complete lie, was it? You were with her. You didn’t date other women. You Yudishtired it.”
“You already know that’s true. But you’re trying to ask me something. Just ask me.”
She jutted out her jaw, determined for answers she knew would hurt her. “Did you sleep with her?”
“Yes. It was a few times, many years ago. It wasn’t . . . I’m not sure how to explain it.” He was too much of a coward to tell her he’d mostly blocked it out. He’d closed his eyes and waited for it to be over, even though it was Naina, someone he trusted.
Something in his voice told her more than he could say, and what she heard made her step close to him again. Their two-step routine, chasing each other’s footsteps, unable to stay away.
“You don’t have to say more,” she said gently. “I shouldn’t have pushed you. I don’t know what came over me. She’s a friend, you felt safe with her.”
Stepping even closer, he pushed her hair behind her ear, then cupped her jaw, needing to fill his hands with her. “I thought I felt safe with her. Truth is, until I met you again, until Ashna brought me to see you, I had forgotten what feeling safe with someone felt like.”
Her eyes met his, the impact of his words on her clear in them. “Yash . . .”
“India . . .” Letting her go, he tugged his inner shirt out of his pants. “I told you about my scars. They aren’t just scars. It’s . . . they’re . . . they cover almost my entire torso.” He had to stop and breathe. “No one has ever seen me without a shirt after I recovered from the accident. I could never take my shirt off around Naina, not even when we had sex. No one’s seen me like this, not even in an inner shirt.” He hadn’t registered taking his shirt off when he saw her bleeding feet. And he didn’t care.
“Even in the video with Julia I have my shirt on. I don’t remember any of it, but she had to have tried and I had to have stopped her. Even in my drugged state I couldn’t let it go.”
He reached for the edge of his shirt, but his hands wouldn’t move to take it off.
She wrapped her hands around his, strong gentle hands. The focus of his entire body shifted to her touch. “You have nothing to prove. I know how safe you feel with me. I feel it too.”
He dropped his head again, their foreheads touching once more. “What if I need to show you? What if I need someone to see?”
Her hands stroked his, tracing the knuckles, the tendons, then inched to the hem of his shirt, cool fingers skimming the hot skin at his waist. “Do you?”
He shuddered, torturously hungry for her touch. “Please.” Just that one word.
She slid her hands under his shirt and splayed them against his abdomen. Skin against skin. The relief was so great that bursts of light blurred his vision.
A laugh escaped her. A laugh, of all things. “Yash Raje, is that a six-pack?” She was teasing him, now, in this moment when the pressure had felt like it might split him open.
A laugh huffed out of him.
“How has no one killed you for being so perfect?” She was looking up at him, eyes bright with wonder, hands trembling on his skin.
“Someone tried,” he said against her mouth, because their lips were almost touching now.
The smile slid off her lips. He felt it.
“Too soon?” he asked.
“Too dark,” she answered, sliding his shirt up and off his body.
“Sorry.” He watched as she took him in. Something fevered flared in her eyes at the sight of his bare ruined body.
He’d expected shock, even anger and pain for the trauma those scars made obvious, but it was her arousal that made him step into her and press his lips to hers.
She sucked in a breath at the contact, then pulled away, only the slightest bit. “Yash . . .”
“India?”
“Let’s think about this for a minute.” But she pressed into him.
“I feel safe with you,” he said. “I feel safe with you.” He pressed another barest of kisses against her mouth; nothing had ever felt so soft. “What if I don’t want to think about anything but that?”
Pushing up on her toes, she returned his kiss with one of her own, as quick as his had been. Then another, this one lingering the