Limitless Love (Lotus House #4)(58)

I kissed her mouth in several hard pecks. “I want to wash your hair for you.”

“That sounds almost as good as you talking dirty to me.” She turned around, presenting me with her back. The wound looked a lot better without the stark black stitches.

“Looks really good. I think you’ll be pleased with how well it’s healing.” I kissed the ball of her shoulder.

“I’m trying to gear up to look again, but I’m scared,” she admitted.

I wrapped my arms around her upper body and let her back rest against my chest softly. “It’s normal to be scared. But I promise you, it will heal every single day. The line will get lighter. You will have a battle scar, but we all have those. It’s part of what you’ve survived up to now.”

She nodded. “It’s just hard. I keep thinking that I’ll be too ugly to wear tank tops or spaghetti-strap dresses. And if Lily sees it”—her head tipped down—“I won’t even know how to explain that.”

I shifted her hair to one side, soaped up the pouf, and ran it down the spots that hadn’t been wounded. Then I poured more soap in my hand and lightly ran it down the wound. Monet stayed perfectly still but let me tend to her.

“She’s going to understand that Mommy got hurt. Mommy is fine now, but she has a scar. I’ll show her some of my scars and explain it to her. It will be fine. Kids are resilient like that. And she’s really smart.”

I could feel the tension pouring off her as I poured shampoo in my palms, rubbed them together, and got to work on her long hair. She groaned a sexy, scintillating sound that made my dick harden again.

“What else?” I murmured into her ear and nibbled the curve down her neck until she relaxed.

Her voice was but a whisper. “I don’t want to be ugly to you. You’re so perfect, and I didn’t really have a body-image issue before, but now…”

I tossed the pouf to the floor and turned my girl around. “Let’s get this straight right now, Monet. I fell in love with you after you were wounded, not before. Sure, I was absolutely attracted to you before. You’re drop-dead gorgeous. Any man with eyes wants you. Period. And they still will. That isn’t going to change because you have a scar.”

“You say that now—” she started, but I cut her off.

“No. I’ll say that a year from now too when I’m tracing your naked back in our marital bed.”

Her gaze flew to mine, the truth in my words hitting her upside the head. I waited to see if she’d call me on it, but I didn’t think she was ready for that admission. Because I did see us married in the future—in the not-too-distant future. Tonight we’d already laid some heavy shit on one another and admitted our love. Now was the time to rejoice and focus on the good we had.

She still seemed down, and I didn’t want that for us after what we’d confided. Her fingers traced my side where my tattoo resided. “What do these letters mean?”

“You’re Chinese. Don’t you know?” I quipped.

Her nose crinkled up and she frowned. “I’m a Chinese and Caucasian… American. I don’t know Chinese.”

I laughed hard, knowing she was going to come at me fast, but she needed a subject change to get her out of her funk. I kissed her pretty nose in apology. “I know you are. I’m messing with you. Relax.”

“Seriously, though, what does it mean?” Her fingers traced each of my ribs in a sensual assault. I sucked in a calming breath and let it out.

“Pursuit of happiness.”

Her gaze ran over the symbols, and it gave me an idea.

“You know, if you don’t like your scar when it heals, you could just get a tattoo to cover it. Make something you despise into something you love, something you made your own.”

She blinked a few times, smiled widely, and then kissed me hard once. “You are so smart!”

I shrugged and turned off the water. “I try.”

As we dried one another, our hands strayed. I tickled her, finding the spots that made her laugh. She pulled back the bedsheets as I stepped into a pair of clean underwear I’d taken from the drawer I’d confiscated. That’s when I heard a blood-curdling scream and the home-alarm system blare. The scream came from inside the house.

Monet’s head snapped up where she stood naked. “Lily!” she cried out.

I was out the door and down the hall as fast as my feet could carry me. Her bedroom door was open, and she was screaming at the top of her lungs while pointing at the window. The alarm blared, sounding like a banshee piercing the quiet of the night. I scooped up Lily and held her to my chest. She wrapped her legs and arms around me like a monkey.

“Baby, what happened?” I tried to use a calm voice, but her fear and the alarm had my adrenaline pumping and my heart pounding.

“A man, a man! He broked my window!” she cried into my chest. I could see the curtains moving across the room.

I flicked on the lights and handed the sobbing little girl to Monet, who’d just run into the room wearing my dirty T-shirt from earlier. I stomped over to the window and opened the curtains with a snap. Nothing was there but a hole the size of a person’s hand near the lock. There was glass on the windowsill inside, as if someone had used a hammer or a tool of some kind to break it.

The phone rang as the alarm continued to blare, adding to the overwhelming onslaught to our senses.