“There’s nothin’ to be embarrassed about, Rose. If you want to…come, you should. There’s no one here.”
“Except for you.”
“Except for me.” His eyes held her captive.
She bit her lip, torn.
“You want me to look away?”
“No,” she whispered.
“Oh… Rose.”
“Duke, I need…."
She moved to the edge of the pool, wanting more contact with him.
“What do you need? Ask and I’ll give it to you—anythin’ your heart desires, Firecracker.”
Duke was inches from her, though the tub separated their lower bodies.
“I need this.” Rose pulled him into her arms, burying her face in his neck. “I need you.”
She wanted to be close to him, to feel him against her—surprisingly, he didn't protest. Instead, he seized her, pulling her to the very edge of the water, and kept his hands positioned at her waist.
“I got you, Firecracker.” Duke tangled his fingers in her hair, soothing her.
Writhing, she opened her legs wider and let the water work its magic. The jet hit her clitoris head on, and Rose trembled as the unyielding pulse drove into her.
“Duke!” Rose moaned in his ear, rocking in the water as she was wrapped in his arms.
“Say it again. Say my name.”
“Duke.” Rose teetered on the edge, she was so close—she could feel the orgasm building, about to wash over her.
He tilted her backward. “I want to see your face when you come. I need to see you. Come on, Firecracker—take your pleasure on your own terms.”
“Oh, yes.”
It finally hit her—speeding through her body like the tequila had–a rush of pleasure so intense she nearly passed out. She shuddered in his arms, gasping with desire.
Duke held her until she quieted and went motionless in his hold, like a rag doll. He released her and stood.
She’d gotten his shirt damp, and Rose could see the bulge in his jeans—he hadn’t been unaffected by her display, but he’d made no move to act on it.
Rose couldn’t worry about that right now. She yawned, feeling sleepy all of a sudden. The orgasm had left her sated and gratified in a way she’d never been before—almost victorious. She’d had an orgasm all by herself, and it’d been about her own gratification. Rose hadn’t been used or abused in the process.
“Let’s get you out of there before you turn into a prune.”
Duke gathered her up in a towel. The night air felt cool on her heated skin, and steam rippled off her. He hauled her into his arms and carried her into his bedroom.
Under normal circumstances, this would make her jumpy, but she wasn’t—not even a bit. As if being held by Duke were the most natural thing in the world.
He’d set out a couple of towels, and she laid down on her belly, the other towel still wrapped around her backside.
Lying on a man’s bed injured, naked, and vulnerable wasn’t new territory, but this was a very different man. Duke would never take advantage of her weakness.
“Ready for a massage?”
All she could manage was a nod.
Duke grabbed a bottle of cocoa butter from the bathroom and squeezed some into the palm of his hand, warming it, before he touched her. He stroked the backs of her thighs, then her calves, and then captured one foot in his hands. Duke rubbed the heel and then moved to the center, his touch gentle, which made her toes curl, and she moaned, pressing her face into the pillow as he patiently kneaded her foot. Then he focused on her calf, holding it in his big hands, manipulating the length of it. She relaxed, leaning into his touch. Rose could feel the muscles relaxing, disengaging under his expert touch.
“Roll over for me.”
Still clutching the towel around her body, Rose obeyed.
His warm palms slid up the sides of her legs–ankles, calves, and then pushed the towel up to reveal her upper thigh, which was marred with red slashes—one very recent.
“You lied to me about cuttin’ your thighs.”
Damn. Rose had forgotten all about it. She sat up, trying to pull the towel back down.
“I—”
“Shh, no lies.” He cupped her chin in one hand. “Your safety and well-being are fuckin’ important to me. I’d hoped you stopped slicin’ yourself open.”
“I know, and I have.”
“You tellin’ me the truth?”
