Free The Innocent: FBI Psychics, Book 2 by Shiloh Walker Page B

quaking.
    Dealing with his jeans, he urged her into the enclosure and turned on the jets. It was programmed to the temperature he preferred, and he watched as her eyes closed in bliss. He was going to enjoy this, slicking her down with his soap, washing her hair. As he slicked the shampoo through her pink- and blue-streaked hair, he was caught off-guard. The rainbow of color washed out and she smiled at him, a sleepy, sexy smile that turned his dick to stone and his heart to mush. “Hair chalk,” she said softly. “I don’t always have the sort of job that lets me walk around with pink and blue hair. Plus sometimes I want orange or green. Or orange and pink.”
    “You’re into variety,” he murmured, rinsing the shampoo from strands made dark gold by the water.
    He eased closer to the gash, checked the bandage. “Feel okay?” he asked, painfully aware of the rasp in his voice.
    “Yeah.” She shrugged. “Just sore.”
    He nodded, told himself he should finish this up, tuck her in bed.
    He wouldn’t though, not unless that was what she wanted.
    He turned her around, stroked his hands down her naked back. Pale skin, swirls of ink. “All these tattoos,” he muttered, pressing a kiss to the vining roses that climbed up her spine. “They drive me nuts. Why roses?”
    Her breath skittered out of her on a sigh and she glanced back at him, her hair dripping in her eyes. “My grandmother…reminds me of her. Happy memories. There were roses that climbed up the wall to the window of the room where I stayed when I visited.”
    There were a lot of roses.
    And thorns. Many thorns. “And the thorns?”
    “For the pain.” Her eyes clouded and she looked back at the wall. “A lot of it, growing up. I put a thorn for the really bad memories.”
    He had counted nearly three dozen thorns.
    “When did you start doing these?” He pressed his lips to the deep, deep red rose blooming over one shoulder.
    “When I was twenty-five.”
    He paused, his hands tightening on her hips. Just what could linger over from childhood that a woman of twenty-five would feel the need to mark her flesh like this? Over and over? “Are the thorns done?”
    For a long, long moment, she was quiet, the only sound the water raining down around them. Then she sighed, pressing her brow to the wall in front of her. “No. I’ll never be done, Linc.”
    She turned around then and slid her hands around his waist, plastering her wet, naked body to his. “I don’t want to talk about the roses, the thorns… I don’t want to talk at all. I want you. Just you.”
    He hesitated. In the back of his mind he suspected this was a mistake. There were things he needed to do, things they needed to say. And he couldn’t help but think how he planned on dragging this fucking town down with him. Into the pits of a very real hell. Making everybody who’d turned their backs on his daughter suffer.
    Jay’s hands came up, cupped his face. “One night,” she whispered. Her lips were cool, soft against his, and the water slicked their bodies together. “We can have one night.”
    One night.
    He banded his arm around her waist and hauled her against him.
    With his free hand, he fumbled and managed to turn off the shower.
    If they only had the one night, he’d have her in his bed.
    Where he’d dreamed of just this.
    He moved out of the shower and she almost made him forget his intentions, almost made him lose his mind as she slid against him, wet and slick, the folds of her sex parting around him as she arched and moved, wiggling almost desperately.
    “Now,” she muttered, leaning in to sink her teeth into his lower lip.
    “Bed.” He cupped her ass in his hands, let himself explore those plump, ripe curves as he moved through the bathroom into his bedroom. He knew the way in the dark. Many a night he had paced the floors of his home, although it hadn’t happened quite like this.
    Determined to keep his thoughts off that, he focused on Jay.
    Coming to the bed,