Chapter 17
Sera
Five minutes ago, he’d told me to leave.
That fact existed somewhere in my brain, filed alongside everything else that no longer mattered, because Travis Hale’s mouth was on mine and his hands were in my hair and the wall behind me was the only reason I was still standing.
This was not the gym kiss. That one had been brief, accidental, a circuit that tripped and reset.
This kiss was a choice. I could feel it in the way his thumb traced the hinge of my jaw, the way his body pressed into mine with an intent that left nothing ambiguous.
My brain was screaming. He’d said this isn’t working.
He’d wrapped rejection in protection and handed it to me like a gift I was supposed to be grateful for.
And now his hand was on the back of my neck, and his teeth grazed the spot below my ear and every thought I’d ever had about analytical consistency left my body on a sound I didn’t recognize as mine.
I pulled back. Just far enough to see his face. His eyes were open, and there was nothing behind them that looked like performance. He looked wrecked. He looked honest.
“You can’t tell me to leave and then do this.”
“I know.” His voice was rough. “I’m sorry. I can’t stop.”
I could have been the reasonable one. The careful one. The woman who didn’t take things that might not belong to her.
But I’d been that woman for four years. She was exhausted. I grabbed the front of his vest and pulled him back to me.
The tactical vest he was still wearing, rigid plates and buckles, the hard bulk of equipment designed to stop bullets standing between my hands and his skin.
I started working the buckles and Travis went rigid, a sharp breath whistling through his teeth that he tried to swallow. The left shoulder. My stitches.
I shifted my hands lower and found the side-release buckles at his waist. One opened with a click. The second stuck. He shrugged the right strap off, tried the left, and his jaw locked. I caught it and eased it off for him.
He was still filthy from the mission. Dirt along his jaw, sweat-dampened collar, the smell of exertion still clinging to him. An outdoor smell on a man who was supposed to never go outside.
“You need a shower.”
He let out a huff of breath, half-laugh. “That’s romantic.”
“You have dirt on your face, and you’re still wearing a knife on your ankle.”
He looked down at the ankle holder like he’d forgotten about it. Then back at me, and something crossed his expression that was almost a smile but landed closer to surrender.
Neither of us suggested he go alone.
His bathroom was functional, like everything he’d built. Wide shower, glass partition, a single toothbrush on the counter. Medical supplies organized on a shelf above the toilet, close enough to reach one-handed.
I understood the reason for that arrangement in a way that made my chest ache.
It was confirmed when Travis pulled his shirt over his head.
The night I’d stitched his shoulder, I’d kept my focus narrowed to the wound and the needle and the work. Now I looked at his body in full light, with nowhere to turn away.
Every scar I’d only glimpsed in pieces over the past few weeks was visible now, all at once. The knife scar along his ribs was the one my eyes went to first, white and puckered at one end where the skin hadn’t come together cleanly because nobody had helped him close it.
The raised line on his forearm where he’d done his own stitches over the bathroom sink at three in the morning. Smaller marks across his shoulders that I hadn’t seen before, the accumulated evidence of impacts and falls, each one a night he’d come home and told no one.
My stitches in his shoulder from a few nights ago were holding. Clean. Even. Slightly more even than the ones he’d done for himself.
I put my hand flat against his chest, and he went still. I traced the knife scar with my fingertip, following the raised tissue from the bottom of his ribs toward his hip, and something fierce rose in my throat.
Not pity. Anger. At every one of these marks. At every night he’d sewn himself together alone because he’d decided he didn’t deserve help.
He caught my hand. Pressed it flat against the scar, held it there.
“They don’t hurt anymore.” His voice was quiet. “Most of them, I barely feel.”
“That’s worse.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Then his hand left mine on the scar and found the hem of my sweater. A question in the gesture, not a demand. His fingers resting against the fabric, waiting.
I pulled it over my head myself. Unhooked my bra and dropped it on the tile.
My body was not Naomi’s. I was a lot softer, rounder, built for desk work and data analysis. Fuller breasts, wider hips, and arms that lacked the definition from years of combat training. He had touched my sister’s body for over a year.
He knew what lean and athletic felt like under his hands, and I very definitely wasn’t that.
