Still Not Over You(15)

It sends shivers through me even now. No one's ever tried to save my life before.

There’s probably something messed up about me that it gets under my skin, but I can’t forget the dark tattoos gleaming on the sweat covering his body, the tight ripple of muscle, that strength focused into pure animal frenzy. That bestial savagery. That bravery leaving no doubt he’d have crawled through the worst of the fire if he’d had to.

It does something to a girl, seeing a man willing to destroy every inch of his powerful body for her sake. Something compelling. Something heady.

Something I can’t possibly have, much less hang onto, which is why I’m pouring it all into my Work-in-Progress.

At least he’s given me words.

I thought I’d struggle to fill up the page after the death blow my publisher dealt my ego, but I feel like I’m fresh and new again. Back when I first started writing, I’d loved the craft so much – even if I wasn’t always that good at it and had to work night and day to refine my skill.

What I lacked in experience, passion made up, but somewhere along the way the ratio reversed until the work part dominated.

Somewhere along the way, I guess I lost the fire. It became routine. A never ending battle against writer's block and creative inertia.

Funny that it took a fire to get my spark back.

We’ll chalk it up to that.

Certainly not the embers cooling in my blood from the way Landon looked last night.

Or this morning, drawing his body through the ocean like a dark leviathan gliding sleek and dangerous through the deeps.

He has no idea I saw him during his swim.

When I’d come down for coffee, I’d caught a glimpse of motion on the strip of beach backing the house and thought it might be a prowler, or something. I’d peeked out the window instead and caught sight of water glistening on burnished skin, chiseled muscle.

My stomach dropped like an elevator. Without thinking, I’d hidden myself to one side of the window frame, everything inside me bristling.

Landon was everything I remembered and nothing I knew.

Before, his body had been lean. Hard. A smug, sexy Peter Pan with mischief in his eyes and power in his bones.

Now, it’s been punished by life. Beaten into a vastly bigger, better shape – like forging and tempering a steel bar into a sharp-edged sword. It's incredible what years in a war zone and then becoming a private mercenary can do to a human body.

Battle-worn is too gentle a term. Each and every one of his new tattoos was a war wound turned into a scar, the one on his shoulder blotted and darkened by the bruise he earned last night, a badge of combat.

I couldn’t quite make out what the ink was, but the designs were as compelling as music turned into art. Like, if I could trace them with my fingers, they’d sing dark, dangerous, beautiful hymns. Entirely disturbing things in the chorus of muscle and strength and power and broken, wounded, defiant things.

Watching him swim was enthralling. I lost time, lingering on the grace of his movements, the way he cut the water like soft butter. A rare, strange glimpse of a wild beast in his habit, and the urge to do so much more than just gawk, even knowing he'd turn at any moment and savage me to bits if I tried.

Landon Strauss is as dangerous as any feral animal – because he’s as unpredictable as one.

I don’t know him anymore.

I don’t know what he could do to me.

I don't know what kind of trouble my own two eyes could get me into with him, if I kept letting them feast, imagining his full, fierce weight holding me down. Driving in. Filling and so fulfilling it hurts.

And that’s why, when I saw him rising out of the waves like Poseidon announcing himself to awestruck mortals, I scrambled to fling myself onto the barstool and start writing.

If he’d caught me watching, he might have put me out on my ass.

It’s strange how much I don’t want to go. Not anymore.

I want to stay here. Just for a little while.

I want to help him, and if that means staying alone and watching for creepers, so be it. I also really don’t want to go crawling home to L.A. defeated. Life's handed me a few too many kicks to the teeth lately, and if I crash down after this one it’ll be a while before I pick myself up.

Plus being here has inspired some of the hottest sex scenes I've ever put into words.

We’ll just call it a coincidence that my smoldering, dark-haired hero is a complete and utter dominant beast in the sheets. And on his yacht, his car, his private jet, her parents' house – damn near everywhere I have him all over my very happy heroine.

I wonder if I’ll give my hero some tortured secret, too. If he’ll look at the heroine with melancholy blue eyes that remember the past.

Just like Landon did, this morning.

I lean against the railing of the spacious balcony off the kitchen, tilting my head back to stare up at the brilliant blue California sky, and sigh. It's late afternoon.

He didn’t have to say a word this morning to cut me open with that look and tell me exactly what he was thinking. It’s like we're both living the same memory in real-time every moment we’re together.

No, we don’t have to say a single thing to each other to know we’re both re-living the same exact moment.

A place I don’t want to travel back to, yet I just can't shake it. Has it really been five long years since we lost ourselves somewhere in hell?