Page 102 of Reckless Woman
I can feel him shaking his head against my hair. “No.”
“I followed the clues you left for me. I followed them all through your past. I cried for you, and then I cried even harder when I thought I’d lost us.”
His palm convulses for a brief moment against my stomach. “That’snevergoing to happen. You’re mine, Anna Grayson. Mine forever.”
“I think it’s okay to be broken.” I pull his hand up to my heart and hold it prisoner. “It’s okay to have jagged edges. That way, they can stick to someone else easier. It’s how you make two people whole again.”
We lie in perfect, peaceful silence for a moment.
“I saw behind your mask when I was on that sidewalk… I always want to see behind it, Joseph. Not just when I’m dying.”
He disappears for a moment to take something from the pocket of his jeans. When he lies back down, he offers me his clenched fist.
“Take it,” he says roughly. “This is my mask. It belongs to you now.”
When I unfurl his fingers, I find a toy tin soldier resting in the palm of his hand. He’s chipped and damaged, and he’s seen more battles than I’ll ever know about, but I love him more in that moment than I ever have.
With a groan, he yanks me astride him and buries his face in the side of my neck, assaulting me with his rich heady scent. Curling my arms around his shoulders, with the tin soldier still locked in my hand, I feel a pulse reawaken between my legs.
“Joseph, will you do something for me?”
“Anything.”
“Give me your hand.”
Trailing the backs of his fingers down between the soft valley of my breasts, I take it lower still, through the wasteland of my scars, before rising up on my knees to encourage him to go further. Taking his cue, he continues the journey alone, sliding down through soft hair to palm my pussy and throbbing clit.
“Tell me to stop.”
“I can’t do that,” I rasp, pressing my forehead to his.
“Is this the part where you admit you have willpower issues?”
Catching my response with his mouth, he starts to circle my clit slowly, and I let out a shuddering gasp.
“I feel you,” I say, crying out from the sheer relief of it. “Oh my God.I feel you.”
“We’ll always feel each other,Luna,” he growls, tipping me onto my back and lowering his mouth to my pussy. “You said that once yourself, and now I’m finally starting to believe it.”
Chapter Thirty
Anna
“Gabriela says his name is Edier,” I say, laying out my painted rock collection on the white sheet to show him. “His mother died a few months ago, and now he’s all alone. She doesn’t have the heart to send him away.”
Joseph’s sitting up in bed, with the rest of the sheet tucked around his hips, smoking a cigarette with heavy-lidded eyes. My dissolute cowboy is a golden god this morning.
He exhales over his shoulder. “He’s a cool kid.”
I smile. “Yes, he is. Super talented too. Look at this one.” I hold up a rock with bright multi-colored swirls and black wheels. “It looks like achivaparty bus I saw in Cartagena once. And that one looks like…” I trail off, as I glance from one rock to another. I’ve always been crap at puzzles, but when it clicks, I see everything.
On shaky legs, I stand and walk to the closet, grabbing the first dress I see. It’s the pale blue sundress that I wore the first time I left this room.
“What the hell are you doing?” he rumbles.
“Reverse floor show.” I flash him a tight smile as I slip the dress over my head and start rooting around for clean underwear. “I’ve forgotten to tell Gabriela something,” I lie smoothly. “I won’t be long.”
Walking back over to him, I give him a long, lingering kiss. He treated me like glass last night. He shattered me, and then he fixed me. His mouth and his hands were the ultimate healers.