Page 101

My voice is suddenly raspy. “Yeah. Can you undo my zipper?”
“In the bedroom.”
I follow him, my dress playing around my ankles. His bed is made, the pillows are plumped.
“Here, sit.”
I perch on the edge of his bed and he sits behind me. “Can I unpin your hair?”
“Okay.”
He pulls one pin out of my updo and it loosens. He presses the bobby pin into my palm and whispers a kiss over the nape of my neck.
Goosebumps pebble my skin.
He pulls out another and kisses the sensitive skin under my ear.
“I have a lot of pins in my hair.”
“I have a lot of kisses,” he says, wiggling out one more.
My whole body is on fire by the time he’s done, and I count twelve pins in my hand.
“You are so beautiful,” he murmurs, moving my hair aside and tenderly kissing my shoulder. “I don’t know how a man could look at you and want to hurt you. I told Zane I’ll probably hurt you, but if I do, I’ll hurt myself just as much or maybe more. People do that to each other, don’t they?”
I turn and look at him, crimes he has yet to commit haunting his eyes. “I don’t know. I’ve never been in love. If Max were here, I would hurt him. I didn’t want with him what he wanted with me.”
I undo his bow tie, surprised it’s a real bow and not a fake. Maybe he wears tuxes more often than I thought. I slowly unbutton his dress shirt revealing a white tank.
We’re sitting in the semi-dark, the hallway’s weak orange light drifting into the room. There’s something about him that’s a little sad, a little melancholy, but we just came from Max’s dinner and he’s on both our minds.
“What do you want, Zarah?” he asks.
I finish unbuttoning his shirt, undo his onyx and silver cufflinks, and drop them onto his dresser. He lets me slide his jacket off his broad shoulders and he tosses it onto the chair in the corner of the room. Standing between his legs, I say, “I want to be able to put what Ash did behind me. I want to look forward to a future that his evil can’t touch. I want to one day be able to make love to you and not be scared of you touching me. Most of all, I want to know why.”
“Why what?”
He tugs off his dress shirt and yanks the tank over his head. He balls it up and it joins his tuxedo jacket on the chair. His dress shirt slid to the floor and he didn’t pick it up. I’m wearing more clothes than he is now.
“These are so beautiful.” I brush my fingers over the tattoos covering one of his biceps.
“You don’t think they’re ugly? Some of the women I’ve dated thought so.”
“No. Stella has a dove on her shoulder. She says it symbolizes peace. Peace she fought for reconciling her past. Maybe one day I could have something like that. Something to symbolize what I’ve lived through.”
“I’d like to be there.”
“I’d like that, too.”
Gage turns me around and slowly pulls my zipper down.
“Why what?” he asks again.
The dress slithers down my body into a heap of material on the floor. I stand in front of him in a hot pink strapless bra, matching panties, and a black garter belt. “Why he hated me.”
“He’s a sociopath, a psychopath. He hated Stella and he hated your brother, a man he claimed to be his best friend. There is no why, Zarah, no blame, no responsibility. Holy fuck, I need to stop talking.”
I laugh, and it feels good to have a positive reaction from a man. I feel beautiful, not dirty.