Page 54 of Beneath the Burn

A prickle lit his skin. “That’s a limit.”

“Talking about your demons is a limit?”

For a moment, he couldn’t shake the grip of the old shack. He saw his aunt’s deserted eyes and felt the stiff way she touched him.

The fingers against his face nudged him, pulling him back to the present. “Yeah.” His voice cracked. “That’s a limit.”

“What are your other limits?”

How could he convince them both they could be together when they couldn’t share the simplest thing? “No hands.”

“No hands where?” Her eyes flicked to her own hand resting against his cheek.

He sighed and lowered their arms to her lap. “Anywhere.”

Her auburn brows gathered. “Then how—”

“I had control of the touch. I put your fingers on my face and kept hold of them.”

She sat there, taking it in, becoming infected with it. She was probably jumping to the next logical question. What would sex be like with a man she couldn’t embrace?

She blinked. “Can I touch your toenail?”

He stared at her in stunned silence.

“Or your nose? Can I touch the tip?” She squinted and her lips bowed downward.

So fucking cute. “I don’t know how to respond to that.”

She was so still, studying his nose, her hands cupped in his. “How do you not know?”

His laugh stumbled out, as awkward and confused as he was. “No one has ever tried to touch my nose.”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“Maybe.”

“Then let me touch it. The teensy-weensy tip.”

The challenge in her tone suspended him in a moment of lucidity. Wonderful things were going to happen with this girl. She would push him. Maybe even fix him. If his nightmares chased her away, though, if she ran out the door, his existence would go up in an inferno.

He shook his head. “It could flip a switch. I don’t want to chance it.”

Women fixated on him all the time with intense wide eyes, wanting things from him. Never had a woman stared at him like that, as Charlee did then, wanting thingsforhim.

“What would happen if we tried it?” She wiggled the finger laced with his.

He knew she was testing him with that minute movement against his hand, but his trigger was unpredictable. “Remember the guy curled up on the floor in the dining room?”

She pursed her lips. “Yeah. Okay, better not then.” Her eyes lowered to his nose as if she wasn’t ready to let it go.

That decided it. He would confront the thing that made him like this. He would become a man she could hold, despite his tattered and worn edges. First, he needed to know more about the man who hurt her. “Who took you, Charlee?”

She withdrew her hands and squared her shoulders, but the abused girl emerged in the falter of her breath. “Roy Oxford.”

Did he hear her right? “Roy Oxford?”

She slumped in the chair and let her head fall against the upholstery, turning to look out the window. Maybe to watch the haughty metropolis bustling below. Maybe to avoid his eyes.

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