Chapter 28 Daisy #2
But it wasn’t only his body. It was his soul that had been so clearly ravaged. Grief and sorrow and shame running from him like a sieve.
“Can you sit on the tub?”
He edged back, never looking away, slow as he settled onto the edge of the porcelain.
I sucked down my reservations and stepped close to him, his knees parting to make me room.
I lifted the cloth and began to dab it on the cut at his temple.
He didn’t flinch, even though I could see the tick of a muscle in his jaw. His breaths hard and his aura all around.
The scent of pines and wild grasses. Sweat and leather. The man a dichotomy.
I tried not to inhale it too deeply.
Impossible when he was right there.
So big and powerful. Even with him sitting, it felt like he was towering over me.
Me breathing his breaths as I carefully cleaned the wound then ran the cloth down his cheek to wipe away the dried blood.
He watched me the whole time, a frozen statue.
I could barely move within the magnet that pulled between us, and I struggled for an extra breath when I turned away to rinse the cloth before I returned to him.
Meticulously cleaning away the blood before I dug into the kit and pulled out some ointment and a bandage.
I struggled for coherency as I applied them to the wound.
The air was dense as it whirred around us. So heavy it felt as if I were moving through quicksand.
My tongue stroked over my bottom lip, and I reached out and barely brushed my fingertips over the fabric of his tee. “You need to take this off so I can inspect the wound on your side and make sure you aren’t hurt anywhere else.”
It was probably a terrible idea. My desire for him was already verging on dire. Being this up close and personal to his bare freaking chest was likely going to do me in.
But this wasn’t about the trembling in my belly or the want that had lit between my thighs.
This was about a man who had basically offered me and my children his life.
A tremor of uncertainty rolled through him, too, before he slowly pushed to stand. He crossed his arms and took the bottom hem of his tee.
He began to pull it up and over his head.
Revealing his torso inch by inch.
I bit down on the inside of my cheek.
Holy crapsnacks.
His abdomen rippled and shook as he peeled it up, his waist narrow and rising up to the brutal expanse of his packed chest and broad shoulders.
A shiver rocked down my spine, and I shifted my weight from foot to foot, unable to sit still with the flush that raced over my entire body.
Hot.
So damned hot.
I’d seen him without a shirt a few times, but it was dark, and I’d barely been able to make out the scourge of designs he had tattooed on his flesh and the litany of scars beneath.
A long cut ran down his right side over his ribs, and several deep, circular marks had been left on his abdomen.
I didn’t want to imagine where he sustained them.
Many others were nicked and scored in a pattern of clear violence that he had lived.
His muscles bulged and flexed beneath them. Tension binding every inch of his cruelly beautiful body as I stood there and stared.
My mouth dry and my head spinning.
A shot of air escaped Cash’s nose like a bull that was about to charge.
I peeked up at his face that was just as hard as the rest of him, before I forced myself to turn my attention to the wound on his side. There was a large scrape and a deeper opening in the middle.
“It looks like you maybe got impaled by a stick.” I leaned down to inspect it. “I don’t think there’s anything stuck in it, though.”
He grunted in response, as if he couldn’t speak.
I turned away and rinsed the washcloth again. I shifted back to him, trying to hold myself together beneath the intensity he emitted.
Sure that all it would take was a brush of his hand and I would completely fall apart.
Who was I kidding? I was already shattering.
Peeled apart by the cruel fervency of his gaze.
He winced when I dabbed the cloth on the wound.
I bit down on my bottom lip. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” he hissed. “I’ve had far worse.”
I knew from looking at him it was true.
“I hate that for you,” I whispered into the dense air that filled the room. “Hate that you’ve been hurt.”
I peeked up at him, hoping he’d open up and give me an explanation. Invite me into the depravities that he’d suffered and the ones he’d surely dealt. Show me who he’d become.
“I barely feel it anymore.” His expression struck me, and I looked up to meet the burn in his gaze. “I’m only numb, Daisy. Empty.”
Except I knew he was feeling then. Knew it with the way his muscles rippled and goosebumps lifted on his flesh as I gently brushed my fingertips over his skin.
He inhaled a strained breath before he rasped, “Except for you. The only thing I felt were the remnants of you.”
Surprise bolted through me at his admission, and my stomach coiled and pulsed with need. A thrum of desire that had been compounded and exacerbated by the years of separation.
Years of imagining him.
Years of fantasizing about him.
Years of picturing his face when I should have been picturing my husband’s.
For a long time, I felt guilty over it, until I came to realize the way Ethan had manipulated me into our entire relationship. Used my insecurities against me.
I began to slowly ease around him, fingertips tracing and memorizing the designs he was written in.
The horrors and the shame.
Demons and horned creatures that prowled the barren plane that he’d marked on his abdomen and side.
The desolation so clear.
My chest squeezed in pain as I gently ran my fingertips over his side where the scene continued, inching around him as if I could memorize every ghost that had left a scar.
His muscles bound and bunched beneath my touch, and his hands curled into fists as I slowly stepped around so I could inspect his back for injuries.
Only the little oxygen I had in my lungs heaved out of me on a rush of grief when I realized there were scars that covered his entire back.
Hidden beneath the designs.
The flesh raised and dented and mottled. A depiction of Hell covered them, the flames licking up his back and rising from the pit to consume the field inscribed above it.
A field of daisies.
Half of them were charred and melted, their petals consumed the same way as a flame would consume paper.
The field extended all the way up to his upper back to his shoulders. Those daisies were blue and thrived beneath the warmth of the sun.
I couldn’t breathe as I stared at the depiction. At the pain he was written in. At his scars that were as distinct as mine.
“It’s what I hoped.” His words had never cut so low. Agonized rasps that cleaved into the tension. “That you stepped out from the shadows and rested beneath the sun. That my Wallflower bloomed and blossomed and grew. That I hadn’t destroyed all of you.”
“You thought of me?” I couldn’t help but ask it.
Hoarse laughter rolled from him. “Every day.”
There was nothing I could do but press my lips to the scene. To breathe it in like the action might hold the power to soothe the bitter, brutal sting.
He went rigid beneath it, and his hands fisted at his sides.
“Daisy,” he wheezed.
The reverberation of my name floated through the room.
A plea.
A warning.
An apology.
I dropped the washcloth to the floor and splayed my hands out high on his ribs, and I whispered my lips across his flesh. Palms held tight against his sides as if I could seep all the way in.
“I thought of you every day, too,” I mumbled as I kept kissing across the flesh.
So outside of who I normally was.
But Cash had taught me I didn’t have to be reserved. That I didn’t have to hide and shield and make myself smaller so people wouldn’t notice me.
“Daisy.” That time my name was definitely a warning. “You can’t be touchin’ me like this.”
“Why?” I muttered. “Why, when I need it?”
A long groan rolled out of him, and he slowly shuffled around.
His big body vibrated with strength and quickly failing restraint.
The man was covered in scars, and I didn’t know why the small, puckered skin on his neck drew me, but I pushed up on my toes and pressed a kiss to that, too.
My heart feeling like it would fail when I sank back to my heels and reiterated, “I need it.”
A huge hand that had only ever shown me kindness slipped to my cheek.
His forehead dropped to mine.
“What is it you need, my Little Wallflower?” His words became a growl.
“You. I’ve always needed you.”