Cass. He has to leave tomorrow, so we figured tonight was perfect timing."
"C'mon, sport," Cass drawled, indicating with his head. "Time to sort out that scarring." He didn't wait to check if Lucas was following, just swaggered his sexy frame inside the house, and I gave Lucas a jab in the ribs to tell him to go.
Lucas still looked confused as hell, but he trusted us enough—or maybe he was just drunk enough—to follow Cass inside without asking any more questions.
All of a sudden that left Zed and I alone, and the sexual tension, which had started at a pleasant, warm thirty, ramped straight up to one hundred in a matter of seconds. He met my gaze over the fire, and my mouth went as dry as the fucking Sahara. Lucas's wise words were still echoing through my head, but... it was one thing to know a fact. It was a whole other thing to accept it and act on it.
I wasn't there yet. Nope. Not yet. So I took the coward’s path and rose to head inside as well. Except I needed to pass Zed to get around the fire, and he wasn't backing down so easily. He grabbed my wrist as I moved closer, holding me totally immobile with just his fingers.
"Dare, why are you being so fucking stubborn?" he asked in a rough whisper. It was a fair fucking question to any outsider, anyone who didn't know us or everything we'd been through together. But Zed knew. He knew so much more than I’d ever wanted him to know... and I couldn't get that out of my head.
Everything I'd told Lucas in that car had been the truth, but there was more to it. There was so much pain and desperation tangled up in my history with Zed, and I couldn't shake it. I hadn't made peace with my own past enough to take Zed out of the friendzone completely. It was all so much worse now that I knew he'd seen what Chase had done to me on those recordings.
My whole body shuddered as the memory slammed into the front of my mind, and I stifled a gasp. I wasn't... Nope, no way. I wasn't remotely ready to deal with those memories yet, and I couldn't take things further with Zed without addressing those issues.
"Hey," he murmured, standing up but not releasing my wrist. He wasn't holding tight, and his thumb stroked gently over my pulse point as he tilted my face up with his other hand. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make you feel—"
"It's fine," I croaked, cutting him off before he could elaborate on what emotion he'd just recognized in my eyes. "I'm just..." I trailed off with a small shrug and a bitter laugh. "Really fucking damaged."
Zed gave a small shake of his head, his gaze holding mine as his fingers brushed over my cheek. "That's where you're wrong." His voice was so soft, his lips barely moving as he spoke. "You're a diamond, Dare. All the shit you've gone through, all the damage Chase tried to make stick? It's just revealing more of your shine."
My breath caught as he leaned in, but this time it was just a gentle kiss to my cheek. This time he was the one to walk away. Frozen, I could do nothing but stare after him, then with a long exhale I sank my ass back down to the seat Zed had so recently vacated.
I took a couple of minutes to pull my shit together, pouring another glass of Scotch and downing it in one huge gulp. Shaking off the intense need to scream or cry or... fuck, run after Zed and climb him like a scared cat on a tree, I headed inside to check on Cass and Lucas.
They were already set up in the living room with Cass's professional tattoo gear that Zed had picked up from his apartment a few days earlier. Lucas was shirtless on the padded table, his arms linked behind his head and an easy, excited smile on his face as he chatted to Cass.
My one-armed Grumpy Cat was hunched over the table sketching out a rough outline of the design he'd put together for Lucas. He'd started drawing it weeks ago, and I'd spotted it on his desk when I was at his apartment. There was no mistaking who it'd been for because it was made up of all things that screamed Lucas.