It was enough. Just to be sitting here. Wrapped around the woman who owned him as the steam began to rise, and their skin began to heat. Her head pressed to his chest, and her arm tucked around his waist, her shivers eased until her body rested warm and pliant against his.
“I’m sorry,” she said, keeping her chin tucked.
“Don’t be,” he replied, his voice gruff. “Not for any of this. What Maya did wasn’t your fault, baby.”
“It might’ve been,” she whispered.
“Why do you think that?” he asked, encouraging her to get the things troubling her off her chest.
“I slapped her. Hard. The night before…” She wiggled in his lap so she could look up at him. “After she threw my journal into the fire, she threatened to take you away from me, said I didn’t deserve to have your baby. Planned to tell our parents to force me to get an abortion. She was so mean. So hateful. And I snapped, and I…and I…”
“You hit her,” he finished for her, and she nodded, her eyes once again welling with tears.
“It was all my fault,” she said, falling into her old habit of taking responsibility for the things she had no control over. “She ran out. Didn’t come home that night. My parents were so worried. And then the next day…”
She didn’t finish. She didn’t need to. What Maya had done next—the rape, the murders—had altered the course of both their lives. “It wasn’t your fault, sugar plum.” He tightened his arms around her. “No more than it was mine.”
“Your fault?” She turned fully to face him, popping off his lap and straddling her knees over his legs before nestling her butt down on his thighs. “Why would you blame yourself? You didn’t do anything.”
He reached for her with both hands, brushing her wet hair away from her face so he could cup her cheeks. “Before confronting you, she came to my apartment. Tried to seduce me. When I rejected her, she told me about the pregnancy and lied about you wanting an abortion. I told her she was crazy. That you’d never give up our baby. That I’d never choose her over you. That she didn’t have half your brain or even a quarter of your heart. I was an asshole to her, cruel and unkind, when I should’ve recognized she needed help.”
“Oh, Jay, no.” She shook her head, and leaning into him, she brushed a quick kiss against his lips. “You’re not the reason Maya did what she did.”
“Neither are you,” he argued. “Chipped or not, she was manipulating both of us. Trying to hurt us. Trying to come between us. Honestly, she was a disaster waiting to happen. I’m just sorry I didn’t recognize the signs in time.”
“Nobody did.” She shuddered, and he reached for the hem of her shirt.
“Take this off.” He peeled the soaked material off her body with gentle hands, and she let him. He removed her bottoms next, shimmying them down her hips and off her legs until she kneeled naked above him, her scars on full display.
“You too,” she ordered, scrambling off his lap and taking the same care to help him out of his wet clothes.
He removed his boxers last, and her gaze lingered on Maya’s handiwork. Two-inch letters carved into his skin that were supposed to form a set of initials, but instead, had healed into jagged lines with no meaning. Just a random puckering of skin near the juncture of thigh and groin, hinting of past trauma, but not the reminder Maya had wanted it to be.
“Come here.” The ache to touch her too much to ignore, he hooked his arms around her waist and settled her between his legs. Her back to his chest.
She took his hands and pressed them over her abdomen. Over the empty space where their baby had been. Wanted and loved. His palms heating against her flesh, he splayed his fingers wide. A protective gesture, and a way for him to hold the child of his heart.
Yeah, as long as he lived, he’d miss his daughter, but until they were reunited, he’d continue to worship her mother. Jay and Becca. Together they were whole, and more importantly, on their way to healing.
The spray of the water hit their legs, misted around them, fogged the air, and turned the glass opaque as they sat in peaceful silence, content just to be.
“I never named her,” Becca said, her grip on his hands firming as she looked up at him over her shoulder, her black eyes wide, her expression full of raw vulnerability. “I…I didn’t want to. Not without you.”
He nodded, and a lump formed in his throat. “She needs a name,” he agreed. “How about Jayla or Jaylene or Jaybecca?”
She snorted. The most reassuring sound in the world. “Ew. No.”
“Okay,” he huffed a laugh against her shoulder before trailing his nose up the curve of her neck and planting a kiss behind her ear. “Let’s hear it, cupcake. What do you think we should name her?”
“What about Iyla Marie?” She caressed her fingers over his. “After our mothers.”
“Iyla Marie,” he repeated, testing the name against his tongue. “It’s perfect, Bec. I love it.”
“Me too,” she whispered, more an exhaled breath than a sound, and then stronger. “Me too.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Back in bed, Becca stared at the ceiling, or rather in the general direction of the ceiling. Too dark to see anything, she lay cocooned in the clean sheets they’d put on the mattress earlier.
