Caine didn’t sleep. Didn’t move. Nearly didn’t breathe.
Because he’d never before allowed another person to sleep with him this way. As a boy, he’d had to share a bedroom with other boys, sure. But at no point in the seventeen years since his fourteen-year-old self had run from that home had Caine ever done this.
His wakefulness now wasn’t because he was uncomfortable, though. Instead, it was because this moment, this…connection? felt so pure, so comforting, so fundamentally good that he didn’t want to miss a single moment.
In what little heart he still possessed, he knew whatever this was wasn’t likely to last. Daring to hope didn’t mean truly believing that a nearly impossible situation would work out the way he wanted. That wasn’t life’s M.O., at least not in his experience. Not ever.
But Emma made him want to try. To hope. To take the risk, no matter how many pieces he’d shatter into if it all went to shit. Scratch that. When. When it all went to shit.
In the meantime, he was going to memorize every second of good he got, in case he never got any more.
Breathing in the scent of strawberries from Emma’s hair, Caine made a mental catalogue of all this good. The slow, regular beat of her heart against his ribs. The heat of her everywhere they touched. The little twitches of her fingers against his chest. The deep, even draws of her breathing. That he could touch her hair and her shoulder and her arm as much as he wanted, and when she reacted at all, it was only to burrow in tighter against him.
Outside of fucking and the occasional handshake, Caine rarely touched another person or allowed himself to be touched. More often than not in his life, touch had been a painful thing. Hateful and hurtful and mean. So, just as he’d done with food and sleep and relationships, he’d shied away from touch, shied away so much that he sometimes wondered if he existed at all. If no one ever touched him, how could they know if he was real? Maybe people were all just twisted figments in each other’s tortured imaginations.
And that kind of jacked-up thinking was just one of the many reasons why all this might fit squarely into the category of felt good but was a really fucking bad idea.
“Then why are you doing it?” he whispered into the still of the night.
Because Emma was the first person who’d truly seen Caine in years. Not the biker. Not the ruthless enforcer of rules and dispenser of justice. Not the ink-and-piercing-covered punk. Each one of those personas its own kind of armor against the darkest sides of life.
But Emma…somehow it was like Emma had looked behind the veil. And, God help him, but it seemed like she hadn’t recoiled at the glimpse of the real him that she’d gotten. She treated him like he was normal, like he was her equal, like he was worthy of her respect. She made him fucking laugh. And, in such a short amount of time, she made him want, and hope, and care. It was almost as if being in her presence was like being pulled out of the darkness into her light, like being plugged into the world of the living, instead of floating as nothingness in the realm of ghosts that he so often inhabited.
Oh, there was more for her yet to see. She had no idea about the dirtiest, filthiest parts of him. He was going to have to tell her, and there was every likelihood that all this goodness would end right then.
But in the meantime, he committed every shred of this to memory.
On a sigh that sounded like pure contentment, Emma drew herself closer, her face slipping in against his neck, her thigh sliding to rest high up on his.
Caine was hard in a fucking instant. Because now he had some new things to add to that catalogue. The way her leg nudged against his balls. And the tight press of her core against the muscles of his thigh. And then, Jesus Christ, she whimpered in her sleep and her hand fisted in his shirt. A breath shuddered out of her. Caine held her tighter, unsure if she was having a nightmare but wanting her to remember that he was there. Just like he’d promised to be.
By the time the first gray light of dawn crept into the room, Caine was struggling against the leaden weight of his eyelids. He yawned so wide his jaw cracked.
Emma stirred against him, her lips pressing to his neck.
He groaned at the sweetness of it, and at the fact that he’d been hard so much overnight that he was strung fucking tight.
“Merry Christmas,” Emma whispered, not otherwise moving.
Caine debated how to respond. Christmas wasn’t something he usually recognized. It’d been a source of torment for him as a child, so as an adult, he’d never seen the point. But he knew it was important to her. One look at this house proved that.
“Yeah, it just might be,” he managed. And then he went one step further, giving her a piece of himself that he’d never before given anyone. “It’s already the best Christmas morning I’ve ever had.”
“Nothing’s happened yet,” she said, a soft, sleepy humor in the words.
“Not true. I got to hold you.” His heart beat harder at the admission.
“That is…the sweetest thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“I’m not sweet, Emma.”
She shifted so that her chin rested on the center of his chest, more of her body coming up on more of his. “You’re not only sweet, but you are absolutely capable of sweetness and gentleness.”
Fuck, what pretty words, even though they painted such a false picture of him. And fuuck, what a pretty face staring back at him, so soft and affectionate and open. “I’m not a hero, Emma. You need to remember that.”
