Madame X - Wilder Jasinda - Страница 48
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Logan is shoving at Cocoa, who is blocking the doorway, which in turn has me stumbling backward. Beyond Logan, rain is sluicing down in hammering bucketfuls, so thick it obscures my view of the street beyond.
The alarm is beeping faster and faster, and Cocoa is on top of me, barking, tail wagging, smearing muddy paw prints on me and on the towel, and her claws catch in the cotton of the towel and loosen it, threatening to tug it away. Logan steps over Cocoa, stabbing at the alarm panel to disarm it, then slamming the door closed.
I shove Cocoa away with one hand, trying to stand up while holding the towel in place with the other.
Logan is soaked to the bone, his gray T-shirt all but see-through now, sticking to abs so grooved and ridged and hard they could be carved from stone, sticking to his lean upper body, hard, chiseled pectorals, broad shoulders. His hair is lank and stringy and sticking to his cheeks and chin.
Rainwater puddles at his feet, and his eyes are hot blue orbs, locked on mine. Neither of us moves. I am not breathing.
The towel covering my torso is hanging loose around me, held up only by one of my hands, the other still fending off Cocoa’s muddy and exuberant greetings.
“Cocoa . . . sit.” His voice is faint, as if he has to remember how to speak. “Stay, Cocoa.”
The dog sits . . . on my feet. Wet fur, on my feet. She stinks of wet dog, a pungent smell.
I unwind the towel wrapped in a turban around my hair and hand it to Logan, who, without looking away from me, kneels beside his dog, unclips her leash, and wipes her down carefully and lovingly, each one of her paws, her legs, her long body, her floppy ears, over and over until she’s wiggling to get free.
“Go to your room, Cocoa. Go lie down.” His voice is still faint, and he’s still staring at me, and I can’t move, paralyzed somehow by the superheated blue of Logan’s gaze.
Cocoa barks once, and then trots into her room.
My back is to the wall, cold against my bare spine. I need to cover myself, but I can’t.
Logan is in front of me, standing tall and broad mere inches away, and he’s wet, too, but now he’s so warm he feels like he could be steaming. I smell him, man-scent as pungent as wet dog.
He lifts his shirt, peels it off, baring a torso that is a sculpted wonder of lean, corded muscle. He isn’t a mammoth bear of a man, not like the only other male body I’ve seen in this state of undress. Clad in those faded blue jeans and nothing else, he is tall, over six feet, but he is a man of razor sharpness, each muscle defined as if cut into his body, each muscle lean and hard. He has no spare flesh or muscle, nothing extra, nothing unneeded. He is all hard lines and deeply etched grooves. There are scars, too. Thin white lines crisscrossing his left pectoral, his right bicep, and left forearm high up near the elbow. Two round puckered scars on his right shoulder, one in the meat of his muscle, the other higher up on the collarbone, and a third lower down, just beneath his ribs. There are tattoos coloring the skin on his shoulder, a nearly indecipherable jumble of images on his left arm from collarbone to just above the elbow, so that they’d be all but hidden if he wore a short-sleeve shirt. I see cartoon pinup girls and flames and a Jolly Roger made of a grinning skull and crossed assault rifles and initials in Old English lettering nearly hidden in a snarl of barbed wire, phrases I can’t quite make out in the same lettering. The whole tangle of images begins just above his elbow, designed as if to grow out of a tree whose roots wrap around his bicep, the jumble of images and designs forming the trunk, and the branches extending in skeletal fingers across his collarbone and back toward his shoulder blades.
My fingers itch to trace the images, to sort them and name them and find out their stories.
His shirt plops to the floor, a wet sound. Water streams in rivulets down his face, over his neck and shoulders, and follows the line of his sternum, over his diaphragm, and into the deeply etched grooves of his abdomen.
“You got mud on you,” he murmurs, his voice a smooth basso ribbon sliding over me. His fingers trace across the upper slope of my breast, through the muddy paw print.
“Well, I was clean,” I say, for lack of anything better.
“Now we’ll have to fight over the shower.”
“You go. This will wipe off.”
He reaches down between us, takes the end corner of the towel, lifts it, and wipes at the mud until my skin is clean again. “There. Good as new.”
Of course, in lifting the towel, he bared a significant portion of my bare skin, from knee to belly. The air is cold on my skin, and I’m trembling. Or maybe it’s Logan making me tremble.
One hand pressed to my chest, keeping me at least nominally covered, I mirror his action, lifting a corner of the towel and using it to wipe at the droplets of water on his chest.
How easy it would be to drop the towel. Some part of me wants to, feels daring enough to risk it. To let him see me. To let him touch me, skin to bare skin.
I wonder if he can read my mind: His hand steals around my back, tugs me to him. I stumble, and willingly fall against him, cheek to chest. Heartbeat, like a drum: Bumpbump—bumpbump—bumpbump. His flesh is warm, smooth, firm, damp. My cheek sticks to his chest, but I have no desire to pull away. My hands are on his chest, palms flat against his skin on either side of my head. My left palm is on the right side of his chest, and I can feel the puckered scars there. Bullet wounds, is my guess. My fingertips touch the scars, trace them gently.
Logan murmurs in my ear. “Those weren’t as bad as they look. Hit meat and bone, mostly.” He takes my hand, moves it down so my fingers touch the wound just beneath his rib cage. “This one nearly got me. Rotated home, took me damn near six months to recover. Nicked the bottom of my lung, narrowly missed a few other important bits.”
Who is this crazy woman inhabiting my body? Not me, not the self I’m accustomed to being. This woman, she is wild, daring. She clutches his ribs with both hands, feeling thick slabs of muscle under sensitive, exploring fingertips. This woman, this me, this X? Her lips touch skin. Feather over tattoos, cross the centerline of his sternum, kiss, kiss, kiss, and touch those wicked scars. My lips, his skin; explosive chemistry. Delicate touch, just a breath, motion across flesh, but enough to set me ablaze. I feel him shake under my hands, under my mouth. I kiss each scar. I don’t know why. Each long-healed slice on his skin—“Close encounters of the shrapnel kind,” he murmurs—a kiss. A burn mark on his forearm, shiny, too smooth, rippled—“Got too close to a hot rifle barrel,” he whispers in explanation—kissed.
Every time my lips touch his skin, he inhales sharply, as if my mouth is afire, as if my tongue is white-hot, scorching his flesh.
Bare skin under my hands, hard muscle . . . I’m addicted. Drunk with him. I pause the skein of kisses, lips on his clavicle, and just touch. Fingers on his shoulder blades, tracing the bright ink I can see with eyes closed, even, down low to explore his waist above denim, slipping palms up sides to stutter fingertips over ribs. A poem of touch, a song of kisses.
“X, you gotta stop.” His voice is tense, wired, slow with precision.
“Why?” I’ve never felt such need, felt such pleasure in merely touching. I revel in being allowed to touch as I wish, no guidance, no commands, no instructions. Only touching as I wish, mouth moving of its own volition, my small hands exploring a work of art.
“Because now isn’t the time.” He grabs my left hand, gathers my right into the same gentle grip, brushes my hair out of my face with his empty hand. “And you keep this up, I’ll forget that.”
“What isn’t it the time or place for?” I look up as I ask this, meet his eyes.
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