Bodyguard by Melanie Shawn

21

Savannah

Feeling Gage’shands on my body, everything in me was on fire. I couldn’t even slow the blood racing through my body down enough to savor the sensations. I just let them crash through me, one after the other, and did my best to stay conscious.

And that wasn’t metaphorical. I really did worry I was in danger of passing out. That’s how lightheaded I was.

“Oh, God, Gage,” I breathed, my lips against his neck.

This didn’t feel real. I was so scared that I was going to wake up at any moment, just like I’d done so many times before when I’d had dreams that started out like this—that I’d be alone. No glorious hands on my body, no warm skin under my lips. No Gage.

I pushed the fear aside. This was real, even if it didn’t feel that way, entirely. There were a lot of other harsh realities that were also real, and if I had to face those head on, then damn it, I was going to enjoy this one beautiful reality I’d been given!

Gage kissed his way down my neck, his hands still moving over my belly. His lips pressed to the pounding pulse there, then moved onto my shoulders, my chest, and finally the sensitive skin at my cleavage.

I arched my back, pressing myself harder into his mouth.

I needed him. I needed to feel him against me, every inch of his skin on every inch of mine. I needed his mouth on my nipples, his fingers between my legs. I needed all of him, everywhere.

“Please, yes,” I breathed. “Touch me. Please.”

He pulled my tank top down over my breasts, and I gasped as the hem of the neckline raked over my sensitive nipples. He kissed his way down, taking one of them in his mouth and suckling it, swirling his tongue around the swollen nub until I thought I would explode, and then moving to the other and doing the same.

He drew back and started to kiss his way further down, but stopped abruptly.

When I looked down to see what was wrong, I saw him staring at it.

My tattoo.

God...I’d forgotten. It had been a part of me for so long, and in all the confusion and chaos of the past couple of days, I had just forgotten about it.

“What is this?” he said, his voice low and raspy.

“It’s...” I trailed off. I wasn’t quite sure how to explain it. “It’s a tattoo,” I tried again. Lamely.

“I can see that,” he said. “It’s my handwriting.”

“It is,” I admitted, and decided to start from the beginning. I ran my fingers through his hair while I talked, reminding myself that he was here. I was here. We were together. The pain of being ripped apart was done. I could tell this story, now. It was painful, but it was the past.

“On the night the Marshals came and took us, they gave me five minutes in my room to throw some clothes together. I was forbidden to take anything sentimental. But...God, Gage. I knew I could never leave without something of you. I wasn’t physically capable of walking out of that house, out of my life, without taking at least some part of you with me.

“But it had to be something small enough that they wouldn’t find it if they searched me. So I ripped out this one sentence from the birthday card you gave me. ‘I love you.’ And I shoved it into my bra. I knew they wouldn’t search there.

“I kept that little scrap of paper. I looked at it, and I thought about you. I put my finger to it, and I felt connected to you. I put it in here, in the locket that you gave me—” I touched my hand to the heart-shaped necklace, the one that never left my neck. “—but it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t close enough to my heart.

So, when I turned eighteen, I had it tattooed onto me. On my breast, on the same place that the paper had touched when I’d smuggled it out two years before. The place on my body that had made it possible for me to take just that one tiny piece of you with me.”

I stopped talking. I couldn’t think of what else to say.

He was unnervingly still and silent, and for once, I couldn’t quite read his expression.

Finally, he asked, “You have the words ‘I love you’ tattooed on your body in another man’s handwriting. What do people say when they see it? Men?”

His shoulders tensed when he asked the question, and his eyes and voice were hard as steel.

I thought about brushing the question off, making something up, but then decided against that. This was Gage. I didn’t lie to him. I just didn’t.

“I don’t know what they would say. No one’s ever seen it.”

He looked up at me, the question burning in his eyes.

“I...I’ve never been with anyone,” I admitted. “Every time I thought about it, it just made me sick. To think about anyone but you touching me, kissing me...it just hurt too much.”

The last few words came out in a strangled gasp. I hadn’t meant them to, but I thought it was actually a pretty decent representation of how I was feeling.

He stared at me for an uncomfortably long time. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. “Gage,” I whispered, “please say something. Anything.”

His hands were still at my waist and he pushed me onto my side of the bed. “We shouldn’t do this,” he said shortly.

My eyes widened, shock and humiliation washing over me. “What are you talking about?” I whispered, my voice nothing but a sandpaper rasp.

He didn’t answer directly, and didn’t look at me at all when he said, “It’s for the best. Trust me. I make a much better friend than a lover.”

I stared at him, willing him to turn and look at me, to talk to me. Anything. But it didn’t work. He just lay flat on his back and stared at the ceiling.

I shook my head and swung my legs over the side of the bed, standing up, holding myself as erect as possible, maintaining what little dignity I could. “Well,” I said, my voice aloof. “After the way you just acted, it takes a lot of balls to call yourself either.”