She gave him an appraising look, one he feared was too observant, too insightful. “A hero is merely someone who risks himself in some way to help others, even if he’s scared of taking that risk or putting himself out there for others. By that definition…” She reached for his face and traced patterns over his skin. Around his jaw, his eye, his mouth. And then her fingers pushed into his short hair, her fingertips scratching against his scalp so good he nearly groaned.
All he could do was shake his head. She had it all wrong. All wrong about him, anyway. Tell her.
But before he could, Emma shifted again, bringing her face closer to his. Close enough that if he just leaned up, he could have a taste of her again. “You know what you are?”
Yeah. Yeah, he really fucking did. A jagged boulder slid into his gut. But he wanted to hear what she had to say. “What?”
“You’re the man who risked himself and saved me, we now know, from being dragged away to God only knows what fate.” She blew out a shaky breath, and damn if her fear didn’t reach into his rib cage and make it hard to breathe. Or maybe what invaded his chest was his own fear—at realizing how close he’d been to losing Emma Kerry before he’d ever met her at all. White-hot anger lanced through him at the thought.
“Okay,” he said.
“I’m not done.” She pressed a soft kiss against his lips, and the freeness of her affection stunned him. “You’re also the man who recognized that I was in danger and took it upon himself to watch over me and my house, to even talk to the police about it.”
He shrugged with one shoulder, his gaze falling somewhere in between them. “Providing protection, investigating threats, and installing security, this is what I do for the Ravens. I know you don’t know a lot about us, but we have a whole mission around defending people who can’t defend themselves. So I just slipped into that mode. But I should’ve told you what was going on. I just… I didn’t want to worry you until I was sure. And I didn’t—fuck, I know this was selfish—but I didn’t want you to hate me for letting the guy get away.”
“Yeah, you should’ve told me. So I could be more aware and know I might need to defend myself. Look at me,” she said, tilting her face to try to align their gazes.
He lifted his and met those warm blues head on, ready for whatever criticism and anger she wanted to dish out.
“But last night, out on the street, you admitted you had something to tell me. And then you did. Just…next time, maybe tell me at the start, okay?”
Caine blinked. That was it?
“And if you have any advice on how to make my voice louder or more convincing than the one in your head that keeps telling you I could ever hate you or that anything about my attack was your fault, could you please let me know?”
His jaw dropped, and Caine felt like he’d just walked cartoon-like into an unseen pole. This…this was just one more proof that this woman saw him. Right now, that wasn’t super fucking comfortable. But it was so foreign to be seen that he couldn’t do anything but bask in it, even if he felt utterly exposed.
“Fuck, Emma,” he managed, his thoughts too tangled to even attempt a meaningful answer to her question. “What are you doing to me?”
“Trying to let you know I care,” she said. Like it was obvious. Like it was normal. Like it wasn’t blowing his goddamn mind. And then she just kept right on doing it. “Because you’re also the man who, for almost three weeks now, has inhabited my dreams and dominated my thoughts and…” She ducked her gaze.
“What?” he rasped, dying for her to continue. He rolled them, pinning her under him. And, damn if that wasn’t a heady thing, especially as she went soft and pliant, her cheeks filling with a pink heat he tasted with his tongue. “And what?”
“And made me so horny so often that I feel like I’m going a little crazy.”
Trapped in between them, his cock was so demandingly hard that his hips surged against hers. “Christ,” he bit out, half wondering if he was asleep in his trailer having a dream from which he never wanted to wake. Because stuff like this didn’t happen to him. “I’ll get you off again. Gladly. Did you like my mouth?”
Her eyes went wide. “I freaking loved your mouth. Did you really need to ask?”
“I just want to be good for you.”
“Then just be you. I’m crazy about that mouth, but I’m also crazy about the rest of you, too.” Her arms looped around his neck and her fingers played in the back of his hair. It was only a matter of time… Her fingers moved over the ruined skin above his hairline where the hair didn’t grow right anymore. She didn’t say anything about it, but he didn’t miss the questions that passed over her expression. “Kiss me?”
On a groan, he did. His mouth found hers already open, her tongue meeting his lick for lick and stroke for stroke. She moaned and shifted beneath him, her knees pulling up and opening so that his hardness lined up with her sweet heat. They kissed until he couldn’t breathe and didn’t want to, not if it meant parting from her, and then she rolled her hips and ground her core against him. Once, twice, three times. God, she could use him like this forfuckingever and he’d die a happy man. Or as close to happy as he was capable of. “Yeah, Emma. You want to get off on my cock?”
Her eyes were soft and hooded and so full of desire that he thrust himself and met her hips as they rolled again. “Yes,” she whispered, panting against his lips. “I told you. I want you. All of you.”
