“Cassie, I’m just telling you so as not to spook you, I’m picking you up now.” And she found herself tossed over his shoulder as he walked her, bare assed, into his house.

“Hey! I don’t have any panties on,” she hissed.

“No one can see but me and I like your ass.” He took her up the stairs and into his bedroom and set her down in front of mirrored sliding doors in his closet.

“Now, I want you to look at yourself.” His hand smoothed over her hair. “Your hair is truly beautiful, thick, black, long, tousled from sex.” A thumb traced her bottom lip. “Luscious. I want to nibble it every time I see you.”

He moved behind her and unbuttoned her camisole and popped the catch on her bra in record time. He held her br**sts in his hands. “Gorgeous.” And let them go. “They do not sag. You have large br**sts and they’re not in a bra and you’re not twenty-one, Cassie. But your br**sts are f**king phenomenal.” A finger traced the valley between them. “I’d very much like to put my c**k here sometime in the future. I think about that. A lot.”

She shivered.

His hand slid down her stomach. “This is not a pooch. It’s your stomach. You are not flabby. You’re beautiful. Your thighs are beautiful. Your calves are beautiful. Your pu**y is pink and pretty and beautiful. Your eyes are beautiful.”

He picked up her hand and kissed it. “Your hands are beautiful.” And paused. “Did you break your fingers?” He held up his left hand and the index finger was slightly crooked. “I broke it when I was twenty-five.”

In the year since the attack, she’d had time to heal. Time for physical therapy. But her middle and ring fingers still bore the scars of the break. Bore the odd bend of what she knew she was lucky to still have working fingers after he’d done so much damage.

“Yes.”

His face hardened and he met her eyes in the mirror. “He did this to you.” It wasn’t a question.

Her eyes closed for a long moment and she nodded. Shane brought her hand to his lips and kissed the fingers. “Beautiful. Cassie, one of the things that surprises me the most about you is how you don’t see your own beauty. You walk into The Pumphouse and men bump into things from staring at you. I believe book readership has skyrocketed in Petal since you started working at Paperbacks and More. You speak and I get hard. You breathe and I get hard. I get jealous. Even when I walked in and caught Sandra with my best friend, I wasn’t jealous. I was just betrayed and hurt and then pissed off.

“And let me clarify the jealous thing because don’t think I didn’t see the fear flare in your eyes when I said it. Yes, it drives me a little crazy to see men watching you and practically drooling. But I’m not going to hurt you over it. I may want to whack ‘em in the back of the head with my pool cue, but baby, I want to cherish you, not hurt you.”

Gaze locked with his in the mirror she leaned back into his body. “If I try to talk about this right now, I’m going to cry. And I am sick of it. So, I’m not going to except to say thank you.”

He bent and as she watched in the mirror, he took her neck between his teeth and she gasped. “You’re so beautiful, I want you right now. Again. Show me, Cassie.” One hand moved up to cup her breast and roll and tug a nipple between his fingers and the other slid down her belly to her pu**y.

Automatically, she adjusted her legs, widening her stance and he put his thigh between them, enabling her to lean back against his chest. Unable not to watch, her eyes caught his fingers parting her and sliding through the still very wet folds of her sex.

She watched the pull, roll, tug of his fingers on her nipple and then two of his fingers disappear into her pu**y and his thumb sliding from side to side over her clit.

Her eyelids slid halfway shut as the lethargy of desire stole over her. His eyes watched his hands on her in the mirror. Watched his fingers f**k into her and she didn’t miss the widening of his grin when she rolled her hips to meet his hand.

But she was past embarrassment. She wanted to come. She’d turned off her expectations of climax during sex with anyone else and the need came back, sharp edged and starving after so many years denied.

“Give it to me, Cassie. I can feel your pu**y beginning to flutter around my fingers. I know you want to come, I can see it in your eyes.” His words were whispered into her ear and she shivered. “Let go.”

Even as she was getting ready to tell him she couldn’t possibly come again, she did. Not the explosion of pleasure she’d felt on the grass outside but a muscle-deep series of contractions. Wave after wave of pleasure rolled through her until she was nothing more than a boneless heap of satisfied woman laying against him.

“Oh, I wish I had a camera.” He chuckled and she raised her hand in a half-hearted one fingered salute.

They cleaned up. He refused to let her reciprocate for the moment and ran outside to retrieve her panties, skirt and shoes which, to his disappointment, she put back on.

They stood side by side in his kitchen, made sandwiches and ate them. Later they brought root beer to his couch, snuggled and watched a movie. The normalcy of the moment fed her heart.

When the movie ended he stood up and stretched. “So, darlin’, you staying over?”

“I have an appointment in Shackleton at ten. I should probably go home so I won’t disturb you.”

“What do you have to run all the way over there on a Saturday for?”

“My therapist is there.” It wasn’t as hard as she’d thought, saying it aloud.