Page 55 of Until You Found Me

She comes as quickly as he did, swept away by sensation, fisting the sheets in a hard grip and chasing his mouth with her hips, fearful he might stop before she’s squeezed every ounce of pleasure from her orgasm. He follows her until she’s boneless and unmoving. Only then does he look up at her from the vee of her legs.

He hasn’t said anything about the scars on her body, but he’s noticed. Of course he has, and when she locks eyes with him, he turns his head to kiss the line along her inner thigh, soothing a long-healed wound.

“I don’t remember it happening,” she says sadly.

He drops another kiss to the vertical scar across her lower belly where a baby must have been pulled out in some long-lost hospital room.

“Don’t remember that either.” She frowns. “Come up here and lay with me?”

He makes the short journey up but stalls after that, unsure of what to do or how to hold her until she’s adjusted them so he’s wrapped around her back, his arm snug across her breasts.

“Still think we’re trauma bonded?” he rumbles in her ear.

She smirks. “Oh yeah. Big time.”

“That’s not all we are though, right?”

The insecurity in that question breaks her heart.

“No. That’s not all we are. Fuck Victor and his labels. That isn’t all we are.” She squeezes his arm where it’s curled around her chest. “What did he say to you before we left?”

“That you should take a few days and schedule another session soon. Thinks you’re close to a breakthrough but only if you keep trying. And to call Carl about doing a sketch of the girl you saw.”

She shrinks in on herself, anxiety crushing her soul.

“Hey, you wanna go to Winter Fest tomorrow? It’s a whole thing. I usually don’t go but they got little shops and food. Could be a decent way to spend the day?”

“Winter Fest?” Her lips curve in a brief excitement, dropping just as quickly. “It might be dangerous to go out. He could be there.”

“I won’t let anything happen to you. Lotsa people there. No one’s gonna try anything.”

She refuses to let that evil man ruin something else, so she nods quickly, scooting back against Logan’s chest to soak up more heat. “Let’s go to Winter Fest.”

Chapter 13

A scream loud enough to crack the windows startles him awake in the night.

Logan grabs for the gun on instinct, certain someone must be breaking in. When he finally releases the safety, he realizes they are alone and the sound he heard was caused by an ongoing nightmare. The initial scream fades, yet Tessa promptly begins another, scratching her skin and fixating on her hands, as if searching for chunks of flesh.

“Hey, hey, don’t do that. You’ll hurt yourself.” He keeps calm even though she’s scaring the shit out of him.

She’s too focused on trying to rip her own body apart to pay him any attention. Is it bugs? Roaches or ants crawling across her arms? Or is that only his first instinct after growing up in a bug-infested house?

“Tessa? Tessa, look at me, wake up.” He rubs her arm with a light touch, trying to soothe her out of it rather than jolt her back to consciousness. She stares right through him when he moves into her field of view and that’s when he notices the streaks of blood on her wrists and decides he can’t let this go on. “Tessa, wake up!”

Her reaction to his sudden, sharp yell is volatile, sending her jerking away and stumbling off the bed until she’s pressedup against the closet, then sliding down to the ground, yelling at him not to touch her.

“Don’t you ever fucking touch me again! Fuck you! I hate you. I hate you. This is all your fault. She’d be here if you didn’t…”

She isn’t talking to him, she can’t be. He pushes through the reactionary pang in his heart and edges closer. “I need you to look at me. You’re in the trailer, remember? It was just a dream.”

He slides off the foot of the bed to kneel down so he isn’t hovering above her, leaving some space between them in case she lashes out. The two of them are crunched into the tiny space where she once cradled him in her lap after he lapsed into a diabetic coma.

She’s trembling hard enough that the thin wood on the closet shakes. Maybe that helps snap her out of it as much as his voice does because she finally looks at him with recognition laced with guilt. “Logan?”

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“I had a nightmare.”

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