The words chased away some of the lust-drunk haze in his brain. He pulled back from the kiss. He wasn’t shy about sex. Like, not at all. But he was usually with people who he’d made prior arrangements with through hook-up message boards, and therefore whose whole approach to sex was transactional and purely physical. Fucking was a given before anyone even walked in the room. This…this was different. And the unknown expectations and boundaries were suddenly kinda fucking terrifying. “What do you want, Emma? You’re gonna have to spell it out for me. I don’t want to risk reading you wrong.”
She cupped his face in her hand. “I want you inside me.”
Jesus. His forehead fell against hers as he was torn in two. Between wanting nothing more than what she wanted and being dead sure he shouldn’t take it. “Are you sure? There’s so fucking much you don’t know about me.”
She shook her head. “Listen to my voice, Caine. I want you. I ache for you. And I know everything I need to know to make this decision. Unless…unless you don’t want this with me?”
“No,” he bit out, thrusting the hard length of his cock against her soft heat. “Fuck, no, that’s not it. Tell me you can’t feel how much I want you.”
Her fingers tugged at the back of his shirt. “So then—”
He pushed up on his hands, separating them and halting her effort to undress him. Regret slinked through his gut, and he wondered if this would be the moment she came to her senses. “Wait,” he said, getting up to stand on the blanket.
She sat up as Caine undressed down to his badly ruined birthday suit, revealing another layer of what was so fucking ugly about him. His dick went soft in anticipation of her revulsion. He’d seen it on others’ faces before, despite that his profile on the boards was brutally, graphically honest about everything he was and wasn’t.
Finally he met her wide eyes. “You can change your mind.”
Emma shifted to her knees as her gaze ran over him, no doubt taking in everything. On his front, the scars, the cigarette burns, the tattoos, the piercings. And then he turned and gave her his back. Where fire had ravaged the right side with second- and third-degree burns from the bottom of his ribs to the lower part of his scalp. He’d inked parts of that skin, which was whiter and stretched tighter from the skin grafts and surgeries, but not all of it.
“Come closer.” Warily, he stood in front of where she now knelt. And then she wrapped her arms around his ass and laid the side of her face against his lower belly. “I want you inside me.”
The words hit him like a shock wave, nearly taking him right off his feet. His heart tripped over itself. His cock grew. The backs of his eyes stung. Blinking up at the ceiling, his hand fell to Emma’s hair, the strokes against the silky blond the only thing he could manage for a long moment.
And then, Jesus, her tongue bathed his erection. Caine nearly doubled over from the unexpected goodness of it, especially since his reaction apparently fueled her on. She gave another, wetter, lick along his whole length and then took him inside her mouth.
“Em,” he rasped, peering down at the sight of her on her knees, at his feet, with his cock in her mouth. Both of his hands fell to her head. She peered up at him, so much emotion in those blue eyes. But he couldn’t guess at it. He could only feel. It was a sweet, sweet torture, especially as his hips wanted to take over, wanted to swing free.
How is this happening?
Her arms smoothed up his back, her left hand lightly caressing his burn scar before she pulled away, her hand and her mouth. “Can I touch your scars? I mean, will it hurt if I do? I want to touch you everywhere, but I don’t want to hurt you.”
He did go to his knees then. Caine took her face in his hands and kissed her like she was water and he’d been thirsting to death all his life. Occasionally, someone asked him if his back still hurt him. Usually after sex as he dressed to leave. He always said no, even though the phantom pain caused by destroyed nerves sometimes hurt so much he couldn’t sleep. But no one had ever asked his permission or sought his guidance the way Emma just had. “You can touch me,” he said around the edge of the kiss, “but I know how fucking ugly it is.”
She gasped. “Caine, no, I think you’re—”
“I wish I had so much more to offer you,” he went on.
“You’re amazing, Caine. I want to explore every inch of you.”
He growled. “Don’t lie to me.”
Emma reared back. “I’m not. You need to hear me. Believe me.” She pulled off her sweatshirt and the little cotton T-shirt beneath it. And then pushed down the thin sleep shorts and yellow satin panties until she was naked too.
And God. Goddamn. She was so pretty and perfect that Caine could hardly look at her. But he did look. At the tumble of her blond waves against her fair skin. At the erect nipples on her small breasts. At how the indent of her waist flared out at her hips. At the dark-blond triangle he’d seen before. He didn’t deserve her, but Christ help him, he wanted her. His cock jutted out between them, arousal coating the tip.
She laid herself out in front of him, knees bent, legs parted. “Let me show you that you’re enough just as you are, Caine. Be with me.”