Chapter 20
Mateo opened his eyes to the sweet sight of Melody’s sleeping face.
The sun had set beyond the window, casting the room into almost complete darkness.
Enough moonlight filtered through that he could make out the fan of her eyelashes, the slope of her nose, the soft pillow of her mouth, and the dainty point of her chin.
The white comforter had fallen almost to her waist, and when he trailed his fingertip over her naked arm, he found goosebumps.
He snatched the blanket up to her chin and pressed a kiss to her forehead.
With a languid stretch, he left the bed and stepped back into his jeans.
A glance at the clock revealed that it was almost nine p.m. They had only slept for a few hours, but Mateo felt rejuvenated.
He was wide awake as he crossed to the bathroom to use the toilet.
His mind wandered over the preceding hours, the freshness of them keeping every image, every word, every breath in sharp focus.
He had been too damned satisfied after having Melody again, too comforted by her nearness and her scent, to feel anything else in the moments following.
Once she had fallen asleep in his arms, Mateo had quickly followed, finally succumbing to the exhaustion that had been weighing him down for days.
If he had dreamed anything, he couldn’t recall it, and that rarely happened after a nightmare.
Peaceful sleep. He had forgotten what it felt like, even for just the length of a decent nap.
The contentment of that realization vanished as his heart nosedived into his gut.
Before tonight, Mari was the only woman he had shared a bed with in over a decade.
And falling into a drunken stupor beside his flavor of the month in his twenties had been nothing compared to curling up with Mari in the shelter of his body.
He only had to close his eyes to imagine it, her curled up against him, her fingers laid over the hand gripping her waist. Her hair, always arranged in a single braid for bed, would tickle his chin and his nose as he lowered his head.
When she wanted him to raise that hand and cup her breast, she arched her back.
When she wanted him to do more than hold her, she would shift her hips and press against his groin.
When she was feeling especially loving, she would turn and face him, burying her face in his chest.
Now, when he closed his eyes to imagine it, the memory was tainted. Because now he could too easily drift toward Melody in his thoughts—her body against his, her scent in his nostrils, her heartbeat tethered to the cadence of his.
“Mateo?”
Her sleepy voice reached out to him from the bedroom, drawing him back into his body. The moment of reverence and guilt fell away as he turned to follow her siren’s call.
“Hey,” he said, flicking on the bedside lamp before easing back into bed with her. “You were sleeping so peacefully, I didn’t want to disturb you.”
To his surprise, she didn’t resist when he reached for her.
She let him pull her into his side, and then compliantly lowered her head to his chest when he gave her a little nudge.
She was stiff, as if she didn’t know how to simply lie with her lover and enjoy his closeness.
Much time couldn’t have passed between her running away from home and being swept up in sex trafficking.
He was willing to bet she’d never wanted to linger in bed with many, if any, of the men who had paid to use her body. She would grow used to it with him.
“Mmm,” she mumbled sleepily. “I haven’t slept that well in a while.”
“Me either.”
He caught a handful of her braids and ran them through his fingers. She began sinking against him, bringing a tentative hand to his chest. He placed one of his over it and squeezed her fingers.
“Will you stay the night?” he asked.
A pause. “Do you want me to?”
He smiled. “Would I have asked if I didn’t?”
“Is this some kind of interrogation tactic, answering all my questions with questions?”
He chuckled, urging her chin up so he could kiss her. “No, but this is. Give me your secrets.”
She kissed him back, short and sweet. But she couldn’t hide her anxiety when they broke the kiss, her eyes wide as she peered up at him.
“I was joking, baby girl,” he assured her. “I told you, no pressure tonight.”
That seemed to ease her mind, and she relaxed, laying her head back down.
“Baby girl?”
“Hmm?”
“You called me baby girl just now. And you did it earlier when you were …”
“Making love to you,” he filled in. He had no choice but to call it what it had been.
He hadn’t approached a woman with such purpose and attentiveness since Mari.
Learning about Melody’s background and what it implied, he had suffered no end of guilt over his handling of her in the storage room.
It had been one of the rawest, uninhibited sexual experiences of his life, but he had been driven primarily by his own need.
His need to placate the brute inside of him that craved to possess every inch of her.