“Yeah, I’ve taken the knife out a couple more times, and it was touch and go for a bit—but I haven’t cut myself since the one on my thigh. I swear! I think the training helps—it gives me another outlet for the pain and anger. When I feel like hurting myself—I pummel the speed bag instead.” Although hitting the pain was far from pain-free, but it was a healthier outlet than cutting.
“Good. I… care about you.” The words seemed to be torn out of his throat as if they were very difficult to say. “Who the fuck knows why? But I care.”
Duke crossed to a small cabinet just inside the attached bathroom and grabbed a tray full of first aid supplies. After bringing them back into the bedroom, he placed them next to her thigh.
“I keep this on hand for accidents.”
Duke removed a few alcohol pads and swiped at her cuts to clean them. Then he applied ointment, along with four large Band-Aids to each side. After finishing, he secured them with medical tape.
“I’m sorry I lied.”
“I understand why you did, but you don’t have to. I get it, and I’ll never judge you.”
“How do you know these things?”
There were times when she didn’t understand everything she was going through, and she’d lived through it. Duke was far too empathetic, even for someone who’d trained as a physician. She wondered if he had personal experience with trauma.
Duke inspected her shoulders, and his expression darkened.
Crap. He could probably see the scars.
“Are those whip marks?”
Before she could answer, he plunked himself down behind her on the bed and pushed the towel lower to reveal the web of scars crisscrossing her back. The lashes from Kent’s whip had left deep welts, which hadn’t healed well.
“Fuck it all. It didn’t even occur to me to check your back during my first exam. I was preoccupied with doing the pelvic and the tox screen. Kent did a lot of damage.”
“Yeah, and most of it wasn’t physical.”
For all the scars on the outside, Rose had countless emotional ones. Kent had ravaged her body, but the destruction he’d inflicted on her mind was far worse.
“I’m gonna fuckin’ kill him.”
“Get in line.”
Before she knew it, Duke pulled her onto his lap and wrapped his arms around her. His face settled into the curve of her shoulder.
While she could feel his erection, she felt so safe in his arms. How strange. Rose had been wondering if she’d ever feel safe again. It felt good to be held with no expectation of anything else.
Duke stroked her back, tracing the lines of the scars with the tips of his fingers. She’d never truly be free of Kent—every time she looked at her own body, she saw him. Kent had made it his forever.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what? Look at you? Touch you? Firecracker, you’re beautiful.”
Rose shuddered, and tears pooled in her eyes.
She didn’t feel beautifulmost days, she felt damaged, used, soiled, and blown apart—sometimes she thought she’d never feel whole again.
“I’m ugly, disgusting,” she said hoarsely.
At one time, she’d had lovely skin, but Kent had left a patchwork of scars all over her body, which she’d added to with her cutting habit. None of them had healed properly, leaving raised marks on her body. Kent hadn’t taken her to a hospital for care. Instead, he’d given her antibiotics, some bandages, and hoped for the best.
“Bullshit.”
She shook her head. “I know exactly what I look like, and it isn’t
beautiful.”
“Then you don’t see yourself clearly.”
Duke grabbed a porcelain bowl from the nightstand and handed it to her. It held some odds and ends—a lighter, coins, a pocket knife. After taking a closer look, she noticed a gold vein running through the bowl—it’d been smashed and pieced back together.
“Ever heard of kintsugi?”
“No.”
“It’s the Japanese practice of mendin’ items with gold. Once the object is put back together, it’s believed to be even more attractive, more beautiful, than the original.”
She touched the gold streak in the porcelain—and no, she hadn’t missed the symbolism of the cracked bowl.
“I suppose it’s pretty.”
“You’re damn right it is—and so are you. I bet you’re a hell of a lot prettier than before, inside and out. Adversity is an excellent character builder.”
Duke kissed the back of her neck. As kisses go, it was chaste, but it made her shiver. He’d hit a very sensitive spot.
She wished she could see his face, but she didn’t want to spoil the moment.
“I haven’t been repaired with gold.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Rose. To me, you shine.”
Tears threatened to fall again. How could he not see how contaminated she was?
