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“You, too,” she ordered him, though her eyes were glassy and her voice was rough.

He’d done that to her. And he liked that so much it made him ache even more.

Jonas stood, making short work of his T-shirt, trousers, and boots.

He was not a self-conscious man. He’d viewed himself as a weapon since the age of eighteen. A useful tool, nothing more, and before that—well, he’d been the same, but he hadn’t much liked the people who’d had their hand on his trigger.

It had been dark in their room last night in California, for the few, scant hours between the end of the reception and the cruel inevitability of the alarm that indicated it was time to head back to reality.

But it wasn’t dark now. And Bethan was staring at him, her mouth slightly ajar and her eyes wider by the moment.

It was enough to give him a complex.

“I have never understood,” she said softly.

She rose from the couch and swayed toward him, and then her fingertips were gently moving over the skin of his chest. And he couldn’t breathe.

His scars, he realized with another jarring beat of his heart.

She was touching his scars.

“What didn’t you understand?” he made himself ask.

“How a man so harsh and cold can be this beautiful,” she whispered. “Always too beautiful.”

And before he could take that on board, she bent. She pressed her lips to the top of the mess of scars that started near his shoulder and then splintered, mapping out a recordof the explosion they had both survived. Then she began to follow those scars down.

Jonas wasn’t prepared for this.

The cool brush of her fingers was like a prayer and a penance in one, and it lit him up as if he’d been waiting his whole life for the bright kiss of sunshine only she could give him. He thought he could muscle through it somehow, but as she kept going, it dawned on him that she intended to leave her mark on every last one of his scars.

Particularly the ones she’d watched him get.

“Bethan...” he began.

But her name sounded like a song, a poem. Something lyrical and unlike him.

Because he wasn’t playing any character tonight. He wasn’t wearing a role, immersing himself in a part, doing what he had to do for some broader purpose.

He was here by choice. He was here as him.

And he might not know exactly who that was, but Bethan did.

She told him with every kiss, every brush of her hand. She smiled, her mouth against his skin as she followed his scars to his back, and she knew how to identify each and every mark she found in his flesh.

As if she were the one singing. A song of battles won and lost. Knives and guns, grenades and shrapnel, and explosions of all kinds.

When she made it all around him, in a big circle to his front again, he wondered if this was what it felt like to be reborn.

Made new in her eyes.

“Absolutely beautiful,” she whispered.

“Not compared to you,” he managed to say in return. “Nothing compares to you, Bethan. Nothing ever has.”

Her eyes gleamed. “Here’s hoping nothing ever will.”

It was hard to say who moved. It was her, or it was him, and somehow, she was in his arms again. His mouth was onhers, she was twining herself around him, and they were tumbling back down onto that couch that was like its own caress.