“Because you’re far too mysterious.”
My mouth curled up at the corner. “Mysterious?”
“Perhaps the most mysterious woman I’ve ever met.”
“I wish.”
“I think I might have to search you,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “Just to be sure you’re not hiding anything else.”
“And if you don’t find anything?”
“Oh I’ll find something,” he said. “And I won’t stop until I do. It’ll be something good, too.”
“How do you know?”
“Just a hunch I have.”
I raised my eyebrows. “A hunch?”
“Yeah.”
“Where will you start?”
“I think I’ll start with your Fighter Arm,” he said, nodding towards the arm in his hands.
I smiled. “My Fighter Arm?”
“Don’t you think that’s a good name for it?” he asked. “Or do you already have one?”
“No,” I said. “Fighter Arm sounds good.”
He cleared his throat. “Anyway, that’s where I’m going to start.”
“Just because or-”
“Because I figure if I can get past that one, I can get past anything.”
“So you have a strategy?”
“More like a plan of attack.”
“I see,” I said, feeling my pulse quicken.
“Plus, that’s the part of you that’s already disrobed.”
I pursed my lips.
Aiden raised my wrist to his mouth and kissed the inside of it so lightly it was like he’d dragged a rose petal across my skin. His eyes flicked up at me and lowered again at which point he kissed slightly higher on the inside of my forearm. Then he did it again. And again.
And with every inch further up my arm he moved, I felt my body begin to light up like a warehouse whose lights come on section by section until my whole body was on high alert and he was just inches from the first scar.
I willed him not to kiss it, willed him to stop before he put his face so close to my unsightly, mangled skin.
But he did kiss it- just as softly and gently as he had my wrist, without even flinching. And I felt the tension drain from my toes and fingertips until there was nothing left but my overwhelming affection for him.
And then he kissed another one, his lips as soft as a feather, changing the way I saw the part of me I’d been hiding for so long, changing the way I felt about it.
There was nothing to do but watch him as he made his way past my scars all the way to my shoulder.
And he didn’t stop there. He dragged his lips across my collarbone and then up my neck. Then he pushed the other side of my robe off my opposite shoulder, moving his lips down, inch by inch. To my chest, to my stomach, to my thighs.
And then he made it all better.
Like only he could.