Page 30 of His to Seduce
The quiet pattering of raindrops hitting the roof of the bungalow and windows pulled me from sleep in the morning.
I roused, stretching my limbs, only to slide my hand across David’s bare chest and stomach.
Peeking an eye open, I found myself still next to him, waking exactly how I’d fallen asleep. My cheek to his shoulder, my lips near his chest, my arm and one leg draped over his body. At my back, the heat of his hand held me tight to him. I tilted my chin up to see if he was awake, but his eyes were still closed, his lips slightly parted.
His chest rose and dipped in that soothing, quiet rhythm of someone deep asleep.
Unwilling to wake him,likingthe fact that waking up next to David for the second day in a row didn’t bring on a rush of embarrassment or fear, I peered out the window and watched the rain continue to fall, hard enough to ruin any thoughts of outside fun. Heavy enough to make me nostalgic, reminding me of summer storms that made me curl up with a blanket and a book, doing nothing but reading my current favorite novel.
In less than forty-eight hours, David had begun changing my perspective of him. He was a man who laughed easily. I doubted he’d ever passed on a dare in his life. He carried himself with a quiet confidence, a saunter when he moved that said he knew the kind of man he was, knew who he wasn’t, and he wouldn’t be swayed to be someone else. He was perfectly comfortable in his skin…clothed or unclothed…and he was loyal. Like me, he still had the same friends he’d had since college, but they weren’t just people he talked about; they were men he’d dropped everything for in order to move closer and help out when needed.
After he’d flirted and teased me and made his attraction to me obvious for the last five months, I was beginning to think I’d pushed him away for all the wrong reasons.
That maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t just a bartender who would pick up and leave at any moment.
Perhaps he was the kind of man who didn’t just stick around when things got hard, but threw himself into a storm to help those he cared about.
The concept was so foreign to me, I couldn’t grasp it.
I had the weekend with him, one more night to enjoy him before our flights returned us to Detroit in just over twenty-four hours. I had one more day to get to know him, to try my damnedest to get past the memory of change clanking in a server’s apron tied around his waist. To get over anything that could possibly hold me back from allowing him to pursue me when we returned home.
Eventually, he stirred beneath me. His hand at my back drifted up my spine and down to my hip. His breath quickened, and I tilted my head up again to this time greet his sleepy, half-lidded blue eyes.
“Good morning,” I whispered, smiling softly.
“How long have you been awake?”
“Not long.” I turned back to the window, taking the moment to relish the feel of his skin beneath my palm, the pitter-patter of raindrops, and the hint of sun that seemed determined to peek through the clouds. “I was watching it rain.”
He adjusted beneath me, turning to look out the window. The scruff on his jaw scraped against the top of my head as he moved.
“Seems like the perfect day to stay in bed all day.”
I laughed against his chest, brushing my lips against his firm, muscled skin. He tensed from my soft movements, and I pulled back.
“I was thinking of when I was kid,” I admitted, forcing myself to open up. It wasn’t easy. Oftentimes, memories weren’t a good thing.
His hand on my back continued gliding up and down my spine, until he settled on my hip. Like he knew exactly where to touch me to make me tense, his fingertips grazed my scar. I froze as he ran his finger along the length of it and lost my previous thought until he asked, “What were you thinking about?”
I blinked rapidly, unsure if my vision went blurry from the rain at the windows muddling my sight or if it was from tears.
Releasing a shuddering breath, I felt David’s hand freeze on my hip, on my scar. Horrific memories flashed in my mind before I focused on the rain, the bungalow, the warmth of the room, and the heat of his body next to mine.
“I told you last night that I grew up living in a trailer, really run down, right?”
His hand on my skin tightened, burning into scar tissue that never healed enough. “Yes.”
“We had this hole in our roof and then in our ceiling. We couldn’t fix it and we couldn’t afford to have someone else come out, so my mom used to patch it with duct tape.” I could still clearly the see the crisscross patterns of gray tape against a yellowed ceiling. “Anyway, sometimes when it’d rain really hard, the water would get into our living room.”
Though it usually did, shame didn’t fill me as I spoke the words out loud.
Chuckling at the memory, the first time I’d ever found anything humorous about the way I lived, I laughed harder. “I could literally dance in the rain while still being inside.”
As proven last night, we had two completely different upbringings, his probably at private schools, city pools with lifeguards, and a tree house built by a loving father.
I had dirty streets and games of kick-the-can using rusted soup cans with other barefoot, scraggly haired children. Many who had it way worse than I ever could have imagined.
Next to me, with David holding me tight to him, his lips pressing against the top of my head, I was safe…for the first time in a long time…to be completely myself.
