"Scared. Excited. Exhausted." She hesitated. It seemed silly to not admit what he already knew. "Turned on. Very." She confessed it in a small voice.
"I was surprisingly turned on myself. As a rule I am quite controlled."
He gave her that back and it made her feel better. She let herself relax totally into him, enjoying the feeling his strength gave her. She'd been alone so long, she hadn't expected to want his touch, to need it, but she was fast realizing she craved it.
"Are you willing to take the next step with me?"
She turned her head to look at him. That beautiful, scarred face. "Next step?"
"Are you comfortable enough with me to wear more revealing clothes, or none at all, depending on what I'm looking for?"
Her heart thudded, the rhythm a little erratic. She started to turn her head away, afraid he would see that was exactly what she wanted, but she was afraid. Shadow riders didn't show fear.
He caught her chin before she could hide from him. At once she read satisfaction there. "Say it for me."
She moistened her lips and nodded. "Yes." A commitment then. To him. To them. Maybe before she died, she'd leave behind a book of beautiful Japanese art for Ricco. Someone would know she'd lived, and maybe he would think of her occasionally.
CHAPTER SEVEN
R
icco stood outside the door of Mariko's room. That rage in him he never quite managed to keep suppressed had risen to the surface as he'd carried her from his studio to her room. He'd placed her carefully on her bed, told her to drink lots of water and get some sleep. He'd thanked her and had to leave abruptly because she looked so beautiful and delicious lying on her bed he'd wanted to kiss her senseless. Kiss her until she gave herself entirely to him.
Every step back to her room, she protested she was too heavy for him to carry. At first, he'd been insulted. He might not be the tallest of his brothers, but he was in the best shape. No one trained harder or worked out more. He ran. He lifted. He did both heavy and speed-bag work. He took down his brothers and any other rider asking to train with them. Just because he'd been in an accident didn't mean he was unable to carry a woman weighing less than a hundred and twenty pounds around. It was a blow to his pride – at first.
He realized when he got a good look at her face, when he'd forced her to quit hiding against his chest, that her protests weren't about his lack of strength. They weren't about him at all. They were all about her. She believed she was far too heavy, and who had done that to her? Who had made her believe she was anything but beautiful? He knew women much heavier who, to him, were gorgeous. It wasn't about a woman's weight, it was about who she was, if that brightness shone through her eyes and skin and hair. Ricco found beauty in art. Women were a form of art. All shapes and sizes. All body types.
The thing that enraged him was that Mariko, by any standards, would be considered a beautiful woman. She had beautiful symmetry. She had gorgeous bone structure. Her hair was thick and wild, silky soft. Hair a man wanted to see on his pillow. Hair he'd like to grip in his fist when he was kissing her or she had her fantasy mouth wrapped around his cock.
She had a completely false image of herself. He had seen the stunned look in her eyes when she'd looked at herself in the mirror – as if for the first time she saw beauty. It probably was her first time. At least he'd been the one to give her that, but she should have had it from the time she was an infant.
He put his palm on the door, level with where her head would have been. He just stood there. Silent. He had never believed a woman could accept what was inside of him. He'd worked hard to get rid of his demons, but it had been impossible. In the end, he'd accepted who he was because he had no choice. He had demons. He lived with them. He would be asking Mariko to live with them as well.
There were two ways he could ease the rage when it overwhelmed him, when the devil rode him hard. He could beat the shit out of a heavy bag until his hands bled right through the wraps, or he could use his ropes. He needed a woman willing to accept those things in him. The good thing, he reminded himself, was that he knew what he was asking, and that made it easy for him to accept a woman the way she was.
He might be accepting, but he'd never connected with a woman on any real level. Not until Mariko. He wished things were different. He wished he were different. He wished he hadn't done so many of the stupid things he'd done publicly. He couldn't take those things back or sweep them under the carpet.
"Okay, baby," he whispered softly. "Give me time before you decide to kill me or run. I can feel that in you, the need to run away from me, but you're really trying to run away from yourself." All of them were. He was. Mariko. Nicoletta. He knew all about running away from one's demons. He had them, and he often didn't want to face them. He used everything he could to escape them. Nicoletta had them. Mariko had them. Maybe most people did, just not quite as ugly as the ones he carried.