Duke pressed a kiss to one of her scars.
And they sat together in silence for a few moments.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?”
Rose swallowed the lump in her throat. “I can’t.”
She hadn’t told anyone everything, especially about the whippings. Daisy had pieced together a complete picture of what had happened to Rose, but Rose had resisted all attempts to discuss it further.
“Yes, you can. You can tell me anything.”
Rose turned around. She saw only compassion in his eyes. This man had been her protector for weeks, her champion, and her knight, to put a fanciful spin on their relationship. He’d been training her how to fight, healing her injuries. If she was going to tell anyone in the world, it should be Duke.
“I’m not ready yet, but I want to tell you, and I will. Just not right now.”
“I hope you do. Let me show you something that might help with your decision.” Duke gently lifted her off his lap.
She set the bowl down and watched as he walked to the end of the bed and peeled off his shirt. He had a lean, muscular body and deliciously tawny skin she wanted to touch, to kiss. On one shoulder blade, he had a three-pronged crown tattoo.
“Is the tattoo in honor of your road name?”
“Yeah, I got it when I joined the Horsemen, but you ain’t seen the important bit yet. Look again.”
Rose noted faded scars on his back as well, long stripes which had washed out to a pinkish-white color.
Someone had abused him as well.
“You were whipped too.” Rose swallowed thickly.
“Yeah. So nothin’ you can say will shock me.” Duke sat on the end of the bed facing her. “You aren’t the only one who is fucked up, Rose. I am too.”
“What do you mean… exactly?”
Duke blew out a breath. “We’ve danced around this topic before, but I’m gonna lay it out. I can relate… because it happened to me too.” A muscle worked in his jaw.
Sure, it was a vague admission, but she could read between the lines.
Oh my God.
Duke had been raped as well. No wonder he’d been so kind, so understanding. He’d gone through the same kind of torment.
“Who? Who did that to you?”
“This stays between us, yeah?” His eyes were black as night, glittering.
“Of course.”
“It was my bastard of a stepfather. It started the night of my thirteenth birthday and didn’t stop until my senior year.”
Rose didn’t rush to say she was sorry or express outrage at what had happened to him. She knew firsthand those sorts of platitudes felt empty.
Her chest tightened. Rose wanted to touch him, share his pain the way he’d shared hers, but his body vibrated with tension—instead she talked to him.
“He beat you and… raped you?”
Her own violation had come at the hands of a stranger, someone who didn’t know her and wasn’t supposed to love and protect her. She couldn’t imagine how Duke had endured such a betrayal.
“Yeah, he reamed my ass for four years.”
Duke said the words without a trace of emotion as if he spoke about something mundane like the weather or a traffic report.
He turned away from her. “I used to lay there at night, listenin’ for his heavy footsteps. I’d think about killin’ him—I fantasized about it, like it was a game. Killing Justin. I imagined him dying all kinds of ways.”
Rose recognized the defense mechanism, had used it a lot herself. Distancing yourself from the dark emotion–from the violence, the pain–helped for a time. Eventually, you went numb, and you couldn’t feel anything anymore.
Tentatively, Rose reached for his hand and squeezed it—a wordless sharing of his misery.
“And your mother? Did she…?”
“Fuck, no. She never knew, and I made damn sure she never found out. My mom was sick at the time, real sick. She was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer.”
And the hits keep on coming. His mother was sick, probably dying, and Duke’s stepfather raped him.
“Is that why you studied medicine?”
“Yeah, I wanted to make a difference.” Duke smiled. “You shoulda heard me as a kid—I was gonna cure cancer, wipe it out.”
“And that’s why you help out the clinic doing mammograms.”
Duke shrugged. “It’s somethin’ to do. Anyway, she’d been sick for a while, but she didn’t have health insurance. The nearest low-cost mammogram place was in Dallas, and she’d have had to miss work to get one.”
“And you needed the money?” Rose guessed. There’d been some hard choices in her childhood too. Sometimes, they’d chosen between food and heat.
