Rescuing the Bad Boy (Second Chance #2)(75)

He’d mentioned another on his shoulder, but she hadn’t seen it. She fantasized about a quick game of I-show-you-mine-you-show-me-yours.

“I can give you my expert opinion.” Even in the moonlight, she could see the silver in his eyes. Those pale, pale blue eyes she saw in her dreams the moment she closed her own each and every night.

“I don’t know…” She flirted back, shrugging a shoulder, and what the hell—just went for it. “Maybe if you show me—”

“Fucking finally!” came a shrill female voice from behind her. Sofie turned to find Heather Conrad, her face pinched. She aimed a scathing glance at Sofie, pushed past her, and walked up to Donny. “Hey sexy, you got the stuff?” she asked him, clasping his leather jacket in one taloned fist.

“You know it, sweetcheeks.” He threw an arm around Heather’s neck and pulled her close.

Sofie’s stomach flopped, filled with gut-wrenching envy. Sick. She was going to be sick.

He dragged Heather to his Jeep and called over his shoulder, “Later, Scampi.”



Sofie snapped back to the present, brought back by the feel of Donny’s rough palm on her jaw. She blinked up at him, the man in her memory feathering at the edges and evaporating into the air. Years, knowledge, and seasons separated him from the man he used to be. He wasn’t the same. Neither was she.

She traced the tattoo on his left side. An infinity symbol the same as hers, but it was a universal symbol. Could be a coincidence. Probably was a coincidence.

“I got it a few years back,” he told her. “Ev came out to visit, did the quote on my ribs. I had this one added at the same time.”

She hadn’t taken her eyes off the symbol yet. Didn’t want to see his face, or embarrass herself by blurting out she’d thought for a moment his tattoo matched hers.

“Endless possibility,” he said.

“What?” Her head snapped up, her eyes finding his.

“That’s why you chose an infinity symbol. You said it represented ‘endless possibility.’ ”

She had said that. She’d been twenty-one and so full of hope. Before she knew bad things happened to nice girls… that bad boys happened to nice girls.

“I never showed it to you,” she muttered, almost to herself.

“Not intentionally.” His fingertip rubbed the tiny tattoo on the side of her left breast. “I saw it the night in the library…” he trailed off but he didn’t have to say more.

He’d had her naked that night. Mostly.

“And you… got your own?” She refused to ask the question she’d been wondering since she laid eyes on it: Why?

“Remember when I said my tats cover scars?”

“Oh my gosh.” He couldn’t mean…

There, under the spraying water, pressed against him, his fingers left her body and dug into her wet hair. He lowered his lips to hers and in a soft voice confirmed her fear.

“You are one of my scars, Sofie.”





It was the truth. But not in the way she was thinking.

“The tree.” He took his hand out of her hair to show her the gnarled branches crawling up his forearm. “That one was bad.”

Her fingers slid through the water running down the scar hidden in the trunk of the tree. Delicately. Sweetly. Trying to make him hurt less, he knew.

“Few years back, I was building this outdoor fireplace at this massive, massive mansion on the beach in the Hamptons. Twelve feet up on a ladder, I’m hauling this big-ass rock, my arm shaking, my shoulders burning.”

Stupid. It was completely stupid. He should’ve had a spotter, much like Sofie should’ve had a spotter at the bottom of the ladder in the dining room the day she was painting.

“There was nothing but concrete to catch my fall,” he continued. “The stone was the perfect shape for the center of the fireplace. I searched everywhere and finally found the rock—right size, color, the right everything. It started to slip, and I did what I could to keep from dropping it and busting it to pieces.”

Sofie’s eyebrows bent into a look of concern. This girl. She felt so damn much. Her thumb stroked back and forth over his skin. He wondered if she knew she was doing it; if she knew how much he liked her hands on him.

“You could’ve broken your neck,” she said.

“Didn’t.” He’d held on to the finished section of the fireplace for dear life, until his muscles shook from exertion. Until he was able to both right himself on the ladder and salvage the stone.

“Got the f*cker on there,” he said with pride.

She smiled up at him, in an expression that looked proud as well. She shook her head. “And cut yourself, I’m guessing?”

“Tons of stitches.”

Her eyes went to his arm again.

“Poured my heart into that piece.” After a silent moment, he asked, “Get it, Scampi?”

The dent between her eyebrows answered his question. She did not get it. He was going to have to spell it out. And for a guy who wasn’t used to admitting his feelings, or that he had them, he wondered for a second what he’d gotten himself into.

Sofie. Sofie was what you’ve gotten yourself into.

Like she was embedded under his skin, infecting him and making him feel the things he’d spent years teaching himself not to feel.