and his head tilted back a little as I continued to work out the snags. My fingers moved through the black curls, the lick of something so soft drawing me into a hypnosis as I worked. A low noise left him somewhere between a sigh and a groan and my heart pattered wildly at the sound. I dropped my hand, grazing my fingers over the hardened muscles of his shoulder and writing out a question. You like it?
He cleared his throat and I noticed his skin was pebbling with goosebumps where my hand laid on him. “It’s just been a while since anyone’s…” He shifted in his seat, clearly feeling awkward about the direction of that sentence.
I skated my thumb over his shoulder, admiring the way his tanned flesh was left with a white mark as I pressed down. No blood was drawn, no marks left. This was the way people were supposed to be touched. And he hadn’t had anyone’s hands on him in who knew how long. In the pit of my stomach, a knot tightened at the thought of that. I would have given anything to keep my body to myself back in my prison. I’d dreamed about a cage I could crawl into, built of iron, one that no one could ever get into. But Nicoli had built that cage in real life and it didn’t look so good from the inside.
I started cutting his hair short ready for the clippers and I sensed we were both enjoying this small, but intoxicating contact. Maybe we weren’t supposed to live life in cages of any kind…
“I didn’t mean to get angry with you earlier, Winter,” Nicoli spoke after a while and I frowned. “What you saw…those articles, it’s just a part of my life that I’m trying to escape. I guess you can understand that better than most.”
I remained quiet, but still curious. I didn’t have any right to this man’s nightmares. Quentin’s words crept into my mind, and I shuddered at the memory of him whispering them against my ear. What happens in the dark, stays in the dark.
“I imagine you’re pretty curious about me, baby doll. And I suppose it’s better the devil you know than the one you don’t…”
I brushed some cut hair from his shoulders, his neck visible now and damn he had a nice neck. All tanned skin, muscle and a freckle just behind his left ear which I wanted to trace my thumb over. I didn’t think I’d ever appreciated a neck before. Except for the time I clawed at Farley’s so badly while he held me down that he had four long gouges on it for days. But this wasn’t a neck I wanted to tear into, this was one I wanted to caress, kiss…
“Do the names Romero or Calabresi mean anything to you?” Nicoli asked.
I wrote no on the back of his perfect neck.
“Well, it’s a long fucking story so I’ll give you the abridged version. The Romeros and Calabresis are sworn enemies, two powerful lineages who fight to take control of Sinners Bay. Their families have been feuding for centuries and if you can believe it, I was once a Calabresi heir trained my whole life to take over as the head of the family.”
My brows arched with interest as I picked up the clippers and started to run them up the back of his head, shortening his hair to tidy it up.
“I was…engaged,” he revealed, his voice thick and my heart jerked at the word. I kept my hand steady on his hair though, ignoring the strange tugging in my chest. “Her name was – is – Sloan. But a Romero showed up on our wedding day and kidnapped her.”
I halted the clippers, gripping his shoulder in surprise and he turned his head to look at me, giving me an expression that said he wasn’t joking. Woah.
Is she okay? I wrote on his arm.
“Yeah, she is now,” he said, a gravelly edge to his tone. His eyes darkened and he turned away again and my heart started twisting up like wire.
Nicoli continued on. “I hunted for her for a long time. Made it my life’s mission. I’d worked my whole life to be a strong enough man enough to protect her, take over her family when her father stepped down and be the leader everyone so desperately wanted me to be. I tried to be that man, I tried to be the one who could fill the