Page 85

When shit goes wrong it’s on me.

It’s been that way for as long as I can remember—in this house, in the locker room, in my life.

“Does it really matter?” I mutter. “I have at least half of it on me.”

She falls quiet, studying me for so long the tension starts creeping back in.

Fuck. I brace.

Only…she lets me off the hook.

“Will you tell me about the nipple-piercing bet?”

I laugh and it’s full of relief, something I know she hears too. Something we both ignore as I tell her about the bet that ended with me having a silver ring through my right nipple for half a season.

“That shit hurt,” I say, absently rubbing my palm over it, the ring long since removed.

“You know that women breastfeed, right?”

“I know that breastfeeding isn’t a needle going through my nipple.”

“I have one word for you, hot shot.” Amusement slides down my stomach, wraps its hand around my dick and strokes. At least until she gives me the word. “Teeth.”

Then I’m torn between getting harder and shuddering.

I decide to put baby teeth aside and focus on my dick.

Typical.

“I happen to have personal experience with teeth, baby, and I know they can be a good thing”—I drag my hand up from the back of her knee, along her hip, the dip of her waist, her ribcage…the side of her breast—“a very good thing.”

She shivers, body canting toward mine.

Then she smirks. “Let me guess, more skills you can show me?”

I grin. She rolls her eyes, but she does it with a yawn and I know that as much as I like this—holding her, talking with her, teasing her—it’s getting late and she needs to sleep. I reach over her, flick off the light, then draw her right back into my arms, her face pressed to my throat, her leg thrown over mine.

Then I ask her an easy one, hopefully one that will relax her enough to drift off.

“Will you tell me about what you like to read?”

She goes stiff again. “Why?”

Damn. I made the wrong call.

“Because believe it or not, I’m a reader too,” I tell her. “Not romances. More like thrillers and fantasy, but since we have a lot of travel time in my job, a lot of time in hotel rooms with shitty cable and not much else to do, I read. That’s all. No ulterior motive, princess.”

It’s dark, so I can’t see much of her face.

But I see enough of it to know she’s weighing what I said.

“It was an escape,” she whispers long moments later. “At first, anyway. It got me the hell out of that house and since the library was free and no one cared what I checked out, it was an outlet. Later, I just fell in love with the stories, the fantasies, the lives I haven’t lived.”

“I can see that.”

“And the way our world is right now, the way I grew up, I was drawn to romances, to the guaranteed happy endings,” she says with a yawn. “Because I knew no matter how tough it got for the characters between the pages, no matter how dark the circumstances, or whether it was the world or their pasts tearing them apart, they would eventually figure it out and come back together. It’s beautiful to read that, to dream of it.” She burrows a little closer to me. “Even if it’s not easy,” she whispers, sleep creeping into her words, “it’s still worth it in the end because they have each other.”

I stroke my hand through her hair, my heart rolling over in my chest, trying to figure out how to tell her I totally get that.