle herbs filled the air. Jack massaged her shoulders, gently kneading the tension from the muscles there.
When his thumbs traced the delicate wing of her collarbones, she leaned into his touch, and the trust of it nearly buckled his knees.
He moved lower, cupping each breast with reverence, his thumbs circling her nipples until they peaked beneath his palms, and a quiet moan slipped from her parted lips.
He washed her the way priests anoint. With intention. With trembling hands that understood the reverence required when touching something sacred.
His touch moved slowly, thoroughly cleaning every inch of her. Down her ribs, over the gentle swell of her hips, the flat plane of her stomach where the muscles quivered under his fingertips.
Turning her to face him, he knelt before her, lathering each leg from thigh to ankle.
He washed away the remnants of what they’d done together, his release and hers, the dried evidence of their shared undoing.
His hands moved between her thighs with clinical gentleness, but his breath came ragged, and his cock stirred against his will.
“Jack…”
With a soft kiss to her lower belly, he moved on. Not because he wanted to, but because time demanded it.
He washed her feet one at a time, his thumb pressing into her arch until she gasped and steadied herself with a hand on the wall.
“Your feet look a little better. Do they still hurt?”
“Not as much.” She moaned as he rubbed between her toes.
When he stood, the water sluiced the soap from both of them. Steam cocooned the shower in translucent white, softening the stone, blurring the glass, reducing the world to only him and her.
She reached for the soap and looked up at him, her eyes cautious more than expectant. Jack swallowed tightly as she lathered her hands.
She waited for him to decide.
Water streamed down her body. Her hair was slicked back from her face, darkened to the color of wet sand, and without it framing her features, her eyes looked enormous. Green as glass. Green as the sea when light passes through a wave.
Slowly, he pulled her hand closer and pressed it flat to his chest. For a moment, he forgot how to breathe. Then she moved, keeping her touch featherlight, almost hesitant, as she traced the planes of his chest, the ridges of his abdomen, and the hollow divots of imperfect skin.
She didn’t linger on the scars or avoid them. She treated them as what they were. Part of him.
Slowly, he remembered how to breathe, hard and deep, but breath wouldn’t reach the base of his lungs.
“Now, your back?” she asked tentatively.
He silently turned.
A quick inhale, held too long, released too carefully. He knew what she was seeing.
The chancellor’s canvas—his twisted, gnarled masterpiece.
When her delicate, soapy hands pressed flat between his shoulder blades, Jack flinched. Every muscle locked as his palms slammed against the wet stone wall.
She stilled, attuned to his every response. “I can stop—”
“No.” He gritted his teeth. “I can handle it.”
Daisy slowly moved her hand between his shoulder blades, and his breath punched out in a staccato burst that ricocheted off the wall.
She didn’t retreat. Didn’t apologize. She simply waited, holding her hands still until the tremor subsided and his breathing steadied. Then she continued.
Slow, patient strokes down his spine, over the ridged landscape of old violence, across the small of his back, the only patch where the skin was smooth and untouched.
Her fingers lingered like a traveler finding a clearing in a scorched forest. So gentle. So tentative and respectful, every touch drenched in clear intent not to disrupt. The sensation was so overwhelming, so impossibly tender and excruciating, that his control fractured down the center.
Slowly, she glided her hand back up his spine, the pressure shifting—firmer, possessive. Something detonated.
He spun and caught her wrist, pinning her arms to the wall like a sacrifice nailed to a cross before he knew what he was doing. The soap fell to the floor as her lips parted on a startled gasp.
Her chest heaved. Water cascaded between her wet breasts, pooling in the hollow of her collarbones, streaming over her hard nipples, before spilling down her stomach.
Those haunting green eyes looked up at him without a flicker of fear as the tension in her body went soft beneath his grip. Not limp, but passive enough that her silent surrender dissolved every rigid line of resistance, turning pliant in his hands. Willing with devastating trust.
Her chin lifted, even as her pulse visibly hammered in the hollow of her throat.