“Yeah, we lived paycheck to paycheck. Anyway, a mammogram would have saved her life, if she’d been able to have one. Justin had insurance and money so she got top notch medical care—the bastard did that much at least.”
Rose couldn’t stop herself, the questions kept coming.
“And Justin… he’s gone, right?” If anyone deserved to be dead, Justin did.
“Yeah.” He didn’t elaborate.
“What stopped him? How’d you get free?” She had to know.
“My fists.” He rubbed the back of one hand absently. “But this isn’t about me. When or if you ever want to talk about what happened to you, I’m here. I understand it.”
“Thank you.” She wanted to ask him even more questions, but she knew this wasn’t the time. “I won’t share your confidence with anyone.”
Silently, Duke returned to his task of massaging her. He gently rubbed her calf muscle.
“Does your ankle feel better?”
“Yes, thanks.”
Actually, everything felt better.
Rose didn’t feel alone anymore. Duke understood her better than anyone in the world, even her sister. She no longer felt like such a damaged head case. She’d believed she was damned, trapped in the pain and the fear. Duke had been through hell too—and somehow he was still standing. Maybe there was hope for her as well.
“I’m glad. I… I like easin’ your pain.”
The room filled with a therapeutic stillness, a shared quiet. Neither one of them spoke, just silently relaxed in the other’s company.
There was nothing in the world but Duke’s big, broad hands on her skin. Rose relaxed and let go. She laid her head on the pillow and closed her eyes.
Before long, Rose fell asleep.
***
Duke let her doze in his bed.
If he were smart, he’d gather her up and take her tempting ass back to the hotel, but he’d gone and lost his shit. He’d babbled away to her about
his fucked-up past too.
Why the hell did I fess up?
Duke never let women sleep in his bed. Sometimes, they stayed over in The Vault, but it was downstairs on a whole other level of the house, so it wasn’t intimate. A couple of times he’d shared a hotel room with one, but it’d been a routine need to sleep. Nothing more.
As a rule, he didn’t get close to the women he boned. Duke kept them on the outer edges of his life. They were a source of fun, of stress relief.
Sure, he fucked them, played with them, and he even did the whole aftercare thing with his subs. The cuddly shit always came after a good deep dicking. Duke couldn’t deal with the emotional, sharing, kumbaya crap. While he didn’t do the wham bam Ryker manwhore routine, he didn’t date women either. They didn’t share meals or their lives with him—just their bodies and some small talk.
The way Duke thought about it, being fucked in the ass against his will had left him fucked in the head—a real shitty two-for-one sort of deal. It was probably some self-protection crap, but it suited him, but for some reason he couldn’t figure out, he liked having Rose in his home, in his bed. All of this felt… right somehow. Like she belonged here, with him. He didn’t want her to go home.
In short, he was in some seriously deep shit.
Sharing his past hadn’t been easy, but it’d popped out anyway. Duke still couldn’t believe he’d confessed it to her. He’d shoved all of it deep down and tried to never think about Justin except when it bubbled to the surface accidently—such as when Ryker accused Duke of liking dick.
It was probably some macho bullshit, but being reamed all the damned time and occasionally getting off during the process made him question his own sexuality. For a long time, he wondered if he was gay, but after Duke fucked his first woman, everything came into focus. He knew for damn sure he loved pussy.
Later, he’d read up on the subject, trying to understand what the fuck had happened to him. Duke discovered his response had been a simple physical reaction, caused by stimulation of the prostate gland—to put a clinical spin on it.
Unfortunately, he was still guarded around gay men. Yeah, he knew Justin was a pedophile, not a gay man, according to the textbooks. Being a gay man and fucking other adult gay men wasn’t the same as having a hard-on for teenage boys and preying on them. Duke understood it intellectually, but he still had psychological hang-ups about it.
Joy Ride: A Virgin Romance (Let it Ride Book 3) Page 23