No Regrets, No Surrender(28)

He strode down the landing, aware of every feminine curve pressing into his side. The frailty she’d exhibited during her initial weeks hardened during her workouts and physical therapy. She may not have mastered walking yet, but she was close.

He would be damned if she was going to just walk away from them.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked. The question dropped into the oppressive silence clouding their trip to the door. He balanced her and unlocked the apartment. The maneuver might have been tough a month before, but practice made perfect.

He could handle anything, even while carrying her.

“Hmm?”

Normally he paused for lunch. Not today. She’d resisted showers with either of them after that first day. Her statement that she preferred her privacy in the bath smelled of a need for independence. He understood the body shyness, but they should never have backed off on them. That was Zach’s plan and he’d insisted. Zach wanted to coddle her, to keep her safe, and make her feel safe. But that wasn’t working either. If anything, the more they catered to her need to push the away, the further she retreated.

Retreat’s over.

“You seem pissed.” The faintest quaver of doubt crept into her words, and she wasn’t ‘not looking’ at him anymore.

Yes, Gunny. Pay attention to the terrain. This is about to be a bumpy ride. He shrugged a shoulder and pushed open his bedroom door with a foot. He closed it the same way. No swift escape for her. She stiffened in his arms and he ignored it. Setting her down on the bed, he rolled his head from side to side, battening down the hatches on his temper. This wasn’t about anger or rejection. It wasn’t about withdrawing from the front lines or pressing the advantage.

He tossed his keys onto the dresser and made quick work of stripping out of his clothes. Once upon a time, he wouldn’t have done that right in front of her. The thick scars from the fire in the vehicle mottled his skin from his face to his thigh. His left leg wasn’t a pretty picture either, crisscrossed with surgical scars. But she never shied away from his body, never made him feel like less of a man—not even when she had Zach to compare him to.

“Get naked. You need a shower.”

“I don’t want to take a shower.” She stared at him. Her expression tensed, and she focused on his face, but her gaze kept drifting down to his body. Her nipples strained against the front of her shirt, clearly outlined by the material. He didn’t smile, but her obvious reaction to him eased the worry gnawing inside his gut.

“But I do want one. I want to take one with you. I want to hold you. I want to touch you. I want to fuck you.” Logan didn’t mince the words. He could dress them up, call it making love, but the unbearable tension in his balls didn’t want pretty words. “I want to have hot, wet, blow-your-mind sex.” He didn’t tack on the like we used, too.

Desire flared in her hazel eyes. “I—”

“You?” He knelt down, pressing right up into her space, flattening his palms on the bed on either side of her. “You what?”

“Logan.” She shifted her weight, not quite squirming, but the troubled cloud darkening her expression stabbed at him. What was she afraid of?

“I’m right here, babe.” He caught her wrist and pressed her hand to his chest. “You can touch me. You can feel me. You can see me.”

“It’s not that.” She glanced to where her hand rested on him. Her right hand. The one she struggled with and cursed about. Her fingers curled against his skin, the barest of friction, but it sent need raging through his blood.

“Talk to me, babe. We can’t fix it if we don’t know what the problem is.” He laid bare the core of his anger. She wasn’t talking to them. She wasn’t telling them what nibbled away at the inside of her soul. Logan would face any battle, he’d take on any enemy, but he couldn’t fight what she would not allow him to see.

“What if the problem is you?” The lack of conviction in the words eased the injury they offered.

He settled his weight onto his right knee, the left didn’t like the pressure still—even on the thick padding of the carpet. “If the problem is me, then I really can’t fix it if I don’t know the source.”

“I’m not that woman anymore. The one who walked into that hotel room in Vegas. I—” She tugged her hand away. Rubbing it against her face, she jarred the hat loose and jerked to secure it.

Eyes narrowing, he pushed her hands away and swept the hat off. Her wince stabbed him. “No, you’re not that woman anymore. That woman was a stranger, one I damn near missed out on meeting because I wasn’t me anymore. I hadn’t figured out how to really be me after the surgeries. I’m not a handsome man—”