She understood his response without judgment. Without criticism. Without fear.
His hands slid from her wrist to her hands. His gaze shifted to the wet gauze on her wrist. “Did I hurt you?”
“No, and you wouldn’t,” she said with more certainty than he deserved. “I won’t hurt you either, Jack.”
The water rushed around them as the blood pounded in his ears. What if this was all he would ever be able to do?
“It’s…” He searched for the right words. “Hard for me…to give up control.”
“Then don’t.”
Her fingers entwined with his. She leaned forward as far as his grip would allow. He sucked in a breath and held it as she pressed her lips to the cigarette burn on his left shoulder. A featherlight kiss. Barely there.
“I would never hurt you,” she whispered, her breath skating lightly over his skin.
Then she kissed the mark beside it. Then the one beneath his collarbone.
“I can be gentle,” she rasped, tracing her lips over the puckered circle that, years ago, had made him pass out from pain. “I can be as patient as you need.”
Her mouth moved across his chest with brutal patience, lips parting against each ridge of tissue, each silvered furrow, each mark the chancellor carved into his flesh with the casual cruelty of a man signing letters.
She kissed the lash mark that curved beneath his ribs like a parenthesis. The jagged surgical scar. The twin burns on his sternum sat so close together they almost overlapped.
Then she lowered herself.
Slowly, her back sliding against the wet stone, her hands rotating in his grip as her body descended. His grip trailed her descent, keeping her hands against the wall and above her head as she sank to her knees before him.
Water streaming over her upturned face, forcing him to step forward and use his body as shelter.
Her gaze found the brand. Those two ruinous letters, R.A.
“They can’t hurt you anymore.” She lifted and pressed her lips to the chancellor’s initials.
The sound that ripped from his throat was not human. He hated the hypersensitivity of the flesh around the burn as much as he despised the numbness below her lips.
“They’re only scars, Jack.” She kissed the tight, glossy edges, then the center where the pain had bit deepest.
The intimacy of it, the tenderness directed at the ugliest parts of him, awakened something dark and dormant inside of him, something he never wanted to let sleep again.
He staggered closer, so she wouldn’t have to strain as her lips dragged slowly over his hips and down his thigh. His cock stiffened, thick and aching, jutting between them with a desperation that shamed and consumed him in equal measure.
She looked up at him, then closed her eyes, grazing her cheek softly against his swollen flesh. Then, she gave him the only thing no one else ever had.
Choice.
“Tell me what you want, Jack.”
His grip tightened between her fingers, and he stepped closer. She arched her back, water coursing over her shoulders as her pert nipples drew into tight, ruby points.
Words strangled in his throat.
Her lips parted. Open. Waiting for him to decide. Giving him complete control.
His head dropped forward, and his breath left him in a rush as the smooth crown of his cock dragged across her lower lip. Their locked hands tightened, squeezing.
A groan escaped him as he shifted his hips, tracing her lips with the tip again. Her lips were impossibly soft. Her breath temptingly warm.
Transferring his hold of her hands into one of his, he gripped his cock, squeezing tightly in a useless attempt to stem off his need.
He swayed his hips, tracing the shape of her mouth, corner to corner, painting her lips with the evidence of how desperately he wanted her.
She didn’t reach for him. She just looked up with those devastatingly trusting eyes, her mouth open like an offering, as water drops beaded on her lashes like crushed diamonds.
A tremor ran from his hands through his chest, down into the marrow of his legs, where his knees threatened to buckle. He gripped his cock tighter and pressed forward.
The heat of her mouth swallowed him. “Fuck.” The word splintered against the stone walls as his hips thrust.
The gentle suction of her lips closed around him, and a bolt of white-hot sensation raced from the base of his spine to the crown of his skull. His vision blurred.
He’d done this before, but never like this.
In the past, it had been his mouth, his hands, his forced submission.
He withdrew slowly, watching his rigid flesh emerge from between her swollen lips, glistening and throbbing. “Are you okay?”
Her cheeks darkened as she licked her lips and shyly nodded.