The thought sat in my chest like a cold stone. I wanted to cross my arms and cover myself. I wanted to reach for the sweater on the floor.
I didn’t. I stood there and let him look, even though every part of me braced for whatever his face would do next.
This was what I had. He could see all of it.
Travis looked at me. Not a glance, not a quick sweep. A focused, unhurried attention. His gaze moved across my skin, and what I saw on his face wasn’t comparison. Wasn’t evaluation.
It was hunger, plain and uncomplicated, and it landed on me like something warm poured over a cold place.
He touched me with steady hands. They traced the curve of my waist and settled on my hips. He pulled me closer. Skin against skin for the first time, the heat of his chest against my breasts, and I felt his breath catch against my hair.
His thumbs traced slow circles on my hipbones.
Then one hand slid up my ribs between us, cupping my breast, his thumb brushing across the nipple.
My head tipped back, and his mouth found the hollow of my throat, and I stopped thinking about anything except the path his hands were making across my body, unhurried, learning me like terrain he intended to memorize.
We shed the rest of our clothes without ceremony. He reached into the shower and turned the water on, and steam began filling the space, then expanding out into the room. The humid air opened my lungs the way it always did, the bronchial tubes relaxing into the warmth.
Of all the things to register while Travis pulled me under the spray and put his mouth on my neck, my body cooperating for once was the detail my brain chose to file.
The water ran over both of us, hot enough to flush my skin pink.
His mouth moved from my neck to my shoulder, tasting the water off my skin, and his hands mapped the same slow path they’d started outside the shower.
My waist. My hips. The curve of my ass, where his fingers spread and pulled me tighter against him.
I could feel him hard against my stomach and the reality of that, the physical proof that he wanted this, wanted me, cut through every doubt I’d carried into this room.
I pressed him backward until his shoulders found the tile. He let me. I kissed the line of his neck and tasted clean water and salt.
I was careful with his left side. When I pressed too close and he flinched, I adjusted without asking.
When my fingers found the edge of the stitched wound, I redirected.
Learning the geography of his damage by touch, mapping the places that hurt and routing around them.
His ribs on the left were off limits. The shoulder needed a wide berth. Everything else was mine.
I wanted to touch every scar on his body. Not to fix them or learn their stories but because they were his, and he was here, and four years of wanting him had turned into warm water and his skin under my hands, and I was shaking and it had nothing to do with the temperature.
He felt it. He must have, because his hand came up and cradled the back of my head and he kissed me in a way that made my knees dissolve.
Slower than before. Deeper. His mouth asking me something his voice wouldn’t, and my answer was to press closer and slide my hands up his chest and into his wet hair and hold on.
Then his hand slid between my thighs and my brain went blank.
His fingers found my clit and I gasped, the sound bouncing off the tile. I grabbed his shoulder with one hand and his arm with the other and held on because the world had just narrowed to the exact point where he was touching me, and nothing else existed outside of it.
“Travis. There,” I managed. “Right there.”
He watched my face. Those green eyes locked on mine while his fingers worked, and I couldn’t look away, and I couldn’t close my eyes, and I couldn’t do anything except stand there with the water running down my back and let him take me apart.
I’d imagined this. God help me, I’d imagined this so many times, lying in the dark in my apartment, hating myself for it. The reality made every late-night fantasy I’d ever had feel like a pencil sketch of a sunset. Close enough to recognize. Nothing like the real thing.
I came hard and almost without my permission, my whole body seizing, my face buried against his neck, my nails digging into his arm. His other arm wrapped around my waist, and he held me up.
“Sera.” My name, quiet against my wet hair. Just my name. Like it was the only word he had left.
My legs were unreliable, and he kept one arm around my waist while I steadied, his forehead resting against mine, neither of us in any hurry to separate. The water was still running, and after a moment he turned me gently under the spray and smoothed my hair back from my face with both hands.
I reached between us, barely grazed the tip of his cock, but he caught my wrist.
“Not here. I won’t last three seconds.” His voice was rough. He pressed his mouth to my temple, and I could feel him hard against my hip, feel how much the restraint was costing him. “Come to bed with me.”
“Yes.”