Page 36 of The Truth About Love

“Just after I arrived you kind of fell asleep.” My eyes widen. I must have been really out of it. “So, Freddy helped me carry you to your truck and I drove it back here.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.” She chuckles. “You were pretty drunk.”

An image of Summer-Raine nestled on my lap and me whispering something about cobbler flashes through my head. I try so hard to catch it, but it escapes me as quickly as it came.

“Did we talk about cobbler or something?”

Her eyes widen in surprise. “Um, yeah.” She laughs nervously. “You told me I smell like peach cobbler.”

“Sweet Jesus.” I groan, covering my eyes with my hands in shame. “Tell me that’s the worst of it. Tell me I didn’t say anything more embarrassing than that?” I’m practically begging at this point.

Tell me I didn’t do something stupid like tell you I love you. Because I do, of course I do, but that’s not how I wanted you to find out.

She assesses me quietly, chewing the inside of her cheek as she thinks about something. There’s an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach telling me that I’m forgetting something important, but Summer-Raine shakes her head and relief fills me instantly.

“Relax, quarterback. You were worried I was mad at you and you were quite emphatic about your relief that I wasn’t. After that and the peach cobbler comment, you fell asleep.”

I ignore the niggling feeling saying that there’s something she’s not telling me and push it to the back of my mind, because I’m a coward and it’s easier that way.

“I wasn’t wrong though. You do smell like peach cobbler.”

“And you smell like Christmas trees,” she says, turning her blushing face away as she climbs out of bed.

I try to be a gentleman and not concentrate on the way her t-shirt barely covers her ass or the extraordinary length of her legs. The way her pretty toes are painted white and how they complement the natural tan of her skin. But I can’t stop my eyes from raking over every inch of her. Can’t stop my body from responding to what I see.

Absolute perfection.

She pads over to her closet, disappearing inside but forgetting to close the door behind her.

I should look away. I know I should. But my eyes stay fixed on the vixen taking off her pyjama shirt, leaving her in nothing but a scrap of black underwear.

But it’s not the bareness of her breasts that catches my eye or even the torturous curve of her spine. It’s the lines that cover both her arms from wrists to elbows. Red, angry scars. There’s hardly a millimetre of skin that hasn’t been touched by them.

I know instantly that she’s put them there herself.

She’s always completely covered up, never wearing anything short-sleeved or loose enough that could fall down and reveal her scars. So, I’ve had my suspicions before. But it’s one thing to think it and another to see it.

I don’t know what to do, but I have to make this better somehow. Have to cover every inch of her scarred skin with my lips, kiss away all of her suffering and replace it with unyielding love. Her pain, so clearly carved into her body, hurts me more than if I’d taken a knife to my own skin.

Though I shouldn’t, I push open her closet door and step up behind her.

“Auden, what the fuck?”

She scrambles to cover herself. Not her body, as you’d expect, but her arms.

There she stands, naked all for a scrap of lace covering the space between her legs, breasts bared to me, her figure completely exposed, and yet her instinctual reaction is to hide her scars from me.

“What did I tell you?” I growl, reaching for her hand and stretching her arm out in front of me, scars facing the sky. “Don’t ever hide from me, Summer-Raine.”

She tries to pull away, but I don’t let her.

Her eyes, wide and fearful, track my movements with the same expression a field mouse would give a cat right before it pounces.

“Shhh, baby, it’s okay,” I whisper.

She flinches at the first touch of my lips to her scars, but I don’t let it stop me. I trace kisses over her perfectly imperfect skin, breathing all my love into her to somehow counteract her trauma. And when my lips have loved every inch of her arm, I move on to the other and start all over again.

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