The Matter of a Marquess - Jess Michaels Page 0,43
When he was propped back on them, watching her every move, she leaned in and kissed him. She felt him relax beneath her lips, felt his body shift from warning to wanting. She wanted to keep him there. She wanted him to never feel warning again, at least not with her.
And she wanted to see him, all of him, and show him that the damage to his skin made no difference in how she viewed him. She slid her lips down, his beard tickling her as she traced his throat, down across the wings of his collarbone, and then she rested her lips on the scar on his shoulder. She licked the length of it, this proof of what he’d gone through.
He shuddered beneath her lips and she could feel the tension in him. This desire to both have more and to stop her, to keep her from seeing what he thought made him weak. Or less.
The fact that she could never see him that way wasn’t something he knew or trusted. Time had done that. Pain had done it. And she wanted so desperately to repair all that damage since she couldn’t fix the physical. She edged her mouth lower, kissing the scar on his ribs. Lower to the one on his stomach, just above the waistline of his trousers.
She unbuttoned the placard there, loosened the buttons at the waist. She looked up at him. “Take them off?”
It was a question, not an order. If he didn’t want to show her what had happened to him, she wouldn’t press. He held her stare for a long moment, what felt like forever. Then he hooked his thumbs into the waist and pushed them away, kicking them from his feet.
He was naked then and she stared, first at the hard cock thrusting toward her. One that made her mouth water. But she shifted her gaze, and for a moment her ardor was not the most important thing.
The damage that had been done to him was undeniable. It was written in his skin. More burn scars crossed his right hip and down the same leg. Deeper scars crisscrossed along the flesh. They were the story of bravery, of pain, of Death coming so close that she realized now Nicholas must have felt the brush of the robes.
“Nicholas,” she breathed, reaching to touch them and then pulling away. If she touched them, she’d have to feel how real it was. How close she’d been to losing him.
“I know,” he said. “Hard to look at.”
She shook her head. “Hard only because they tell a story of your pain.” She blinked at the tears that stung her eyes. “This is worse than I imagined. How did you survive?”
He drew in a long breath. “Luck,” he said, his voice rough. “And the bravery of the men who I’d saved, including Selina’s husband, Derrick. They worked to staunch the deepest wounds. They got me to the field doctor. Some of them are butchers, but ours was a good man. He saved my leg, my life. A hundred men with the same injuries would have died.”
She bent her head as emotions overwhelmed her. Pain on his behalf, fear at what had almost been, gratitude to the men who had kept this man in her world. But also a strong sense of how fragile life was. How short.
She didn’t want to waste even a moment of it.
“I realize the scars are…disturbing,” he said.
“They are not,” she said. “And I don’t know why you keep trying to convince me that I want you less after seeing the evidence of your bravery. Of the man you have always been, that I always knew you to be. If anything, I want you all the more.”
His nostrils flared slightly, and in that moment she saw the truth. This man, this strong, powerful man who had endured so much, become so much, always been so much…was vulnerable now. To her. And that was a gift as much as anything else that would happen tonight or any night.
She wanted to return that gift. To show him how she could be trusted with what he had revealed of himself, physically and emotionally.
“I want to touch you now,” she whispered. “May I?”
He swallowed hard and then nodded wordlessly. She kept her gaze on his, watching him track her as she placed a hand on the damaged skin of his hip. She felt him stiffen as she traced the web of rise and fall there.