Tonight had been about atoning for that, for giving her no less than she deserved.
He wasn’t ready yet to grapple with what it might mean.
“Yeah,” she whispered.
“It kind of just came out before I could think about whether you would like it.”
“I did like it.”
She sounded almost ashamed of the fact, which sent another laugh up out of his throat. He turned on his side to face her.
“It fits, you know.”
She scoffed and rolled her eyes. “It’s cute, but you have to admit it’s a little misogynistic. I’m neither a baby nor a girl.”
He traced a fingertip along the line of her jaw. “But you have a baby-doll face. A sweet face. Therefore, you’re a baby girl … my baby girl.”
She chewed her lip thoughtfully, studying him in silence for a moment before she responded. “You shouldn’t say things like that to a girl like me.”
“And what kind of girl is that?”
“The kind who’s never known tenderness or love. The kind who might take you seriously and get the wrong idea.”
The same visceral reaction that had swept over him when she’d disagreed with his opinion of her reared its ugly head. He tightened his hold on her until she gasped, as if fighting for air. He eased his arm a bit but didn’t let go.
“In the short time you have known me, have I given you any indication that I am anything but serious?”
That got a giggle out of her. “You got me there. I can imagine you terrify the shit out of your suspects.”
“Certainly seemed to unsettle Suede.” He cringed. “Shit. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Said what?” she teased, grasping his point.
He slipped a hand beneath the comforter and ran his hand down her belly.
Encountering her mound and the landing strip of dark hairs leading the path to her seam, he had a sudden thought.
Yanking the blanket down, he reached for the flashlight on the nightstand.
The lamp wasn’t bright enough for him to see what he was looking for.
“What are you doing?” she asked, squirming under him as he pointed the light at her lower belly.
“I saw something earlier and wanted to get a better look.”
She went still as the light illuminated a tattoo. Etched from hipbone to hipbone was a vine in black and gray lines and shaded dark green. Along the vine, little roses bloomed, most of them in a shade of rich, deep red. A single blossom toward the middle was shaded a vibrant golden yellow.
“It’s gorgeous,” he murmured, sensing that it meant something to her. All of his tattoos were personal, and Melody seemed like the kind of person who wouldn’t take permanently inking her skin lightly.
He traced a finger over the vine, finding puckered, raised skin beneath it. It was a scar, he realized, and it was thick and ropey, as if it hadn’t healed properly. It was only visible when he was close, but he could feel the devastation beneath his fingers.
“What happened?”
He turned off the flashlight and put it aside, laying his head on her belly and keeping his hand over the tattoo. She rested her hand on his head and twined her fingers in his hair.
“I had to have a partial hysterectomy when I was nineteen,” she whispered.
Mateo stiffened, his entire body reacting to the weight of her words. He was pinned beneath them, incapable of moving or breathing as he digested what she’d just said.
“I contracted PID after a bad back-alley abortion. My first pimp, Darrell—D-Ray—he got me pregnant. Got mad at me, as if I had done it to myself.”
“Dick,” Mateo muttered.
“The biggest dick. He wouldn’t even take me to a decent clinic.
I was terrified. I wasn’t ready to be a mother at nineteen, but I didn’t want an abortion.
I don’t know what I was thinking … that maybe a baby could be my way out.
Having a kid would make me a burden and diminish my worth.
D-Ray would let me go. Other girls who’d had babies had disappeared, and I never knew for sure where they went.
I convinced myself they had somehow escaped. ”
Mateo’s chest squeezed and he winced. He’d been extensively trained on the methods of pimps, who knew how to target young, na?ve girls with no safe place to turn. By the time the girls understood what was happening to them, it was almost always too late. The trap would have snared them.
“He forced you to go through with it,” he choked out.
“Yes. And afterward, I was in so much pain, and I got so sick. One day, I just collapsed and then woke up in the hospital. I had contracted an infection … the instruments used for my abortion likely weren’t properly sterilized. I almost died.”
Mateo’s hand slipped to her waist and held tight, his stomach giving a lurch at the thought of her dying.
“I had to undergo an aggressive round of antibiotics and ... I lost one ovary and both my fallopian tubes. So, you know … you can’t get me pregnant or anything. Still get a fucking period every month, even after all that. Ain’t that a bitch?”